Laura Bullard | Vox

How Minion Jesus died — and then rose — on TikTok

2024-10-22T17:39:54-04:00

Traci Coston, a serious young Christian TikToker, stares directly at the camera.

“One day, an animator was messing around, and he created this picture of a little minion.”

Coston points up to an image of a sausage-bodied minion hanging limply from a wooden cross.

Easily among the most recognizable anti-heroes in film history, minions are the stars of a $5 billion animated movie franchise. The enduring success of the franchise can be attributed, at least in part, to their extremely online fans, who have been feverishly producing minions memes since the release of the first movie, Despicable Me, in 2010.

“Listen to this,” she continues, “a minion didn’t die for you, but somebody actually did. Jesus actually died for you.”

Coston had sacrificed the Minion Jesus for my attention, and the crucified minion had done its job. I had not scrolled away. His death was the key that unlocked the door to my carefully curated TikTok algorithm, and Coston had walked right through.

The 40-second video was as sacrilegious as it was sincere. It was deeply funny and deadly serious. I typed “Minion Jesus” into the search bar and dove headlong into the wild world of high-kitsch TikTok evangelism.

What I learned was that Coston isn’t a lone wolf. A dozen other TikTokers had recently posted Minion Jesus videos, all repeating the same near-verbatim message in front of the exact same minion torture scene.

The scriptedness of the videos was unusual. On TikTok, sounds and trends go viral, and participation in memes tends to be iterative and improvisational. In the comment sections of these scripted Minion Jesus videos, hundreds of TikTokers gathered to discuss the mystery. Who wrote this script? Do these people know each other? Are they AI deep-fakes? Are they joking?

For the Today, Explained podcast, I decided to get to the bottom of it.

The road to Minion Jesus is long and rambling. It takes us from a tiny town in Louisiana all the way to the steps of White House. But our tale begins in the halls of Facultad de Artes Plásticas, a small art school in Arteaga, Mexico.

The Minion Jesus origin story

In 2021, a young graphic design student named Americo Cruz sketched out a Minion Jesus on paper, opened up his 3D modeling software, and got to work. Two days later, he posted it to his personal Facebook page. Cruz told Vox he took inspiration from a 2015 meme: a photograph of a stuffed toy minion engulfed in flames and fastened to a cross. “The truth is that it’s just a parody — a simple joke,” he said. “At the end of the day, it is just the absurd humor that we have in Gen Z.”

Cruz hadn’t seen the TikTok videos until I reached out to him for this story. How they’d gotten hold of Cruz’s image, though, seemed relatively straightforward. Minion Jesus went moderately viral in 2021, and it has since been shared thousands of times on Facebook, X, Reddit, and Instagram — all platforms where images are easy to access and download. In all likelihood, someone had stumbled across the image online, downloaded it, and penned the script.

Less clear was who, and whether the subsequent videos were a part of some sort of coordinated campaign. The Minion Jesus TikTokers post similarly structured content every day, most of it concerned with convincing the viewer to convert to Christianity. Several also make conservative political content.

They don’t all follow one another on their various social media platforms, but I soon realized they all have one connection in common: a blond, brawny evangelist named Taylan Michael Seaman.

The makings of a Christian content farm

Seaman is the 26-year-old self-proclaimed millionaire behind a coaching program called Kingdom University. From a small town in central Louisiana, he offers online courses to any would-be social media evangelist willing to “invest” thousands of dollars into his ministry. In exchange, he teaches them his “Viral Video Framework,” a basic digital content marketing strategy couched in the language of proselytism. The program offers its students a bold guarantee: “at least 100,000 new followers in 90 days.”

As you may have guessed by now, the Minion Jesus video is a Kingdom University product.

@vox
If you scroll away from this video then you’ll miss our producer explaining “Minion Jesus.” #minions #minionjesus #christianity #religion
♬ original sound – Vox – Vox

According to several enrollees who spoke to Vox under the condition of anonymity, the coaches alert their students when a particular piece of content — like Minion Jesus — is doing well. They are then encouraged to follow suit, which is the reason the videos are often so eerily similar.

