As Christian conservatives take to satire, the left is not amused

CHRISTIAN CONSERVATIVES do not have a reputation for being funny. The language of the right has more often been outrage, while liberals dominated comedy through shows such as “Politically Incorrect” and “The Daily Show”. But some are poking fun at the left’s pieties with satire.

The prime example is the Babylon Bee, created in 2016 by Adam Ford, a cartoonist, as a Christianised version of the Onion, a popular satirical news outfit. Seth Dillon, an entrepreneur, bought it from Mr Ford in 2018 and, by further politicising it, has turned it into one of the most popular conservative sites after Fox News, claiming as many as 25m readers a month at its peak.

Mr Dillon says its mission is to “ridicule bad ideas” from a conservative Christian worldview. Readers love it because it lampoons the left. “Biden warns Russia that if they invade Ukraine, America will evacuate haphazardly and leave $86bn in weapons behind,” it announced last month.

But it does not spare the right. In 2019 it poked fun at Donald Trump for boasting that he had “done more for Christianity than Jesus”. The article went viral, leading Snopes, a fact-checking outfit, to label it as satire after some people believed it was a real story. Then, last September, Mr Trump actually said in an interview: “Nobody has done more for Christianity, or for evangelicals, or for religion itself than I have.” The Bee now frequently tweets its original satire side by side with a real media headline that fulfilled it.

The jokes court controversy. Some play on covid-19. (“Liberal feels sad for man dying of covid, then happy after hearing he wasn’t vaccinated, then sad again because he was an illegal immigrant.)“ The Bee recently compiled a sardonic list of “ten fun ways to celebrate” the anniversary of the January 6th insurrection.

To the glee of the editors, many in the mainstream media do not seem to get it, fact-checking glaringly bogus headlines. USA Today once listed 15 sources to disprove that the “Ninth circuit court overturns death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg”.

Yet many Christians feel that, like American evangelicalism itself, it has become too political. Terry Lindvall, author of “God Mocks: A History of Religious Satire from the Hebrew Prophets to Stephen Colbert”, warns that Christian satire runs the risk of going awry if it does not love those it pokes fun at. ■

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