Real Time comedian Bill Maher and Borat director Larry Charles are men on a mission: to destroy societys blind faith in God. The medium they chose to convey their doctrine is not a dusty old book, but an entertaining documentary which highlights the ridiculous aspects of religion, hence its name, Religulous.
In an effort to spread their brand of enlightenment, Charles and Maher embarked on a romp around the world, questioning religious beliefs in the places they began and the palaces they paid for. The duo returned from their three-month pilgrimage with oodles of often-funny footage, much of it shot guerrilla-style as with Borat. Stringing interviews together with biting commentary and incisive footnotes, (to quote Kazakhstan's most famous fake export) they present their "cultural learnings" which they ultimately hope may "make benefit" of our "glorious" globe.
We chatted with Charles, who mastered absurdity while working on Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and took the opportunity to challenge a few beliefs of his own.
Nicole Powers: Before we talk about the film, tell me a little about your religious background.
Larry Charles: My parents were secular Jews. I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. New York has a very high density Jewish population, and I grew up in a very Jewish neighborhood, and thought the whole world was like that. My parents were very secular, but I went to a very Orthodox Jewish school and I really got into it. I found it all fascinating, and I was just kind of really attracted to the metaphysical questions but I was completely discouraged by everyone around me to explore that. That wasn't what it was about, it was about getting bar mitzvahed, getting the money and getting out, you know. The metaphysical questions continued to plague me over the years and I've done a lot of reading and thinking about the subject. So it was kind of a fortuitous meeting when I finally hooked up with Bill. He had a lot of the same issues and questions, and a similar background in terms of age, generation and cultural reference points, and it just seemed like it was God's will that it happened.
NP So how would you describe yourself now? Atheist or agnostic?
LC: Those two words have come to mean so many weird things. I don't like the word atheist for two reasons: First of all it's a pejorative word that religious people put on people who may not believe in their god, and so it's almost like an oppressive word. And agnostic has also just come to mean something so vague, I don't even know what that means anymore.
What I would say is I don't believe in the god of the Old Testament. I don't believe in the god of modern theism. I think that god is a constructed god in the same way that Zeus was, in the same way that all gods that preceded him were. Monotheism is a movement, before that there was polytheism, and there was animism, and there was Norse, Greek and Roman mythology. These were all the religions of their time, and they all eventually served their purpose and then died out, and that's what I think needs to happen with monotheism. I think it's in its end game essentially. I think that end game could take a long time to play itself out, or it can result in the destruction of the species, but that's what I believe. I believe there's many, many questions to ask about the universe, about where we are, where we're from, and where we're going.
NP That's the classic paradox with religion. If God exists, he made us intelligent, yet religion doesn't really encourage us to use our intelligence. 93% of scientists don't believe in God, and these are a group of some of the most intelligent people on the planet.
LC: That's correct. We have that statistic in the movie in fact, and, yes, I think there's a correlation for the most part. You see exceptions to this quite often, but there's obviously a correlation between education and religious belief. For instance, in our movie we talked to two Vatican priests, and both of them debunk a lot of the commonly held beliefs about religion, about the birth of Jesus, and evolution, and a lot of issues that are very iconoclastic. They're both Ph.D.s, and you realize the Vatican's full of these very, very learned people -- the Pope is a history professor -- so they know, but what they don't do is disseminate that information to the masses because it would be shattering.
Their job is to perpetuate the institution of the church, not necessarily to profligate peace with religion. So you see that a lot, the more educated people in society, or the more progressive societies like Europe, London, Paris, Rome and Amsterdam, cities like that, you see a progressive society where basically the churches are now empty and most people consider themselves to be non-religious. Of course in those societies what's happened is there's been this immigration of a very fringe radical element of Islam into these societies, which is changing those societies also.
NP Your research on the multitude of almost identical precursors to Christ really changed my opinion about whether he even existed. Why aren't we taught that part of history in school? Isn't it kind of an important bit to leave out?
