Some Christian women on the internet seem convinced that Jesus wants them to be holy—and hot.
If you search “Jesus glow-up” on Instagram or TikTok, the first video to show up will likely follow a template. First, there’s a variation on the words “The Jesus glow isn’t real” (a statement the content creator aims to debunk) overlaid on a series of photos or videos showing the users in their “pre-glow-up days”—that is, before they committed their lives to Christ. Then there are the “after” images, meant to provide evidence that their newfound devotion has noticeable physical effects. Often the videos are set to a mash-up of an Olivia Rodrigo song, either “deja vu” or “traitor.”
One influencer posted a “before” video of herself wearing club clothes, a spiked collar, and dramatic makeup. After, she poses and twirls for the camera in long, flowy dresses and skirts. (Her TikTok has over 1 million likes.) Another user shared pictures of her heavily made-up face and collection of crystals. After, she’s wearing a cross necklace and reading the King James Bible.
Christian influencer Hailey Serrano (who goes by Hailey Julia on social media) posted four “before” pictures of herself smirking at the camera. A transition slide with a cross emoji precedes five “after” images of Serrano smiling in noticeably better lighting and softer makeup.
“I can confirm that the Jesus glow is, in fact, real,” Serrano wrote in the caption.
Some internet personalities are even sharing advice to guide others on their glow-up journeys. Christian influencer and cookbook author Ashley Hetherington posted a list of “Christian glow up tips,” including run-of-the-mill spiritual advice like “Bible before phone,” “join a church,” and “memorize scripture” alongside wellness tips like “whole foods,” “move body,” and “dress in fine linens.”
It’s easy to dismiss this trend as unserious. Perhaps in a vacuum it’s harmless. But the “Jesus glow-up” is also a symptom of something endemic and pernicious. Eagerness to claim the blessing of heightened physical beauty, bestowed from on high, is just another indication of our appearance-obsessed worldview.
These days, women can’t scroll social media without running into Ozempic mentions, #SkinnyTok, and an endless cascade of advertisements for beauty products. In this context, claiming Jesus wants to make his followers prettier is just putting a spiritual spin on the message the secular world is already sending.
I don’t necessarily doubt the sincerity of the content creators sharing these images. Some of them refer to their glow-ups as an inside-out process of internal sanctification appearing physically as some undefinable, magnetic quality. “It’s in the eyes,” commenters say, insisting they can detect a change in countenance that’s about more than aesthetics.
But on social media, a share-worthy glow-up has to be visual, and the photographic lexicon of platforms like Instagram doesn’t showcase the spiritual. It can’t differentiate between normative physical attractiveness and some deeper, virtuous, more transcendent type of beauty.
Many Jesus-glow posts use “before” pictures in which the user is wearing a lot of heavy makeup; the “after” images show a more on-trend, “clean girl” look. The unspoken subtext: “Followers of Jesus don’t look like that; they look like this.” (Some Christian influencers in alternative fashion and art scenes have pointed out that faithful believers can also look as if they are on their way to a metal show.)
At the same time, creators participating in this trend seem to be earnestly celebrating something every Christian hopes for: that the work of the Holy Spirit will transform them and bear fruit, including joy, peace, and goodness. These are certainly qualities that can change one’s life in meaningful, even embodied ways. In some cases, the advertised glow-up seems to be most directly attributed to lifestyle changes; users post “before” pictures of themselves partying, drinking, or smoking and say they’ve left behind the makeup and clothing they wore to participate in their former social worlds. Perhaps a perceived improvement in physical appearance has to do with a decrease in substance use.
But it’s risky to offer up evidence of those physical changes to be judged by the rules of social media—especially Instagram, a platform that consistently pairs with decreased self-esteem and body image in young women.
More than anything, the Jesus-glow-up trend is a failure of imagination. Just as evangelists for the prosperity gospel can’t imagine a clearer sign of blessing than financial wealth, those who claim Jesus wants us to have a glow-up can’t imagine a clearer sign of blessing than physical attractiveness. It’s the result of our contented acceptance of the constantly shifting, often-oppressive beauty standards determined by entertainment media, male desire, capitalism, entrenched racism, and ableism.
