The Performance of Blasphemy
The bravest thing many adults do these days is announce, loudly and in public, that they don’t believe in God. This declaration is delivered with the swagger of someone storming the beaches of Normandy, even though it usually happens while seated on a couch, thumb-deep in a phone, surrounded by other people doing the exact same thing. The courage is mostly theoretical. The applause is real.
The performance goes like this, religion is stupid, believers are gullible, and anyone who still cares about Jesus in the year of our extremely online Lord must be either malicious or simple-minded. This is not an argument, it’s a ritual. It’s the atheist equivalent of crossing yourself before a meal, except the meal is validation and the cross is a comment section.
I say this as someone who has done it. I’ve smirked through conversations, dropped a sarcastic “sky daddy” here and there, and felt that warm glow of superiority that comes from believing I’ve graduated from a belief system without realizing I’ve just enrolled in another one with worse music and no holidays. If hypocrisy were a sacrament, I’d be confirmed twice.
The modern blasphemer is not actually interested in God. God is old content. God is the Beatles. Everyone has an opinion, no one is listening, and the loudest voices are usually the least interesting. What people are interested in is being seen not believing. Blasphemy has become a form of social grooming. You bare your teeth, the group nods, and everyone agrees you are one of the good ones, rational, enlightened, and absolutely not like those embarrassing believers who need stories to cope with death.
The irony, of course, is that this posture requires just as much faith as the thing it mocks. Faith that you are smarter. Faith that history is settled. Faith that you are immune to the same psychological needs that have driven humans to gods, myths, and cosmic parents since we figured out fire but not therapy. The only real difference is branding.
Jesus, in this context, is no longer a religious figure so much as a conversational prop. He exists to be dunked on, misquoted, or used as a rhetorical speed bag. You don’t need to know anything about first-century Judea, Roman occupation, or why apocalyptic cults were popping up like startups with worse funding. You just need a joke. Preferably one that signals you are not like those people.
And to be fair, a lot of those people deserve mockery. Organized religion has earned its reputation for cruelty, control, and breathtaking levels of bullshit. But the contemporary blasphemy performance doesn’t actually interrogate power. It interrogates straw men. It punches down at the most embarrassing version of belief because that’s easier than admitting that certainty itself is the drug everyone’s hooked on.
Watch how quickly this collapses when you push it. The same person who scoffs at miracles will become visibly upset if you suggest their worldview is also stitched together from assumptions, vibes, and a Wikipedia page they skimmed in 2014. The same person who calls believers sheep will lose their goddamn mind if you challenge the moral consensus of their peer group. Apostasy is only brave when it’s popular.
There’s also a strange tenderness beneath the cruelty. Blasphemy today is rarely about rejecting God, it’s about wanting God to be wrong loudly. Quiet disbelief doesn’t get likes. Quiet disbelief doesn’t prove anything. What people want is the relief of declaring, “I see through it,” because seeing through something feels like control. It’s the adult version of yelling “I know you are but what am I,” except now it comes with podcasts.
The funniest part is how moral the whole thing becomes. Religion is mocked not just for being false, but for being embarrassing. As if the cardinal sin is not oppression or violence but cringe. Believers are framed as emotionally needy, which is rich coming from a culture that melts down when a tweet doesn’t get enough engagement. We have replaced prayer with posting and call it growth.
And let’s be honest, the blasphemy is rarely risky. It is performed in rooms where it will be rewarded. It is uttered among people who already agree. It is not shouted in places where it would actually cost something. That would require conviction instead of costume. That would require the kind of courage that doesn’t translate well to merch.
None of this means belief is noble or disbelief is wrong. It means humans are predictable assholes who will turn any idea, God included, into a way to feel less small. When belief was dominant, piety was the costume. Now that disbelief is fashionable, mockery is the costume. Same body underneath. Same hunger.
The real tell is how uncomfortable everyone gets with uncertainty. Suggest that maybe no one has the full story. Suggest that history is messy, theology is human, and certainty is mostly a sedative. Watch the room tighten. Watch the jokes stop. People don’t want mystery, they want a position. They want to plant a flag, even if the ground is imaginary.
So we keep performing. Believers perform belief. Nonbelievers perform disbelief. Everyone insists they’re different while rehearsing the same lines. And I’m right there with them, pretending my self-awareness absolves me, as if naming the problem means I’m not part of it. That’s adorable. That’s faith.
In the end, the joke isn’t God, or Jesus, or scripture, or even hypocrisy. The joke is us, grown adults so desperate to be seen as correct that we’ll turn existential questions into personality traits and call it courage. We mock belief to avoid admitting we want meaning just as badly. We laugh because laughing feels safer than saying, “I don’t actually know.”
That’s the real blasphemy. Not offending God, but refusing to admit how much we resemble the people we’re pointing at, finger extended, mirror ignored, absolutely certain we’re not the ridiculous ones.