Saturday Night Live, Djesus, and Masculine Christianity

Today's guest post comes to us from Blaine Hamilton, a graduate student at Rice University with John Boles

Saturday Night Live, Djesus and Masculine Christianity

Blaine C. Hamilton

As many of you may be aware a few weeks ago Saturday Night Live produced a brief, two-minute sketch that has received a lot of attention from religious communities in the United States.  “Djesus Uncrossed” was a movie trailer spoofing Quentin Tarantino’s recent historical revenge films like Inglourious Bastards and Django Unchained.  The video, which you can watch here, suggests how Tarantino might tell the story of the resurrection if he got his hands on it.  Instead of ascending peacefully into the skies, Djesus emerges from the tomb with a vengeance, a cross on his back and a samurai sword in his hands.  The apostles are also featured reeking havoc on the Romans with even more blood than a typical Tarantino film.  The clip claims, “Critics are calling it a less violent Passion of the Christ.”  For everyone familiar with SNL and sketch comedy in general the satire and humor should be evident.  The joke is on Tarantino, who if given the opportunity would even rewrite the resurrection as a revenge story.

However, that’s not the message that a number of religious groups took away from the sketch.  A variety of Christian groups felt that SNL was mocking Jesus, not Tarantino.  The Catholic League and the coalition Concerned Women for America (CWA) expressed outrage at the sketch’s depiction of Jesus, especially during the season of Lent.  They and other bloggers also questioned whether SNL would be as willing to mock the prophet Mohammed or Islamic violence.  Penny Nance, president of CWA, suggested, SNL “would NEVER have the nerve to mock Islam as it did Christianity. They would never be brave enough to run a skit mocking Mohammad at any time — let alone during Ramadan.”  According to these groups and individuals, SNL’s error was not sacrilege, it was targeting Christians instead of all religious groups equally.  (Interestingly, the Council on American-Islamic Relations has also spoken out against the sketch for its “misrepresentation” of Jesus, whom Muslims revere as a prophet).

While the outrage of the conservative religious blogosphere is somewhat predictable, another blogger made a different observation about the clip.  Over at patheos.com, David R. Henson suggested that perhaps SNL’s “Djesus” was more reflective of current Christian culture than many Christians would like to admit.  According to Henson, the sketch “said something quite profound and revealing, if unintentionally, about how Americans have remade Jesus in our own violent images.  Because, if truth be told, we’ve been trying to uncross Jesus for decades in this country, long before SNL got their pens into him.”  As an example, Henson cites Mark Driscoll’s comments from a 2007 interview with Relevant Magazine in which Driscoll laments:

“Some emergent types [want] to recast Jesus as a limp-wrist hippie in a dress with a lot of product in His hair, who drank decaf and made pithy Zen statements about life while shopping for the perfect pair of shoes. In Revelation, Jesus is a pride fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up.”

Driscoll, like many male leaders in the American evangelical movement, is concerned that the Christ-figure represented in Christian churches has been emasculated.

Of course, Driscoll is not alone in his concerns about Jesus’ masculinity.  While feminist Christian scholarship in recent years has questioned the value of a male god, evangelical men have been working diligently to reaffirm a hypermasculine Jesus.  Many of us are probably familiar with popular examples like Promise Keepers, a national Christian men’s ministry, whose 2013 theme is “Awakening the Warrior.”  In the promotional video an average man looks in the mirror only to see an armor-clad twelfth-century French crusader staring back at him.  At the end of the clip, the man reaches under the bed to unwrap his broadsword and prepare for the day ahead. 

In recent years some churches have embodied the Christian warrior ethos by developing mixed-martial arts fight clubs in their men’s ministries.  Others, agreeing with Driscoll, have rejected the artistic depictions of a weak, frail Jesus by painting him as muscular and straining against his bonds or doing push-ups with the cross on his back.    

 In my opinion, “Djesus Uncrossed” does what only good satire can do – it reflects a cultural image in such a way that makes us question what is true.  Is Djesus really that far off base?  Or were the SNL writers much closer to the truth than they may have even realized?  Certainly the field is ripe for a fresh analysis of the hypermasculine trend in recent Christian pop culture.