Why I Hate Religion But I Love Jesus

About

I Hate X, But I Love Y is a snowclone used in an image macro series featuring stills from Jefferson Bethke's monologue video "Why I Hate Religion, but Love Jesus."

Origin

A video^[1] of Jefferson Bethke^[8], a Washington-based spoken word artist, performing a poem he wrote^[4] about the difference between religion and Jesus was uploaded to Bethke's YouTube channel^[2] on January 10th, 2012.

The video was posted to Reddit^[7]on the 11th, where it received 839 upvotes and 421 downvotes. In five days, the video had over 12 million views, tweeted about over 86,000 times, and had over 1.4 million shares on Facebook.^[5]

On January 13th, the first Scumbag Jefferson Bethke^[3] was posted to the Advice Animals subreddit^[9], only receiving a score of 3. It also inspired several image macro series on the generator sites^[10][13] with alternative names including Contradiction Guy^[11] and Contradiction Chris.^[12]

Spread

The video was covered on MetaFilter^[23], the Daily Dot^[24], Yahoo! News^[14], the International Business Times^[15], and the Huffington Post.^[16] It was also heavily discussed on religious sites and blogs including Christianity Today^[17], the blog^[18] of St. Mary's Catholic Center of Texas, the Mennonite Weekly Review^[19], and American Jesus^[20]. A Michigan pastor, Kevin DeYoung, published a verse-by-verse critique^[21] of the poem, breaking down Jesus's true opinions on the church, citing the Bible verses when appropriate. Bethke responded^[22] to this article and appreciated this critique, stating that he was aware of his flaws:

"If I can be brutally honest I didn’t think this video would get much over a couple thousand views maybe, and because of that, my points/theology wasn’t as air-tight as I would’ve liked."

Response Videos

Notable Examples

Search Interest

Search for the video began on January 11th, the day after it was uploaded.

External References