Longoria: But, if you’ve followed The Babylon Bee over the last few years, you know it doesn’t just poke fun at megachurches. This is, like, insiders, who totally get what evangelicalism is and love it and consider themselves part of it-and also just told a really hilarious joke about smoke machines at a megachurch. Green: I remember thinking, Oh, this is something different. Longoria: Emma, of course, covers religion for The Atlantic, and she first came across The Babylon Bee as the sort of evangelical answer to The Onion. After a moment, a funky lopsided beat begins to play under a synthesized melody.)
![funny anti gay memes funny anti gay memes](https://images7.memedroid.com/images/UPLOADED609/5d524d5272cd5.jpeg)
( A faint guitar solo plays, then ends and takes the whole concert with it. So it’s just a funny joke to be, like, “We’re here to be reached by the Holy Spirit, but the fog machine kept us from doing that, because we got distracted thinking that the fog machine was the point.” It’s, like, fog machines and skinny jeans and neon lights. Green: This is poking fun at the fact that there’s a certain kind of megachurch where the environment is very much like a rock concert. ( The cheering and rock-concert ambience returns, duller, as if through some kind of haze.) And the headline is “Holy Spirit Unable to Move Through Congregation as Fog Machine Breaks,” which is really funny because, you know … I guess now I’m explaining the joke, which is a little lame. So this is from their early days-from 2016. Longoria: I recently asked Atlantic staff writer Emma Green to pull up a joke she’d told me from a Christian satire website called The Babylon Bee. Why don’t we start with you just telling me the joke?Įmma Green: ( Laughs.) I guess I can pull it up to see what year it’s from. ( It’s a crowd it’s a rock concert it’s a Christian metal band! The megachurch ambience rolls for a handful of lyrics before abruptly scratching out.) Additional audio from Fox Business and Tucker Carlson Tonight.Ī transcript of this episode is presented below:
![funny anti gay memes funny anti gay memes](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/204/066/6e9.jpg)
Music by Keyboard (“ Freedom of Movement” and “ Contractions”), Parish Council (“ Looking for Tom Putt,” “ The Grey Around It,” and “ Walled Garden 1”), and Column (“ 「The Art of Fun」 (Raj)” and “ Sensuela”), provided by Tasty Morsels. Sound design by David Herman, with additional engineering by Joe Plourde. Use the hashtag #TheExperimentPodcast, or write to us at episode was produced by Gabrielle Berbey and Julia Longoria, with editing by Emily Botein and Katherine Wells. In this episode, The Atlantic’s religion reporter Emma Green sits down with The Bee’s 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.įurther reading: “ Who Would Jesus Mock?”īe part of The Experiment. The satire site The Babylon Bee, a conservative Christian answer to The Onion, stirred controversy when some readers mistook its headlines for misinformation.