The Kate Middleton Easter memes don't make sense anymore

Modern Relics is a newsletter focussed on religion, but in an extremely online way.

Small housekeeping note, last edition I included a lot of videos from X, which I embedded in the hopes you could just watch them all natively in your email/browser window. Unfortunately once it was sent they all showed up as text-only embeds with no visual thumbnail and they were all really ugly! I have gone back through and replaced them all with screenshots of the tweets, which will hopefully make them all more tempting to click on. If you want to go see what you missed, you can go back to last week here.

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Update on the AI Jesus situation

Last week I wrote about the proliferation of AI-generated pictures of Jesus on Facebook and how they were getting pushed into a lot of people’s feeds.

Reader David found this Stanford University preprint paper about the phenomenon and posted it in the Modern Relics Discord — thank you David!

From Stanford:

[The] capacity to produce captivating, novel, and immersive imagery, cheaply and instantly, and to immediately double down on wins that generate significant engagement, is … what makes the technology appealing to spammers and scammers.

It seems I was right: Jesus is extremely clickable. And the more bizarre the image, the more it is likely to be shared, both by users and the platform itself. Facebook “is actively recommending [this] content by pushing it into users’ Feeds.”

This is a problem because users are encouraged to click through to low-quality and scam websites in pinned comments below the posts. Also, “[c]omments on the AI-generated images suggest many users are unaware of the synthetic origin of the images,”

Other newsletters have seen this paper and have done further investigation and commentary. The excellent 404 Media has this piece about the practice, and the equally great Today in Tabs covers it here. Ryan Broderick has also covered it in Garbage Day, and expands on the whole "Amen" thing too:

From Garbage Day:

As I wrote in October, the “Amen” comment is a new growth hack on Facebook. You get people to say “Amen,” underneath a post, the post gets recommended to others, who say “Amen,” as well, etc. This is especially powerful on the platform right now because as news has been deprioritized on the platform, a lot more religious content has bubbled to the surface.

My own theory is there's a bunch of bots and hijacked accounts posting "Amen" below religious-themed Facebook content, which then encourages actual religious people to post "Amen" as well.

TikTokers have also started to take notice and make videos about it. I thoroughly enjoyed this one that came up on my fyp.

"See why fact-checkers say this is an altered photo"

Hey Alma Purim VeggieTales watch party

To celebrate Purim, Jewish outlet Hey Alma hosted a watch party for the VeggieTales Esther movie.

Afterward, Deputy Managing Editor Vanessa Pamela Friedman had 23 questions, which is fair enough. What kind of vegetable is Esther? Wait is Haman's catchy antisemitic song really about a "sneaky family" with "sneaky noses"? Holy shit.

Gotta admit I was a little surprised that VeggieTales is apparently a staple in some Jewish households, but I guess it makes sense. VeggieTales mostly focuses on stories from the Hebrew scriptures and there's never explicit mention of Jesus.

Thanks to Moose for pointing this out to me!

Custom emotes

Sydney Sweeney reading the Bible

Congrats to whoever picked Elisha and the she-bear as the reading.

Easter is nearly here

A lot of the Easter memes I collected in the lead up to Holy Week were Kate Middleton-themed. After "going missing" for many weeks, the palace said she was going to "make a return" after Easter. The jokes write themselves.

Kate's return appears to have been brought forward after runaway speculation online forced her to announce the reason for her absence from public life early — she was diagnosed with cancer. Also she's not returning to public life on Easter Sunday after all. The jokes don't make sense anymore.

Anyway, for some reason Easter is the time Americans make passion scenes out of soft drink boxes.

This rabbit post reminded me about Religion For Breakfast's mythbusting videos about Easter and Christmas using the power of archaeology and religious studies. Did Christians co-opt the Easter festival from Pagans? Almost certainly not, although the name for the festival, "Easter" actually does come from the name of a Pagan goddess.

This year Religion For Breakfast tackles Jesus' tomb: Did the authors of the gospel accounts have in mind a room with a single bench found mysteriously empty, as depicted in art? According to some scholars, probably not. Rock-cut tombs of the time were more like family mausoleums that could hold upwards of 70 bodies. The later gospel accounts insist Jesus was the first one to be buried there, but the earliest, Mark, doesn't stipulate the tomb was unoccupied.

Jesus in the tomb on Saturday

This is my caption I posted on my rarely-used Tumblr lol

Hallow ad on Fox and Friends

This is pretty wild to me. Hallow, Mark Whalberg's prayer app that advertised during the Super Bowl, has a weekly Sunday sponsored prayer spot on Fox and Friends.

The presenters bow their heads in prayer as one of them reads out a prayer taken from the app. Before ending the prayer he says, "Thank you again to Hallow for this partnership during Lent. Amen". Weird!

Embrace cringe

This is who you're talking to when you call me cringe.

Don't look Jesus

A rival skull

This week, St Murray is not the most famous skull in this newsletter. Earlier this month, to commemorate the 750th anniversary of the death of St Thomas Aquinas, a church in Priverno, Italy decided to take his skull out for a bit and show him around.

The pictures of the event rule, but especially this one of St Thomas in the car.

There's another skull in France claiming to be St Thomas Aquinas which a group of Dominicans have also been touring with after commissioning a new reliquary for him in last year for the 700th anniversary of his canonisation.

There may be two Aquinases, but there's only one St Murray, and he wrote an edition of Modern Relics once.

Another Sydney Sweeney post

A small plug: Tyler Huckabee has a great piece, "The Culture Warrior Urge to Possess Sydney Sweeney" for subscribers to his Substack.

It's still Ramadan

Hey sorry I didn't post last week – I'm trying to keep this newsletter as regular as possible but sometimes things happen! Not sure if Easter is a long weekend overseas but it is here in Australia. Anyway, enjoy!