Babylon Bee CEO urges Christians to produce 'more good books' to push back against bad ideas
Seth Dillon, CEO of the leading Christian satire site The Babylon Bee, told religious broadcasters Thursday night that humor remains one of the most powerful weapons against bad ideas.
In his speech at the National Religious Broadcasters 2026 International Christian Media Convention at the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center in Nashville, Dillon began by acknowledging that the mission had changed.
“Basically, my job at the outset to me was just to monetize mockery, not to defend freedom,” he said.
What started as an upstart Christian “fake news” site quickly became a cultural force that surpassed The Onion in traffic while also producing genuinely funny Christian comedy — something Dillon said the culture needs now more than ever.
“We don’t need more Christian books; we need more good books written by Christians,” he said.
But with success, said Dillon, came new challenges.
In an era where “your job is to write jokes that are funnier than what Democrats are doing in real life,” reality kept overtaking satire. Social media platforms began fact-checking punchlines and threatening suspension.
Dillon said the breaking point came when the Bee published a headline that read: “A man in a dress is Woman of the Year” — a reference to transgender Biden administration official Rachel Levine’s award.
That’s when the Bee’s Twitter account was locked, right around the same time then-former President Donald Trump and The Christian Post had their respective Twitter accounts locked as well.
Dillon recalled the moment Elon Musk reached out. After buying Twitter, now called X, Musk sent a direct message that Dillon says he now keeps framed: “You want the Babylon Bee restored, there will be no censorship of humor.”
That intervention, Dillon said, proved a larger point. Quoting Musk’s earlier verdict on the ideology behind the censorship, Dillon told the crowd, “Wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful. It gives mean people an excuse to be cruel while harboring false virtue.”
The lesson, he argued, is simple and costly: “We have to stop caring what freedom might cost us.”
Too many believers practice “soft censorship,” he said, biting their tongues to protect followers or revenue, a practice Dillon said he rejects.
He also pushed back against despair following the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.
“The man who killed Charlie Kirk did not win,” Dillon declared. “Free speech didn’t lose.”
In his view, the resort to violence was an admission that Kirk’s opponents had already lost the marketplace of ideas.
Dillon closed with a 1950s psychology study known as the Asch conformity experiments, in which subjects denied the clear evidence to fit in with the group. When even one person voiced the obvious truth, conformity collapsed.
His charge to the room: be that one person.
“Courage is like a good infection and it spreads,” he said.
