Oh, by the way: ChristWire is all one big joke.

Not the readership  which hit a high of 27 million page views in August  but the content, the opinions and the fake authors who write the stuff. (There is no “Stephenson Billings.”) Neither of the two founders is a conservative Christian. They are just like-minded 28-year-olds who met on the Internet, have never seen each other in person, and until this week had never given their real identities to a reporter.

Bryan Butvidas is a software developer who works out of his house in Southern California. Kirwin Watson is a former Pepperdine student who moved back home to Kansas, where he now works “on the patient-care staff” of a local hospital. According to phone interviews with both men, they met online in 2005, when both were contributing to the news aggregator Shoutwire.com.

They are fuzzy on the dates, but soon  “maybe it was 2007,” Mr. Butvidas offers  they were posting collaborative humor pieces on the Web. Mr. Butvidas bought the ChristWire.org domain name, and the partners began to conceive the Web site that exists today, something like what The Onion would be if the writers cared mainly about God, gay people and how both influence the weather.

“The first real post that we let stay up,” Mr. Butvidas said, “was ‘Gays Raising Stink Over Rick Warren Prayer at Socialist Obama’s Inauguration,’ and that is dated Dec. 31, 2008.”

Today, the expanded editorial staff, who all work free, includes “six to eight other monitors, who keep an eye on things,” said Mr. Watson, “and 20 to 30 other regular writers.” Mr. Watson usually writes the pieces signed “Jack Gould.” Mr. Butvidas typically writes the pieces by “Tyson Bowers III,” whom you may know from Wednesday’s article, “Gays Now Using Santa to Entice Man Boy Love Relations.”