Culture – Family Council

Guest Column: Unlaughable Comedy

Jun 18, 2026John StonestreetCultureComedy, Culture

Over 13 million people watched the Netflix celebrity roast of comedian Kevin Hart. Irreverent insults are part of roasting, but the recent series of celebrity roasting has featured increasingly outrageous and often profane jokes, from mocking abortions to vilifying women. However, Hart’s roast has won the prize for the vilest yet.

The extremely inappropriate comments made at this roast about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, for example, demonstrate how debased mainstream comedy has become. Even worse, in a social media context, comedy is captive to likes and shares, so the desire to provoke and shock is ever escalating. So, what is the proper approach to comedy? Can the current state of comedy be redeemed?

Sociologist Philip Rieff coined a unique term for understanding many elements of modern culture, including debased comedy. Cultures produce artifacts. Cultures without a moral center produce what he called “deathworks,” or cultural artifacts that don’t build up but only tear down the sacred orders of a civilization. Roasts like the one for Hart are a deathwork, leveraging humor for no constructive noble or redeeming purpose. It’s just about degradation or, to borrow Carl Trueman’s term, desecration all the way down.

Humor is a unique, human characteristic that reflects the creativity and world-making for which humans were made. As such, it should rise above the mere profane and childish.

A Christian worldview offers the kind of moral framework humor needs, including the ability to discern between what one should laugh at and what one should not. If, on the other hand, nothing is sacred, then nothing is off-limits. Truly creative comedy operates within a worldview that identifies what is humorous while recognizing—and respecting—what is sacred. Put simply, if everything is funny, then nothing is sacred.

A notable exception to the current comedic trend is Nate Bargatze, a comedian who professes belief in Christ and stands out from virtually everyone else in his field. Bargatze’s humor is clean and avoids morally objectionable content. And yet, he has emerged as the top grossing comic in the world. His Saturday Night Live skit “Washington’s Dream” and its sequel, “Washington’s Dream 2,” became two of the most popular SNL skits in recent memory, with the first sketch now having amassed an amazing 30-plus million views on YouTube. In it, his comedic genius highlighted quirks of American culture that we hardly notice.

Or consider the Babylon Bee and its humorous satire on real-life events. Bee humor includes both inside jokes, that point out the foibles of the Christian community, and outside jokes, that expose dangerous ideas that need to be taken captive. A common experience after reading a Bee headline is to chuckle and then to think, “That sounds like it could be real.” That’s because they use satire to speak truth from the Christian worldview in a post-truth culture when others do not. As Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon said at our 2025 Great Lakes Symposium, humor is effective as a “vehicle for truth delivery,” and to “expose an absurdity for what it is.”

The gulf between comedy that acknowledges the sacred and comedy that denies the sacred reveals to us truth about reality. In the Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis described how modern attempts to remove man’s moral discernment has formed “men without chests.” As he put it:

In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings to be fruitful.

Notice Lewis’ words, “we laugh at honor.” In a morally castrated culture, nothing is truly sacred. In such a scenario, nothing is off limits from what is considered “funny.” When the counterbalance of a Christian worldview is removed, and the laughing gas is emitted, we laugh at anything—even the honorable.

Such a perspective brings to mind the less-than-morally upright comedian, Woody Allen, who sometimes closed his routines by saying, “I’m sorry I can’t leave you with something positive—would you accept two negatives?” At least Allen’s joke acknowledged the objective nature of mathematics. Still, since so much modern comedy is deathworks, there is opportunity for something better. Comedy that’s not only funny but, properly speaking, holy.

Looking for God at Disney: Guest Column

Jun 1, 2026John StonestreetCultureChristianity, Culture

Disney Adults are an example of the new festivals, games, and liturgies invented to give life meaning without God.

In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche famously proclaimed “God is dead” in The Parable of the Madman. In it, Nietzsche warned that the modern zeal to rid the world of the divine would not turn out the way that the skeptics and utopianists hoped. In fact, the deed of killing God, Nietszche wrote, was far beyond what they imagined.

. . . how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?

Then, Nietzsche asked:

How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?

As far-seeing as he was, it is unlikely Nietzsche could have guessed all the ways this prediction would play out. John Calvin called the human heart a “factory of idols,” and our creativity in inventing “festivals of atonement” and “sacred games” knows no limits.

For example, a recent essay in The New Yorker described the rise of “Disney Adults,” who take multiple trips to the various parks each year, even taking on serious debt to do so. One young woman who was described in the article spent over $15,000 on six park visits in two years. That’s why, author Amelia Tate wrote,

So-called Disney adults have become a subject of online fascination, with many people now questioning how much it costs to be one. … It’s a genre of content that has become more popular, recently, with critics seizing on it as evidence that the Disney-obsessed are not only culturally but financially bankrupt.

