Who Would Jesus Mock?

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4.5 • 2.8K Ratings

🗓️ 14 October 2021

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The satire site The Babylon Bee, a conservative Christian answer to The Onion, stirred controversy when some readers mistook its headlines for misinformation. In this episode, The Atlantic’s religion reporter Emma Green sits down with the editor in chief, Kyle Mann, to talk about where he draws the line between making a joke and doing harm, and to understand what humor can reveal about American politics.

Further reading: “Who Would Jesus Mock?”

A transcript of this episode is available.

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This episode was produced by Gabrielle Berbey and Julia Longoria, with editing by Emily Botein and Katherine Wells. Fact-check by Michelle Ciarrocca. Sound design by David Herman, with additional engineering by Joe Plourde. Transcription by Caleb Codding.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Okay, why don't we start with you just telling me the joke?
0:14.1	I guess I can pull it up to see what your it's from.
0:17.7	I recently asked Atlantic staff writer Emma Green to pull up a joke that she told me
0:24.4	from a Christian satire website called The Babel On B.
0:28.1	So here we go.
0:30.6	Okay, so this is from their early days from 2016 and the headline is, Holy Spirit, unable
0:37.4	to move through congregation as fog machine breaks, which is really funny because, you know,
0:45.1	I guess now I'm explaining the joke, which is a little lame.
0:48.9	This is poking fun at the fact that there's a certain kind of mega church where the environment
0:56.8	is very much like a rock concert.
0:58.4	It's like fog machines and skinny jeans and neon lights.
1:02.5	So it's just a funny joke to be like we're here to be reached by the Holy Spirit, but
1:10.8	the fog machine kept us from doing that because we got distracted thinking that the fog
1:15.8	machine was the point.
1:19.6	Emma of course covers religion for the Atlantic and she first came across the Babel On B as
1:24.8	this sort of evangelical answer to the onion.
1:29.4	I remember thinking, oh, this is something different.
1:34.4	This is like insiders who totally get what evangelicalism is and love it and consider
1:42.6	themselves part of it and also just hold a really hilarious joke about smoke machines
1:48.6	at a mega church.
1:50.5	But if you've followed the Babel On B over the last few years, you know it doesn't just
1:56.1	poke fun at mega churches.
	...

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