I first learned of the website ChristWire from a Facebook friend who linked to a much-read post that lists questions for wives to answer if they think their husbands might be gay. My friend asked whether anyone knew if the list was satire, because it sure seemed like it. The answer to her question, according to New York Times columnist Mark Oppenheimer, is a resounding “yes.” Having operated ChristWire since 2008 under pseudonyms, the founders revealed their true identities—and intent—publicly last week.
Bryan Butvidas and Kirwin Watson started ChristWire to be “something like what The Onion [a popular fake-news site] would be if the writers cared mainly about God, gay people and how both influence the weather.” The site’s tagline is “Conservative Values for an Unsaved World,” and articles are heavy on pronouncements about God’s vengeance against gay people (e.g., “Hurricane Earl Projected Path, Gay East Coast of America”), as well as racist rants and ridicule of celebrity lifestyles.
It’s ugly, hateful, over-the-top stuff intended as social commentary. But it appears that many readers don’t get the joke. Many commenters respond to ChristWire posts seriously, with both support and shocked contempt. According to Oppenheimer, even seasoned bloggers from established conservative and liberal news sites, such as RenewAmerica and the Huffington Post, were taken in.
The founders, a nondenominational Protestant and a practicing Catholic, insist that their target “is not Christians but those who do not question what they hear on the news.” Even so, a brief glance through ChristWire’s topics suggest Butvidas and Watson are taking on a certain brand of Christian. While their portrayal of conservative Christianity is not completely fair or accurate, we shouldn’t simply write them off as the product of a media culture that fosters stereotypes (although it often does), or of a godless popular culture (research consistently scores American culture high on religiosity, especially compared with secularized Europe). A few high-profile leaders in the evangelical movement have described natural disasters as God’s punishment on gay people—or, more recently, on Haitians who purportedly practice witchcraft. Even if ChristWire mistakenly conflates a few leaders’ comments with an entire Christian movement, we evangelicals are wise to understand how some prominent mainstream voices perceive us, and to ask if some of the poking fun is deserved.
I regularly partake of satirical humor, including The Onion, Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert. As the mother of a little boy whose favorite color is pink, for example, I snorted helplessly through The Onion’s video about creating a masculine Halloween costume for an effeminate son. The video was a cutting take-down of our culture’s equating of militarism, violence, and toughness with masculinity—and it was very funny.
At this point in the post, I wonder if I should put a disclaimer at the top letting readers know that, if they click through to some of the links, they will likely encounter colorful language, nonsense, and irreverence. I wonder if I’m endangering my fledgling career as a Christian blogger by admitting that I like comedians (and musicians, writers, and filmmakers) who employ colorful language, nonsense, and irreverence—when they do it well, in a way that is artful and truth-revealing, not gratuitous.
Blogger, author, and editor Jana Riess (who, full disclosure, is my book editor) recently asked on her Flunking Sainthood blog, “Why Are Jews Funnier Than Christians?” She pointed out that most high-profile comedians are Jewish, with the exception of Stephen Colbert, who is a committed Catholic. Christian comedy is largely limited to “the people your youth conference hires if you want to make sure the kids are entertained by someone who is not routinely dropping the f-bomb.”
Commenters to Riess’s post suggested several reasons for this comedic disparity, including the idea that humor is often born of great pain, and Jews know pain. Several observed that Christians concerned with pure messages and motives can have trouble appreciating satire and irony. Christians, in other words, sometimes take ourselves and the world a little too seriously.
I like the idea behind ChristWire—to challenge those who accept without question factually deficient, ideologically driven opinion masquerading as news. But I find it too heavy-handed, not particularly artful or clever, and also completely one-sided. I appreciate The Onion, Stewart, and Colbert because they are willing to highlight the hypocritical, ignorant, dishonest, or just plain silly aspects of anyone and anything. In targeting one viewpoint and hammering it into the ground, ChristWire’s humor feels gratuitous. Homophobia and racism are easy to ridicule, and those who seriously spout hateful speech about God’s vengeance are unlikely to see the irony, or themselves, in ChristWire’s fake journalism.
I’ll stick with the equal-opportunity humor of Stewart, Colbert, and The Onion, where people and ideas that make me cringe are ridiculed alongside people and ideas I embrace. The ability to laugh at ourselves and the world, to recognize the rampant hypocrisy and vanity of people and our institutions, is an important ingredient in humility. Comedy reminds us to question our allegiance to ideologies, organizations, and personalities whose wisdom is so easily revealed as foolishness, and to reaffirm our allegiance to the God who “made foolish the wisdom of the world” (1 Cor. 1:20). Sometimes, irreverence, colorful language, and satire can reveal the world’s foolishness—along with its pain and beauty—far better than earnest sermonizing.
Several British newspapers ran a series of stories over the holidays about the demise of The Golden Compass movie trilogy. The first film hit theaters in 2007 amid protests from Christians, especially Catholics, claiming the stories and movies were a slam against the church and an invitation to children to turn to atheism.
When asked what happened to the film trilogy, Sam Elliot, one of the actors in the first movie, told London’s Evening Standard, “The Catholic Church happened to The Golden Compass, as far as I’m concerned. It did ‘incredible’ at the box office, taking $380 million [worldwide]. Incredible. The Catholic Church … lambasted them, and I think it scared New Line off.” (New Line Cinema was the studio behind the film.)
Bill Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights took some of the credit for shutting down the franchise, citing his call for a boycott of the first film: “I am delighted the boycott worked,” he told the Evening Standard.
In response to Donohue’s comments, Golden Compass author Phillip Pullman, an atheist, told Wales Online, “It’s disgusting, but only the sort of behaviour I expect of these people.”
Pullman went on to tell the publication about his new novel, coming out this spring – The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, in which he denies Jesus was the son of God. He also recently finished writing his own version of the New Testament in which he imagined Jesus being given a fair trial and walking free instead of crucified.
Finally, London’s Guardian isn’t so sure the Catholics are to blame for the demise of The Golden Compass. Their film blog recently concluded, “Maybe The Golden Compass wasn’t given any sequels because it didn’t deserve any. Rotten Tomatoes gave it a score of 42%, ranking it alongside such masterpieces as Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, with reviewers calling it “bland,” “patchy,” and “a crushing disappointment.” . . . It’s a little sad that Elliot has to blame a shadowy religious conspiracy for [its] failure, especially since he was just about the film’s sole redeeming feature, but the truth is that not many of us could bear to sit through any more sequels if there was any chance they would be as ropey as the first film. Nice try, though.”
