Responding to satire with satire

Anthony Sacramone, no mean satirist himself, shows how a religion that is being attacked by satire should respond:  with satire.  And he gives the example of one of the great apologists of the Early Church:   Tertullian.

From Anthony Sacramone, How a Religion Should Respond to Public Ridicule | Intercollegiate Review:

He was a North African adherent of what was a minority religion in the territories in which he lived and traveled. He had seen his faith mocked publicly, with opponents parading cartoonish images in the streets to inflame the animus and contempt already directed against his beliefs. They declared his religion the threat to social order and cherished values, and they blamed its inexplicable increase in followers for the calamities befalling civil society. Many of his fellow believers had already been imprisoned, even tortured. He blamed “ignorance as the chief root of [the] unjustifiable bitterness” toward his faith.

This pious man predicted that a cataclysmic judgment was coming that would dismantle the very civilization that was threatening him, and that only his creed could save it and prevent a chaos and lawlessness heretofore unknown.

He decided the time had come to enter the lists and fight the good fight.

His name was Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus. He was a Christian. And his weapon was . . . satire.

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