In print | Published October 23, 2008

There can be little doubt that we live in an extremely, perhaps a frighteningly, religious time. In this country alone, it has become almost expected that political candidates will toss out platitudes about going to church and believing in God, almost as a precondition for being elected to any office. More Americans go to church than in just about any nation on earth and in 2004 more voters cited “moral values” as their justification for their presidential vote than cited any other factor, including national security, the war in Iraq, or the economy. Meanwhile, around the globe we see unprecedented acts of violence by extremists claiming to act in the name of faith. In the midst of such an age of extremism and intolerance, it should be a time for skeptics and doubters to strike back by reclaiming the rationality and thought at the core of so many religious traditions. Instead, we get increasingly popular radical anti-religious tracts by such authors as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, which are designed only to provoke rather than to encourage any constructive dialogue. Now we also have a film to include in that list. Comedian Bill Maher’s recent documentary “Religulous,” for all its many virtues, is ultimately too self-assured and self-righteous to contribute anything positive to a dialogue that is so necessary right now.

The majority of “Religulous” consists of Maher traveling around the world, finding the most insane examples of religious people he possibly can and using them as examples of what is wrong with religion today. He travels to the Netherlands to explore the tension between the country’s libertine culture and its growing Muslim immigrant population. He goes to the Vatican in an attempt to interview the Pope and ends up standing outside and baiting a priest into admitting the absurdity of many Catholic teachings. And he spends time in Israel wondering why Muslims and Jews can’t just get along when their holy sites in that country are essentially the same places. (Isn’t that precisely why they’re fighting?)

The majority of Maher’s barbs, however, are saved for ridiculous people within this country. For example, he talks to an evangelical Christian preacher who seems convinced that he has gotten wealthy and is able to wear fine clothes due to the grace of God, despite the fact that Jesus had nothing positive to say about the acquisition of wealth. He confronts an absurd, comical man who believes that it is possible to “convert” homosexual desire into heterosexual desire through prayer. (Does anyone remember the Reverend Ted Haggard, conservative preacher extraordinaire, who was caught soliciting sex from a male prostitute?) We get a tour of the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where exhibits depict dinosaurs and humans living together. Later, we get to see the Holy Land Experience theme park in Orlando, where people pay good money to go see reenactments of the crucifixion of Jesus and where one woman states confidently that she will return on a white horse after the end of days to save all of the Jews from eternal damnation. He even manages to locate a Florida preacher named José Luis de Jesús Miranda who claims to believe that he is the descendent of Jesus and that God told him to tell people not to worry about sin anymore. It’s never quite clear whether or not he actually believes this absurdity or whether he’s just using it as a way of extorting money from gullible churchgoers, and it’s equally unclear which of these alternatives would be scarier.

The problem with all of this is that people like Jesús Miranda are such easy targets. There are always going to be people who claim beliefs that most of us would perceive as crazy, with or without organized religion to motivate them. But Maher tries to tar all religious people with the same brush by showing us a few people on the fringes of each of the three major Western faiths. It would be as if the entire American political left were slandered on the basis of a few people who were involved in bombings back in the 1960s. (And naturally no one would ever do that, right?)

Maher refuses to engage with any of his opportunities for genuine conversation about religion and the problems it creates in the modern world. Perhaps the movie’s most interesting character is Father George Coyne, the retired director of the Vatican Observatory, who speaks about his attempt to reconcile his Catholic faith with his realization that Scripture cannot possibly explain most of the revelations of science and acknowledges that the Bible should not be used to teach science. Coyne comes across as far more reasonable than the majority of Maher’s interviewees do, but Maher refrains from taking the opportunity for a dialogue, preferring instead to resort to smug wisecracks and easy laughs, as he does at just about every other potentially enlightening moment in “Religulous.”

But Maher is simply too certain that his views on religion are the correct ones to even consider alternative perspectives. In a way, Maher and the others in the new school of anti-religionists are just as dogmatic and unbending as the fundamentalists they criticize. At the end of “Religulous” Maher delivers an almost comically overdone monologue in which he argues that the fate of the world depends upon doubt, upon people questioning their beliefs and accepting that they might be wrong. Perhaps Maher would do well to follow his own advice.

Joel is a junior. You can reach him at jswanso1@swarthmore.edu.

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