A Biblical Symbology of Clowns: The Clown on My Wall
Clowns embody contradiction and inversion, acting as cultural symbols that expose the boundaries and hypocrisies of human systems through humor, discomfort, and absurdity. Though often feared, their purpose is not malevolence but revelatory: clowns function as sacred fools or prophetic tricksters who disrupt social order to reveal truth. Historically rooted in the role of the jester, the clown occupies the space between order and chaos, revealing hidden realities and confronting tyranny by returning overextended structures to a state of potential. The clown’s unsettling presence reminds us of the wilderness beyond the city—unformed but filled with potential—where God's dominion is meant to extend. Unlike the Nephilim, who represent fallen power structures rooted in underworld tyranny, clowns challenge tyrannical structures by embodying disorder in the hopes of divine renewal. They are not evil but disruptive, meant to provoke discomfort that leads to growth in wisdom, endurance, and insight. In a world of inverted values, the clown is the only archetype meant to turn things right-side up.
Jason Bostow: Before we get into it…what is up with the creepy clown?
Anthony Delgado: That’s my grandmother’s artwork.
Jason Bostow: Don’t take offense to the word “creepy.” I’m scared of clowns, so…it’s not a big deal. We had one of those—I don’t know if it was my grandma or my brother’s grandma—but one of them had it, and it scared me as a kid.
(RING THEM BELLS Interview: The Gospel is BIGGER than you think!)
The truth is, my grandmother painted many, many clowns over many decades. When she recently passed, that’s what I wanted to remember her by—one of her clown paintings. My mom also worked as a professional clown. I don’t love clowns, but I’m not afraid of clowns like many others. To me, they’re a hopeful, if slightly creepy yet comforting, part of life.
On the aforementioned Ring Them Bells interview, even though the explanation was given up front, many viewers responded:
“The clown is creepy!”
“The first poltergeist movie came out when I was about 11. Clowns sucked before that movie, but after that movie I was a wreck. Then at about 14 years old I read the story “it” from Stephen King and it ruined me for life. I guess it scarred me for life would be more accurate. i'm much better now at 55 years old, but I get it. I totally get it.”
“The nephilim were clowns.” 👀
And let’s not neglect this amusing email from one casual observer:
In the video, you appear on camera with a poster of a clown prominently in your background. I suggest you appear on camera without a clown in the background.
Sage advice.
The host of RTB, Jason Bostow, warned me. My wife mentioned it when I hung the painting in my office space. But I left it, and for several reasons.
It’s a clown, folks. Get real. Others out here in the biblical theology space have ancient weapons, aliens, depictions of spiritual beings, and all kinds of truly demonic things on their shelves (perhaps those are more appropriate for a Bible podcast than a clown—IDK).
As mentioned, it’s personal to me, so it belongs in my office. It’s a memorial, and its presence in my videos reflects that.
A bit of deeply rooted ‘90s kid rebelliousness…
Clowns should not be scary, per se, but a bit unnerving. In fact, clowns serve unique and important historical and symbolic purposes.
That said, at least one study found that over half (53.5%) of surveyed adults reported some level of fear of clowns, with 5% experiencing extreme fear (Scientific American). As we’ll see, clowns should be unsettling at times. No one should be entirely at ease around clowns, just as no one should be fully relaxed while boarding a roller coaster. Both extremes misrepresent the clown’s meaning and social purpose.
What Is a Clown?
The clown archetype can take many forms: comic, chaotic, tragic, or prophetic. They exist to alleviate tensions with humor or disrupt monotony with drama. Clowns have seemingly unpredictable behavior, often engaging in unsettling activities as they represent the chaos in the unordered wilderness between heaven and earth, so that we know things are higher and lower than the world we normally experience.
Though comical at times, clowns also depict tragedy—life is real and hard; clowns don’t pretend that it’s not. (Sometimes we have to pretend everything is okay when it's not, so who’s the real play-actor?) And clowns, not unlike comics, can speak truths or highlight social realities that otherwise result in social anathemitization. In this sense, the clown functions as a sacred fool—a character who can invert power structures and speak freely where others must remain silent. Clowns should never be silenced or canceled; they play the part of the outsider to reveal what’s hidden within, offering a kind of wisdom disguised in absurdity.
