Mark I. Pinsky writes about a growing group of fundamentalists from all religious walks of life who have incorporated humor into their faith:
Brad Stine is an angry, braying stand-up comic whose best-known venues are Promise Keepers rallies that have drawn thousands of evangelical Christian men to coliseums. He once admonished conservative churches that were burning Harry Potter books: “Here’s a good rule of thumb: If Hitler tried it—maybe go the other way.”
…Such self-deprecating humor is a mark of theological maturity—and I’m not joking. But it can be a tricky business as well, giving tacit permission to members of the culture at large to laugh at someone else’s faith in an acceptable way. Yet if non-believers, outsiders, told some of the same jokes on national television, vociferous protests would no doubt follow. Like those that greeted the mean-spirited cheap shots in Bill Maher’s movie Religulous.
Read the full article here, and see our previous here & there coverage of stand-up Sikhs.