'Religulous'?

Theo Hobson is a Christian theologian with a deep suspicion of organised religion. The perfect person, then, to watch ‘Religulous’, a new documentary that sticks the knife into all forms of faith

Laughter can be a form of cheering. A certain sort of comedy depends on the audience’s agreement with the speaker’s polemical agenda. This form of comedy makes me uneasy. It feels like the self-congratulation of a self-righteous gang. The laughter does not mean ‘That’s so funny!’ but ‘We’re so right!’

‘Religulous’, the new film by political satirist Bill Maher and ‘Seinfeld’ co-writer Larry Charles, is a marriage of Michael Moore and Richard Dawkins. It’s an angry attack on religion, by a comedian. Last year Dawkins presented a Channel 4 series called ‘The Root of all Evil’, filled with lots of earnest little arguments with believers, and earnest little speeches from the great atheist sage. Maybe Maher and Charles watched it and thought: He’s right, but boy is he dull! This message needs some sexing up.

Maher is our Moore/Dawkins. He’s a middle-aged comedian from Boston whose rubbery face rings a bell (in fact, he looks a bit like Bill Murray). He was brought up Catholic, he tells us, though his mother is Jewish. As a boy he found church boring, less relevant to him than baseball and Superman. Gently knocking religion was part of his stand-up act in the 1980s, but recently he has been feeling the urge to hit it hard, to expose its fraudulence. He tells the camera as he’s driving along that religion is corrupt, ‘not just corrupt, but fucking-little-kids-corrupt, and burning-people-alive-corrupt’. The idea is that he dares to tell it straight, to say out loud what most of us are half-daring to think.

His first stop is a truckers’ church, a little prayer room in a service station, where he questions some large men about their gullibility. One man explains that he was losing himself in drugs and sex before Jesus saved him. ‘So you were taking all these drugs and having all this sex…’ Maher responds, ‘…and your problem was?’ This sums up Maher, for me: he is a sort of overgrown teenager, ill at ease with the seriousness of life. He is very sure that he’s a lovable good guy and is deeply offended that there’s a whole way of thinking that puts this in doubt.

When he interviews believers he often cracks jokes that are intended to rattle them. For example, a minister who encourages gays to go straight is told that he looks gay. At such moments the camera lingers on the interviewee’s confused face, milking the laugh.

Sometimes, believe it or not, there are subtitles telling us what to think about his victim’s answer. There’s some overlap with Louis Theroux here, but Theroux is careful to inject just enough tonal ambiguity to avoid looking smug. The director of ‘Religulous’, Larry Charles – who worked on ‘Seinfeld’ and ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ – ought to know better: it seems that his polemical agenda has clouded his comedic judgement.

Maher often reverts to the simple point: how can modern people believe in ancient doctrines, and fairy stories, such as Jonah living inside a whale for three days? (The film often illustrates such beliefs with clips from religious epics.) If one is genuinely interested in such questions, one should talk to articulate believers, who will probably talk about myth and symbol and metaphor and so on. Too boring for Maher, who chooses to quiz the man playing Jesus at the Holy Land Experience theme park in Florida (who is very reasonable and nice, as you’d expect from Jesus).

There is a brief section on religious nationalism, which gives the impression that most of America’s Founding Fathers were anti-religion. This is a half-truth, at most: they were wary of religious extremism, and of churches meddling in politics, but not of religion itself. We are shown clips of the religious right, and Bush’s war, which ‘prove’ that religion turns America violent. There is no footage of Reverend Martin Luther King quoting the prophet Isaiah, or of Barack Obama speaking in church. The truth is that Christianity is built into America’s progressive, idealistic side.

This evasion is depressing, for a really good film could be made about the ‘wall of separation’ between religion and politics, that is such a major part of American tradition, and has perhaps been breached in recent years. This nation has managed to combine faith and secular liberalism over the centuries, which is a huge and complex achievement. Instead of usefully reflecting on this tradition, this film damages it, by offering a sneering caricature of religion as intrinsically detrimental to freedom. At the risk of sounding like Sarah Palin, this is a deeply un-American thing to do.

Towards the end he meets a few Muslims in the Netherlands, asking whether their faith is compatible with liberal values. Good question, of course, but to handle it in ten jokey minutes is unenlightening. A braver film would have placed more emphasis on Islam, for here a stronger case can be made that the irrationality of religion has violent consequences.

The conclusion is preachy. ‘Religion must die for mankind to live… Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking… Moderately religious people must look in the mirror and realise that the comfort they gain from religion comes at a terrible price.’  The last comment is particularly out of order, as he has not bothered to probe the question of moderate, non-literal belief, preferring to assume faith is essentially fundamentalist.

This film will confirm what critics of Michael Moore have long known: the wall between comedy and serious argument needs to be built up again. This sort of film prides itself on being brave but is actually cowardly. When it is accused of superficiality, gross bias and disrespect for the opposition, it can claim that satire does not play by the normal rules of argument.

How about a new word for political comedy of this sort? Satiresome.

Theo Hobson is the author of ‘Against Establishment: An Anglican Polemic’. ‘Religulous’ opens on April 3.

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