One For Israel

Seth Dillon: The dehumanization, I see it in the comments all the time. People saying things like, "Christ is King, you dirty Jew," posting pictures of ovens, and saying that Hitler was right. Right about what?

What upsets me the most, probably more than anything else, is that a lot of these ideas right now are being advanced on the right, where I live politically, under the banner of Christianity. As if these are Christian ideas.

You want to be able to joke about people that have ridiculous ideas, but these are dangerous ideas. They've been tested in history. The cost was millions of lives lost. It's a very important moment. This is the moment where people need to realize what direction things are going in and stand up and say something about it.

If young people are becoming susceptible to propaganda, veering off on the wrong path, and starting to question whether Hitler was really bad, the answer to that is not to join them for the sake of remaining popular with them. That is insane for one thing, but immoral for another. Young people need to be led, not followed. There is a very concerning shortage of that kind of courage and leadership.

Dr. Erez Soref: Shalom everyone, and welcome to another episode of Pod for Israel. Today we have a special guest, Seth Dillon from The Babylon Bee. Many of us have been following the Bee and liked what we see. Seth, I'm so happy that you could join me on this podcast. Shalom and welcome.

Seth Dillon: Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here.

Dr. Erez Soref: Seth, I wanted to ask you, we live in a world where there's a tremendous amount of opposing messages. One thing I liked about the Bee is that you use humor and satire to expound on it. We look in the Bible and see many of the biblical authors, including Jesus himself, used humor and satire. Can you share a little bit about your journey and how you got to this place?

Seth Dillon: Humor's an interesting thing because it's such a powerful thing. It's not just a form of entertainment where it makes you laugh; humor can also be used very effectively as a vehicle for truth delivery. Mockery can be used to tear down, ridicule, and expose bad ideas and foolishness very effectively. There's plenty of biblical precedent for that.

Satire has always been an interesting part of political discourse because you have all of these people out there debating the issues and arguing with each other. They're all taking themselves very seriously. Satire is really interesting because it offers commentary on the issues without taking them seriously. In fact, it attempts to do the opposite. It attempts to show just how silly and stupid some of these ideas are rather than giving them the benefit of treating them very seriously and attempting to refute them.

In some ways, I think it's the most effective way of combating bad philosophy and bad ideas because it's very disarming. It makes you laugh and approaches things from a different angle. It can really get you to see the silliness of an idea in a way that an argument doesn't necessarily. There's a great quote from a British Christian thinker who said that humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle. When you wrap your message in the package of humor, it's very easily delivered and received.

I think that's part of the reason why the Bee is so successful. My interest in The Babylon Bee is that I didn't create it. I took it over in 2018 from its original founder. When I first saw it, I thought it was really funny. It was this Christian version of something that was typically dominated by secular progressives here in the United States. The humor and entertainment industry is all coming at you from one worldview, and there weren't really any Christian conservatives who were doing comedy really well.

The Babylon Bee was a Christian alternative to that. It's remarkably successful because it's not just simply a Christian alternative to these other things; it's a good alternative that happens to be run by Christians. We make so many attempts to do Christian content—Christian movies, Christian TV shows—and often it comes across as very cheesy and low quality. It actually discredits us in some ways.

I think the Bee is a great counter-example to that of something that's done by Christians in a quality way. The content's good. That's why I liked the Bee and why I got involved. It was such refreshing, honest, and quality humor and entertainment, but also impactful for all the reasons I just gave about mockery's effectiveness. I got involved the first opportunity that I had and I've been running it since 2018, just trying to have an impact on the conversation.

Dr. Erez Soref: Satire and irony go hand in hand. I have to be honest with you, I would love to get your take on it. For a lot of people here in Israel, and many of our supporters in the United States, people were dumbfounded after October 7th. It was the worst onslaught on our people after the Holocaust. We wake up the next morning and we're the villains. It would have been funny if it wasn't sad, but there was a lot of black humor about that going on in Israel. It's coming from the same direction. There's an onslaught on the Judeo-Christian worldview, so both on Jews but also on Christians in the United States as well.

Seth Dillon: October 7th was worse than a tragedy because it was perpetuated by evil people. It wasn't just a natural disaster; it was a brutal act of terrorism that should have really united people in opposition to what was so clearly evil. The fact that it didn't happened with reasonable, sane people who have their senses about them.

