Courtesy of Americo Cruz

Traci Coston, a serious young Christian TikToker, stares directly at the camera. 

“One day, an animator was messing around, and he created this picture of a little minion.”

Coston points up to an image of a sausage-bodied minion hanging limply from a wooden cross. 

Minions are the stars of a $5 billion animated movie franchise. And their extremely online fans have been feverishly producing minions memes like this one since the release of the first movie, Despicable Me, in 2010. 

“Listen to this,” she continues. “A minion didn’t die for you, but somebody actually did. Jesus actually died for you.” 

Coston had sacrificed the Minion Jesus for my attention, and the crucified minion had done its job. His death was the key that unlocked the door to my carefully curated TikTok algorithm, and this summer, Coston had walked right through.  

Coston isn’t a lone wolf. A dozen other TikTokers had recently posted Minion Jesus videos, all repeating the same near-verbatim message in front of the exact same image. 

The scriptedness of the videos was unusual. In the comment sections of these scripted Minion Jesus videos, hundreds of TikTokers gathered to discuss the mystery. Who wrote this script? Do these people know each other? Are they AI deep-fakes? Are they joking? 

For the Today, Explained podcast, I got to the bottom of it. 

The road to Minion Jesus is long and rambling. It takes us from a tiny town in Louisiana all the way to the steps of White House. But it begins at the Facultad de Artes Plásticas art school in Arteaga, Mexico.

In 2021, a young Mexican graphic design student named Americo Cruz opened up his 3D modeling software and created Minion Jesus. Two days later, he posted it to his personal Facebook page. Cruz told Vox he took inspiration from a 2015 meme: a photograph of a stuffed toy minion engulfed in flames and fastened to a cross. “The truth is that it's just a parody — a simple joke” inspired by Gen Z’s absurdist sense of humor, he said.  

Minion Jesus went moderately viral in 2021, and it has been shared thousands of times on Facebook, X, Reddit, and Instagram — all platforms where images are easy to access and download. But Cruz hadn’t seen the TikTok videos until I reached out to him for this story.

The Minion Jesus TikTokers post similarly structured content every day, most of it concerned with convincing the viewer to convert to Christianity. Several also make conservative political content. 

They don’t all follow one another on their various social media platforms, but I soon realized they all have one connection in common: a blond, brawny evangelist named  Taylan Michael Seaman.

Matt Cardy/Getty 

Seaman is the 26-year-old self-proclaimed Louisiana millionaire behind a coaching program called Kingdom University. He offers online courses to any would-be social media evangelist willing to “invest” thousands of dollars into his ministry. In exchange, he teaches them his “Viral Video Framework,” a basic digital content marketing strategy couched in the language of proselytism. 

As you may have guessed by now, the Minion Jesus video is a Kingdom University product. 

According to several enrollees who spoke to Vox under the condition of anonymity, the coaches alert their students when a particular piece of content — like Minion Jesus — is doing well. They are then encouraged to follow suit, which is why the videos are often so eerily similar.

Seaman’s personal content skews a bit more pessimistic. His message is also often about money, and his videos contain clear nods to a midcentury offshoot of Pentecostalism commonly known as the Word of Faith Movement.

In the 1960s, itinerant evangelist Kenneth Hagin rose to fame by performing (and possibly inventing) the miracle of Holy Laughter in churches around the United States. At the wave of his hand, congregants would fall to the floor shrieking and convulsing in rapturous hysterics. This kind of ecstatic religious expression is a defining feature of the Pentecostal tradition. Hagin’s Word of Faith movement capitalized on that fervor. 

Fifty years before TikTok appeared in the app store, Hagin began broadcasting his sermons over the radio and selling reel-to-reel tapes to anyone willing to pay for them.

In 1974, he founded Rhema Bible Training College, an unaccredited bible school in Oklahoma. Today, there are Rhema training centers in 14 countries, and course listings include classes on using the Internet to grow your congregation. 

In 2002, two Rhema graduates founded Faith Church Ruston, a nondenominational church in Ruston, Louisiana. Their son-in-law and protégée is the godfather of the Minion Jesus TikTok, Taylan Michael Seaman.

After Hagin’s death, a new Kenneth rose up: Kenneth Copeland is now the figurehead of the Word of Faith movement and has taken it to new heights. He founded a Christian broadcast network, built a multimillion-dollar empire, and now claims that his flagship show reaches 885 million viewers a day.

Under Copeland, and thanks to his network, theology and conservative politics began to meld. The Word of Faith movement dovetailed neatly with another quasi-Pentecostal movement called the New Apostolic Reformation — a fusion of prosperity gospel theology and Christian Nationalist politics. Where the Word of Faith movement leveraged the faithful to amass wealth, the New Apostolic Reformation is leveraging that wealth to build political power. 

Andy Kroll, who covers fringe religious movements in America for ProPublica, told Vox that where right-wing Christian political movements in decades past have encouraged Christians to effect change from within the political system, the New Apostolic Reformation’s vision for America is more ambitious and less democratic. 