A clown has a dual nature. They can laugh and cry with the same face. The exaggerated features of the clown leave us with eerie, uncanny valley feelings similar to antique dolls and mannequins. Clowns appear in times of discomfort to bring comfort, and in times of comfort to cause much-needed discomfort. Their presence ranges from joy and bliss in one extreme to terror and horror in the other. The same clown can do a children’s birthday party in the early afternoon before starring in a B-rate killer clown movie by night–all it takes is a change of lighting. Pop culture portrays clowns as sinister or malevolent to contribute to fear, yet the most frightening thing about the clown is that we believe the clown is designed to bring joy and bliss. In this way, the attack of a killer clown invokes a more dramatic response than, for example, an obviously malevolent alien or serial killer (at least they do what we expect). The clown’s duality can also be seen in the trickster—characters like Loki, Coyote, or Hermes—who disrupts the tyranny of human order to illuminate unseen realities.
Clowns wear makeup ironically. Clown makeup obscures facial expressions, making it difficult to discern their emotions and intentions, leading to further discomfort. A clown can frown even while its human puppeteer smiles (or vice versa). The mask (or transformation) both hides and reveals. It plays with the human actor’s identity, persona, and sincerity. The clown covers their humanity in white paint and unnatural colors with exaggerated expressions for the express purpose of helping those not cloaked in makeup to see into their own hearts and minds.
Clowns bring people outside themselves, often to stand beside themselves so that they can see themselves and others more clearly. The clown’s grotesque humor and exaggerated sorrow force us to acknowledge what we try to suppress. That’s both their gift to us and their danger to a normalized society.
The Metaphysics of Clowns
(The following section is paraphrased from Jonathan Pageau’s talk on The Metaphysics of Clown World.)
The clown is a contradictory figure—an embodiment of the edge, of inversion. Everything the clown does is exaggerated: oversized clothes, shoes that don’t fit, and clumsy gags. The clown's whole aesthetic is about ‘not fitting.’ Accidents, like falling down or too many clowns in one car, represent a breakdown of intention—a collapse of meaning. Even a simple pie in the face has symbolic value. A pie is a vessel of nourishment, a potential meant to be integrated into the body. But in clown logic, it’s not eaten; it’s weaponized. It humiliates. It inverts purpose. Similarly, rigged and almost unwinnable carnival games symbolize striving from a distance toward a center you can’t quite reach. The futility of the game reflects the absurdity of the world the clown inhabits.
Clownish sounds are interruptions—bursts of nonsense in the middle of speech. They symbolize eruptions of chaos into normalcy. Clowns are funnier when placed next to a straight man; the contrast heightens the absurdity. The clown mocks and is mocked, amplifying the world’s inversion. Balancing acts—like rolling on a ball—capture this paradox. The ball represents chaos and flux. Yet the clown rides it. He’s not lost in it; he’s aware. He embodies the chaos but maintains form. This awareness gives rise to the redemptive potential of the clown.
Across cultures, we find holy fools—figures who expose the limits of systems. They reveal what the system can’t contain by acting insanely or inappropriately. In Christian tradition, some saints feigned madness to uncover hypocrisy. In the Lakota tradition, the Heyoka would act backward—eating when there was no food, breaking taboos during rituals—to expose hidden truths. Jesters in royal courts played a similar role. Because they were ‘nothings,’ they could speak the truth. Even Scripture shows David pretending madness in Gath to escape recognition and danger. These fools don’t reject order; they reveal its edges. And that exposure strengthens the whole.
But what happens when the world itself becomes a carnival? When does inversion become the rule? Today’s society prizes the clown—the comedian, the subversive. Sexual ethics are reversed, materialism is exalted, and spiritual order is mocked. This raises the question of double inversion. If the clown turns the world upside down, what happens when the world is already inverted? Then, perhaps, the clown alone can turn it right side up. By embodying inversion consciously, the clown might lead us back toward meaning. The circle can turn again. Chaos can serve as a revelation. And perhaps, in a world where absurdity reigns, the fool is the one who restores wisdom.
A Cosmological Look at Clowns
Clowns are the opposite of ascetics. They are from the wilderness, but they live in the city. (Perhaps the ascetic leaves the city for the wilderness in search of the clown’s wisdom or, through absurdity, to become the clown.) When Adam and Eve rebelled against God, they descended the mountain of God, no longer living in the Garden, but entering into the wilderness. They lost the perfect order of God’s Kingdom on earth. Yet the mandate given by God is “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion” (Genesis 1:28). As the city of man was built upon the earth, it was so apart from the goodness and wisdom of God. In the city of man, man is on the throne; it is man who seeks his own sovereignty, even at the expense of the kingdom he serves.
When tyrannical kings rise up, they bring with them tyrannical order–order for the sake of the king, not for the sake of the people (the inversion of the design). God’s ordering of the world is for the good of the people at the expense of the king (note, Christ’s sacrifice according to ‘the definite plan and foreknowledge of God,’ Acts 2:23). A decent king knows his tyrannical leanings, and for this, he willingly employs the clown.
