The importance of Religulous and Bill Maher
By Editor on October 6, 2008 2:02 am
Bill Maher’s film Religulous does not subject secular rationality to the same withering critique as it does faith and and religious belief. But, argues Rohit Chopra, it raises necessary and difficult questions about the right to offend, the arrogance of easy certitudes, and the dangers of religious absolutism.
SUFFICE IT TO say that in our secular age religion is everywhere. The orthodoxies of social science once had it that as the world progressively fell under the sway of modernity and societies got increasingly rationalized, faith and belief would concurrently diminish in importance. That perspective has increasingly been qualified in academic understanding: the secular and religious are not necessarily viewed as antithetical to each other; religious commitment is not conflated with tradition; tradition is not considered the polar opposite of modernity. Nonetheless, the appropriate role of religion in society continues to be a matter of contentious debate, including in its ambit a series of vitally important questions. What is the relationship between religion and politics? Is religious fundamentalism a quintessentially modern phenomenon or an eruption of primordial hatreds? How are religious tenets about non-believers to be reconciled with ideas of democracy, equality, and universal human rights?
To the many views about religion that permeate public discourse in the US and globally, we can now add a distinct and provocative voice: that of stand-up comedian and social critic, Bill Maher. Religulous, which Maher has produced and stars in, is directed by Larry Charles, he of the cinematic deadpan seen in episodes of the acclaimed HBO series, Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Maher’s targets in the film are religious absolutism and religious literalism. In a series of conversations with believers and religious authorities, Maher pushes them, in genial but relentless fashion, to explain their core beliefs and to confront contradictions among their beliefs. Focusing on Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, Maher poses a series of specific queries to his interviewees that often reflect deeper questions. How is x or y claim to be explained? Why does evil still exist in the world if god is all powerful? Why is damnation reserved for the unbeliever or outsider to the faith?
Maher does all this in singularly funny fashion, not necessarily unsympathetic to, or patronizing of, his interview subjects, but with the slightly bemused air of someone who doubts. He claims not to have all the answers, and is, apparently, at least, willing to be dissuaded of his skepticism by those he speaks with. His litmus test is what may be called the counter-literalism standard, which, more often than not, is met with silence: “What if you’re wrong?” he asks one such believer who has just posed the same question to Maher.
As Stephen Holden observes, in his New York Times review of the film, Maher’s targets are often almost too easy, such as flashy self-promoting self-appointed prophets or kitschy theme park recreations of the life of Christ, bursting with melodrama and sentimentality and seemingly utterly devoid of any meditative or spiritual reflection. Holden also suggests that Maher does not push at the more profound philosophical questions about faith and belief which naturally emerge in an endeavor such as his.
There are, additionally, at least two other grounds on which the film might be critiqued. First, Maher does not distinguish between different interpretive frameworks for understanding religion or between the positions of literalists and those who find in religion something other than prescriptive absolutes. In failing to acknowledge the metaphorical significance that religious narratives might hold for believers, Maher is perhaps guilty of the same literalism that he critiques. And, secondly, Maher does not consider that secular rationality, scientific rationality, or just rationality– a word that Maher mentions several times in the film as a positive virtue– might also result in irrational outcomes, might also be the cause of violence and discord, and might very well cause the world to end with either bang or whimper. Rationality, then, is a self-evident and transparent concept for Maher; it does not seem to occur to him that the very category of rationality, too, could be deconstructed like the axioms of religious belief.
But Maher’s film should not be judged by omissions alone. The strength of the film lies in several timely and necessary points that it makes in unapologetic, if sometimes subtle, fashion. In drawing attention to the fact that 16 percent of Americans claim to have no religious belief, Maher suggests that this constituency also has rights that are no less important because their ‘identity’ is defined negatively, that is, as the absence of belief. Maher here implicitly offers a brilliant critique of one strand of contemporary American and global religious identity politics: the idea that god and the claims of a particular faith are the exclusive property of believers or adherents of that faith and that non-believers must constantly meet believers on their terms.
When addressing Islam, Maher also treads fearlessly where, with a few notable exceptions, most academics, journalists, media experts, or policy wonks have failed to go. He draws attention to the deeply problematic positions held by several Muslim activists, religious leaders, and politicians in the West. For instance, Maher brings into focus the apologetic view that any and all violence carried out in the name of Islam is ‘political’ and has nothing to do with the religion itself. Some of the Muslims Maher interviews refuse to admit that Islamic sources discriminate in any way against non-Muslims. The controversial British Muslim rapper, Propa-Gandhi, waffles about why Salman Rushdie’s freedom of expression in The Satanic Verses controversy is not a simple black and white issue, even as he seeks to assert his own rights against an apparently oppressive West. Maher’s film illustrates that ‘contextual’ or ‘holistic’ approaches, as held by Fatima Elatik, a Muslim Dutch politician, or Propa-Gandhi, can sometimes function as an evasion of the discriminatory aspects of a religion. The fact that Muslim youth in Europe are disaffected or that countries with Muslim populations are locked in neocolonial or neoimperial relations with the West do not satisfactorily account for or explain the actions of some Muslims against those accused of denigrating Islam.
The public discussion on Islam in the US and the West often appears stuck between, on the one hand, right-wing vilifications of Muslims and Islam, and, on the other hand, liberal refusals to criticize Islam out of an apprehension that right-wing Islamophobes will coopt any such criticism. Maher’s film demonstrates that it is okay to criticize Islam, even if one is a non-Muslim, and that one should not hesitate to engage in such criticism for fear of committing the cardinal academic sin of ‘essentializing’ about Islam and Muslims.
Perhaps the most enduring message of the film is a simple one that sometimes gets buried in the gnarled debates about history, policy,violence, rights, faith, West and non-West, democracy, clash of civilizations, terrorism, modernity, progress, etc. that haunt our times. The film reminds us that the right to freedom of expression includes the right to offend. It also includes the right to be questioning, skeptical, cynical, ignorant, wrong, and mistaken. That right, Religulous and Bill Maher say, belongs to believers and non-believers alike. Of any faith or lack thereof. Anywhere in the world.
Rohit Chopra is Assistant Professor of Communication at Santa Clara University and Editor, Interjunction.
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