As the locations roam from a truck stop chapel to a creationist museum and a Jesus theme park, and the production travels to Jerusalem, London and Amsterdam, director Larry Charles (Borat) sustains a crackling, irreverent tone. He deftly interweaves clips from classic (and not-so-classic) biblical movies as well as news footage and "educational" films, and uses on-air titles to deflate the bogus the same way Stephen Colbert would on The Colbert Report.
Maher's subject in Religulous, and it's a useful one, is religion as it is actually practiced in the suburbs, the country and the streets. He's an agnostic, not an atheist. His goal is to proclaim doubt about the mysteries that surround our mortality (such as what happens at death), and thus promote rationalism. He leaves certainty to true believers. He doesn't ponder what faith can do except summon a vision of the afterlife or provide an alternative to nothingness for the jailed or destitute.
Maher never grapples with the faithful who've made doubt part of their religious process. The movie contains some wry, eloquent cleric-intellectuals, including a Vatican astronomer who articulates that the Bible and science move on separate tracks, and a man described only as a "Vatican senior priest" who discounts (among other tenets) the sanctity of saints.
Maher attacks hypocrisy and mindless escapism for feeding social illnesses like exploitation of the poor and xenophobia. Pundits and now movie reviewers describe some of Maher's subjects as "easy targets." Easy for whom? Why should religious hucksters thrive without exposure and continue to bilk gullible followers because conventional commentators consider them unworthy of examination?
The Rev. Jeremiah Cummings, a former member of Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes (and also a former Muslim), wears a fancy suit, lizard skin shoes and lots of bling. He professes ignorance that Jesus said it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven. His exchange with Maher is horrifying as well as amusing, partly because Cummings is so relaxed. A combination of ego and show-biz rapport must make characters like Cummings or Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda, the self-described Second Coming, feel at home with a comedy-club veteran.
Maher doesn't shy away from anyone's excesses, including a group of fanatic anti-Zionist Jews whose convoluted rabbi is the one on-camera subject he actually walks out on. Some Western Muslims exasperate him when they refuse to acknowledge the potential for war-mongering in Islam or to defend Salman Rushdie's right to free speech (a right they claim for themselves).
After laying out the awful ironies of three faiths competing for ownership of Jerusalem, Maher presents his own jarring Sermon on the Mount. He urges rationalists and skeptics to speak out and seize leadership from the devout before religion brings on Armageddon. It's the one heavy-handed sequence in Religulous, a movie that mostly manages to debunk blind faith with a twinkle in its eye.
Religulous
(Lionsgate) A documentary starring Bill Maher. Directed by Larry Charles. Rated R for some language and sexual material. Time 110 minutes.
