What are Christians to make of this season’s South Park? – Baptist News Global

AnalysisMara Richards Bim  |  September 4, 2025
The television show South Park first aired in 1997, the same year I graduated college. I don’t remember watching it right away, but by the second season, I was an avid fan. I was drawn to the show’s total irreverence and its willingness to say and do anything. It was raunchy and funny and called out the hypocrisy and insanity of the culture at-large.
Like many people of my generation who initially followed South Park, at some point my tastes changed and I moved on. I honestly didn’t even know the cartoon was still around until a few weeks ago when it landed in our current cultural swamp like a big, naked cannon ball.
Once again I find myself completely engrossed in the show and its commentary on our present moment. And I’m not alone.
As Jesse Hassenger of The Guardian has pointed out, part of the draw of South Park at this moment is the “gratifyingly mean caricatures of deserving figures such as Trump, JD Vance and the Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem. … In a world where Trump’s actual political opponents seem terrified to actually fight him, some well-deserved, point-and-laugh meanness has become a surprising novelty.”
But, as a Christian, what am I to make of the show at this moment? How am I to relate to its unrelenting and very pointed satire of the Trump administration?

Mikhail Bakhtin
Recently I have dusted off my copy of Rabelais and His World by Mikhail Bakhtin, a 20th-century Russian culture and literary critic. The book was first published in the 1930s in the Stalinist Soviet Union, which makes its undertaking — the use of folk culture of humor by the French writer François Rabelais — even more interesting.
Rabelais lived in the early 16th century in the midst of the continued fallout of the Protestant Reformation. Originally a Catholic priest, he drew the ire of both the Catholic Church and John Calvin for his satirical lambasting of those in power in the overlapping spheres of politics and religion.
Four hundred years later, Bakhtin — writing in Communist Russia — wrote his classic analysis of Rabelais’ literary work as a cultural commentary on the workings of a grossly stratified and polarized society. Bakhtin’s treatise led to new understandings about the significance of carnival and satirical representations of the grotesque in societies.
Typical masks worn in Venice for Carnival. (wikipedia)
During carnival, everyone is equal. Those of the lowest classes mingle with those of higher classes and the costumes, parades and such erase boundaries between social classes. The element of the grotesque within carnival also plays an important social function. The materiality of bodies and their varied and sometimes-gross biological functions are on full display, offering a common human experience for participants. It is also a time in which—for a brief period — those of the lowest classes are given permission to mock those of the higher classes and everyone laughs.
Bakhtin’s analysis of the social function that carnival, the grotesque and satire play in providing a pressure release for an otherwise deeply contentious society are insightful for this moment in which South Park regularly portrays President Trump trying to have conjugal relations with Satan.
More than half the country is deeply disillusioned and fearful right now.
Immigrants who are following the rules laid out by our government are being kidnapped from the streets, their homes, their workplaces and courtrooms where they are following the rules to seek legal status, and they are growing hopeless. Those of us who see these mass kidnappings and deportations to third-party countries without due process as the first step toward the removal of U.S. citizens whom this administration deems undesirable are terrified.
“We can think of South Park as the carnival atmosphere and necessary permission structure our country desperately need right now.”
Small business owners are seeing the companies they poured their hearts, souls and money into being destroyed by misguided economic policies. Women and girls are watching as a new wave of religious fanatics argue that the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote should be repealed.
From a cultural standpoint, we can think of South Park as the carnival atmosphere and necessary permission structure our country desperately needs right now. Or, in the words of Shakespeare’s Hamlet:
The purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.
What about Jesus?
In addition to considering the cultural function of this season’s South Park through the lens of Bakhtin, as a Christian I’ve also been considering what this season has to say to Christians about the cultural moment we’re in.
PC Principal and Jesus
Notably, this season’s premiere of South Park actually featured the character of Jesus. Religion Dispatches, a publication of Political Research Associates, published a thoughtful essay on the largest issue tackled in the season premiere: Christian nationalism and the threat of theocracy.
In the episode, Stan Marsh and his dad are angry with the principal who has gone all-in on MAGA Christian nationalism. The PC (“Power Christian”) Principal is forcing his version of Christianity on the students and teachers of the town’s public school.
Even Jesus doesn’t want to be in the public schools telling the townspeople in a whispered voice: “I didn’t wanna come back and be in the school. I had to because it was part of a lawsuit and the agreement with Paramount.” Comedy Central — the network home of South Park — owned by Paramount, needed (and obtained) Trump’s approval for its merger with Skydance after Paramount agreed to pay the president $16 million in his lawsuit against CBS’ 60 Minutes.
The show’s commentary on the way in which the Christian faith has been hijacked by right-wing fascists is an important voice in this moment. While the show’s creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, are generally considered atheists, their insight into the role Christofascism is playing within the political machinations of the Trump administration are important.
The premiere episode is actually titled “Sermon on the Mount.” There is a certain poetic irony to the storyline in which the character of Jesus is forced by the state to be the unwilling mascot for Christofascism within the public schools. And the state in South Park is run by a President Trump who is constantly seeking to have sexual relations with Satan.
Touché.
I often write about the need for Christians — actual Bible-reading, churchgoing, Christian-virtue-ethics-living Christians — to stand in this moment against the unholy, blasphemous and heretical version of Christianfascism that is being used by MAGA Republicans as a cudgel to force compliance with their theocratic aspirations.
I love South Park both for its commentary on the dangerous political and religious forces at work in our country. And, even more scandalously, I think Jesus might even enjoy this season too.
The Jesus of the Gospels was always on the side of the oppressed. He never forced his religious teachings on anyone. In fact, he told his followers if their message wasn’t accepted to shake the dust from their feet as they walked away.
The Jesus of the Gospels was a bit of a rabblerouser known for eating and drinking with common people who were oppressed by the religious elite who were in collusion with the Empire.
And, the Jesus of the Gospels spared no insults when speaking truth to power. At various points, he told the religious elites to their faces they were hypocrites, vipers, children of hell, blind guides, blind fools and like whitewashed tombs (beautiful on the outside, but full of filth and bones of the dead on the inside).
I’d wager if Jesus returned today, he’d say the same about MAGA Republicans and the Dear Leader they bow down to.
In other words, my guess is Jesus might get a kick out of this season’s South Park.
 
Mara Richards Bim
Mara Richards Bim serves as a Clemons Fellow with BNG and is the first Justice and Advocacy Fellow at Royal Lane Baptist Church in Dallas. She is a spiritual director and a recent Master of Divinity degree graduate from Perkins School of Theology at SMU. She also is an award-winning theater artist and founder of the nationally acclaimed Cry Havoc Theater Company, which operated in Dallas from 2014 to 2023.
 
Related articles:
King of the Hill reminds us change can be good, too | Analysis by Tyler Hummel
Fighting hate with humor? Moms for Liberty and Toby Morton’s dark humor | Analysis by Mallory Challis
 
(123rf.com)
• Stuck in the Middle With You
• Highest Power: Church + State
• Non-Disclosure: The Silenced Stories of Kanakuk Kamps Survivors
• Change-making Conversations

BNG interview series on the state of faith, politics and resistance in our nation.
See also Greg’s series on Politics, Faith and Mission
 
News
Opinion
News
Opinion

© 2025 Baptist News Global. All rights reserved.
Want to share a story? We hope you will! Read our republishing, terms of use and privacy policies here.

source