They crucified Ironman
Also, "Worshipping Jesus 30,000 Feet In The Air!"
Thanks to the skull for covering for me last week. My holiday was great, plus I got engaged.
Also today I did a short interview for my colleague Karen about whether Twitter is still relevant. I talk about religion on the platform and how it connects niche groups like witches and queer Christians.
Some of my favourite things I said didn’t make the final cut but ah well nevertheless. I’m still catching up on everything from the last two weeks so this is still pretty Eastery sorry lol. It was only Orthodox Easter last Sunday I can totally get away with this.
A string of unlikely Jesuses
In the wake of Easter, these clips from The Church of the Rock in Winnipeg, Canada went viral. Every year they do an Easter play based on a blockbuster movie and make it into a musical by doing parody versions of popular songs. Their back catalogue is available online only around Easter Sunday (it’s closed again now, sadly) but at least we have these clips.
This one is set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe where Loki crucifies Ironman who then sings Tubthumping by Chumbawamba:
Something felt very familiar to me as I watched this, and I realised I’d gone to a similar play in a church in California while visiting my sister one Christmas. My own church in Australia does a silly nativity play every year too, where one year baby Jesus was Shrek.
Is that the same as what’s happening here? Probably, but doing absurd parody plays for Easter, with all the violence and death that’s part of that story, has sent me into the stratosphere. Here’s a Church of the Rock performance based on Back to the Future with an unusual take on the crucifixion:
At some point during the show they sing a parody of Uptown Funk by Mark Ronson:
Here’s a Toy Story one:
Not even a Captain Jack Sparrow falls without the Father knowing:
Here’s a Lion King one where Nala sings Someone Like You by Adele while Simba-Jesus gets taken off the cross:
You’d think maybe it would be Simba’s dad, because he literally dies in the movie and bringing him back to life would be a rad twist, but I know it’s Simba because of this other clip from the same production, where Zazu is played by Toucan Sam.
I love these so much. The combination of high and extremely low production values. The campy costuming and weird takes on the source material. The deeply earnest acting in such an absurd setting. I hope they never stop doing them.
“Look! Each of us is just like this doughnut!”
“Remember we are empty and sinful inside with no power to do the things God wants us to do. Not until Jesus comes and fills up that hole.”
YES ERIN
This entire thread of shows Erin Stuvek found on Christian streaming service Pure Flix is very good.
Were those evangelists really singing on a commercial flight?
This clip did the rounds last week — it depicts a handful of Christian evangelists singing How Great Is Our God on what appears to be a commercial flight. The original video on TikTok posted by one of the group was captioned “We are taking this flight over for Jesus!”
Some users were incredulous. How could this happen without the flight staff asking them all to sit down? How weren’t they deemed a security risk? Why is nobody wearing masks? Was it staged?
Video surfaced of the same group singing at a Polish train station while Ukrainian refugees waited for transportation after fleeing the war.
Senior editor of Relevant Magazine Tyler Huckabee suggested the flight may have been chartered by the mission group in order to fly into the warzone, but plenty of people on the original post pointed out not everyone in the video seems thrilled about the song.
As it turns out, it was totally a commercial flight. In a follow-up on Instagram, the pastor who posted the video, Jack Jensz Jr, says the video was filmed on an EasyJet flight back from Poland and the team got permission to sing from the flight attendant and pilot.
They even made an announcement to all passengers letting them know who we are and what we did in Ukraine and introduced us and allowed us to get the guitar out! People then clapped and welcomed us.
Please never do this to me when I’m on a plane. The website Church Leaders has a not-totally-negative take, and reports Jensz attended the Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry. The blog Live And Let’s Fly is less measured, calling the song “a pathetic display of skill and of courtesy”, but says “our primary scorn should fall on EasyJet, not the musicians.”
Delightfully angelic, Seymour
Beating the trolley problem with facts and logic
Sorry this edition has been almost exclusively Christian
Heres a… Jewish Easter joke(?) to make up for it.