The wilderness is not per se evil. It is chaos. When God created the world in Genesis 1 and 2, he did not bring it all under his dominion, only the Garden. It was for humankind to spread the good order of God to the ends of the earth, that is, to order the unordered wilderness. In this way, we understand the wilderness as an image of potential. In the soil are the elements necessary to build either the city of man or the Kingdom of God. There is potential for either.
The Chaos is primed and ready to be ordered. I’m a media arts teacher by trade. When I grade a student's artwork and think to myself, “Wow, this kid’s got potential,” I don’t mean that she has arrived or that she’s already the greatest artist who ever lived—far from it. The artwork is likely very juvenile. But the building blocks of greatness are present. It’s up to the student now to pursue dominion of their craft to become great.
Likewise, the chaos is potential. It has everything necessary for greatness, but it is not great yet. Neither is it evil, lacking potential altogether. Therefore, we don’t conceive of the chaos, the wilderness, or the clowns who are born there as evil or sinister. Potential realized is often tyrannical, but of potential undeveloped, it is yet to be seen what will come of it. Indeed, the clowns are there to return tyranny to disorder, to potential so that civilization can be reborn. With that said, we turn to history to see how it illustrates this very point.
A Brief History of Clowns
Clowns didn’t just appear out of nowhere. They have an ancient expression as inversive figures in human society. Before wigs and oversized shoes, ancient Egyptians employed dwarfs as entertainers who performed at royal courts and public festivals. They provided amusement, but also subtly reminded people, including the Pharaoh himself, of their shared humanity. Ancient Rome carried on the tradition with mimes and fools who entertained through physical comedy and exaggerated gestures, silently lampooning everyday life, especially directing their buffoonery at authority figures in humorous but quietly critical ways.
In medieval and Renaissance Europe, the clown took the form of the court jester—a unique, subversive figure, not entirely unlike the Roman fool. Unlike anyone else, jesters were licensed, employed, permitted, and even encouraged to mock kings and nobles openly. This strange cultural anomaly allowed jesters to speak blunt truths veiled in humor — open mockery — truths that would have led to punishment or exile for any commoner. Through absurdity and clever jesting, they critiqued power structures and exposed the hypocrisy of authorities with no fear of repercussion.
In the 16th century in Italy, Commedia dell’Arte turned clowning into an art form with defined archetypes and roles. Characters like Harlequin, Pierrot, and Columbine wore recognizable masks and costumes, each portraying exaggerated personalities and moral lessons. Their performances relied heavily on physical comedy, slapstick humor, and familiar tropes that audiences immediately recognized. The modern circus clown emerged in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Distinct makeup, exaggerated features, and elaborate costumes became standard. Not unlike their predecessors, the new clowns relied on slapstick, pratfalls, and visual gags to entertain audiences while subtly providing notable social critiques. Silent film stars like Charlie Chaplin took inspiration from these clowns and others, incorporating physical comedy and emotional appeals into cinematic storytelling. Chaplin’s ‘The Tramp’ is perhaps the purest modern picture of the clown, demonstrating developed character through comedy, tragedy, and social commentary.
But in the 20th century, clown symbolism also took a darker turn. The ‘sad clown’ trope, epitomized by the Italian opera Pagliacci or Krusty the Clown from The Simpsons, began to highlight the melancholy side of the clown hidden behind the painted smiles. Then, in an even darker twist, figures like John Wayne Gacy, who dressed as Pogo the Clown, turned the clown’s comforting image into one of horror. Pop culture intensified this sinister portrayal with Stephen King’s Pennywise, reinforcing societal anxieties about the hidden dangers beneath friendly appearances. And who can ignore the musical phenomenon, Insane Clown Posse?
Are Nephilim Clowns?
This question is clearly driven by the terror that people experience (because of whatever kind of trauma) related to clowns. The question could really take two forms:
Are Clowns Nephilim?
Are Nephilim Clowns?
The responses to these questions are not the same, though the answer to both is invariably ‘no.’
Are Clowns Nephilim?
In Biblical Theology, the Nephilim are the giant offspring of the sons of God (Watchers, rebellious angels) and human women. These giants are depicted as tyrannical leaders of earthly tribes and kingdoms: Og of Bashan, Goliath of Gath, Anak the progenitor of the Anakites,…(Hercules?). In the Hebrew folklore, specifically, the Enochic literature, the giants have ravenous appetites, ruling the people with an iron fist, demanding to feed, even on human flesh. They are in every way tyrants who order their societies around their own lusts, hungers, and thirsts.
