On SNL, and the Christian Retreat from Culture
Changing it up this week. I gave the ETL character the week off, so you get Matthew instead.
Typically, when I write something in my own voice, I put it behind the paywall. However, the Saturday Night Live 50th Anniversary has been in my brain all week. I have been thinking a lot about how Christians react to popular culture, specifically entertainment and humor.
So, enjoy a serious article for a change. The ETL character will be back next week, and I will make sure there are extra boob and wiener jokes, as penance :) Thanks for reading, and have a good week. -M
Like a lot of Christians who grew up in the culture wars, I was taught to view Secular Entertainment with wariness. They didn’t understand Us, and if they mentioned Christianity with anything short of reverence, that meant that they were mocking us. That they were mocking God.
When Dana Carvey put on the purple dress and cocked his eyebrow as The Church Lady, we were sure that we were the butt of the joke.
So, we left.
When you withdraw from culture, sometimes your reaction is to make your own culture.
And when it comes to entertainment, that gets complicated. This is a perpetual dilemma for the Church, an unsolvable, Amy Grant-shaped riddle: when believers create entertainment, does it have to be explicitly Christian? Does it have to say something?
Even in the beginning, it seemed like the answer was always yes.
We tried to make our own Saturday Night Live. It was a reasonably well-produced show called Fire By Nite, consisting of sketches and Christian music, aimed at teens. It’s not particularly funny now, and I’m not sure that it ever was. Though, to be fair, that wasn’t really the goal: the goal was The Message, and each show was crafted around a theme and anchored to an earnest devotional. If you enjoy the sketches, that’s fine. But we’re really here to talk about Satanism or premarital sex. Pull up a chair.
30 years later, the culture wars have ebbed and flowed, but we’re still making our own things. The streaming era has given us Pure Flix and Angel Studios, plus other smaller companies who also make Christian films. I suppose I am the target audience: the YouTube algorithm floods me with trailer ads for these faith-based movies.
And I’m not here to bury Christian movies. I’ve seen some of them. You may laugh at the ham handed-ness of it all, but if you grew up watching Fire by Nite and Carman’s Time2 show, Pure Flix doesn’t faze you.
Still, the concept of Christian Entertainment remains tricky.
You don’t want to advocate for more adult content, not exactly, but we can also be honest here: when you watch enough faith-based films, the whole experience just feels…off. You are peering into a world where no one swears, where sin is implied but never shown. Where, even if Bad Things happen, it is always in service of The Message.
Movies aren’t supposed to be real, or even realistic, necessarily. It’s okay to turn your brain off and watch spaceships shoot lasers. It just feels like too much Christian entertainment requires you to leave your brain turned off.
Humor is perhaps the most difficult area of culture for Christians to create. To put it simply, many Christians aren’t sure what they are allowed to laugh at. There are questions: Does 1 Corinthians 8 cover humor? What if it does? Am I sinning if I offend someone with a joke?
But who has answers for those questions?
In the old days, Christian music lagged behind for a bit while churches worked out the theology of guitars and drums1. The same thing happened to Christian humor, only worse: it wasn’t allowed to grow. There was too much fear, which led to too many rules, which forced anyone with any sort of edge to decamp and search out secular audiences.
The Christian comedy that remained became stilted, like an awkward teenager who is angry, but doesn’t know why. Christians want to tell jokes, but aren’t sure what the rules are. So, the edges get sanded down. PG-13 jokes must be worked into PG form, and then reworked again into G form. Christian comics trudge through sanitized, winking material, guiding the audience to punchlines hinged to faith-based stereotypes: Chick fil-A! Carrying chairs at church to impress girls!
The best jokes, I think, are surprises. They push you a little further than you thought you were okay with. They stretch you. When this is off the table, when you are scared to surprise the audience, all you have left is the familiar. You lead the audience to something that they can recognize, and this connection makes them happy. Women are cold! Pastor’s kids get in trouble!
This kind of humor isn’t my favorite thing, but it’s not a bad thing, either. Christians need to laugh. I just hope that Christian humor learns how to grow, too.
Time has a way of turning you around.
Watching the old SNL Church Lady sketches in 2025 is a surreal experience. There is a revelation staring me in the face:
We weren’t the butt of the joke.
Why couldn’t we see this 30 years ago? Were we that sensitive? Did we not know how to laugh?
