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Abstract
This article examines an Internet music video in which Jesus has an orgy with strippers, knocks out an old lady, steals her necklace, steals from a homeless man, and rolls a joint with a page torn from the Bible. We contend that the lack of online censorship enabled the producers of the Hater Jesus music video to ruthlessly mock Jesus in an original fashion in order to produce a subtle critique of the militarization of Christian youth. The novelty of the representation of Jesus in this case has to do with the fact that while Jesus has often been joked about in popular media, he has rarely been seen. Moreover, when he has appeared, Jesus has usually been portrayed as an effeminate weakling. Hater Jesus, on the other hand, presents us with a thoroughly punk rock version of Jesus—a smirking, nihilistic menace to society.
Notes
1For the sake of clarity, we use Hater Jesus (italicized) to refer to the music video. Hater Jesus (not italicized) is used to refer to the young man dressed in a crown of thorns (the Jesus character) in the video. “Hater” refers to the song that gave rise to both the video and its central character.
2In his classic essay “The Rhetorical Situation,” Lloyd Bitzer (1968) suggested that rhetoric was situational, by which he meant that persuasive appeals are produced in response to particular “rhetorical exigencies.” Bitzer defined the “rhetorical exigence” as “an imperfection marked by urgency … a defect, an obstacle, something waiting to be done, a thing which is other than it should be” (p. 6). These exigencies, according to Bitzer, literally call out to would be rhetors demanding a response “in the same sense that an answer comes into existence in response to a question, or a solution in response to a problem” (p. 5).