Seaman’s personal content skews a bit more pessimistic. His videos are often concerned with demonic possession, and they tend to be more overtly political and caught up with conspiracy theories than the content created by his students. His message is also often about money. This is no coincidence. An explicit focus on wealth-building is integral to his ministry, and his videos contain clear nods to a midcentury offshoot of Pentecostalism commonly known as the Word of Faith Movement.

How Word of Faith became an evangelical powerhouse

In the 1960s, itinerant evangelist Kenneth Hagin rose to fame by performing (and possibly inventing) the miracle of Holy Laughter in churches around the United States. At the wave of his hand, congregants would fall to the floor shrieking and convulsing in rapturous hysterics.

This kind of ecstatic religious expression is a defining feature of the Pentecostal tradition, which originated in the early 20th century. At the height of Jim Crow, Pentecostalism emerged in California as a multiracial, working-class movement. The services were frenzied experiences, and congregants often jumped out of their seats during services, dancing in the aisles and crying out in what a 1906 Los Angeles Times story referred to as a “weird babel of tongues.”

Half a century later, Kenneth Hagin’s Word of Faith movement capitalized on that fervor. The laughing evangelist told his followers that poverty was “the penalty for breaking God’s law,” and true faith was the key to wealth. As he traveled the country spreading his Holy Laughter, Hagin asked for large donations from congregants and promised them miraculous returns on investment. Fifty years before TikTok appeared in the app store, Hagin began broadcasting his sermons over the radio and selling reel-to-reel tapes to anyone willing to pay for them.

In 1974, Hagin founded Rhema Bible Training College, an unaccredited bible school in Oklahoma. Today, there are Rhema training centers in 14 countries, and course listings include classes on “how to apply proven techniques in the areas of multimedia, web and management to grow your congregation” and “the importance of the corporate governing documents, IRS and state legal requirements, liability issues, setting of compensation and benefits packages.”

In 2002, two Rhema graduates founded Faith Church Ruston, a nondenominational church in Ruston, Louisiana. Their son-in-law and protégée is the godfather of the Minion Jesus TikTok, Taylan Michael Seaman.

The movement turned toward Christian nationalism

“It’s the blood, the blood, the blood — the word, the name, the blood — the word, the name, the blood,” shouted Kenneth Copeland, an 84-year-old prophet with an estimated net worth of $300 million. One year into the Covid-19 pandemic, he was receiving a vision from God on a megachurch stage. For a brief moment, the prophet saw heaven, crying out: “There is Brother Hagin! There is Brother Hagin!”

By 2021, Word of Faith founder Kenneth Hagin had been dead for 18 years. In his absence, this new Kenneth had risen up: Kenneth Copeland is now the figurehead of the Word of Faith movement, a millionaire prophet with pinprick pupils and visions of blood. In the 1960s, a young penniless Copeland attended one of Hagin’s seminars and allegedly offered to trade his car for a collection of Hagins tapes. He managed to walk away with a few without giving up his vehicle and promptly memorized them.

Within a few years, Hagin was acting as the young man’s mentor. Under the guidance of this new “spiritual father,” Copeland took the Word of Faith movement to new heights. He founded a Christian broadcast network, built a multimillion-dollar empire, and now claims that his flagship show reaches 885 million viewers a day.

In the decades after Hagin’s death, Copeland’s theology and conservative politics began to meld. The Word of Faith movement in its current form has dovetailed neatly with another quasi-Pentecostal movement called the New Apostolic Reformation — a fusion of prosperity gospel theology and Christian Nationalist politics. Where the Word of Faith movement leveraged the faithful to amass wealth, the New Apostolic Reformation is leveraging that wealth to build political power.

Andy Kroll, who covers fringe religious movements in America for ProPublica, told Vox that where right-wing Christian political movements in decades past have encouraged Christians to effect change from within the political system, the New Apostolic Reformation’s vision for America is more ambitious and less democratic.

New Apostolic Reformation’s most prominent figure is Lance Wallnau, a regular guest on Kenneth Copeland’s television network, the movement’s loudest megaphone. For the last two decades, Wallnau has been scribbling out a vision he calls “The Seven Mountains Mandate” on dry-erase boards across the country. He argues that conservative Christians should “take dominion” over American life by assuming positions of power in seven key spheres of influence: arts and media, business, church, education, family, government, and science and technology.

