“I’m promoting doubt—that’s my product,” says writer and star Bill Maher near the beginning of Religulous. “The other guys are selling certainty.”
And while this docu-comedy does liberally cast aspersions on the sincerity, integrity and honesty of today’s major religious faiths (living up to its title, a portmanteau of “religious” and “ridiculous”), it doesn’t quite live up to another of Maher’s axioms, that “doubt is humble and that is what man needs to be.”
Religulous 
Directed by Larry Charles. |
Maher interviews a range of subjects, from a senior Vatican priest to an anti-Zionist Rabbi, from an ex-Jew For Jesus representative to a U.S. senator who favours Creationism over evolution—all these and a host of everyday people—yet it is often Maher himself who comes across as preachy.
Directed by Larry Charles, who helmed Borat in a similar manner (down to in-car soliloquies by the protagonist while driving), Religulous follows Maher from Arkansas to Israel as he questions believers (mostly Christian, Jewish, and Muslim) about just why they believe.
Maher makes the material fun, but once in a while an awkward spectre of desperation materializes as—even fully aided and abetted by the power of editing—Maher simply comes across as trying too hard to disagree with and criticize the people he interviews.
Perhaps they deserve it; after all, the film’s ultimate message is that religion is a toxic agent in the contemporary stew of global ideologies and geopolitics, responsible for all manner of intolerance and corruption, not to mention the countless deaths brought about by faith-driven conflicts.
But it’s human nature to root for the little guy in situations like these, and often enough it is the interviewee rather than Maher (standing in for all those oppressed by religion) who figures as such. Religulous is at its best when he lets his subjects contradict themselves and each other, as in the case of a newly devout “ex-gay”; or when he cuts from an American Creationist advocate to a Vatican dignitary who reminds us that the official papal stance is in favour of evolution.
Maher, being a comedian, knows how to earn his laughs, and he succeeds quite frequently. Religulous works as a comedy, driven by Maher’s Jon Stewart-like insouciance and irreverence. But as a documentary-cum-exposé? It’s somewhat heavy-handed, a bit light on serious, incisive commentary, mostly focusing on the basics and the obvious.
Religulous marketed itself as exactly what it is: a liberal, humorous, explicitly agenda-driven assault on religious institutions, and precisely for this reason it is not about to change anyone’s mind. For the atheistic types and those die-hard viewers of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report (at least, the ones who understand that Colbert as seen on TV is an adopted satirical persona), Religulous is a hilarious 90 minutes more of the same. The fundamentalists, evangelicals, and other alleged lunatics, on the other hand, will presumably spare themselves the pain of enduring Maher’s diatribes.
Just like The God Delusion author Richard Dawkins, Maher is likely to find himself preaching to the choir.