(Opinion by Bishop Robert Barron. CNN).
Editor’s Note: Bishop Robert Barron is bishop of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester (Minnesota). He founded the Word on Fire Catholic media ministry and is one of the most followed Catholics in the world on social media. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinion on CNN.
CNN – Bill Maher first came to my attention in the 1980s as a clever, wry and politically alert stand-up comic. But I began to follow him more closely about 20 years ago when, in the wake of the new atheist movement, he dedicated a good deal of his comedy to mocking religion and religious people.
Again and again, on Maher’s HBO program, “Real Time with Bill Maher,” he would often present the most extreme and simple-minded version of Christianity, and his audience would derisively laugh with him at the poor rubes who still believed such nonsense. All of this came to full expression in his 2008 documentary film, “Religulous,” which featured interview after interview with religious people utterly incapable of fending off Maher’s rather standard and tired atheist objections. (HBO and CNN share a parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery.)
Although he annoyed me, I suppose I continued to watch Maher to see what the “other side” was saying and thinking. In fact, the first YouTube video of mine that got a sizable audience was my rejoinder to “Religulous.” Actually, I can say with some confidence precisely why Maher’s understanding of religion was so weak. He and I are around the same age, and both of us were educated in a Catholic context (his mother was Jewish, but his father was Irish Catholic).
To put it gently, the time when we were going through school was not a golden age of the Catholic intellectual tradition. I remember that religion class was largely a matter of banners, balloons and a vague commitment to social justice. An awful lot of Catholics from our Baby Boomer generation fell away from the church because, when they grew up, the childish version of the faith that they had received proved grossly inadequate.
Over the past five years, Maher appears to have largely dropped his obsession with religion and has spent considerable time articulating his opposition to the “woke” ways of thinking that have managed to capture the allegiance of most of the major institutions of our country: universities, corporations, the military, government and so on.
As he has done so, I have found myself, time and again, nodding my head in agreement. To my surprise, the nemesis had become an ally.