Jesus freak

noun

Informal: Usually Disparaging and Offensive.

1. a member of any of several fundamentalist groups of chiefly young people Jesus people originating in the early 1970s and emphasizing intense personal devotion to and study of Jesus Christ and His teachings.

2. a Christian with an intense enthusiasm for Jesus Christ and His teachings.

Jesus freak

noun

1. informal,  a member of any of various Christian groups that combine a hippy communal way of life with zealous evangelicalism

Word History and Origins

Origin of Jesus freak¹

First recorded in 1970–75

Example Sentences

Then a teenager and a self-described “Jesus freak,” he’d come to Ocean City, N.J., to attend a Youth for Christ conference.

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“She’s that ‘Jesus freak,’” Washington said of Jess.

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A skittish electronic beat collides with a low, morose guitar riff on Blood Orange’s “Jesus Freak Lighter” — which is to say it’s a little bit New Order, a little bit Joy Division.

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“Jesus Freak Lighter,” though, is all Hynes, fitting since it conjures a mood of digital-era solitude: “Got carried away,” he sings with a kind of muffled melancholy, “Living in my head, photo fantasy.”

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Growing up in rural Washington state — not far from where she lives now — she was poor, she was a Jesus freak, she was a high school dropout and she was beginning to think that she was gay, and all of that added up to a tendency to be misread by the outside world.

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