One of the most successful new media outlets in America does nothing but publish fake news. If that seems like a bad thing, it should be noted that the website in question is even more dedicated to spreading the Good News. Adam Ford, the founder and only full-time employee of the Babylon Bee, a Christian satire website, is clearly surprised at his success. “On the first of March, we celebrated two years in existence, and a couple of days later I noticed we had passed 100 million page views,” Ford tells The Weekly Standard. The Bee’s social media presence—it now has over 400,000 followers on Facebook and nearly 100,000 followers on Twitter—has grown quickly too. “All of this was totally organic. We’ve never run an ad, never boosted a post, never spent a dollar on spreading the word. And we’ve had no outside funding. Our growth has been totally driven by the content.”
If you’re one of the shrinking number of people to have never encountered an article from the Babylon Bee, the publication could be described as something like a Christian (largely Protestant) version of the Onion. With such headlines as “Treasure In Heaven Revealed To Be Bitcoin,” “Satan Sprinkles A Few More Stegosaurus Bones Across Nation To Test Christians’ Faith,” and “Opinion: My God Is An Imaginary Deification Of My Idiotic And Contradictory Personal Opinions,” you can see where the site gets some of its conceptual inspiration.
The Bee taps into a huge audience less accustomed to being the subject of well-intended comedy than of being made the butt of jokes. “There was a kind of a thirst for that perspective. The Onion’s really funny, but a lot of [its humor] comes from a secular and even anti-religion” point of view, says Kyle Mann, the Bee’s head writer. “Whenever there’s a big topic of national discussion” that in some way might touch on religion, comedy and satire in general seem to have only “that one perspective.”
But the Bee doesn’t just want to be a Christian spin on the Onion. The site regularly makes fun of evangelical America’s tendency to produce bad, faith-based facsimiles of things that are popular in secular culture (see “Holy Spirit Empowers Man To Make It Through Christian Movie”). The Bee also mines humor from a part of American life and culture that secular comedians don’t know the first thing about. If you’re not already theologically conversant or a regular churchgoer, you may not even understand why headlines such as “Calvinist Dog Corrects Owner: ‘No One Is A Good Boy,’” “Rude Mother Fails To Put Baby On Silent Mode Before Church Service,” and “Pew Pencil Sharp” would make Christians scrolling through their Facebook feeds laugh out loud.
Now, two years after its launch, the Bee is going multimedia, with the release of the site’s first spinoff book, How to Be a Perfect Christian: Your Comprehensive Guide to Flawless Spiritual Living. The book is an extended parody of a grab-bag of regrettable tropes in the Christian publishing industry’s self-help genre. “We didn’t want to do a collection of greatest hits because, honestly, that just seemed too easy,” Ford says. “We wanted to expand into a new realm.” Doing a standalone book seemed like “a way to leave a mark on culture that is more deep and lasting” than a collection of parody articles.
How to Be a Perfect Christian “is going to go down in the annals of history as a turning point for Christianity,” the first chapter says. “Think Pilgrim’s Progress or The Purpose Driven Life, then kick it up a few levels.” Taking the form of a how-to guide, the book leads readers from picking a parish (“A church that will help you achieve perfection will have a superslick website”—and don’t forget the “essential” church coffee shop and, preferably, laser lights for the sanctuary) to fellowship and ministry (“Your goal at the potluck is to enjoy as much food as possible while providing the absolute minimum contribution yourself”) to memes and emojis (“All the great Christians of centuries past found that they were closest to God when just absolutely blasting people on Facebook”).
Although all manner of hypocritical pomposity and pretense comes in for parody in the book, many of the most pointed moments involve the commercial aspects of church life today (“An Ohio man once shopped at a shopping mall for over twenty years before realizing it was actually a church”). The nexus of evangelicals and conservative culture warriors also provides plenty of material. At the close of each chapter, a helpful holiness tracker monitors progress toward perfection; by the book’s end, the careful reader, “doing the right things and avoiding the wrong things,” will be just as perfect and holy as Jesus himself.
It’s safe to say that thus far, to the extent it has noticed, secular America is confounded by the success of the Babylon Bee. In March, Facebook threatened to reduce the visibility of the Bee’s stories. The reason? One of Facebook’s fact-checking partners, Snopes.com, obliviously labeled a Bee story (“CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine to Spin News Before Publication”) false rather than satire. Considering how important Facebook traffic is to Internet publications, the threat was no joke.
“We’ve been ‘Snoped’ before a number of times, but this was the first time Facebook used it to threaten us and to redirect readers away from our link and to Snopes’s website,” says Ford. “Over an article about CNN spinning news in a washing machine! It was just insane.” Snopes has fact-checked more than a dozen other Babylon Bee stories in the last two years. Last fall, the Bee even responded to all the unwarranted attention by publishing an article entitled “Snopes Rates Babylon Bee World’s Most Accurate News Source.” After an outcry on social media about the Bee’s mistreatment over the CNN gag, Facebook came to its senses and issued a public statement calling its treatment of the Bee a mistake. For its part, Snopes has continued to classify Bee stories as false, as it occasionally does stories from the Onion and other satirical publications, but has apparently not repeated the mistake of labeling Bee stories as false in Facebook’s fact-checking system.
