My mother was the sweetest lady who ever lived on this planet, but if you tried to tell her that Jesus wasn’t a Christian, she would stomp you to death.

Gregory uses affectionate hyperbole to sketch a familiar kind of devout, culturally Christian piety: gentle in everyday life yet fiercely protective of inherited religious identity. The joke turns on a basic historical distinction—Jesus was a Jew, not a “Christian” in the later institutional sense—colliding with a believer’s instinct to treat “Christian” as synonymous with “on Jesus’s side.” By placing this reaction in his mother, Gregory ties the point to family, Black church culture, and the emotional power of faith traditions that can resist nuance. The line critiques dogmatism while preserving tenderness, showing how love and certainty can coexist in the same person.