Swearing on a Christian Server

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About

Swearing on a Christian Server refers to a series of jokes about cursing in family-friendly online communities that have strict rules forbidding swearing. In 2017, they became the subject of image macros and other memes joking about the servers' strict rules on swearing on the servers, particularly for the sandbox mining game Minecraft.

Origin

Christian servers have long been a part of online gaming communities. For example, the earliest Christian Minecraft server dates back to when the game was launched in Beta on December 20th, 2010. On that day, user Spector17 of Minecraftforum.net^[1] created a thread promoting a gaming "clan" called Soldiers of Christ, a community of christian gamers with a dedicated server that would be playing Minecraft.

Christian servers for video games had existed prior those for Minecraft but have seen little online spread. One of the more popular examples of these servers being mocked in a humorous context appeared on April 1st, 2013, when YouTuber Playing Gaemz uploaded a video in which he is killed by an admin in a Battlefield 3 game because he said "Holy shit," gaining over 29,000 views (shown below).

Jokes about swearing on Christian servers began appearing more in the early half of 2017. On March 6th, 2017, Redditor CommanderQBall uploaded an image macro of an unnaturally muscular Winnie the Pooh captioned "Sorry sir this is a Christian server so no swearing" to /r/me_irl,^[2] gaining 2,100 points (shown below).

Spread

Other image macros relating to swearing on Christian servers and communities appeared in the ensuing months, often in a similar manner to the Please Do Not Swear On My Profile, Thanks meme. On April 27th, 2017, a thread was posted to /r/OutOfTheLoop^[3] inquiring about the origin and the spread of the joke on /r/dankchristianmemes. There, a user posted an image that was a variation with Club Penguin (shown below).

The joke began being associated with Minecraft in the early summer of 2017. On June 12th, Redditor caomanderwhab posted an edit of the Pooh image with a caption about a Minecraft server to /r/2b2t,^[4] gaining over 90 points (shown below).

In the following months, many more image macros about swearing on Christian servers began appearing in meme-centric subreddits such as /r/dankmemes and /r/MemeEconomy. A popular part of these jokes involved saying words like "frick" and "heck," which are family-friendly substitutes for actual curse words. On August 31st, 2017, an edit using an image from Taylor Swift's Look What You Made Me Do gained over 10,000 points on /r/dankmemes^[5] (shown below, left). Another post from August 5th used a character from Courage the Cowardly Dog and gained 1,500 points^[6] (shown below, right). The trend in memes has been covered by KnowYourMeme^[7] and The Daily Dot.^[8]