“This segment of Christianity is not the largest by number, but it’s the fastest-growing,” says Kroll. Across the country, pastors are using Wallnau’s language to communicate a new kind of Christian Nationalism to their congregations.

You cannot, of course, spell “dominion” without the word “minion.”

“How To Have DOMINION!!”

In July, the man behind the Minion Crucifixion TikToks livestreamed a sermon to his YouTube followers. For an hour and a half, Taylan Michael Seaman paced back and forth across Faith Church Ruston’s stage, microphone in hand, and delivered a sermon he titled “How To Have DOMINION!!”

Once fringe, this vision for America has found a champion in former president Donald Trump. Wallnau was one of the first Christian leaders to endorse Trump, and Trump has spent the past eight years borrowing liberally from Wallnau’s language and theology to appeal to his base.

Hours after Donald Trump survived the July 13 assassination attempt, Wallnau made a special appearance on Flashpoint, a Christian political show on Kenneth Copeland’s broadcast network. “There are some attacks, when they happen, God intervenes and he moves in a miraculous way,” said Wallnau, pointer finger raised, “and I pray for a miraculous intervention of God now on President Trump.”

The next day, Trump logged into his Truth Social account and typed, “Thank you to everyone for your thoughts and prayers yesterday, as it was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening. We will FEAR NOT, but instead remain resilient in our Faith and Defiant in the face of Wickedness.”

Who could have more influence than … minions?

In the tradition of Hagin, Copeland, and Wallnau, Seaman has come to recognize that he is only as powerful as his flock is large. His YouTube audience? 3 million.

“When I go online and I look up Minion Jesus, and when I read about Taylan, I see an archetype,” said Kroll. “Someone who is common throughout this Wild West of Christianity. Someone who’s really thinking about how to break through on whatever the latest communication platform is.”

At this point in his career, Seaman is nowhere near as influential or wealthy as the trailblazers that came before him. There is also a chance his subscriber count has been inflated by purchased followers. This is a common practice, and the fact that Taylan’s Kingdom University guarantees enrollees 100,000 followers in a matter of months does raise red flags. Regardless, he is effectively exploiting a loophole that his predecessors could only have dreamed of.

Put simply, I didn’t go searching for Minion Jesus. Minion Jesus came looking for me.

Hagin, Copeland, and Wallnau have demonstrated that there are myriad ways to become a millionaire Christian influencer.

Perhaps the simplest one to date is Seaman’s. Game the system. Crucify a minion. Let the algorithm do the rest.

What the Methodist split tells us about America

2024-05-14T16:02:57-04:00

An LGBTQ+ flag flies over Union United Methodist Church in the South End of Boston on January 5, 2020. | Jessica Rinaldi/Boston Globe via Getty Images

Last week, hundreds of United Methodist Church (UMC) delegates from around the world sat down to vote on whether or not to reverse a longstanding ban on the ordination of LGBTQ clergy. The decision would also determine whether or not to strike a rule that prohibited clergy from presiding over “homosexual unions.”

The room was uncharacteristically hushed as delegates logged their votes. They’d gathered to participate in a quadrennial General Conference, where an elected group of clergy and laypeople review and edit the rules and social stances of the church on a variety of subjects. When the results were announced, the room erupted in loud sobs and cheering. With this vote — and several others — over 50 years of church law, doctrine, and social stances aimed at restricting the full inclusion of LGBTQ methodists were reversed.

In a dramatic deviation from the staid (remarkably congressional) proceedings, the Methodists began to sing.

Church historian Ashley Boggan told Today, Explained’s Noel King that the UMC’s schism should matter to Methodists and non-Methodists alike. “If you look at Methodist history within the United States, it’s a great lens for looking at American history,” she said.

How did we get here?

For the last five years, the United Methodist Church has been fighting over its stance on LGBTQ members.