LC: It's almost like imagine the New York Times tomorrow printing the headline "Jesus Didn't Exist!" There would be a real cataclysmic impact on the world, because, first of all, it would send Christianity into disarray, into chaos. Secondly, Islam, which is locked in this great battle, this world battle with Christianity, would sink upon that as well, obviously. In a way, that truth is evident, that truth is obvious. There is simply no evidence that Jesus existed -- there's not -- and yet, that information is essentially suppressed in a society with the passive approval of the society itself of course. Because the society itself would in some ways probably have to disintegrate on some level, and then if we survive that we might come out the other side in a very healthy way, but that would have to happen first. We'd have a certain kind of rapture ironically I would think.
NP And so, ironically, if this movie is successful you're maybe contributing towards a disintegration of society?
LC: I remember this great Ian Hunter song called "All American Alien Boy." He says the future's got to change but it means you have to destroy, and I think, to some degree, if religion was to start to lose its importance in society, and out of it came a higher level of consciousness where we evolved to our potential as a species, then that would be a positive thing of course, but I think it's probably unrealistic to expect something like that to occur without there being some price, some consequences to it.
NP In the film you also explore this idea that Christianity is somehow American, despite the fact that the birth of it couldn't be further from our shores. Somehow America has managed to hijack Christianity.
LC: Yes. Again that's fodder for me because it's so ridiculous and absurd, and yet it's taken totally seriously you know. I mean the man we spoke to, Ray Suarez, who I happened to go to high school with by coincidence, he wrote that book about the Founding Fathers, and you learn, again, these were revelations to me and hopefully they're revelations to the audience also, but the fact is the separation of church and state was essential to the formation of the country, and that's all been blurred now.
That really started with Jimmy Carter in 1976. Up until then you never saw religion creep into the campaign, into the political process. Jimmy Carter was the first presidential candidate in the wake of Watergate to profess his religion, his born again Christianity, his faith in Jesus, etc., etc. When he lost the presidency the Republicans saw a voting block that was untapped, and they seized upon that in a ruthless fashion, and the moral majority emerged, and certainly a religious right voice emerged which has remained very strong in the political process all these years.
NP In England, they don't really tolerate religion in the same way in their politics. Tony Blair was forced to keep a lid on his religious beliefs while he was Prime Minister, and the English certainly wouldn't tolerate a politician who believed in creationism. I love that quote you have from Senator Mark Pryor, who is a creationist, who says, without any sense of irony, "You don't have to pass an IQ test to be in the Senate."
LC: Exactly. It's very scary. I mean the Scopes Trial was eighty years ago, like 1925, and here we are today in 2008 talking about putting Creationism back into the school system, and being taught alongside evolution. It's like teaching magic alongside chemistry. It's shocking that society has disintegrated to that level, that we have regressed so badly to the point where we've become, out of all the Western industrialized nations, the most religious nation.
NP Part of it is this idea that you explore in the film, that free speech doesn't apply to religion. As essentially a non-believer, I tap dance around and am mindful of those with beliefs, not wanting to offend, but the believers have no compunction about offending non-believers.
LC: That's one of the things that the movie could potentially change. If people come out of this movie laughing and realizing the silliness of a lot of this stuff, I think that the onus might fall on the believers to defend the absurdity of their beliefs. And that would be a very interesting shift in the paradigm.
NP But that goes back to education and intelligence. People need to have a certain level of intelligence to appreciate the absurdities in the first place.
LC: That's interesting that you say that, because maybe the end result of having creationism taught next to evolution will be that the students themselves will recognize the absurdity of creation science versus the science of evolution, and maybe, inadvertently, the attempt to insinuate it back into the public school system will have the opposite effect, and kids will start to reject it, and on a foundational level it will end up being rejected all over again.
NP It was staggering how poorly many of the people of faith defended their beliefs in the film. Ironically, the fake Jesus at the Holy Land Experience theme park in Florida was able to articulate and defend his beliefs far better than many of the men of cloth you interviewed.
LC: Yes. I think that's very true. You know why? Because he's a regular guy. He was trying to be cool. He was kind of like Jesus Lobowski to me. He was a very laid back Jesus.
NP With that interview you were fighting the theme park officials, who, when they realized what you were about, wanted to halt the interview and throw you off their property, so there were some Borat elements to this movie. You were having to use a little subterfuge to get the footage, and had to be prepared to run from the scene.