For centuries, people have categorized and described the bodies of female followers of Christ in ways that tie the physical form to spiritual goodness. During the medieval period, hagiographies of female figures like Saint Agatha foreground the female body in grotesque, disturbing ways, describing horrifying torture scenes. According to historian Kirsten Wolf, narrators generally imbued these exemplary female followers of Christ with “irresistible beauty,” as well as virginity, an aristocratic background, and unshakeable faith.
Describing female saints in this way was what Wolf refers to as a “simplification” process: a means of making a character easily legible to a mostly illiterate audience that would be hearing the story orally. A beautiful, socially respectable virgin was sympathetic, valuable, and desirable. She was a type that persisted. Kristin Kobes Du Mez has written about the early 20th-century child evangelist Uldine Utley, whose “angelic” appearance gave her the power of perceived innocence.
Writers and artists have long endowed virtuous female characters with normative physical beauty, symbolizing that appearances aren’t skin-deep. Examples abound—from Lucie in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities to the heroine of Disney’s Cinderella, whose beauty contrasts with the cartoonish flaws of her cruel “ugly stepsisters.”
Too often, Christians have tacitly adopted this value system. Rather than working to create a radically liberatory alternative, they’ve shackled women to beauty standards with spiritual language.
Take John Eldredge’s best-selling book, Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul, and its counterpart for women, Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman’s Soul (coauthored with Eldredge’s wife, Stasi). In this vision of a fulfilling Christian life, men want to “win the beauty,” and women long “to unveil beauty.”
The Eldredges would certainly say the beauty they refer to is an inner radiance, not tied to the ever-shifting standards of the media. But when so many examples of the masculine quest for fulfillment in Wild at Heart are epic Hollywood films (in which the attractiveness of the people onscreen is part of an entertaining fantasy), one wonders what kind of grace these books are lauding. A few nods to inner beauty don’t cancel out the emphasis on desirability.
American Christian women have received a baffling collection of messages about our bodies and their value. Those who encountered Gwen Shamblin Lara’s Weigh Down program heard God wants you to be thin. Millennials who grew up on contemporary Christian music owned CDs with covers featuring slender, mostly white, pretty women; they may have read Brio magazine, which in its November 1998 issue ran an article addressing girls in the throes of puberty:
Some of your least favorite qualities are often only temporary. Perhaps your most picked-on will become your most prized possessions. It happened for me as my formerly skinny legs and knobby knees won me the preliminary swimsuit competition and a college scholarship in the Miss Oklahoma Pageant.
Today, provocateurs and Christian manosphere influencers claim Christian women are just prettier. A glut of social media content emphasizes the value of physical upkeep and fitness for believers, almost always accepting current standards as the ones faithful women should be trying to meet. Influencers connect spiritual health to weight loss and performance ability and post about 21-day water fasts to “get closer to God” while reaching fitness goals.
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Not all American Christian women are political conservatives, and vice versa. But Christian women who consume right-leaning media also encounter products like Evie magazine and the “Real Women of America” calendar, both examples of attempts to prove that women on the conservative “team” are hotter.
In a way, participants in the Jesus-glow-up trend are competing in the same arms race. Whichever side has the most beautiful people must be doing something right, right?
Christians eager to claim that women who follow their faith are more desirable are attempting a form of evangelism that turns people into showpieces, luring curious seekers with the promise of better looks. And because good looks are social currency, this has a lot in common with the prosperity gospel.
If the Christian faith is built on the life and death of one who “had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him” (Isa. 53:2) and it envisions a kingdom that upends our world’s power structures, followers of Christ should have a radically different way of looking at female bodies.
We should be able to name the harm we cause when we equate normative beauty with goodness, and we should seek to divest ourselves of a system that uses the bodies and faces of human beings to create social and political hierarchies. The glow-up prosperity gospel just keeps us competing in a perpetual beauty pageant that ultimately hurts both its winners and its losers.
Kelsey Kramer McGinnis is the worship correspondent for Christianity Today. Her book The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families, cowritten with Melissa Burt, will be released this October.
