God Is Not Mocked

[October 1st, 2008]

In the annals of unbelief, there are few anecdotes more telling than the time British novelist Kingsley Amis was asked by the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “You atheist?” Amis’ reply: “Well, yes, but it’s more that I hate him.”

That quip leaps to mind often during the 101 minutes of Bill Maher’s satire Religulous, since it so neatly sums up the feelings of the Politically Incorrect host toward divinity of any stripe. Jesus, Allah, Tom Cruise: They all face his wrath. (In all fairness, he seems to have no hard feelings for the Egyptian deity Horus, though he may have simply run out of time.) In a moment of pure disgust, Maher describes religion as being “not just corrupt, but fucking-little-kids corrupt.” The chuckle that follows this line, however, reveals the obstacle facing Religulous: A lot of people hate Maher as well, probably because of the beams of smug self-satisfaction radiating miraculously from his face. In fact, the catechism running through the movie is the question of who is more annoying: God or Bill Maher?

The answer is God, though it’s a close race. Maher is marginally less insufferable in Religulous than he usually is on television, perhaps because here he only interviews people more obnoxious than himself. This is the same technique mined for comic gold in 2006’s Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, and little wonder—the films have the same director, Seinfeld producer Larry Charles. (This movie is, one suspects, his ultimate show about nothing.) But while Borat’s brilliance lay in its flirtation with cruelty, Religulous is neither as funny nor as problematic, since this time most of the victims deserve the mockery they receive. A few of them are gullible to the brink of the sheeplike, and the rest are wolves in shepherds’ clothing. There’s the health-and-wealth pastor sporting lizard-skin shoes, the gay-curing mission leader who does not seem entirely cured himself, and the Australian creationist who runs a staggeringly uninspiring dinosaur museum in Kentucky. (Full disclosure: In my youth, I attended several seminars hosted by this last fellow, and so I am sadly familiar with the triceratops wearing a saddle.)

What do these figures have in common? They’re all easy targets, and they’re all fundamentalist Christians. Maher spends his entire first hour in the Jesus camp, and it’s hard not to suspect he does so because it is, in fact, the most politically correct territory to mock—especially without a single reputable theologian on hand. To his credit, he eventually expands his ridicule to include Scientologists, Mormons, Jews and Muslims—he gives an especially hard time to a British rapper who considers himself a victim of Islamophobia but can’t quite manage to condemn the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie. Maher’s response to nearly everybody is the same expression of incredulity: He purses his lips, raises his brow and nods, as if patiently waiting for the men with the butterfly nets to arrive. (The Holocaust-denying rabbi is the sole exception—he’s too disgusting for Maher to endure.) He recognizes that often the only response to absurd arguments is to smirk.

But he also knows that sometimes a smirk isn’t enough. In the final five minutes of Religulous, Maher explodes in a masterful diatribe, which Charles scores against a montage of God-honoring atrocity, none of it trimmed for content. “That’s it,” Maher rails. “Grow up or die.” It’s a symphony of outrage, and betrays Religulous for what it is: the latest salvo from an groundswell of irate atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who look at religion and can’t imagine why humanity has endured it for so long. Whatever you may think of it, this is a consequential position, and it shames the rest of the movie—makes its cheap shots and sniggering look pale. If Bill Maher hates religion this much, he ought to take it a little more seriously.