The personalities behind Christian satire site The Babylon Bee are tackling gender, a “hot-button topic in the culture” that has become both ever-contested and flammable.
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Joel Berry, managing editor of The Babylon Bee and co-author of “The Babylon Bee Guide to Gender,” said the book’s sentiments focus on an age-old problem rooted in evil.
“It really all ultimately goes back to God, the creator, and Lucifer saying, ‘I will be like the Most High … ‘God, you’re not going to define who I am. I’m going to define who I am.'”
With that mentality seeping into the culture, Berry said the Babylon Bee team felt gender was an “important topic to discuss.”
“[It was a very easy] topic for us to write about, just because it’s something we joke about all the time,” he said. “And it’s very funny … this ideology, or religion, if you will; you could call it a religion — gender ideology.”
Berry said there’s no need to “stretch the truth” or exaggerate considering what he sees as the “ridiculous” state of the debate.
And while some might feel the current precarious circumstances took root out of nowhere, Berry said that’s not necessarily the case.
“In reality, the groundwork for this has been laid very slowly in the institutions, in our schools for a very long, long time,” he said. “I’m a child of the 90s. I grew up in the 90s. … I just remember all the pop culture that I consumed … from Disney movies, every kids show — the message of everything that I consumed as a child was like, ‘Follow your heart.'”
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With this obsession with living out one’s “authentic self,” Berry said many people might not have realized where things were going, but added the current circumstance is where “it had to conclude logically.”
And that conclusion, he said, is one rooted in “narcissism.”
“It’s really the ideology of self-worship,” he said. “You hear the phrase, ‘Your truth,’ ‘my truth’ a lot.”
Berry continued, “I think our culture has migrated away from this idea of truth being a thing that exists outside of ourselves, that exists independently of us.”
All of this, he said, paved the way for the current gender ideology we see dominating culture. With that in mind, Berry is hoping “The Babylon Bee Guide to Gender” provides some laughs around a topic that often creates “anxiety and frustration” for many people.
“A lot of people are worried and frustrated, and we wanted to bring a levity to the whole thing,” he said. “And I think laughter is not just healing for your anxieties and your worries, but it also, I think, gives people courage that this thing that they’re opposing isn’t necessarily some big, scary giant.”
Find out more about “The Babylon Bee Guide to Gender.”
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