Christianity: May 2006 Archives

By now you've all seen Stephen Colbert's career-defining performance at the White House Press Correspondent's dinner, right? Okay, I want to zero in on one joke:

"And though I am a committed Christian, I believe that everyone has the right to their own religion, be you Hindu, Jewish or Muslim. I believe there are infinite paths to accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior."

Funny, right? Colbert's satire of religion has always been especially notable because it's religiously literate satire. Here, Colbert nails Bush because he pushes his pluralistic rhetoric up against his conservative evangelical exclusivism to highlight the fundamental incompatibility of these two ideas, thus demonstrating how Bush's use of religion is at best shallow and rudimentary, at worst disingenuous and opportunistic. He's funnier than, say David Cross or George Carlin when they mock evangelicals, because Colbert's not using satire to paint a broad, unflattering caricature of religious adherents. Rather, he's making a substantive critical point about the incomprehensibility of Bush's theology.

Today I discovered that Colbert is a practicing Catholic, and it all made sense. He's able to satirize Christianity effectively because he knows it from the inside! It explains the sense of moral outrage that drives his satire--no one does moral outrage better than a progressive catholic (Michael Moore, Dorothy Day, Octavio Paz for example). It also explains his attention to labor and education issues, which are unusual topics for political comedy but key issues for the Catholic Worker movement.

As he told Time Out New York:

I love my Church, and I'm a Catholic who was raised by intellectuals, who were very devout. I was raised to believe that you could question the Church and still be a Catholic. What is worthy of satire is the misuse of religion for destructive or political gains. That's totally different from the Word, the blood, the body and the Christ. His kingdom is not of this earth.

Thanks Stephen Colbert, for demonstrating why we need the Christian Left.

Here's an NPR interview where Colbert talks about his faith, among other things.