The Evangelical Onion

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

Before people realized that LarkNews.com was a parody site, it ran an item about the Christian publishing giant Zondervan, which has marketed the Bible to seemingly every niche group but one--a deficit Lark rectified by reporting that Zondervan had put out a new, lifestyle-friendly edition (the "GNIV") for gays. Zondervan promptly called the story the work of a "disturbed individual."

"I'm not sure that could happen anymore," chuckles the individual, a churchgoing Evangelical named Joel Kilpatrick, 35. His five-year-old site, a kind of Christian version of the satirical newspaper the Onion, is now recognized as a healthy supplement in an irony-poor culture. Even Zondervan grudgingly admits that the Bible item was "in the spirit of legitimate satire." Rick Warren (WARREN TO BUY SAINTS, BUILD PURPOSE-DRIVEN FIELD) e-mails Lark items to his flock and says, "If you can't laugh at yourself, you have a pride problem. These guys are the best."

Actually it's mostly just Kilpatrick. The son of a Christian musician who played hundreds of churches, he developed a keen sense of the distinction between the Christian message (not inherently funny) and what he calls its social, institutional and political "scaffolding" (a big target). He feels others share that view. "There's a shift," he remarks. "A new generation that without being less Christian is more culturally agnostic" and distanced from the architecture of insularity. "There's a deconstruction going on," he says, "and satire is one of the ways of doing that." Here are a couple of examples of how Kilpatrick is doing it: