What Would Jesus Drink?
Share
There is an energy drink called Yahweh. It has a picture of Christ on the front, crown of thorns and all, under the words "Take Him Anywhere." The flavor is Berry Blessed. A 12-pack runs about thirty-six dollars, which is roughly three bucks a can to take the Lord with you to the gym.
I want to be fair here. I grew up in this world. I worked in Christian publishing. Christian books, Christian music, the T-shirts, the bumper stickers, the doormats. None of that surprises me. A bumper sticker is a thing you keep. A T-shirt is a thing you wear. They signal something about you to the people who see them, and that has always been part of the point. You're telling the world where you stand.
An energy drink is different. You drink it and you throw the can away. So what exactly is being signaled, and to whom?
The whole catalog is bigger than you think
Once you start looking, the energy drinks are just the doorway. There's a snack bar called Holy Locust whose whole pitch is "the future of snacking is biblical." There's protein powder called The Whey of the Lord, with a pre-workout called Righteous Rage. There's Christian hot sauce, Christian beard oil, Bible verse lip balm, anointing oil sold like designer cologne, dog collars with scripture on them, faith-themed ammunition boxes, and scripture toilet paper. Somewhere on Reddit, a person is genuinely asking which Bible passages work best for the job. That last one turned out to be the atheism subreddit, which tracks.
Here's the thing I noticed about almost all of it. The product itself is usually ordinary. A peanut and date bar. A whey isolate. An energy drink that tastes, by most accounts, like a gummy worm. The Christianity is the wrapper. Literally. The strategy is to take a normal thing, print a verse on it, and call the printing a ministry.
Niche down, the business gurus say
If you've ever read anything about starting a business, you've heard the advice. You can't be everything to everyone, so pick your market and go deep. Find your people. Christian products are that advice taken to its logical end. Christians are a large, loyal, identifiable audience who often prefer to buy from inside the tent.
Which is fine, honestly, until the marketing starts insisting it's something holier than marketing. The founder of Yahweh said in a video that God laid it on her heart to start the company. She also said, in the same breath, that yes, it's a business, and businesses make money, but they're storing up treasures in heaven. You can feel the gears trying to grind in two directions at once. We did this because God told us to, and also please don't look too hard at the revenue.
The Guardian writer who reviewed these drinks noticed the part that actually matters. While the Lord has apparently been moving a lot of entrepreneurs to launch beverage lines, He does not seem to be moving many of them to give the proceeds to feeding the poor. The mission, as far as anyone can tell, is brand awareness. There's a 4GVN flavor called Gospel Gummy and a 20-pack of Agape that comes in a little cardboard sleeve "designed for evangelism," which is a generous way to describe a cardboard box.
Who is this actually for
Say you buy the whole premise. Say the goal really is to reach the lost. Walk it through. A person who isn't a Christian is standing at a gas station cooler looking at forty kinds of energy drink. Why would they reach past Monster and Celsius for the one with Jesus on it? They wouldn't. The branding that's supposed to attract seekers is the exact thing that filters them out. The only people buying a Jesus energy drink are people who already love Jesus.
So the verse on the can isn't reaching anybody new. It's a product Christians sell to other Christians, with the comfort of feeling like outreach stitched into the price.
And even if a stranger did pick one up, then what? A Bible verse with no context lands on someone who has no framework to read it. "The wages of sin is death" means nothing to a person who doesn't already speak the language. It's like working as a waiter in restaurants and getting handed a gospel tract instead of a tip. That tract doesn't make you feel reached. It makes you feel skipped. Nobody gets loved by a pamphlet. People get loved by people who bother to know them.
This isn't new, it's just thirstier
If this all feels familiar, that's because the playbook is old. There's a documentary from the early seventies called Marjoe, about a Pentecostal revival preacher who lets the cameras watch him work a crowd into ecstasy and then count the money out back. He says it plainly. He doesn't believe a word of it. He's grifting. You can stream it. It holds up uncomfortably well.
The Christian music industry ran a softer version of the same machine for decades. It was easier to break in there than in the secular market because the competition was thinner and the audience was built to be loyal. Plenty of artists came up in it, made their money, and later said out loud that a lot of it was hollow. The grift wears different outfits in different decades. In the nineties it was a worship album. Right now it's a can of caffeine with a cross worked into the logo.
The part that's actually a little sad
There's a real backdrop to all of this. Gallup has weekly church attendance down from 42% twenty years ago to about 30% now. The pews are emptier. And the response from a chunk of the culture is not to go talk to anybody. It's to print the message on more stuff. To turn faith into inventory and hope the inventory does the witnessing for you.
You're never going to lead anyone anywhere if you never actually talk to them. A label can't do that. A relationship can. Everything else is just product, and you can tell, because the moment you ask where the money goes, the answer is never the poor. It's brand awareness.
Take Him anywhere. Just maybe not in a can.