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Andrew Klavan’s recent riff about Christians becoming humorless nailed a truth many of us have watched unfold online and in our pulpits: a good many of the faithful have traded wit for a brittle, policing seriousness that mistakes moral clarity for moral grandstanding. Klavan, who’s made a career mocking both left and right excess while explaining his own late conversion to Christianity, pushed back against this dour turn with the sort of biting satire the left claims to admire—until it’s aimed at them.
Don’t be fooled into thinking Klavan’s a shallow comic; his journey from skepticism to deep Christian faith informs his barbed humor, and he’s repeatedly said that becoming a believer didn’t sanitize his art into saccharine “happy talk.” Rather, Klavan argues that real faith contends with darkness honestly, and that honest art—and honest Christians—can be rich without being joyless.
Why the humorlessness? Part of it is the weaponization of “offense” in modern public life: when saying anything remotely irreverent risks being branded hateful, people naturally clamp down and adopt a stern, risk-averse posture. Klavan and others on the right have pointed out how this climate encourages a performance of piety that’s more about avoiding scrutiny than about worship or witness.
Another cause is the shrinkage of spiritual imagination inside many churches that have traded depth for messaging and authenticity for brand management; when faith becomes a PR campaign, the laughter that used to accompany humility and confession disappears. Klavan has warned against a Christianity that flattens into either smug triumphalism or brittle moralizing—neither of which leaves room for the lightness of heart patriots used to admire in our communities.
Conservatives should not conflate seriousness about truth with being joyless. The remedy is simple and unapologetic: reclaim a robust, winsome Christianity that can preach truth without scolding every person into silence, that can be solemn where doctrine demands it and delightfully human where real life calls for mercy and mirth. This is not flippancy; it is courage—courage to be funny, to take risks, and to trust that conviction can withstand a joke.
Meanwhile, the left’s selective outrage shows its own fragility: when humor supports its agenda it’s celebrated as “edgy,” but when it exposes leftist pretensions it’s weaponized as proof of bigotry. Conservatives must seize that inconsistency and use it to teach a larger lesson about free speech, mercy, and the necessity of honest discourse in a free society.
So to hardworking Americans and faithful Christians: don’t let the canceling, joyless bureaucrats of culture dictate your tone. Stand firm in doctrine, but laugh at the nonsense, love your neighbor without performing piety, and remember that the Savior we follow laughed, wept, and spoke truth plainly—qualities that ought to make us neither humorless nor cowardly, but fully, gloriously human.