The power of the giants is not in heaven; it is in their fathers, the fallen angels now chained in Tartarus, in gloomy darkness (Jude 6). Though they belong on earth, and indeed the spirits of their fallen continue to roam the earth (demons), they belong, cosmologically, to the underworld. Conversely, clowns belong to the earth, specifically, the wilderness. Their job is to take the tyrannical kings (seen symbolically, at least, as Nephalim) from their high places and return them to the underworld by deconstructing the social constructs that give power to the giant kings. In this way, the work of the clown is God’s work–undoing the tyrannical power of the underworld so that man can regain his mandate to spread God’s dominion over the earth.
A Case Study: You may ask how ‘evil clowns’ fit into this paradigm. Take Stephen King’s It, a horror novel about a group of children who are terrorized by a malevolent, shape-shifting entity that most often appears as a clown named Pennywise. The creature awakens every 27 years to feed on the town’s children, drawing power from their fear. The story alternates between two timelines—one in the 1950s when the children first confront the monster, and one in the 1980s when, as adults, they come together to defeat Pennywise once and for all.
The basic message is to face your fears and to come together with others to overcome the darkness, but what that darkness represents must be more than a literal monster. There’s a symbolic reading of It, that I think sheds light on the situation. Pennywise functions in the narrative as a disruptor of the illusion of normalcy and forces confrontation with what lies beneath. He interrupts the comfortable rhythms of adulthood, compelling the characters to reenter the world of memory and imagination, to explore vulnerability and communal courage. The clown is an anti-hero, not because he does good, but because his intrusion (his exaggerated inversiveness) exposes the tyranny of isolation, forgetfulness, and atomization that defines much of the modern world–in this way, he is good, even if he does evil. Pennywise is not the face of evil in the book, but a mirror reflecting the culture. So it doesn’t matter that the clown wears an evil face—his function is disruption, and in doing so, he calls the characters (perhaps more so, the reader) to escape the institutionalized meaninglessness of life. Pennywise is, therefore, chaos and potentiality in the wilderness, not evil in the underworld where the Nephilim live. The Nephilim are represented by evil kings and institutions that perpetuate godless tyranny in the city of man.
Are Nephilim Clowns?
Nephilim can only be clowns in a Gnostic world. Gnosticism, though not a defined system of thought, tends to see the world as polarized between good and evil and ultimately is antimaterialist, seeing the ultimate reality of life, not about the physical universe, but about eternal spiritual realities. The Gnostic should struggle to see the unordered chaos on earth as potential — what is unordered, but could be constructed for the honor of God or the tyranny of man. For the Gnostic, the world, ordered or not, is evil, a physical nature that must be shed to experience God in true spirit. The Gnostic cosmology is so overly simplified that it radically redefines cosmic structures that are meant to lead us to God (primarily, the dominion of the earth and the ascension of the holy mountain). In the Gnostic way of thinking, the chaos of clown world can be seen as an expression of the darkness.
But there’s a reason historical Christianity has rejected Gnosticism. It is a tyrannical system that deconstructs the biblical pathway to God, calling what is good in God’s purpose evil. Within the biblical worldview, we must consider the Nephilim for what they are—physical expressions of spiritual realities from the darkness below. And that is most certainly not the clown; the clown is the agent of the king (even in a cosmic sense), employed to prevent or deconstruct human tyranny.
Keeping the Clown on Your Wall
I’d like to revisit my reasons for keeping the clown on my wall and see if, with some elaboration, they make a bit more sense at this point.
It’s a clown, folks. Get real. On one hand, I want to be pastorally sensitive to ways that conscience is affected by my actions. But on the other hand, I want to correct deceitful intuitions. Perhaps, fear of clowns has become fadish. Rather than live in the discomfort, you avoid it. But it's biblically wise to remain in discomfort because of how it causes you to grow in wisdom, insight, and also endurance. “For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” (Hebrews 12:11). And that’s what clowns do; they bring tyranny under discipline so that we can grow past the purely human faculties that constrain us.
As mentioned, it’s personal to me, so it belongs in my office. (Not much to say here, except I obviously care about this more than anyone realized.)
A bit of deeply rooted ‘90s kid rebelliousness…I think we all need a little ‘90s kid rebelliousness in us to keep us from conformity to the patterns of the world so that we can be transformed into Christ’s image. How much tyranny do we willingly submit ourselves to because of mere normality?
Clowns should not be scary, per se, but a bit unnerving. In fact, clowns serve unique and important historical and symbolic purposes. Chaos isn’t fun. But it’s a necessary part of human flourishing under God.
It may be time for you to figuratively and/or literally hang a clown on your wall. I’ll be keeping mine.