In a one-off special session in 2019, the UMC had voted to tighten its prohibitions on LGBTQ members — a decision that nearly half of all UMC congregations across the country went on to publicly reject in the following years. So, in 2022, a splinter denomination was born: the Global Methodist Church. Traditionalist congregations had seen the writing on the wall: Change was coming, and they didn’t want to be part of it.

Conservative churches began leaving the denomination in droves, and by the time the General Conference convened this year, a quarter of US congregations had jumped ship. It was this newly slimmed-down UMC that voted to reverse the church’s anti-LGBTQ positions earlier this month.

What Methodists say about America

The Methodist church developed in tandem with the United States. Both are 18th-century experiments in democracy, and each has weathered the great challenges of the last two centuries — war, reunion, and an ever-expanding understanding of personhood — in distinct but parallel lanes.

Throughout the 19th century, as the United States grappled with the notion of Black personhood and the reality of chattel slavery, so too did the Methodists. In 1844, 40 percent of Methodist congregations split off to form a pro-slavery splinter congregation.

That was the last time this many Methodists split off from the main denomination. Fifteen years later, the Confederacy seceded as well, and a bloody civil war shortly followed. This parallel has not gone unnoticed.

According to Boggan, in the decades that followed, this pattern repeated itself. As the post-war US reconstructed itself, the Methodist church followed suit. In a 1939 merger, the Southern and Northern Methodists were once again united. As states enacted Jim Crow laws across the country, the Methodists created a segregated system of their own.

The Methodist church became a sort of bellwether for larger national sentiment, and this extended beyond racial politics, The church granted full ordination rights to women in 1956, and seven years later, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique mainstreamed “the problem with no name.”

While this all might lead us to fear that the current breakup in the Methodist church is yet again a harbinger of violence, it is helpful to remember this caveat: the Civil War-era United States was extremely Methodist. According to church historian Nathan Hatch, in the runup to the Civil War, the Methodist church was “the most extensive national institution other than the Federal government.” The sheer size of the denomination meant that the political reality of the church would eventually become the political reality of the country.

Today, church membership is in decline, and the institutional influence of mainline protestant churches is much diminished (although to exactly what effect is debatable). The church is not, as it was in the 19th century, a small-scale model of the country. Today, according to Boggan, the church acts more like a lens: a way to see broader national tensions work themselves out on a smaller scale.

What next?

At the General Conference, several traditionalists told me that their local congregations were still actively considering leaving the denomination. Dixie Brewster, a conservative delegate from Kansas, told me she feels like the UMC is no longer a big-tent denomination, and “it seems like there’s no place at the table for the conservative view of traditional marriage and family.”

I’m not sure these anxieties are warranted. On paper, the church is an objectively bigger tent today than it was last year. Queer people can pursue ordination, and clergy now have the right to perform same-sex weddings.

Notably, a clear majority of delegates also voted to pass a statement that formally enshrined the rights of traditional clergy to refuse to officiate a same-sex marriage. In a 479–203 vote, the UMC decided that “all clergy have the right to exercise and preserve their conscience when requested to perform any marriage, union, or blessing of any couple.”

It appears that this now “more progressive” UMC is walking a sort of quasi-libertarian road toward progress. By “removing restrictions on paper,” Boggan said, the conversations about how best to love one’s neighbor must change venues. No longer enshrined in the black-and-white text of doctrine, debate is forced back inside the four walls of the church.

While the Methodist church was once a reliable indicator of national sentiment, it lifted its prohibition on gay marriage nearly a decade after Obergefell v. Hodges did the same for the rest of the country. This is not to say that LGBTQ rights in the United States are set in stone. In Florida, legislators have decided that while you can say gay, you have to say it carefully. Most Republican-run states have restricted or outright banned gender-affirming care for minors, and in states where restrictions on LGBTQ people have gotten tighter, reported hate crimes against LGBTQ elementary and high school students have quadrupled.

It is unclear whether or not the United Methodist Church will continue to embody these tensions. The mass exodus of conservative congregations was orchestrated by what Boggan called the “evangelical wing” of the UMC. The wing of the church most actively engaging in conservative culture wars has taken itself out of the conversation.

Whether the Methodists pull back together or splinter further is still an open question.

This story originally appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.