Of course, Americans spend a lot of money on vacation, with many wanting to visit the same place over and over each year. But that is not what drives Disney adults. According to a pop-culture historian quoted in a New York Post article about Disney adults, the parks are “very appealing to childless adults who’re looking for a way to recapture or keep alive that feeling of delight and comfort.” One woman told The New Yorker, “It’s the nostalgic feeling of what brought you joy when you were little and you didn’t have the stressors of adult life.”

Anyone who has visited a Disney park can attest to remarkable attention to detail in creating an alternative world. The safety, cleanliness, rides, and even the smells are perfectly calibrated to produce an experience that is unmatched. One can walk through the gates and step back into childhood, and that’s nice sometimes.

And Disney is not even close to being the only way people seek meaning and fulfillment. From youth sports to fast cars to carefully built social media platforms to politics, humans can turn virtually anything into a focus of worship. What we live for become our gods. The practices we build to honor these things become our religion. And, as the Psalmist said, we will see ourselves in the image of whatever it is we worship.

The yearning of Disney adults is just one example of the new festivals, games, and liturgies invented to give life meaning without God. But in the end, even the good things of this world are only vanity, if not built on what is ultimately true and good.

Like all human beings with eternity in their hearts, Disney adults are creatures of longing. They may not know it, but nostalgia will not fill the God-shaped hole in their hearts. Neither will a scholarship or a Lexus or a million new followers. C.S. Lewis once wrote, “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” Indeed, but Disney parks, though fun places to visit (at least on days that are not too hot or crowded), is not the world for which we were made.

Even the most committed and indebted Disney adults aren’t necessarily crazy. But they are looking for God in the wrong place. Better instead to listen to St. Augustine, who, after many different attempts to fill his own longing, concluded: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”

One in Four Likely Voters Now Supports Socialism

Mar 17, 2026Jerry CoxCultureCommunism, Socialism

Earlier this month Rasmussen reported that support for capitalism has declined since 2023, and a growing share of likely voters now say socialism is better. On the whole, most Americans still support free markets — but that support has dwindled.

Rasmussen writes:

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 25% of Likely U.S. Voters say socialism is a better system than capitalism. More than twice as many voters (51%) say capitalism is better. Fourteen percent (14%) are not sure. Support for capitalism has declined by 16 points since February 2023, when 67% of voters said capitalism was better than socialism.

We’ve seen support for socialism play out in recent elections. In November, Zohran Mamdani won New York City’s mayoral election. Mamdani, 34, belongs to the socialist Working Families Party. In his victory speech, Mamdani promised New Yorkers a “new age,” saying, “We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.”

Unfortunately, there is nothing “new” about what Mamdani is saying. During the last century, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong, and others made similar promises to their citizens, and they all met with the same results. Many young people have been taught that socialism and communism failed in the past because they weren’t properly implemented, but that’s not the case. Socialism and communism failed every time they were implemented, because they are fatally flawed.

After the election, our friend Joseph Backholm, Senior Fellow for Biblical Worldview and Strategic Engagement at Family Research Council, published a list of some of socialism’s and communism’s basic flaws:

1. Socialism misunderstands human nature and implies that people will be virtuous as long as they have enough money. Then, ironically, it assumes everyone with money is sinister.

2. Socialism takes from the capable and gives to the less capable, ensuring that resources won’t ever be used productively.

3. Socialism destroys competition and consequently destroys innovation.

4. Socialism destroys people’s incentive to be productive by denying them the benefit of their labor. It always produces fewer, lower-quality products.

5. Socialism assumes I have the right to other people’s property just because they have more than I do. It depends upon and incentivizes greed.

6. Socialism denies people the dignity of having what they earn and earning what they have.

7. Socialism assumes people engaged in commerce always operate with corrupt motives, but people in government never do.

8. While claiming to decentralize power, it always centralizes power with a handful of bureaucrats.

9. Socialism assumes it’s always unjust for one person to have more than another, when real justice means the dishonest and unskilled shouldn’t have as much as the honest and skilled.

10. Socialism assumes humanity’s natural state is prosperity and rages over the fact that we aren’t all rich, when in reality the natural state is poverty, and capitalism is the only reason we aren’t all poor.

Joseph concluded by rightly pointing out, “Of course, none of this means a capitalist system doesn’t have weaknesses, but it can produce good outcomes and has. Communism never has because it assumes a world that does not exist and never will.”

Over the decades, other pundits have pointed out that socialism and communism are oppressive and cannot work without using force against everyday citizens.

Americans — and especially Christians — need to understand socialism’s basic problems and its track record. This is a fatally flawed belief system that has produced disastrous results every time.

Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.