LC: Right. In my opinion, one of the things that excited me about making this movie was that we had to make it that way. I think that is a very dynamic and spontaneous lightening-in-a-bottle form of filmmaking. I like to go places where no one else has gone if possible, and so we keep stepping deeper and deeper into these situations, and we keep shooting and shooting and shooting until someone tries to stop us, and then we keep shooting even as we're being taken out. I wind up just trying to capture these single moments that can only exist in this one moment. You have to capture it, because if it passes you're never going to get it back again. That gives the movie a certain urgency, which I think adds to the entertainment value.
NP It's very similar to Borat in a way; Bill Maher is Borat. Borat used humor and the documentary format to challenge ideas of sexism, racism and homophobia, and Bill's essentially using the same device to challenge people's beliefs about religion.
LC: That's very true. The main difference is the level of artifice necessary, the alternate reality that is created, that's the main difference. But yes, they both are sort of enquiring amongst people about their belief systems, about their values, and hopefully painting a portrait of a society in the process.
NP I guess the one major difference is that Bill doesn't have a sister who's a whore who he plays husband and wife with.
LC: [laughs] Not that I know of. His sister's a very demure, very sweet woman actually.
NP What was a surprise to you as the movie unfolded?
LC: One of the things that people point at a lot, and was a revelation for me, was Father Foster in front of the Vatican; I had no idea that he was going to say the things that he ended up saying. We were all taken aback. I think, of all the things that were said in the movie, I think to have a high level Vatican priest basically say that Jesus being born on December 25th, and hell, and all these Christian Catholic concepts are all a bunch of nonsense was pretty shocking and revelatory.
NP Do you know if there's been any consequences for him?
LC: You know what? I think he could become a hero actually. Again, I don't think he's saying anything that other priests, other high level Ph.D. Vatican priests don't believe. Pope John Paul himself has written that evolution is no longer a theory. So if you want to go in and look at Vatican writing, which is available if you go look for it, you probably will see a lot of this kind of thought in there. It's like the Dalai Lama; The Dalai Lama talks about quantum mechanics and science, and he's reconciled it with his religion, and the Pope and his crew probably have as well, but they just don't really talk about it for public consumption.
NP When I visited the Vatican, one of the most shocking things for me was seeing a bunch of nuns selling tacky souvenirs in a hut on the roof. I know Jesus wasn't a big fan of people turning his dad's house into a marketplace [John 2:16]. It's was a graphic illustration of how the Pope picks and chooses what he wants to take from the Bible.
LC: Well that's right. We open up that section of the movie with Bill saying "do you think this is at all what Jesus had in mind?" And you realize right there in that one image, and that one question, how absurd that whole thing is. It's unavoidable.
NP There's one statistic that worries me though. They say that people who have religion in their lives are happier. I guess it's that faith that there's someone warm and fuzzy looking after you.
LC: See I question that statistic. First of all, what does happy mean? How's happy defined? How deep are these people talking about their happiness? Are they talking worldwide? What about all the Christians, Catholics and Muslims in the world who live in abject poverty? Are they really happier? I don't know if I even accept that statistic on the surface.
NP You said a lot of things that needed to be said in the film. What kind of response have you been getting -- from both sides?
LC: Well, first of all, wherever we've played it, we've played to packed houses and gotten standing ovations, like at the Toronto Film Festival, so it plays really well. Underneath it all, I wanted to make a Saturday night date movie about religion. I wanted to make a rock & roll, rollercoaster ride through religion, and so on that level it works. It's a really fun movie strangely enough. It's entertainment and it's the kind of movie that should be able to compete with any movie in the mall on Saturday night. So on that level it's very satisfying.
As far as the controversy and all that kind of stuff, I'm hoping that the people you're describing, the religious right, people who might normally be aghast or offended by the movie, wind up in the mall on a Saturday night looking for something to see, and choose this, and find themselves laughing despite themselves. I think that would be the most controversial thing that could happen.
In an effort to spread their brand of enlightenment, Charles and Maher embarked on a romp around the world, questioning religious beliefs in the places they began and the palaces they paid for. The duo returned from their three-month pilgrimage with oodles of often-funny footage, much of it shot guerrilla-style as with Borat. Stringing interviews together with biting commentary and incisive footnotes, (to quote Kazakhstan's most famous fake export) they present their "cultural learnings" which they ultimately hope may "make benefit" of our "glorious" globe.
