Rappin' for Jesus

2013viral videoclassic

Published September 24, 2026

Rappin' for Jesus is a 2013 viral hoax music video in which a fake middle-aged pastor and his wife rap about Christianity while calling Jesus a racial slur over and over. Uploaded to YouTube on February 5, 2013 by Brian Spinney, the clip's straight-faced absurdity and instantly quotable chorus made it one of the most-watched fake church videos of the decade.

religious parody memesparody song memeshoax memesshock humor memescringe memes

Overview

Rappin' for Jesus, also filed under the chorus line 'Jesus Christ Is My N**', is a low-budget three-minute clip in which a stiff, middle-aged white man in a plaid shirt raps over a canned hip-hop beat while his wife plays keyboard and joins in on the hook[4]. The verses start off innocent, church youth outreach, hip-hop beat, Christian truth, before the chorus swings into 'that's 'cause Jesus Christ is my n**,' repeated by both singers with total deadpan1. Later lines cover Jesus turning water to wine, drug abstention, sagging pants, and Mary Sue's 'little Christian swag'2.

The joke works because the corny youth-pastor framing makes the chorus land like a trapdoor, and the couple perform it so flatly that first-time viewers spent the first days of virality genuinely arguing about whether it was real1. Christian outlets and viral news blogs treated it as a possible real embarrassment for a real church until fact-checking pulled it apart in under a week2. The song sits somewhere between a shock comedy sketch and a fake documentary artefact, which is why it kept surfacing in reaction videos and lyric quotes long after the hoax was confirmed3.

Origin & Background

Platform
YouTube (upload) / Reddit + WorldStarHipHop (viral spread)
Creator
Brian Spinney; actors P.J. Waggaman and Elizabeth Ince played the fictional Pastor Jim and Mary Sue Colerick
Date
2013

On February 5, 2013, a YouTube account called Brian Spinney uploaded a music video titled 'Rappin' for Jesus,' with a description claiming Spinney was an Iowan father of two and devoted Christian who had filmed the clip years earlier as a high school project with his pastor at the West Dubuque 2nd Church of Christ in West Dubuque, Iowa4. The upload was the only video on the account, and the song ended with a link to the church's website2.

The story fell apart within a couple of weeks. The Daily Dot found no online record of a pastor called Jim or James Colerick anywhere in Iowa, noting that ordinary small-town pastors show up in Google results almost immediately1. The church's own site said the congregation had shut down in the summer of 2004, but a WHOIS lookup showed the domain westdubuque2ndchurchofchrist.org had been registered on January 15, 2013, roughly three weeks before Spinney's YouTube upload6. Mary Sue's rap about 'Christian swag' also used a slang sense of 'swag' that only entered common use in the 2010s, well after the video's supposed high-school-era recording3. The Colericks were later identified as actors P.J. Waggaman and Elizabeth Ince, confirming the whole thing as a scripted hoax; Waggaman died in 2021 at age 773.

How It Spread

The video jumped platforms fast. On February 11, 2013, it was posted to r/videos, where the thread pulled in more than 2,900 votes and 1,100 comments before being archived4. WorldStarHipHop reposted it the same day, which pushed the clip into hip-hop-adjacent audiences that would not have found it through a Christian channel4. Within a couple of weeks the upload was past 1.2 million views, and outlets from The Christian Post to The Daily Dot were running debunk pieces alongside the video12.

Reaction videos became their own small genre around the clip. YouTuber Tyrone Magnus uploaded a 'Rappin' for Jesus' reaction on October 16, 2013, one of many creators who filmed themselves cracking up at the chorus4. On February 6, 2015, SoundCloud user MajorLeagueWobs posted a mashup of the song with Bobby Shmurda's 2014 track 'Hot N****', which pulled more than 105,500 plays and 3,500 likes over the next five months4. Spinney also started selling digital downloads of the track, and someone stood up a separate web page selling t-shirts printed with a glowing Jesus and the chorus line2.

By the end of the decade the original YouTube upload was past 90 million views, per Genius, keeping the song in circulation as a reference point every time a real church attempted a rap or a corny 'reach the kids' outreach clip surfaced3. Godspam and other Christian bloggers spent 2013 arguing in the comments about whether the video was blasphemy, satire, or both, an argument that never fully closed6.

How to Use This Meme

The song is used mostly as a quote source. People drop lines like 'life-changer, miracle-arranger, drink-exchanger' or 'my rhymes are fly, my beats are sick' as a bit whenever the topic of Christian rap, corny youth outreach, or square adults doing hip-hop comes up7. The chorus itself is generally referenced obliquely rather than typed out, and clips of the video get reposted as a punchline any time an actual church tries a rap tie-in3.

Frequently Asked Questions