{"id":65,"date":"2010-09-07T08:04:13","date_gmt":"2010-09-07T08:04:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/christwire-and-satire.html"},"modified":"2010-09-07T08:04:13","modified_gmt":"2010-09-07T08:04:13","slug":"christwire-and-satire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/christwire-and-satire.html","title":{"rendered":"Christwire and Satire"},"content":{"rendered":"

What’s scary about the satirical website Christwire<\/a>
\nis imagining how many people who ran its page views up to 27 million in
\nAugust actually take it seriously. “A close reader of ChristWire will
\nsoon figure out (one hopes) that the site is not serious,” Mark
\nOppenheimer wrote in his New York Times<\/i> “Beliefs” column<\/a>
\nSaturday. “But many of the columns are deft enough, just plausible
\nenough, to fool the casual reader. Even–or perhaps especially–a reader
\nwhose beliefs are being mocked.” <\/p>\n

Sure, the Christwire “riposte”
\nto Oppenheimer, “Satire, Poe’s Law and the New York Times Campaign to
\nDiscredit the Evangelical Message of Christwire,” attributes to the Gray
\nLady “a recklessly pro-Zionist, anti-Christian agenda.” Pro-Zionist is
\nhardly a term of opprobrium in conservative evangelical circles these
\ndays. Such missteps notwithstanding, it’s clear from Oppenheimer’s
\nreporting that plenty of people who should know better take Christwire
\nat face value. <\/p>\n

And why shouldn’t they? Head over to Doveworld<\/a>,
\nthe website of the World Outreach Center, the tiny church in
\nGaineville, FL, that has generated worldwide attention for announcing
\nits intention to burn a pile of Korans on 9\/11. There you’ll find a
\nblogpost on “Ten Reasons to Burn a Koran,” which is comparable to
\nChristwire’s viral “Is My Husband Gay”<\/a> post (with its 15-point checklist)–except that it’s no satire.<\/p>\n

David Petraeus has informed<\/a>
\nthe AP that that images of burning Korans could be exploited by Muslim
\nextremists to inflame popular passions in Afghanistan and endanger
\nAmerican troops. From which Bryan Fischer of the American Family
\nAssociation, blogging<\/a>
\non the Renew America website, deduces that Gen. Petraeus is making the
\ncase that Islam is a religion of violence. Not that Fischer is himself
\nadvocating the burning of Korans. No satire there either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What’s scary about the satirical website Christwire is imagining how many people who ran its page views up to 27 million in August actually take it seriously. “A close reader of ChristWire will soon figure out (one hopes) that the site is not serious,” Mark Oppenheimer wrote in his New York Times “Beliefs” column Saturday.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nChristwire and Satire - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/christwire-and-satire.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Christwire and Satire - 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}