God help us!

Religulous
With Bill Maher and the faithful.
Directed by Larry Charles.
101 min. Rated R

If the most commonly cited public opinion polls are correct, Americans feel more comfortable voting for a woman, a Jew, a black person (fingers crossed, at the moment), a Catholic or a Mormon than for an atheist. Hell, Americans would rather vote for a homosexual than an atheist. Hey, there, all you Republican closet cases! Time to come on out! Just keep the faith when you do!

In the new documentary Religulous, comedian Bill Maher takes a stand against religion — against the very notion of faith (as the word is generally used these days) some of the time, and against the intermingling of religion and public policy all of the time. It’s not a minor distinction: There are many millions of believers in the U.S. who are as resolute about the separation of church and state as the most devout — does that word apply here? — atheists. Hell, lots of them thrive, even in a godless sinner’s paradise like Los Angeles.

For the film, Maher travels around the U.S. and to Israel and Europe to interview believers (and former believers) of all faiths. Well, not exactly all: His interviews cover only the subscribers to Abrahamic religions: Catholics, Evangelicals, other Protestants, Jews, Muslims and Mormons. Nothing about Buddhism, Hinduism, Shintoism, Taoism and the rest. There are swipes at Scientology, but mostly for the sake of ridiculing Mormonism. He talks to Islamic scholars, rabbis of various stripes, Christian ex-Jews, Southern evangelicals (at the Truckers Chapel in North Carolina), creationist U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor (“Hey, you don’t have to pass an IQ test to be in the Senate,” Pryor tells him) and even his Jewish mother, who proves herself a pretty sharp old babe.

We meet Pastor Jeremiah Cummings, who was known as Jerry Cummings back when he was in Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes; Ferre van Beveren of Cannabis Ministry in the Netherlands; Dr. Francis Collins, who is a devout Christian while also being the scientist in charge of the Human Genome Project; and Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda, of Miami’s Growing in Grace Ministry, who confidently and unironically proclaims himself to be the second coming of Christ. Maher verbally spars with the actor portraying Jesus at Orlando’s Holy Land Experience, while other park employees nervously huddle to figure out how to handle this intrusion of apostasy.

He introduces one man as a “former homosexual” who now works helping “cure” others. “I’m not a homosexual,” the man tells us. “I’m a heterosexual man who dealt with homosexuality. I don’t believe people are born homosexual.” (“Have you ever met Little Richard?” Maher responds skeptically.) He talks to the Muslim owners of a gay bar in Amsterdam.

It’s easy to imagine many viewers — certainly many of the targets — seeing Maher as a smirking wisecracker. And, while he tries not to look snarky, his comic impulse sometimes overwhelms him.

Maher may have been willing at some stage to gently mock without making a militant stand of his disbelief. But in the first and last scenes of Religulous, he explains why he thinks atheists shouldn’t be meek and polite about the foolishness of blind faith anymore. And, metaphorically speaking, the reason is (though Maher couldn’t have known it while making the movie) Sarah Palin — Moose-Hunting Mom, Wicked Wolfkiller of Wasilla, Field-Dressing Fascist from the Frozen North.

Maher wraps things up by zeroing in on a particular, ever-growing corner of Christianity, the evangelicals who welcome the coming of the End Times, as supposedly forecast in Revelation — you know, with the final battle at Armageddon, which just happens to be located in the Middle East. This particular group, seen as loonies by many other Christians, has had disproportionate influence on the Bush administration without quite driving us into a self-fulfilling final war.

The rise of Sarah Palin is the scariest development on this front to date. Palin accepts some of this apocalyptic gibberish or, at the very least, has paid lip service to it. If, through some fluke (or through rigged voting machines and suppressed minority turnout), McCain wins the upcoming election, the actuarial odds are pretty high that, within the next decade, Palin could be calling the shots (and I do mean shots). If Maher considered the situation urgent while he was shooting Religulous, he must consider it doubly so now.