“At their best, my videos are life-changing,” CJ The X tells me, with a laugh that acknowledges the immensity of the claim. From the mouths of many other internet creators, this statement might sound ludicrous—but the comments on CJ’s channel will reveal that they are not exaggerating.
“Every CJ The X video gives me about 5 metaphysical panic attacks before giving me some sort of closure,” one commenter remarked.
Another said, “For an entire hour and 21 minutes CJ just had me like, ‘yeah I’m gonna incorporate that into my worldview, thanks.’”
And still another: “This video went from a fast-paced funny rant about capitalism and Bo Burnham, to an existential discussion about cyborgs and transhumanism, to a monumentally soul-wrenching ending that shifted my whole paradigm.”
Needless to say, these comments are not outliers. When CJ The X calls me from Toronto in August, they are just returning from a fast-paced lecture tour across Canada and the U.K., where they sold-out an entire theater in London’s Leicester Square without doing much marketing beyond their own email newsletter. Among the lectures they performed were tongue-in-cheek titles like “(What You Mean By) ‘Art Is Subjective,’” “You’re Not God, I Am!: The Case Study of the Century,” and even, “Does Jesus Care If You Masturbate?”
Despite the success of this in-person tour, CJ’s career for the past four years has primarily been online. Scrolling through their YouTube videos, you might not immediately understand the connection between their topics and those of the lectures; among CJ’s most successful videos are, “Skipping The First 5 Minutes of Tangled,” “No Way Home Was Kind of Sexist,” and “In Defence of Breaking Dawn Part 2.”
What you’d see if you watched any of these videos, however, is that their focus on pop culture acts as a Trojan horse. While CJ often starts the conversation with a popular piece of media or an obviously laughable topic like “Top 10 Types of Water,” their videos quickly veer into philosophical rabbit holes that transform a seemingly surface-level subject into something existentially confronting. In one video, CJ breaks down the now-iconic “Running Up That Hill” sequence from Stranger Things 4 by discussing its metatextual, metaphorical, and metaphysical layers across three parts, ending with a rousing spoken-word monologue about what it means to be truly present in both body and soul. The title of that video? “Stranger Things & The Meaning of Life.”
“I think of a lot of my work as jokes,” CJ tells me. “So, like, when it’s me doing an hour-long video intellectually analyzing this niche fan-made My Little Pony song and then spiraling into ‘The Idea of The Holy’ by 20th century German Lutheran theologian Rudolph Otto and comparing hearing this song to experiencing the fear of God? Hilarious. Like, the fact that it’s actually serious is the punchline.”
These fast-paced, meme-infused, unabashedly queer, wine-sipping and caffeine-fueled deep-dives have connected with Gen Z greatly. One commenter on CJ’s video called “Bo Burnham vs. Jeff Bezos” remarks, “Ah yes, a 2.5 hour philosophical breakdown on a 1 minute song. That is exactly what my adhd brain craves, while your flamboyant presentation is what my goblin heart craves.”
And it’s not just amateur philosophy, either. As their channel grows, CJ is meeting and interacting with an increasing number of university professors who appreciate their work and even offer voluntary consultation. Although CJ often dresses like David Bowie in Labyrinth, all that glam is backed with rigorous academic research.
A large part of CJ’s specific resonance, though, happens on a spiritual level. While their video topics aren’t explicitly focused on Christianity, the notion of a transcendent reality and the person of Jesus (whom CJ describes in one video as “an anarcho-socialist homeless Jew with superpowers”) come up in casual conversation repeatedly. These videos often reference “building the Kingdom of God” as a core human calling, touching on the cultural decline of sacred rituals and speaking about organized religion with a degree of seriousness other YouTubers would rarely dare. At first, the sudden mention of Jesus Christ in a video about The Emperor’s New Groove can feel like another joke—but beneath the surface, CJ’s marriage of irony with a deeper sincerity is clear.
The comments in response are resounding: “CJ talking about Jesus and religion for 2 minutes was more impactful to me than 23 years of going to church,” wrote one. Another remarked, “CJ talking about Jesus and everyone being a child of God is so ADHD and yet some of the most powerful words about Christianity I have ever heard, and the whiplash of crying and laughing was extreme.”
CJ tells me they were raised around what they describe as a “Christian socialist halfway house” in rural Canada, their mother intent on living out the teachings of Christ in an embodied way. This communal “on earth as it is in heaven” ethos ripples through CJ’s work, which often encourages people to radically live out their most intrinsic beliefs: depending on others and allowing others to depend on them.
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Another formative piece of CJ’s theological and philosophical outlook is pragmatism, influenced by philosophers like Robert M. Pirsig and John Dewey. In pragmatism, what can be tried and found to produce positive results—to a specifically intentioned end—is the closest thing to truth. CJ sees this as an overlap with Christian theology: true manifestations of faith are known by their abundant, live-giving fruit.
By the same token, CJ’s embrace of a nonbinary identity carries pragmatic resonance for them. Put simply, it’s just a helpful description of reality.
