Hey everyone, Jared here.
If there’s one word we’ve come to associate with South Park, it’s “irreverent.”
In the world of South Park, nothing is sacred.
Whether they love the show or hate it, almost every critic has called it irreverent at some time or another.
Most people who call South Park irreverent are using the word in a very general sense,
but there’s something...special about the way the show deals with religion,
which is usually all about reverence.
Whether the series is pitting baby Jesus in mortal combat against Frosty the Snowman or
exploring the question of whether Satan should wear a Britney Spears costume to his sweet-sixteen
birthday party, South Park forces us to take a hard look at what religion really
means to us.
And in the process, the show raises some important questions that other series wouldn’t have
the nerve to ask.
Welcome to this special Wisecrack Edition on religion in South Park.
Part 1: Are You There God (It's Me: Jesus)
Before South Park was even South Park, Matt Stone and Trey Parker released two standalone
holiday specials that pitted Jesus against an evil snowman and Santa Claus over the soul
of the holidays.
And both specials ended with the same sentiment:
In the world of South Park, things that seem ordinary can be a really big deal,
and things that sound mindblowingly important on paper can be no big deal at all.
The boys aren’t at all starstruck when they talk to Jesus, but
they fight over who gets to play him in the Easter play.
The profound and the ordinary are all swimming in the same soup.
When the boys meet God in season three and are given the opportunity to ask him any question
Stan asks about periods.
In season seven, they do find out what the meaning of life: Earth is an intergalactic
Truman Show-style reality series on the verge of cancellation.
Jesus can’t get anyone to watch his public-access talk show.
And Satan is a serial monogamist who keeps going back to Saddam Hussein, even though
he knows Saddam isn’t good for him.
The only time religion does stand out as important is when people are manipulating it for their
own purposes.
And while several town leaders try this over the course of the series, Eric Cartman is
the undisputed master.
Stan: "You don't even know anything about christianity."
Cartman: "I know enough to exploit it."
In season four he becomes a tent revival preacher and gets rich off
the donations.
In season seven he makes it big in Christian music by taking
secular pop songs and making them almost sound almost religious.
In season eight’s “The Passion of the Jew,” he builds a fanclub around Mel Gibson’s
The Passion of the Christ because he sees it as an opportunity to lead the Fourth Reich.
In season 17, he paints a cow to resemble the biblically prophesied
red heifer just to screw with Kyle’s head...and accidentally brings about world peace.
Is the message of South Park that religion is just plain ridiculous and makes people gullible?
It's easy to walk away with that impression and a lot of people have.
But the actual series creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, largely disagree.
Matt Stone: "Recently atheists and people who hate religion have really grabbed onto our show too,
"because we make fun of a lot of religion, we've made fun of everything."
"But neither one of us is anti-religious at all. I mean I'm fascinated by religion."
So what’s really going on here?
South Park may come across as antireligious to some people because it doesn’t
treat religion as a sacred subject, and in Western spiritual traditions honoring the
sacred is a big part of what it’s all about.
As the French philosopher and sociologist Émile Durkheim put it in The
Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Western religions primarily work by dividing the world
into two categories: the sacred and the profane.
You always take the sacred seriously, because it deals with fundamental cosmic forces and
determines the state of your soul.
The profane- not so much.
As he put it: “In the history of human thought there exists no other example of two category
of things so profoundly differentiated or so radically opposed to one another.”
South Park fundamentally denies the legitimacy of the distinction between the sacred and
the profane.
In the season six episode “Red Hot Catholic Love,” for example, Father Maxie travels
to the Vatican to try to end the clergy molestation scandal, only to find that the Catholic
Church is an intergalactic coalition ruled over by a sentient giant spider who has given
the green light to pedophilia.
Father Maxie bravely tears the sacred Vatican Document in two, defying and invalidating the
Queen Spider’s authority.
It’s a metaphor for the molestation scandal itself: As long as the church was too sacred
to investigate, it was too sacred to evolve.
The church could only be saved if someone was willing to desecrate it, or the
Boston Globe’s team of reporters for bringing the scandal to light.
This is a recurring theme in the series: That sometimes the only way you can save something
you’ve made sacred
is by desecrating it.
This is especially evident in the South Park movie
where Cartman and Kenny save the world by cursing out Saddam Hussein
and making a deal with the Devil, respectively.
And in the season seven episode “Cancelled,” the cosmic TV industry agrees not to destroy Earth
for reasons that Gene Roddenberry probably wouldn’t have found very inspiring.
South Park also suggests that our concept of the sacred is a little screwy to begin with.
Jesus literally walks the Earth, but most of the time nobody really pays much attention
to him. It’s not even clear that they recognize him.
His public access talk show, Jesus and Pals, routinely gets clobbered in the ratings by
Jimbo and Ned’s series, Huntin’ and Killin’.
But let him fight, something he usually has no interest in doing, and suddenly he’s their Lord.