Its most prominent figure is Lance Wallnau, a regular guest on Kenneth Copeland’s television network, the movement’s loudest megaphone. Wallnau has a vision he calls “The Seven Mountains Mandate,” arguing that conservative Christians should “take dominion” over American life by assuming positions of power in seven key spheres of influence: arts and media, business, church, education, family, government, and science and technology. 

“This segment of Christianity is not the largest by number, but it's the fastest-growing,” says Kroll. And you cannot, of course, spell “dominion” without the word “minion.” 

In July, Seaman, the man behind the Minion Crucifixion TikToks, livestreamed a sermon to his YouTube followers that he had titled “How To Have DOMINION!!” 

Once fringe, this vision for America has found a champion in former president Donald Trump. Wallnau was one of the first Christian leaders to endorse Trump, and Trump has spent the past eight years borrowing liberally from Wallnau’s language and theology to appeal to his base. 

In the tradition of Hagin, Copeland, and Wallnau, Seaman has come to recognize that he, too, is only as powerful as his flock is large. His YouTube audience? Three million. 

“When I go online and I look up Minion Jesus, and when I read about Taylan, I see an archetype,” said Kroll. “Someone who is common throughout this Wild West of Christianity. Someone who’s really thinking about how to break through on whatever the latest communication platform is.”

There’s a chance, of course, that his subscriber count has been inflated by purchased followers. Regardless, he is effectively exploiting a loophole that his predecessors could only have dreamed of. 

Put simply, I didn’t go searching for Minion Jesus. Minion Jesus came looking for me. 

Hagin, Copeland, and Wallnau may have created the millionaire Christian influencer. Seaman perfected it: Game the system. Crucify a minion. Let the algorithm do the rest.

Viktor Kovalchuk/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images

Ukraine’s drone strike in Russian territory: On Wednesday, Ukraine’s military launched a large-scale drone attack against a weapons depot in Russia’s Tver region, causing the town of Toropets to be evacuated. This attack follows August’s offensive into Russia’s Kursk region. Both are likely efforts by Ukraine to put itself in a better position to receive aid and end the war.

Bill Gates on the global health revolution: Global development funding to support health efforts grew by 6.6 percent a year on average from 2000 to 2020. Now, that growth has slowed, falling to just 2.3 percent. Vox spoke with Bill Gates about the challenges facing global health advocates and the developments he thinks hold the most promise for regaining the momentum of the movement.

There’s nothing populist about Trump’s plans to gut health care: In his address to the Republican National Convention, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance suggested that he and former President Trump hold similar priorities on the “divide between the few, with their power and comfort in Washington, and the rest of us.” Yet, Trump’s newly revealed health care plan would deregulate the health insurance market, which could possibly allow insurers to refuse coverage to those who need treatment the most.

Why everywhere seems to be flooding right now: This week, North Carolina was hit with a historic amount of rain. Central and Eastern Europe and Nigeria experienced unprecedented flooding following multiple days of torrential rain, too. While there are unique factors that are causing the storms across the world,  a new study reports that extreme weather changes could affect as much as 70 percent of the Earth’s population in the next two decades if greenhouse gas emissions and global temperature increases aren’t reduced.

“Willful, wanton, and reckless”: The US Justice Department is suing Grace Ocean Private Limited and Synergy Marine Private Limited for $100 million to cover the costs of the government response to the fatal bridge collapse caused by a container ship in March, which killed six people. The FBI has also opened a criminal investigation into whether the ship’s crew was “grossly negligent.” [CNN]

Has Tupperware gone stale? The iconic food storage company — which for much of its history has counted on homemakers, and mostly women, selling the products via "Tupperware parties" — is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after years of struggling sales. [Wall Street Journal]

1989 photo by Fairfax Media Archives

When the war in Gaza broke out, I had to catch up on hundreds of years of history in the Middle East, including the various militia groups that emerged in opposition to Israel. Hezbollah: A Short History by the late historian Augustus Richard Norton is a thorough primer on the group that traces its evolution into a dominant Lebanese political party, provider of social services, and a formidable military force in the Syrian civil war, which is still ongoing. If there’s a definitive history of Hezbollah, this is it, or at least a top contender. Norton drops in personal anecdotes from his three decades studying Lebanon and the Middle East.

The book underscores that while Hezbollah is designated as a terrorist organization by many countries, it is a major, if divisive, force in Lebanese society. For that reason, it has been reluctant to plunge Lebanon into an all-out war with Israel in the current conflict and forfeit some of its power and popularity. Lebanon has seen a lot of violence and instability over the decades, and the pager and walkie-talkie attacks this week mark only the latest episode. For more, read my explainer on the history of Hezbollah and its role in the war in Gaza.

—Nicole Narea, senior reporter

Getty Images

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Today’s edition was produced and edited by senior editor Lavanya Ramanathan, with contributions from staff editor Melinda Fakuade. We'll see you tomorrow!

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