Carvey plays the character as silly and a little bit mean, but there is something real about her. In perhaps the best of the sketches, a bumbling Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker repeatedly minimize and rationalize their scandals, only for The Church Lady to deftly bat away their arguments and skewer their attempts to cling to power.
She was one of us; she was the good guy.
In 2025, this is somehow even more relevant. At any given moment, one of our many fallen celebrity pastors is on Twitter, trying to tweet-launder his brand back to prominence. And lurking in the replies, an informal alliance of Church Ladies: receipt-waving abuse bloggers, smarmy theobros, and Bible-quoting anons, all there to say the same thing.
Well, isn’t that special.
I don’t have all the answers.
I don’t think it’s particularly helpful for Christians to abandon secular culture. My generation tried that, and I’m not sure how it benefitted anyone.
I also don’t think that we should be totally at home in the world. Christians should be at least a little weird, right? If you never break with the cool kids, then I don’t know, man. Maybe when you tried to get saved, the Gospel didn’t fully take.
This is a joke, of course. I would never imply that a fellow believer isn’t saved.
And if you were offended by the joke, please understand that you are mocking God, and I am leaving.
:)
*Weekly-ish articles are free; periodic special articles are behind the paywall. If you are a paid subscriber, even for a short while, thank you for making this whole thing work. To everyone, thank you for reading and sharing. Please understand that all offensive content is the fault of Jim Bakker.
the extent to which it caught up is for another time. In any case, I will not be apologizing for the Newsboys’ disco album, and I will not be taking further questions
I really enjoy your satire pieces but I think this might be my favorite of your posts. You've captured exactly why I feel so meh about so many aspects of "Christian" comedy. It's such a hard line to walk but I think that if people of faith want to make good art then we need to at least try to walk that line and not take a slow boat around it.
I distinctly remember in my very short lived Hillsong career being puzzled by the simultaneous iconoclasm of evangelical Protestantism and the whole industrial production of ‘Christian’ art. It always struck me as little better than propaganda, because the message was central and imagery was not to be trusted and confined to the obvious message. None of it was created with a real understanding of ancient artistic and musical traditions of Christianity. I am a cradle Catholic (going through an atheist/agnostic phase circa 2005). My mother was an artist and a master iconographer in the Byzantine tradition. My Dad is a borderline boomer with excellent taste in film and music. My house was FULL of high quality religious/devotional art and ‘secular’ art. We listened to a lot of classical music, including the explicitly religious stuff like Bach’s St Matthew’s gospel (sublime) and the aching boomer cries of classical rock and roll like the Who, Cat Stevens, the doors etc into Van Halen, Prince, Led Zeppelin (not the nude kind) etc.
My Dad introduced us to quality movies, (a lot of Mel Gibson, Frank Coppola and Martin Scorsese) and taught us how to read them. My mum’s taste in music is.. terrible. She listens to bad Christian pop and made us to watch bad Christian films at least until God is Not Dead which was SO blatantly terrible propaganda that she gave up on them.
It seemed utterly bizarre to deliberate settle for propaganda instead of art. And that’s the problem I see with “Christian art” is that is basically propaganda (some of it is not) but it is enormously difficult to push back on the mindset that pervades a rejection of ‘secular’ art. I dispute that art can be divided so neatly into religious or secular, given that beauty is a transcendental. A beautiful painting of a sunset can give just as much glory to God as a perfectly written icon of Christ Panokrator, whether the artist realises it or not. And humour is the same. Something, even if it is vulgar, can be supremely funny, and since God is the author of all creation including the vulgar parts, a perfectly executed fart joke gives just as much glory to God as the best ‘Christian comedian’ who never drops an ‘f-bomb’.
All of this is to say, I wholeheartedly agree with your take on Church Lady. I would also encourage every Christian here to watch the funniest Christian movie ever made: *Monty Pythons: Life of Brian*.
If you need a primer: John Cleese himself has said in making the film, they spent a month reading the entire New Testament and a bunch of other material about the time period. After a week of deep reading they all came to the conclusion that you can’t make fun of someone who says profoundly true and beautiful things like the sermon on the mount. But the people at the back who might not hear properly and draw the wrong conclusion: FAIR GAME and the premise of the whole movie.
If you haven’t seen it, I’d love to see ETP’s review of it. 🤣