We chatted with Charles, who mastered absurdity while working on Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and took the opportunity to challenge a few beliefs of his own.
Nicole Powers: Before we talk about the film, tell me a little about your religious background.
Larry Charles: My parents were secular Jews. I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. New York has a very high density Jewish population, and I grew up in a very Jewish neighborhood, and thought the whole world was like that. My parents were very secular, but I went to a very Orthodox Jewish school and I really got into it. I found it all fascinating, and I was just kind of really attracted to the metaphysical questions but I was completely discouraged by everyone around me to explore that. That wasn't what it was about, it was about getting bar mitzvahed, getting the money and getting out, you know. The metaphysical questions continued to plague me over the years and I've done a lot of reading and thinking about the subject. So it was kind of a fortuitous meeting when I finally hooked up with Bill. He had a lot of the same issues and questions, and a similar background in terms of age, generation and cultural reference points, and it just seemed like it was God's will that it happened.
NP So how would you describe yourself now? Atheist or agnostic?
LC: Those two words have come to mean so many weird things. I don't like the word atheist for two reasons: First of all it's a pejorative word that religious people put on people who may not believe in their god, and so it's almost like an oppressive word. And agnostic has also just come to mean something so vague, I don't even know what that means anymore.
What I would say is I don't believe in the god of the Old Testament. I don't believe in the god of modern theism. I think that god is a constructed god in the same way that Zeus was, in the same way that all gods that preceded him were. Monotheism is a movement, before that there was polytheism, and there was animism, and there was Norse, Greek and Roman mythology. These were all the religions of their time, and they all eventually served their purpose and then died out, and that's what I think needs to happen with monotheism. I think it's in its end game essentially. I think that end game could take a long time to play itself out, or it can result in the destruction of the species, but that's what I believe. I believe there's many, many questions to ask about the universe, about where we are, where we're from, and where we're going.
NP That's the classic paradox with religion. If God exists, he made us intelligent, yet religion doesn't really encourage us to use our intelligence. 93% of scientists don't believe in God, and these are a group of some of the most intelligent people on the planet.
LC: That's correct. We have that statistic in the movie in fact, and, yes, I think there's a correlation for the most part. You see exceptions to this quite often, but there's obviously a correlation between education and religious belief. For instance, in our movie we talked to two Vatican priests, and both of them debunk a lot of the commonly held beliefs about religion, about the birth of Jesus, and evolution, and a lot of issues that are very iconoclastic. They're both Ph.D.s, and you realize the Vatican's full of these very, very learned people -- the Pope is a history professor -- so they know, but what they don't do is disseminate that information to the masses because it would be shattering.
Their job is to perpetuate the institution of the church, not necessarily to profligate peace with religion. So you see that a lot, the more educated people in society, or the more progressive societies like Europe, London, Paris, Rome and Amsterdam, cities like that, you see a progressive society where basically the churches are now empty and most people consider themselves to be non-religious. Of course in those societies what's happened is there's been this immigration of a very fringe radical element of Islam into these societies, which is changing those societies also.
NP Your research on the multitude of almost identical precursors to Christ really changed my opinion about whether he even existed. Why aren't we taught that part of history in school? Isn't it kind of an important bit to leave out?
LC: It's almost like imagine the New York Times tomorrow printing the headline "Jesus Didn't Exist!" There would be a real cataclysmic impact on the world, because, first of all, it would send Christianity into disarray, into chaos. Secondly, Islam, which is locked in this great battle, this world battle with Christianity, would sink upon that as well, obviously. In a way, that truth is evident, that truth is obvious. There is simply no evidence that Jesus existed -- there's not -- and yet, that information is essentially suppressed in a society with the passive approval of the society itself of course. Because the society itself would in some ways probably have to disintegrate on some level, and then if we survive that we might come out the other side in a very healthy way, but that would have to happen first. We'd have a certain kind of rapture ironically I would think.
NP And so, ironically, if this movie is successful you're maybe contributing towards a disintegration of society?