He fights Frosty and Santa in the preseries Christmas specials, Satan in season one,
Iraqi soldiers in season six, right-wing activist
Bill Donohue and a xenomorph in season eleven and
a the Seussian villain in season sixteen.
It’s a tall order for the Prince of Peace, but it’s the only way he can keep his followers’ respect.
South Park’s Jesus seems to be wellacquainted with what the American theologian Walter Wink
called the myth of redemptive violence.
According to the myth, our sense of the sacred, going all the
way back to ancient Babylonian mythology, comes from the desire to see good fight evil and win.
Wink writes: “This myth of redemptive violence is the real myth of the modern world.
It, and not Judaism or Christianity or Islam, is the dominant religion in our society today..
Jesus fights, in other words, because he realizes the myth his followers
project on him is more important than anything he can offer himself.
It never comes naturally to him, but it’s all people seem to care about.
When Jesus and other religious figures turn into superheroes,
they’re just carrying the idea through to its logical conclusion, conceding
the power the myth of redemptive violence seems to hold over every religion.
As I said earlier, nothing is sacred in the world of South Park.
And while they have faced right-wing boycotts for their portrayal of Jesus and network censorship
for their attempts to portray the Prophet Muhammad, Stone and Parker don’t see themselves
as heroes.
After all, this is South Park.
If they had a bigger point to make something we might be inclined to treat with more,
I don’t know, reverence they’d probably never admit it.
Part 2: A Scause For Applause
Once you get past the casual attitude towards the sacred, South Park isn’t really all
that hard on religion.
And one of its major recurring themes is that you don’t have to actually be religious
to act like a narrow-minded assh*le.
Almost every episode of the series features at least one character who’s self-righteous about something,
but Stan’s season sixteen character arc as a selfpromotional activist
stands out as a particularly strong example.
In “Butterballs” and “A Scause for Applause,” Stan gets a taste of what it’s like to be
treated with reverence.
And he likes it a little bit too much.
What holds Stan back is that every time he’s seen as a hero, something happens to take
him down a peg.
As soon as he realizes his cause won’t make him popular, he moves on.
This is what distinguishes him from his on-again, off-again girlfriend Wendy Testaburger:
she doesn’t care if her opinions make her popular or not.
She has deeper motivations and a lot more selfrespect.
One of the points South Park makes is that if a movement is run by people
who are motivated by people just trying to be taken seriously, it’s likely to go off the rails.
This is as true of the New Atheism movement as it is of any other movement.
In the two-part episode “Go God Go,” Cartman is trapped in the 26th century
as three rival militant atheist factions kill each other over branding disputes.
The message is simple: Human beings are violent and irrational, and getting rid of religion
isn't gonna change.
The difference between Stone and Parker and the New Atheist movement ultimately centers
on a chicken-or egg question: Are people ridiculous because religion is ridiculous, or is religion
ridiculous because people are ridiculous?
Stone and Parker take the second view.
In Pythagoras’ Trousers, Australian science historian Margaret Wertheim argues
that in the West, scientific models of the universe tend to look a lot like religious ones.
This is, at least in part, because they both labor under a hypermasculine drive for certainty and finality.
Insisting that we have to be absolutely sure about where the universe came from and why,
even when we don’t have much evidence to work from, is kind of like trying to navigate
old country roads without asking anybody for directions.
Wertheim, like Stone and Parker, argues that our refusal to accept ambiguity can make our
answers to the big questions sound ridiculous.
So if all of our worldviews are doomed to be at least a little bit ridiculous, and all
of our movements run the risk of becoming at least a little bit fanatical, should we
be religious or not?
This isn’t a question Stone or Parker are interested in answering for other people.
As Matt Stone rhetorically asked Slate in 2011: “[I]f the mass delusion of a religion
makes you happy, makes your family work better, is that bad or good?”
The series itself has explicitly made that argument twice: once at the end of season
six’s “Red Hot Catholic Love,” and again in season seven’s “All About Mormons.”
After the entire episode rips on new kid Gary’s disconcertingly upbeat family life and unfamiliar
religious beliefs, he finally stands up for himself at end.
Stone and Parker’s view, that being religious is sensible and not being religious is also
sensible, echoes the words of the American philosopher William James.
As he writes in Pragmatism (1907):
'When a play is once over, and the curtain drawn, you really make it no better by claiming"
"an illustrious genius for its author, just as you make it no worse by calling him a common hack.”
Essentially, whether it or not it was created by a divine figure, it's still life.
Most series that deal with religion as often as South Park,
give us an escape route,
a religion or ideology we can accept to avoid being ridiculous.
What makes South Park unique is the show’s underlying philosophy that being human is
inevitably ridiculous, and that there’s no way of avoiding this fate.
No matter which religion or life philosophy we adopt, South Park tells us we’ll look
silly if we take ourselves too seriously.
The question, in other words, isn’t whether our belief system is a joke.
It’s whether or not we know it.
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