This weekend, I saw Religulous, Bill Maher’s documentary-style raz of religion.

Given to comedic ridicule, and preoccupied with talking snakes and other absurdities, the movie is somewhat predictable as Maher wends his way across the globe in search of believers he can mock. He spends much time in the US, at the odious Creation Museum in Kentucky, and the repugnant and unrepentantly lucre-driven Holy Land Experience in Orlando, Florida, where six-year-old children line the streets to watch a gore-covered man being horse-whipped toward his ultimate place of torture. Lovely religion.

Maher takes on the usual suspects: a fundamentalist senator, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, who stumbles his way through an interview in which he seems to admit his less than stellar IQ; a Jewish convert to Christianity whose sole reason for finding Christ had something to do with a rude believer who told him to hold a glass of water out the window if he was thirsty — which he inexplicably did — purportedly resulting in a deluge from the heavens; a gay man who, on turning to Jesus, suddenly married and fathered three children and found this reason enough to make his life’s work the conversion of gay men everywhere to his special brand of Christianity; a bunch of slack-jawed, slack-bellied truckers whose chapel is in the bowels of a transport truck and whose command of English is as one would expect; and on and on and on.

The interviews are fodder enough for Maher, and the movie punctuates each idiotic quip and every forehead-slapping affront to reason with clips from old movies, which serve to punctuate the stupidity of it all. This is great fun, and one of the better reasons to see the movie. But Maher isn’t too concerned with getting things exactly right.

For example, he cites a figure of 16% from a “recent study”, that represents, as he puts it, Americans who do not identify with any religious group. He says this percentage is a larger demographic than blacks, Jews, homosexuals, and others that have a strong political lobby. He seems to admonish the audience to use this knowledge in order to effect secular change in the political landscape of the United States.

He doesn’t name the “recent study”, but it’s probably the 2004 report done by the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, entitled The Decline of Religious Identity in the United States. But the study does not suggest that this number of 16% of religiously unaffiliated people are either hard-core secularists or agnostics, and they are certainly not atheists. In fact, one of its major findings is that those who don’t identify with a religious group — a turn of phrase that Maher himself uses in describing the study he refers to — do, in fact, practice some form of religion.

Sizable numbers of those who do not affiliate psychologically with any religion are, nevertheless, occasional or unsettled practitioners. As such, they might sometimes attend religious services, have previously identified religiously as adults, or expect to take up a religion sometime in the future. A more complete religious profiling requires additional information about religious beliefs and behavior.¹

So described, these are hardly the sorts of people who are going to be demanding a lot of fundamental secular change in the way politics is conducted in the United States.

Maher also conflates the biblical account of Jesus with the stories of Mithras, Horus, Osiris, and Dionysus, as has been done before, most notably in Brian Flemming’s documentary The God Who Wasn’t There. In fact, he even uses a similar device for counting matches between the stories, where his narration of the similarities is punctuated by a visual and audio element that increases a counter as the matches accumulate.

Maher isn’t the quickest thinker on the planet. On ridiculing the trinity, he was impressed with one believer’s response that compared the Christian god to water, which, said the believer, also has three states of solid, liquid, and gas. Without needing to get into the fallacious nature of this analogy, Maher could simply have said something like, “But they’re not all three at the same time,” or some such, and neutered this non-starter with a non-starter of his own. Alas, he was merely impressed.

The most memorable interviews were with a cantankerous but oddly lovable Catholic priest outside the Vatican, and a Catholic priest and scientist who deftly swept aside creationism and fundamentalism as the backward anomalies they are.

The movie takes a dark turn in the last five minutes. Standing on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the site of the end of the universe according to all three major monotheistic religions, Maher launches into a dark oratory, concluding that, indeed, the world might end because of religion, but not for the reasons believers think. He makes a worthy appeal to reason, and to the reasonable, and asks doubters and atheists to come out of the closet to make reason and logic important in the national discourse once again. It’s a good ending to what had been a fun and fluffy ride.

Here and elsewhere, Maher owes a lot to writers like Christopher Hitchens, and especially Sam Harris. His appeal, though condensed, strongly echos the essays in Harris’ The End of Faith. He is neither as eloquent nor as studied as Harris, of course, but the resemblance to the gist of Harris’ book is striking.

I enjoyed this movie, and so did the audience. It’s not for everyone. It’s certainly not for the believer who is easily offended at irresistible clarity. Nor is it for the atheist who is squeamish when the believer is unapologetically ridiculed. But the message, like the urgent message carried by all atheists in the early twenty-first century, is important indeed, and I would recommend this movie both for its entertainment value, and its five-minute ending message.

1. Sid Groeneman and Gary Tobin, The Decline of Religious Identity in the United States, Institute for Jewish and Community Research, San Francisco, 2004, p. 3 [↩]

Louis Atheism, Believers Believers, Bill Maher, Catholic, Movie, Religion