Setting a new world record for shooting fish in a barrel, Religulous sees Bill Maher asking religious types – religious + ridiculous = Religulous; get it? – logical, sensible questions about their belief systems. To the surprise of nobody, none of the many folks he visits with can posit anything that holds water.
Even Francis Collins, a leading geneticist of the Human Genome Project, is seen to shrug his shoulders when he’s asked to square his rigorous practices as a scientist and his Christianity. They’re just two different things, he says.
Born to a Jewish mother and Catholic father, the young Master Maher, we are told, was brought to church every week until the Pope took against birth control. At this point, the entire family renounced their already lukewarm beliefs in favour of the Sunday lie-in. Our host is up front from the get-go. He just doesn’t get the whole religious thing. The virgin births, talking bushes and death reversals common to many religions leave him cold.
It’s this baffled honesty coupled with impeccable comic timing that allows Mr. Maher to get away with his prejudices; one can forgive pretty much anything when it‘s funny or done in the name of research.
Predictably, many of his interviewees do nothing to dispel the idea of the religious nut. José Luis de Jesús Miranda, a Miami-based minister who claims to be the second coming can barely keep a straight face on camera: Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, the anti-Zionist Jewish leader, simply won’t shut up; Ken Ham, a young earth Creationist takes us around various exhibits depicting children frolicking with dinosaurs in a theme park that promotes the idea that the earth is less than 10,000 years old.
Take that, geological records.
There are Jews for Jesus and Truckers for Jesus, but Mr. Maher is an equal-opportunity satirist who is just as comfortable quizzing Aki Nawaz, the Muslim British rapper as he is hanging out in the Dutch parliament with anti-Islam campaigner Geert Wilders.
Despite this proliferation of nutty concepts found from Amsterdam to the Holy Land, the American funny man and Borat director Larry Charles are happy to play nice when their subjects demand it. They give respectful time and space over to reasonable, entertaining senior figures in the Vatican; indeed, Father George Coyne, the former director of the Vatican Observatory and Father Reginald Foster, the Pope’s principal Latinist may be the smartest people in the movie. (The latter, hilariously, doesn’t seem to have much use for Catholicism at all.) They get along famously with the guy who plays Jesus at Orlando’s Holy Land experience. Hell, they even get the former gay minister who “coverts” gays back to homosexuality onside after a few wobbles.
There is a reason for these shenanigans beyond the obvious gags. As Mr. Maher points out, the last US census had a greater percentage of folks ticking the no-faith box than make up, say, the black or gay communities. In a country where God is always your running mate, the faithless had better start preaching before the dumber, emptier vessels get everything their own way.