LC: I remember this great Ian Hunter song called "All American Alien Boy." He says the future's got to change but it means you have to destroy, and I think, to some degree, if religion was to start to lose its importance in society, and out of it came a higher level of consciousness where we evolved to our potential as a species, then that would be a positive thing of course, but I think it's probably unrealistic to expect something like that to occur without there being some price, some consequences to it.
NP In the film you also explore this idea that Christianity is somehow American, despite the fact that the birth of it couldn't be further from our shores. Somehow America has managed to hijack Christianity.
LC: Yes. Again that's fodder for me because it's so ridiculous and absurd, and yet it's taken totally seriously you know. I mean the man we spoke to, Ray Suarez, who I happened to go to high school with by coincidence, he wrote that book about the Founding Fathers, and you learn, again, these were revelations to me and hopefully they're revelations to the audience also, but the fact is the separation of church and state was essential to the formation of the country, and that's all been blurred now.
That really started with Jimmy Carter in 1976. Up until then you never saw religion creep into the campaign, into the political process. Jimmy Carter was the first presidential candidate in the wake of Watergate to profess his religion, his born again Christianity, his faith in Jesus, etc., etc. When he lost the presidency the Republicans saw a voting block that was untapped, and they seized upon that in a ruthless fashion, and the moral majority emerged, and certainly a religious right voice emerged which has remained very strong in the political process all these years.
NP In England, they don't really tolerate religion in the same way in their politics. Tony Blair was forced to keep a lid on his religious beliefs while he was Prime Minister, and the English certainly wouldn't tolerate a politician who believed in creationism. I love that quote you have from Senator Mark Pryor, who is a creationist, who says, without any sense of irony, "You don't have to pass an IQ test to be in the Senate."
LC: Exactly. It's very scary. I mean the Scopes Trial was eighty years ago, like 1925, and here we are today in 2008 talking about putting Creationism back into the school system, and being taught alongside evolution. It's like teaching magic alongside chemistry. It's shocking that society has disintegrated to that level, that we have regressed so badly to the point where we've become, out of all the Western industrialized nations, the most religious nation.
NP Part of it is this idea that you explore in the film, that free speech doesn't apply to religion. As essentially a non-believer, I tap dance around and am mindful of those with beliefs, not wanting to offend, but the believers have no compunction about offending non-believers.
LC: That's one of the things that the movie could potentially change. If people come out of this movie laughing and realizing the silliness of a lot of this stuff, I think that the onus might fall on the believers to defend the absurdity of their beliefs. And that would be a very interesting shift in the paradigm.
NP But that goes back to education and intelligence. People need to have a certain level of intelligence to appreciate the absurdities in the first place.
LC: That's interesting that you say that, because maybe the end result of having creationism taught next to evolution will be that the students themselves will recognize the absurdity of creation science versus the science of evolution, and maybe, inadvertently, the attempt to insinuate it back into the public school system will have the opposite effect, and kids will start to reject it, and on a foundational level it will end up being rejected all over again.
NP It was staggering how poorly many of the people of faith defended their beliefs in the film. Ironically, the fake Jesus at the Holy Land Experience theme park in Florida was able to articulate and defend his beliefs far better than many of the men of cloth you interviewed.
LC: Yes. I think that's very true. You know why? Because he's a regular guy. He was trying to be cool. He was kind of like Jesus Lobowski to me. He was a very laid back Jesus.
NP With that interview you were fighting the theme park officials, who, when they realized what you were about, wanted to halt the interview and throw you off their property, so there were some Borat elements to this movie. You were having to use a little subterfuge to get the footage, and had to be prepared to run from the scene.
LC: Right. In my opinion, one of the things that excited me about making this movie was that we had to make it that way. I think that is a very dynamic and spontaneous lightening-in-a-bottle form of filmmaking. I like to go places where no one else has gone if possible, and so we keep stepping deeper and deeper into these situations, and we keep shooting and shooting and shooting until someone tries to stop us, and then we keep shooting even as we're being taken out. I wind up just trying to capture these single moments that can only exist in this one moment. You have to capture it, because if it passes you're never going to get it back again. That gives the movie a certain urgency, which I think adds to the entertainment value.