“When people hear that I am nonbinary, they gain a lot of accurate information about me pretty fast,” they say. "And then when they mix that with meeting me and talking to me, that’s a very accurate description.”
For CJ, pronouns are a combination of describing something both internally true and tangibly helpful and accurate about how a person engages the gendered world around them. In CJ’s mind, their nonbinary identity is less of an “immutable cosmic category” and more so a useful terminology for communicating to people who meet them that they tend to blur the line between masculine and feminine more than most.
“I had always been squirming to get to ‘me’ somehow and I knew it was a materially different thing,” CJ tells me. “It’s not just [that I’m] an emotionally healthy guy—it’s a different language than most guys speak, like a true amalgamation. It’s always been present in the visual presentation and some strangeness in my manner and whatever, and it really just found its natural resting place in using they/them pronouns.”
One of the most compelling things about CJ’s presence for me is the distinct lack of shame or conflict that they seem to feel about their queerness in combination with their Christianity. As a trans Christian myself, I feel like I’m still in the jungle of untangling the internalized condemnation I feel against the realities of my own identity. Throughout our conversation, CJ expresses humble doubts and open-handed uncertainty about many things—but whether God loves and affirms queer people like them is not one of those doubts.
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“For me, it’s just authentic,” CJ says. “This is my sincere Christianity. This is sincerely the way I talk. I’ve never felt a contradiction in my own life with my Christian faith. I feel like I’ve been on a sincere Christian journey the entire time.
“I wonder sometimes with some Christians, if they came to my lectures, what would they think?” CJ continues. “At what point do they walk out? Because as far as I’m concerned, it’s straight up ministry. Like, it literally is. I’m speaking to hundreds of people about Christ. And so really, is it just me saying ‘f---’ or wearing a tiara that has you walking away?”
Not all Christians are alienated by CJ’s work, though. “In my audience there’s a lot of ex-Christians,” they tell me later. “There’s a lot of people who aren’t religious at all who are getting turned onto Christianity, there’s a lot of people who have no interest in the Christian part and just like other stuff about me.
“But one population that I see a lot of is people who are in churches now, still, and very involved in church—and they’re that one person in church that’s like, ‘Come on, we’ve gotta f---ing’ change some things.’” CJ continues. “I feel very fulfilled if my community is the critical mass of those people in the churches. All those people are here, and that’s exactly—like, I’m getting chills right now, because those are my people. At the bottom of my heart, those are really my people.”
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For me, and no doubt for other viewers, the apparent paradoxes of CJ’s presentation are what make them so distinctly compelling. On the one hand, CJ’s takes are often leftist-coded, and their lavish, glamorous gender presentation and unabashed queerness can break through barriers for those usually turned off by the mention of religion.
On the other hand, CJ espouses ideas about mythic archetypes and objective moral reality that often have less in common with secular progressivism and more similarity to Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist and professor who has become famous for his “tough love” appeal among Gen Z men (and his adamant refusal to use preferred pronouns.)
The aesthetic differences between CJ and Peterson could not be more comically dramatic. Nevertheless, many former Peterson followers who’ve been disaffected by his descent into the right-wing culture war trenches have found themselves welcomed into CJ’s ideologically diverse online community. This is a community where, unlike Peterson’s, both preferred pronouns and discussions of religion and ritual are taken truly seriously.
“I think a lot of my work is about reclaiming things that do not belong to one side of the ideological spectrum,” CJ says, “and just letting queer people and all sorts of people know that Christianity can be yours too. You’re allowed to touch these things. Don’t let human beings contaminate some of the greatest ideas and revelations that humanity has had with their agendas ... You can just sit down and read the Gospels, and you can take them or leave them.
“I think a lot of my work is about reclaiming things that do not belong to one side of the ideological spectrum,” says CJ the X, “and just letting queer people and all sorts of people know that Christianity can be yours too.
“The world gets a little more beautiful once you realize you’re allowed to sincerely engage with religion and ideas, and that you’re not gonna be destroyed by them.”
This radical and unself-conscious intellectual honesty—and refusal to fit into tidy categories—is probably why the enigmatic title “The X” feels so fitting for CJ’s idiosyncratic presence. But it also might be why CJ appeals so strongly to people who would otherwise be turned off: CJ challenges all their stereotypes of what a leftist, a nonbinary person, a philosopher, and a Christian are “supposed” to think and look like.
Toward the end of our interview, CJ tells me, “My mother never ceases to remind me that when I go onstage to perform a lecture, and I’m always so anxious about getting my deep message across about individualism or the arc of history from monarchy to democracy towards technocracy, that the main thing that the audience often comes away with is that they saw a nonbinary person in a skirt who loves Jesus and is confident. That’s very humbling.”
Georgia Coley is a documentary filmmaker and culture writer living in Nashville. She writes about the intersection of trans experience and theology at her Substack, Georgia In Her Mind.
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