So I’ve held off writing a review of Religulous until I’ve seen it twice – once so I could laugh, twice so I could understand the intent and its effectiveness. Unfortunately, the second time was just as funny, so I apologize if this article isn’t as in-depth as you might expect it to be.
From the beginning of the movie, Bill Maher paints himself as an average guy who’s in search of answers. Nothing could be worse for the atheist community than a widely released movie with an atheist telling the audience that he’s right and everyone else is wrong. Instead of proclaiming himself an atheist, Maher sets up a more humble approach by asking his mom “so what are we.” Her response.
“Nothing”
Maher – reminiscent of a contemporary socrates – goes around asking questions and proclaiming, while making others’ beliefs look batshit insane, that he just doesn’t know. He plays a middle ground, calling all literal beliefs insane. And this is where many critics have found issue with the movie, claiming that Maher goes after easy targets for a laugh. While it is true that he goes after some ridiculously stupid people, like a guy who thinks he’s the reincarnation of christ, Maher also goes after the kind of average person that makes up a relatively large percentage of the American population, and arguably the entire population of the midwest. But still, most of these people are canonical literalists. He leaves religious moderates out of the picture, aside from a fleeting remark about how liberals who praise faith provide a base of acceptance for fundamentalists to act on.
At about the halfway mark of the movie you realize that even though Maher is hilarious – often making stand-up like jokes, punch-line and all, on the fly – the religious people he approaches are punch-lines in themselves. All Maher had to do was ask a few simple questions and the believers fumbled and fell back to telling Maher that he just needed “faith,” or that he needed to leave. And as much as the religious folk in this film would like to make a good argument, they just can’t, partly because Maher and director Larry Charles edited the scenes, and partly because they just can’t think outside of their narrow minded worldview.
Similarly, I think Maher made his own narrow minded point. The movie ends with a rather specious appeal to fear that the world will end with a war between religions if we don’t do something about it. It’s not so much that he makes the claim itself, because as unlikely as it is it’s still possible, but that the movie ends with a montage that comes to an explosive climax of violence and destruction, which is associated with religion. It left a bad taste in my mouth as it reminded me of Expelled’s Nazi cutaways.
But once you get past this small blip in Maher’s reason you realize that this is a good movie for atheists. Maher makes an explicit call for people of non-belief to come out of the closet and rightly criticize the religious. He does this with a swagger of confidence, topped with a down to earth feel that only Sarah Palin could rival. By doing so, and by appealing to common sense, Maher finally makes it look normal to be a non-believer. And I think this is where the greatest strength of the film lies. No longer is the atheist positioned in the role of contrarian; he is in the norm; he is the popular. Religulous is finally atheism commodified, and doubt normalized.