NP It's very similar to Borat in a way; Bill Maher is Borat. Borat used humor and the documentary format to challenge ideas of sexism, racism and homophobia, and Bill's essentially using the same device to challenge people's beliefs about religion.
LC: That's very true. The main difference is the level of artifice necessary, the alternate reality that is created, that's the main difference. But yes, they both are sort of enquiring amongst people about their belief systems, about their values, and hopefully painting a portrait of a society in the process.
NP I guess the one major difference is that Bill doesn't have a sister who's a whore who he plays husband and wife with.
LC: [laughs] Not that I know of. His sister's a very demure, very sweet woman actually.
NP What was a surprise to you as the movie unfolded?
LC: One of the things that people point at a lot, and was a revelation for me, was Father Foster in front of the Vatican; I had no idea that he was going to say the things that he ended up saying. We were all taken aback. I think, of all the things that were said in the movie, I think to have a high level Vatican priest basically say that Jesus being born on December 25th, and hell, and all these Christian Catholic concepts are all a bunch of nonsense was pretty shocking and revelatory.
NP Do you know if there's been any consequences for him?
LC: You know what? I think he could become a hero actually. Again, I don't think he's saying anything that other priests, other high level Ph.D. Vatican priests don't believe. Pope John Paul himself has written that evolution is no longer a theory. So if you want to go in and look at Vatican writing, which is available if you go look for it, you probably will see a lot of this kind of thought in there. It's like the Dalai Lama; The Dalai Lama talks about quantum mechanics and science, and he's reconciled it with his religion, and the Pope and his crew probably have as well, but they just don't really talk about it for public consumption.
NP When I visited the Vatican, one of the most shocking things for me was seeing a bunch of nuns selling tacky souvenirs in a hut on the roof. I know Jesus wasn't a big fan of people turning his dad's house into a marketplace [John 2:16]. It's was a graphic illustration of how the Pope picks and chooses what he wants to take from the Bible.
LC: Well that's right. We open up that section of the movie with Bill saying "do you think this is at all what Jesus had in mind?" And you realize right there in that one image, and that one question, how absurd that whole thing is. It's unavoidable.
NP There's one statistic that worries me though. They say that people who have religion in their lives are happier. I guess it's that faith that there's someone warm and fuzzy looking after you.
LC: See I question that statistic. First of all, what does happy mean? How's happy defined? How deep are these people talking about their happiness? Are they talking worldwide? What about all the Christians, Catholics and Muslims in the world who live in abject poverty? Are they really happier? I don't know if I even accept that statistic on the surface.
NP You said a lot of things that needed to be said in the film. What kind of response have you been getting -- from both sides?
LC: Well, first of all, wherever we've played it, we've played to packed houses and gotten standing ovations, like at the Toronto Film Festival, so it plays really well. Underneath it all, I wanted to make a Saturday night date movie about religion. I wanted to make a rock & roll, rollercoaster ride through religion, and so on that level it works. It's a really fun movie strangely enough. It's entertainment and it's the kind of movie that should be able to compete with any movie in the mall on Saturday night. So on that level it's very satisfying.
As far as the controversy and all that kind of stuff, I'm hoping that the people you're describing, the religious right, people who might normally be aghast or offended by the movie, wind up in the mall on a Saturday night looking for something to see, and choose this, and find themselves laughing despite themselves. I think that would be the most controversial thing that could happen.
VIEW 12 of 12 COMMENTS
and a great interview by the way....
i see a big part of the problem of society comes from group assignment. like said about atheism or agnosticism, everyone HAS to be branded with a strict structure of belief. that's just ridiculous. i can go to the vegetarian group here and listen to pescetarians (doesn't the word sound denominational?) call themselves "vegetarians" when the majority of the time they practice doing one thing, but every now and then they commit the mortal sin of having a little fish and they go straight to hell for being "wrong". people do take their beliefs way too seriously.
i liked that there was reference to the thc ministry, as well as the cerne abbas giant (i'm sure there's a way to make them go together as one could grow around the other). personally, two of my favorite religions would be the church of the flying spaghetti monster as well as the church of stop shopping. sadly, these did not make the list.
did it surprise you at all how it seemed so many people had hate for bill maher, mostly for posing questions that were well-founded? i have to wonder what the percentage of people is that just think him to be pure evil.