As the CNN story suggests, the Bee is at least sympathetic to political conservativism and religious traditionalism. “Obviously there are topics that we just pound on again and again and we show no mercy on,” says Mann. “We hit Planned Parenthood and abortion pretty hard. That’s just the biggest tragedy in our culture.” However, in a climate in which evangelical leaders responded to the previous Democratic president’s suing nuns over paying for birth control by unreservedly endorsing the election of a publicly adulterous casino magnate, the Bee finds no shortage of targets among Christian conservatives, in addition to mocking the godless left.
Recent articles such as “Republican Party Publishes New, Improved Edition Of Jesus’s Beatitudes” and an op-ed purportedly written by King David headlined “If You Could Stop Comparing Me To Donald Trump, That’d Be Great” testify to the fact that Ford and Mann grasp a fundamental problem with religion and politics: American Christians may be enamored of the idea of civil religion, but Jesus clearly wasn’t. At one point in How to Be a Perfect Christian, Ford and Mann twist the quotation famously attributed to St. Francis of Assisi and sarcastically exhort Christians to “Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use the voting booth.”
The Bee is largely ecumenical in the way it ribs all corners of Christendom. Ford and Mann are understandably coy about revealing their own religious affiliations, though they both seem to share a deep understanding of, and even affinity for, the culture of evangelicalism. However, much of their humor derives from critiquing the excesses of the megachurch experience that defines worship for millions of Americans (“Elevation Church Debuts Water Slide Baptismal,” “Holy Spirit Unable To Move Through Congregation As Fog Machine Breaks”). And they do draw a clear line on certain doctrinal matters—like the prosperity gospel, which Mann says is “one of the most dangerous things out there, and that’s within our own camp, that’s within evangelicalism or Christianity.” Prosperity gospel teaches that doing good works and acting righteous will bring you wealth and success. Although considered by many Christian leaders to be a heresy, prosperity gospel is preached by some major televangelists. Its best-known popularizer is Houston megachurch pastor, bestselling author, and Oprah consort Joel Osteen. He is probably the Bee’s favorite punching bag, inspiring such stories as “Joel Osteen Sails Luxury Yacht Through Flooded Houston To Pass Out Copies Of Your Best Life Now,” “Joel Osteen’s Bible Spotted Shivering Under Seedy Freeway Overpass,” “Joel Osteen Apologizes For Using Lord’s Name In Sermon,” and “Joel Osteen Launches Line Of Pastoral Wear: ‘Sheep’s Clothing.’”
However, Christians are commanded to put the best construction on things when rendering judgment about sinful behavior, and arguably the Bee has crossed lines it shouldn’t have. When televangelist and Trinity Broadcasting Network cofounder Jan Crouch died in 2016, the Bee published an article beginning:
Even fans of the Bee noted on the site’s Facebook page that it should perhaps not have mocked Crouch, her heretical beliefs notwithstanding, so soon after her death.
But good satire is often defined by fearlessness and not shirking from making readers uncomfortable for identifying with what’s being mocked. Ford doesn’t see the need to apologize for being a satirist. “From God chiding Job in Job 38, to Elijah mocking the prophets of Baal, to Jesus’s famous ‘plank in the eye,’ satire is well established as biblical,” he says. “If being Christian means never criticizing anyone—even sharply—nobody told that to Jesus, or Paul, or countless others in the Bible.”
If How to Be a Perfect Christian is any indication, the Bee is unlikely to head in a kinder, gentler direction. Readers who attend churches that use T-shirt cannons and who virtue-signal online or on bumper stickers instead of worshiping authentically and helping the poor are in for a lot of squirming. The book is an especially bold indictment coming from the reclusive Ford, a former atheist whose social anxiety is so pronounced it dashed his hopes of becoming a pastor and makes him very reluctant to talk to press or otherwise promote his own work. Fortunately for Ford, help is on the way. With the book coming out and the site’s continued growth, Mann plans to quit his job in the construction industry and work for the Bee full-time.
Despite the Bee’s success, Ford maintains “the real motivation behind launching the Bee continues to drive us: speaking truth into the culture in an engaging, intelligent way.” For his part, Mann sees the Bee’s mission as something more than chasing modern cultural relevance. He sees it as also harking back to a time when Christian leaders were not afraid to take a stand for what they believed. Reading Martin Luther’s satirical and harsh criticisms, Mann says, a reader today might react, “‘Wow, this is crazy. Is this guy even a Christian the way he talks to his theological opponents? We don’t really use that kind of language.’ And so when we come along and do it, I think it really does wake a lot of people up.” The comparison to Martin Luther might seem a bit much, as Mann is quick to concede: “I don’t want to overstate what we do, obviously; it’s comedy—it’s fun. But I do hope that once in a while someone reads the article, laughs, and then starts to think about it.”
Amen.