There has been a very deliberate effort to invert reality and invert morality, painting Israel and Jews as the oppressors in this conflict who brought this on themselves. I've been in this world long enough to see what people are capable of and the mental gymnastics they're willing to go through to try to see things from a certain perspective. The fallenness of man is a biblical and fundamental reality. I still found it hard to believe that there were people who were immediately taking the side of literal terrorists and acting like Israel somehow had it coming or even perpetrated the attack themselves so that they could gain sympathy on the world stage.

I found that outrageous, but there's been a massive effort here to try to get people on board with that inverted way of thinking, including Christian conservatives on the right side of the aisle here in the United States. The effort to try to promote what I considered up to this point leftist thinking has been ramped up significantly since October 7th.

Dr. Erez Soref: If you ask the average Israeli, he would say America is a Christian country. Yet, I hear from many of my Christian friends in the United States that their children and sometimes their grandchildren do not share their worldview anymore, definitely in regards to Israel. Even those of our children and grandchildren generation who are Christians. Do you see that? What do you think promotes that?

Seth Dillon: The polls show that younger people are in pretty large numbers turning against Israel. A lot of these main podcasters here, like Megyn Kelly or Tucker Carlson, are looking at this trend. In response to that, instead of saying young people should be led and corrected when they're wrong, they look to young people as a sort of barometer. They're trying to gauge where things are going and where the trends are going. Because they're chasing audience and they want a large audience so they can get as many clicks and as much engagement as possible, they look at what young people are believing and decide to adapt their beliefs to stay relevant and popular.

They are captured by their audiences. They're so fixated on their numbers and how many views they're getting on YouTube that they're just chasing wherever the clicks and the views are. I see it very differently. If young people are becoming susceptible to propaganda and veering off on the wrong path, then the answer is not to join them for the sake of remaining popular with them. That is insane and immoral.

Those of us who have a little bit more knowledge and experience in this world, and know a little bit more about history, should realize young people need to be led, not followed. There is a very concerning shortage of that kind of courage and leadership. We do have it; you still have voices like Ben Shapiro as a counter to those others. But there is a deep divide.

What they will say on the anti-Israel side is that they are just waking people up to reality because people have been asleep, lulled into this belief that Israel is a friend of ours. This is part of what many of us in the conservative Christian world have dubbed the "Woke Right." They are waking up to this system of oppression where the Jews in Israel are controlling everything. They claim they control our country and our president like a puppet. They say they've controlled how we interpret the Bible by planting all of these false interpretations and theological viewpoints, like dispensationalism. There's a massive effort underway, and more people are finding their courage and saying enough is enough. The truth must prevail here. If we start going down this road, things get very dark very quickly.

Dr. Erez Soref: Some of my family members in the United States and Jewish friends who are not followers of Jesus comment that the atmosphere in the United States for Jewish people feels like it was in Germany in the 1930s. There's a lot of talk, even in some Christian circles and the wider society, that Hitler was actually a good guy and the Nazis were actually correct. The reading and selling of Hitler's *Mein Kampf* is on the rise. It reminds me of Charlie Chaplin's movie, *The Great Dictator*, where he used humor to show the ridicule. Are those issues that you were addressing?

Seth Dillon: Bad ideas, wherever they live, need to be pursued. Historically, The Babylon Bee is a Christian conservative satire site, so we were coming at the issues from that perspective. For many years after the Bee was started, we were focused pretty heavily on the secular progressive left and the advancement of their values and policies, which we found objectionable. Everything from abortion to the radical gender ideology stuff, the idea that men can become women if they identify as women.

All of those were issues that we focused on pretty heavily. We also focused on ourselves a lot, with a lot of self-deprecating humor about the church and some of the things that we get wrong. It's only recently that we've had to turn our sights much more intently on some of the bad ideas rising on the right. This idea that Hitler wasn't necessarily a bad guy has been promoted even on Tucker Carlson's show. It was done purposefully to try to whitewash not just Nazi ideology, but real figures in history who did terrible things. They try to downplay what actually happened, making it sound like it wasn't so bad and questioning the numbers of the Holocaust.

All of that is being done very deliberately, and there's an attempt to mainstream these ideas. We find it deeply concerning. We do everything that we can to try to ridicule it, but we also try to confront it head-on very seriously too. On a very deep and fundamental level, it's not funny at all. You want to be able to joke about people that have ridiculous ideas, but these are dangerous ideas. They've been tested in history and the cost in lives—not just those who were victims of fascist dictators, but from the world standing up against this and fighting back against it—was millions of lives lost. It's a very important moment where people need to realize what direction things are going in and stand up and say something about it.

