Christian Satire Site Babylon Bee on ‘How to Be a Perfect Christian’
ChristianWeek: How did the Babylon Bee get started?
The Babylon Bee Editors: We were created ex nihilo on the third day of the literal creation week. But also, Adam Ford helped a little bit by kicking things off in early 2016. The site launched with a couple dozen articles and we’ve published three or four pieces almost every day since that. The satire of Christian culture and idiosyncrasies immediately filled a void in the Christian internet space, and it’s just been growing ever since.
ChristianWeek: Your first book is How to be a Perfect Christian. How do you define the “perfect Christian”?
The Babylon Bee Editors: The perfect Christian is the guy holding his hands up high during the worship set while all the lame Christians just have their hands crossed in front of them, the girl who burns all her secular music CDs in a big bonfire and replaces them with Newsboys albums, the pastor who entertains the crowd like the stand-up comic the Bible calls him to be. Anyone who conforms to modern Christian culture will be able to attain perfection, no matter what the Bible says.
ChristianWeek: How to Be a Perfect Christian satirizes modern cultural Christianity as a whole. What makes church culture so easy to satirize?
The Babylon Bee Editors: American Christianity is often so far removed from biblical Christianity that the satire writes itself. We have preachers making millions of dollars and living in giant mansions, Christians getting rich and famous by denying essential parts of the Christian faith, and churches that are run more like amusement parks than local expressions of the body of Christ. It’s a piece of cake.
ChristianWeek: You pretty much touch on every part of the Christian life from how to pick a church to how to look spiritual online. What are the biggest issues with how Christians live out their faith that you wanted to address?
The Babylon Bee Editors: Every Christian wrestles with discerning between what legalistic rules you’ve made up for yourself and what the Bible actually teaches about faith and practice. The Reformer Ulrich Zwingli once told his congregation, “You know your liberty too little,” and that sums up a lot of the message we wanted to get across: that faithfulness to Scripture rather than man-made evangelical culture is incredibly liberating.
ChristianWeek: After they finish laughing, what is the underlying message that you want readers to grasp in How to be a Perfect Christian?
The Babylon Bee Editors: That true Christianity is so much better than 21st Century American religion, that the Bible is better than your own man-made rules, and that God’s grace is better than you could possibly imagine.
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