The most influential Christian voice in America today has never stood behind a pulpit.
It’s never baptized a baby or consecrated the Eucharist. It doesn’t minister to the poor and the sick or raise money for any cause whatsoever (except its owners’ wallets).
In fact, the voice vehemently rejects anyone’s attempt to take it too seriously—to hold up the content and insinuations of its prodigious output against the mirror of any creed, confession, or catechism.
That’s because the most influential Christian influencer in America today is, well…a joke.
The Babylon Bee—launched less than a decade ago—has become ubiquitous in the vast (and, for better or worse, high-stakes) world of Christian public dialogue in America. Its satirical, ironic tone taps into its audience’s religious and social priors to evoke genuinely funny and insightful humor. Its authors and editors, to their credit, seem well-informed about the nuances of virtually every corner (of any consequence, at least) of Christian belief and practice across the English-speaking West. And if you watch closely, it’s even become a powerful (albeit unwitting) arbiter of political and doctrinal disputes between these Christian traditions themselves.
The Bee has millions of followers. Its content reaches millions of people every single day. Its headlines are quoted in the White House. Its memes show up in congressional hearings. Its posts are re-shared by presidential candidates. And it’s not uncommon that a small number of viewers mistake, at least initially, its satire for “real” news (a key indicator of any satire publisher’s success).
I suppose it’s all a testament to The Bee’s genius. Or perhaps to society’s collapse into self-parody and cynicism. Probably both. But the point is: There is no other openly-religious brand that reaches so many people. Not even close.
But what is it, exactly, that makes The Bee so effective at reaching American Christians where hundreds of other brands fail? That’s a good (and big) question with, I think, many possible answers. The landscape of American Christian “consumers”—broken, as it has always been, into dozens of significant and different traditions—has never been friendly to catch-all, “meta-denominational” brands trying to reach everyone. When such ventures do find traction, they’ve often fallen prey to over-generalization—sentimentalism and “fluff” used to fill the gaps between traditions and paper over (with very thin paper) meaningful and relevant denominational divides.
For better or worse, content from The Bee is the closest experience many American Christians have of something that’s truly catholic.
But somehow The Bee is genuinely ecumenical and has, to its credit, managed to stay on-topic. Millions of evangelicals, Catholics, Orthodox, and even “mainline” Protestants (even people who, still, wouldn’t be caught dead in each other’s churches) follow and share Bee headlines with each other. For better or worse, content from The Bee is the closest experience many American Christians have of something that’s truly catholic. The precise words and images its editors use to weigh in on a given subject are awaited by millions of people and serve the function of a truncated resolution or even encyclical—both engaging and orienting public opinion and drawing some ideological lines around what, exactly, constitutes the right (or, at least, an acceptable) way for a Christian to think about a given issue. When The Bee’s satirical response to some current event resonates, it’s because it is sufficiently informed and tonally authoritative.
Undoubtedly, keeping this up seems like a tall order. The Bee’s editors are remarkably skilled. But the fact is, all of this isn’t actually that hard to do when one simply refuses to ever be taken seriously. Even The Bee’s “About Us” page is satirical. By totally eschewing seriousness, The Bee’s satire offers a kind of lowest-common-denominator and (ironically) in-offensive Christianity with maximally broad appeal—an ideology built not on some shared liturgy or doctrine (which gets complicated and, yes, very serious), but on shared enemies. “Progressive” Christianity, political correctness, pronouns—The Bee is a place where “believers” can agree, at the very least, that these things are ridiculous. Its editors pull on existing moral throughlines to generate sarcastic and ironic content that crosses traditional fences and gives Christians of many stripes something to laugh (or roll their eyes) at together.
“Look at this thing that happened. Based on certain real but unarticulated values we all share, it is stupid.”
This is the effective message underlying almost every Bee headline. What’s “stupid” goes without saying because the dogmatic priors of its readers are just-enough held in common to make the joke work. And when it’s all couched in such harsh relief, dissenters to a given headline become “party-poopers.” Calling a piece of satire “too much” comes at a high social cost. The whole enterprise is impressively self-propelling.
Now, I don’t suspect most people would admit to taking The Bee too seriously. It’s funny, we say, and that’s it. Only because the world itself has become so ridiculous does this stuff resonate in the first place, right? It’s a welcome relief in the (evaporating) sea of self-righteous “wokeness.”
But is it all, maybe, just a little too much? What happens when satire becomes the most popular way to communicate religious values? What trade-offs do we make when we supplant whatever is crowded out by roasts, memes, and gotchas? When laughing passes for dialogue?
Satire is a useful scalpel, no doubt. It cuts through nonsense in ways other forms of rhetoric—often because of intense social pressure—cannot. It deflates pretension and opens up dialogue where it perhaps wasn’t allowed before. It’s especially good at exposing hypocrisy (always a good thing). But satire ultimately cannot heal. It doesn’t build up or construct (if it’s good satire, it’s not meant to, and can’t). And insofar as our society is as broken as The Bee’s reams of successful posts suggest, it’s ultimately healing—not more cynicism—that’s needed.
Of course, satire itself is not some modern phenomenon. The Hebrew prophets used it to defend Yahweh. Jesus used it to expose the Pharisees. But it’s what comes after that makes the difference. We’ve mastered the roast, but can we reply? We know what’s absurd, but do we know what’s holy? We know how to (and secretly love to) be outraged, but do we know how to pray? To confess? To change?
Insofar as The Bee now occupies something near the center of American Christian discourse, what’s crowded out, I think, is an articulated (not just implied-by-negation) path toward holiness—the harder, quieter work of offering something better. Mockery is easy, building is hard. Sharing a clever headline costs nothing. Living the Gospel—in public, in community, in flesh—costs everything. Sell all you have and follow me is hardly a punchline.
In the empire of satire, sincerity feels naive, courage looks “cringe,” and public displays of conviction can feel embarrassing. It’s all too earnest, too try-hard, too exposed. Is this where we’re at, now? Is this the reward for our hyper-literacy—an instinctive recoil from anything unvarnished, anything too sincere to survive the meme cycle unscathed? Is our knee-jerk reaction to public displays of genuine passion, however modest or meaningful, to swiftly clip, caption, and recirculate until its original impulse is all but unrecognizable?
(Is there any doubt about the answer to these questions?)
No, I don’t think The Bee set out to become this. “What we want to do is defend what we believe, as Christians, is the truth,” said Seth Dillon, The Bee’s CEO, in an interview last January. But maybe that’s the point—the very fact that a vacuum existed for relentless satire is, in itself, an indictment of us. And perhaps our collective revelry in shared derision is less medicine than slow-acting poison. It’s the “vibe” of conviction, say, without the risks and costs of authenticity, and it’s the most popular thing going.
I’m not eager to see where it takes us.
Image via picryl.