The dehumanization, I see it in the comments all the time. People saying things like, "Christ is King, you dirty Jew," and posting pictures of ovens and the implications of what that means. Just saying that Hitler was right. Let's expand on that a little bit. Those sentiments are becoming very popular. What upsets me the most, probably more than anything else, is that a lot of these ideas right now are being advanced on the right under the banner of Christianity. We're being told that all of the objections that we have to the cultural decay and degradation that's happened as we've abandoned Christian values, the blame for that is laid at the feet of Jews and Israel.

People who are calling themselves Christians are suggesting to us that we got it wrong when we decided after World War II that we don't want a fascist dictator and that authoritarianism is really bad. They say this post-World War II liberal consensus is a Jewish idea so that people will feel sympathetic to the Jews, and then the Jews can bring their anti-virtue spread it through the West and the world and destroy our culture and rip Christianity away from us.

The core idea at the center of all of this is that this post-World War II liberal consensus means Americans have been conditioned to think that fascism is wrong and that we shouldn't like someone like Hitler. But, as Nick Fuentes will tell you, we need an American Hitler to come in so that we can cast off this post-World War II liberal consensus and destroy the left's values by imposing Christian values from the top down.

I can't think of a more anti-Christian mentality than that, and I certainly can't think of a more anti-American attitude than that. The American political project is predicated on the idea, long before World War II, that tyranny is bad and that liberty is good. Our Constitution safeguards these ideas, the idea that every person bears the image of God, has inherent rights, and deserves to have this pursuit of happiness and liberty. We've been getting better at it and it's something that's actually worth protecting and safeguarding. All of this effort undermines that. So it's anti-American, it's anti-Christian, and it's anti-Jew. It offends me on every level.

Dr. Erez Soref: It's deeply ironic and very sad that you hear from Christians that Hitler was right and we should eradicate the Jews. They say, "Christ is King, you dirty Jew." Their King, their Christ, is a Jew. For Hitler's system, if you had any Jewish blood in you, then your extermination is your fate. To that method, Jesus himself would have been cast to the ovens.

Seth Dillon: This is where they do a little bit of revisionism because they try to suggest that Jesus was not Jewish, that Jesus was a Christian. They'll even say Jesus was Palestinian. I've even heard it said that Jesus was a Jew before he became a Christian. He is the Christ. He didn't become a Christian; he is the Christ. To be a Christian is to be a follower of Christ.

Christ was not his last name. Christ means something. This is a man who claimed to be the fulfillment of the Messianic expectation that was already there. That's why he was called the Christ. If you're a follower of Jesus, then you are being grafted into the root tree.

I love this note from the ESV Study Bible talking about the purpose of Luke. It outlines several points that Luke is trying to make in his Gospel. Point two says: "To help his readers understand how Israel's rejection of Jesus and the Gentiles' entrance into the kingdom of God are in accord with the divine plan. Luke emphasizes that Christianity is not a new religion, but rather the fulfillment and present-day expression of the religion of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."

This idea that Jesus came to start a new religion is not true. The idea that Jesus left the faith of his childhood to start a new faith is not true. He was the fulfillment, not the abolitionist who was there to abolish something. He was there to fulfill it and stepped into it, and then we get drawn into it and grafted into it through our belief in him.

The Christian perspective would be that a Jewish person who rejects Jesus as Messiah is the one who has veered off the path. It's not that Jesus himself went off onto some new path. It's just that not everyone follows him. Those are interesting debates, but that is the irony of it. There's a reason why they have to try to separate Jesus from his Jewishness. The reason they have to do that is because they hate Jews. This is how you can tell that they're not really Christians because Christians couldn't possibly hate Jews. We're being grafted into that root tree ourselves by believing in Christ.

There's this real tension there. This is why I say these people are dressing themselves up in Christian language and symbols. The Christian heart towards the Jewish people would be a heart that reflects what Paul was saying in Romans 9, where he's expressing his anguish over his Jewish brothers and sisters who were rejecting Jesus. He went so far as to say that he himself would be cut off from Christ if it meant that his brothers could be saved. That heart of anguish for unbelieving Jews is the Christian attitude towards the Jewish people. The attitude that says "Christ is King, you dirty Jew" is the exact opposite of that. It is as far opposed to Paul's attitude as possible. Anyone who's communicating in those ways and expressing those ideas is merely dressing up as a Christian to use Christianity as a political and ideological weapon, not to actually understand and embrace the faith and what it actually teaches.

