‘We’re Not Making Fun of Jesus’: Inside the Christian Satire Website Babylon Bee That Facebook Flagged as ‘Fake News’
The Babylon Bee continues to make a splash with its comical take on Christian culture, but unlike other satire sites, the Bee has a deeper purpose than simply making its readers giggle: The site also aims to make Bible believers think.
“What we want to make clear … we’re not making fun of Christianity, per se, and we’re not making fun of Jesus or the Bible or the gospel,” head writer Kyle Mann recently said on the “The Billy Hallowell Podcast.” “What we’re making fun of is the Christian culture that kind of builds up around those things and around the gospel and around the biblical message.”
Take a peek behind the world of The Babylon Bee — and learn more about the site’s upcoming book, “How to Be a Perfect Christian,” — below:
Mann, who also co-authored “How to Be a Perfect Christian,” explained that, as Christians, he and other members of the Bee team are looking to make a deeper point with their satire.
“Good satire should really make you laugh,” he said. “And then it should make you think.”
Mann said that the goal, in addition to sparking laughter, is to help Christians think through whether they have potentially created idols or erred in their handling of issues.
“We want people to see … [that] Christian culture is dispensible and American Christianity is dispensable, but Jesus and the Bible are eternal,” Mann said, adding that The Babylon Bee team wants to see people “build faith around those things.”
Of course, creating Christian satire is no easy feat. Mann said that every article goes through a process in which the team looks it over and reassesses — a workflow that he said likely keeps the Bee out of hot water.
“With every, single article it’s always a risk. I think if you want to write a good satire article … then you can’t really write from that place of fear — ‘Is everyone going to misunderstand this?'” he said. “If you start there, kind of afraid everything you write is going to be taken the wrong way … I think your satire comes off kind of weak; it doesn’t have the sharpness it needs to have.”
As for “How to Be a Perfect Christian,” which releases on May 1, Mann said that the idea for a book came about after he met with Bee founder Adam Ford and the two discussed creating a comical how-to manual for Christians.
“We [didn’t] want to do a best of compilation,” he said. “We kind of wanted to do something all new.”
He said that the book starts by offering perspective on what not to do and then works its way back to provide a helpful path for Christians who are looking to tackle culture and various issues in a constructive way.
Mann also discussed the Babylon Bee being fact-checked by Snopes, his journey to the Bee and plenty, plenty more.
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