It Pays to Have Long Hair and a Beard in Utah—Jesus Models Are in Demand

January 4, 2025 Duy191098 Blog 0

Bob Sagers was walking around an indie music festival in Salt Lake City when a friendly stranger approached and asked for his number.

“Has anyone ever told you that you have a Jesus look to you?” the man asked, according to Sagers, a 25-year-old who works as a cheesemonger at a grocery store. It wasn’t a pickup line—the man’s wife was an artist looking for religious models.

“I didn’t really get that a lot,” says Sagers, who is 6-foot-5 with dirty-blonde, shoulder-length hair and a beard he says gives Irish and Scandinavian vibes. “I make for a pretty tall Jesus.”

And so it was that Sagers began a side hustle as a savior.

Models who look like Jesus are in high demand in Utah. That’s because for a growing number of people in the state, a picture isn’t complete without Him. They are hiring Jesus look-alikes for family portraits and wedding announcements. Models are showing up to walk with a newly engaged couple through a field, play with young children in the Bonneville Salt Flats, and cram in with the family for the annual Christmas card.

Since being recruited about four years ago, Sagers has posed as Jesus nearly a dozen times. Others have done so far more often, charging about $100 to $200 an hour to pose with children, families and couples at various locations in the Beehive state.

For the newly sought-after models, the job can be freighted with meaning and responsibility. Look-alikes find that people expect them to embody Jesus in more ways than the hair and beard. Some models said they feel like a celebrity when they don the robe—and get treated like one too. (One felt compelled to remind an onlooker he wasn’t the real Jesus.) Others said they’ve had their own semireligious experiences on the job.

In the fall of 2020, MaKayla Avalos hired a friend’s brother to pose as Jesus for pictures with her children. The 28-year-old runs a photography business in Ogden and she wanted her children to be able to see the photos of themselves with Jesus every day.

MaKayla Avalos hired a friend’s brother to pose as Jesus for pictures with her children.© MaKayla Avalos

“Most Christians have Christian artwork in their home,” she said. “This is a way to make it more personal, more catered to an individual.”When she put the pictures on Facebook, she was inundated with comments and private messages from people who wanted similar photos. Avalos created a waiting list and started doing shoots with the model on Antelope Island, an outpost in the Great Salt Lake full of backdrops that pass for an anno Domini Middle East. She has photographed about 50 or 60 groups.