Dr. Erez Soref: For us at One For Israel, part of what we did in response to many of our friends telling us that there's a whole generation that they feel don't share their values as Christians, we've produced a series and a book called *Why Israel?* where we trace the biblical narrative. We're working on a second season now, and then also on a series on Romans 9 to 11. I think the key is it's not about Israel; it's about the God of Israel. If you truly follow the God of Israel and the Messiah of Israel, Jesus, then it changes your worldview not just about Jewish people, but about how the God of Israel sees the world. Personally, I pray that the current climate, especially in the church but also in general American society, is like a pendulum. I hope it doesn't have to get to an extreme point before it starts to balance out. I think humor and satire can get in the door before the more serious talk.

Seth Dillon: I want to add another thought about this animosity that's here for Israel. The people that hold that animosity and hostility are really at war with evangelical Christians because evangelical Christians are still at this point very supportive of Israel. You will talk to many Christians who will cite the Bible as a primary reason for their support. They will cite Scripture in defense of their own defense of Israel and say we have a biblical imperative to be supportive of Israel.

Of course, Christians debate this issue. There's different theological camps. There's this supersessionist idea, replacement theology, where the church has replaced Israel in God's promises and covenants. They've been transferred over to the church.

Dr. Erez Soref: But just the blessings, not the warnings.

Seth Dillon: Exactly. They view that there was some kind of detour that happened and God has decided that Israel and the Jews are the problem actually. They start to adopt language like "the synagogue of Satan" or they'll call Jews "Christ-killers." That's one camp. There's other camps, like the dispensationalists who are so heavily derided now because of this idea this is a Jewish subversion. They have a very different view about Israel.

These are in-house theological debates. What's interesting to me, though, is that you don't need a biblical imperative to see that what's happening with the October 7th attacks—Israel is a current political ally of the United States. They're one of our stronger allies throughout the world, and we have a good relationship with them. They were attacked and they've defended themselves. If you don't buy into a lot of the false narratives and distortions of what's happened there, and you start buying into this genocide idea that Israel's conducting a genocide—that is just false on its face.

You don't need to have a biblical reason. I know a lot of Christians who don't even know what dispensationalism is. You just simply need to understand basic right and wrong, basic good and evil. There is a significant difference between what Hamas did on October 7th and what Israel has done defensively, and how Israel tries not to take innocent civilian life. Sometimes there is collateral damage in war that happens, but it's not the purpose; it's not the intent. The intent of Hamas, in Hamas's own charter and what their goal is, is to literally just eliminate the Jewish people. If they had their way, they would kill all of them. They would commit a genocide. They just don't have the capability. Israel has the capability and doesn't use it.

In fact, this conflict went on for so long you could make a reasonable argument that they were too restrained in going after Hamas. If you're actually interested in protecting innocent life, including innocent Palestinian life—the children, the women and children who have been killed in this conflict—you would be wanting to see Hamas wiped off the map because they are terrorists. They are the ones who are attacking innocent Jews and putting their own people at risk and using them as human shields. If you take the Bible out of the equation and just look at it from that perspective, you would be supportive of Israel in this conflict. I think to some extent the theological debates are a distraction from all of that.

It does concern me how a certain theological perspective, for example the Catholic view on replacement theology that I was mentioning, the Catholic Church holds that view. However, they've put out proclamations condemning antisemitism and saying that this does not mean that Jews should be treated as less than or other, or that we should blame modern-day Jews for the death of Christ as if a Jew that you meet on the street today is responsible for killing Jesus. It doesn't mean that we should hold out hatred and hostility towards them. We should share Paul's heart for the Jewish people. That's the official Catholic teaching, but young people in the Catholic circles have adopted that very mentality—that replacement theology does mean that Jews and Israel are bad across the board and are enemies of Christ. They treat them with hostility. Anytime a theological framework is being used for the purpose of perpetuating hatred like that, it has diverged from actual Christian teaching. It's diverged from what you're going to discuss when you go through Romans 9 through 11 and look at what Paul actually said and felt. My overall point is you don't have to rely on your Bible to treat Israel as a friend or to see clearly where right and wrong lie on this issue.

Dr. Erez Soref: Super interesting. Seth, I want to thank you so much for taking the time and joining us, and I look forward to more times like that in the future. Also, to get to know you better. When you come to Israel, please do come visit us.

Seth Dillon: I'd love to. And give me a heads-up when you're in Florida. Love to see you here, too.

Dr. Erez Soref: Will do. Thank you.