Is Christianity Laughable? Nietzsche and The Coneheads
At home were recently watched, The Coneheads, the 1993 feature film based on the 1970s Saturday Night Live “Coneheads” sketches. In The Coneheads, an alien couple from the planet Remulak is stranded on Earth, attempting to blend in until they can be rescued by their fellow Remulakians. Early in the film, Jane Curtin’s character, Prymaat Conehead, bursts into laughter while reading a hotel-room Gideons Bible:
The Coneheads aren’t alone, however, in finding Christianity laughable. 19th-Century German philosophy Friedrich Nietzsche likewise found Christianity laughable, even dangerous for the human spirit:
I regard Christianity as the most fatal seductive lie that has yet existed, as the great unholy lie: I draw out the after-growth and sprouting of its ideal from beneath every form of disguise, I reject every compromise position with respect to it—I force a war against it. (Nietzsche, Will to Power, No. 200)
The New Testament is the gospel of a wholly ignoble species of man; their claim to possess more value, indeed to possess all value, actually has something revolting about it—even today. How little the subject matters! It is the spirit that gives life! What stuffy and sickroom air arises from all that excited chatter about “redemption,” love, blessedness, faith, truth, “eternal life”! Take, on the other hand, a really pagan book, e.g., Petronius, where fundamentally nothing is done, said, desired, and valued but what by peevish Christian standards is sin, mortal sin even. And yet how pleasant is the purer air, the superior quality of its quicker pace, the liberated and overflowing strength that feels sure of the future! (Nietzsche, Will to Power, Nos. 186 & 187)
This was the most fatal kind of megalomania there has ever been on earth: when these lying little abortions of bigots began to lay claim to the words “God,” “Last Judgment,” “truth,” “love,” “wisdom,” “Holy Spirit” and with them made a boundary between themselves and “the world”; when this species of man began to reverse values according to his own image, as if he were the meaning, the salt, the measure, and the standard of all the rest—one should have built madhouses for them and nothing more. That one persecuted them was a piece of ancient folly in the grand manner: that meant taking them too seriously, that meant making something serious out of them. (Nietzsche, Will to Power, No. 202)
Which aspects of Christianity should we rightly find the most laughable?
The way in which the fantastic events of the Bible—from miracles to the resurrection itself—fly in the face of every aspect of our experience?
The way in which man’s weakest and least praiseworthy qualities are turned upside-down, elevated, placed on a pedestal, and somehow, convincingly even, praised as virtues?
Asceticism and the suppression of all earthly and bodily desires, even the ones that make human life possible in the first place, as “worldly” and sinful?
Or the self-justifying logic of salvation—a divine being having created creatures in his own image, with free will and all, necessarily casting them out of Paradise when they make use of that free will, only to rush to their aid after the fact millennia later in some narcissistic blaze of glory, like firefighters who start fires only to put them out after the fact (eerily reminiscent of the book-burning fire brigade in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451), or perhaps like a two-faced superhero who secretly gaslights an emergency at night only to come flying to the rescue in the morning, thus ensuring his place on the front page of the morning news and the adoration of those helpless little humans who couldn’t save themselves?
The list goes on. There is so very much to laugh at in Christianity, all while it extols itself as the standard-bearer and trumpeter of virtue. This laughableness arguably doesn’t do justice, however, to the explanatory role that certain theological concepts can play both philosophically and cosmologically. The concept of God as a necessarily existing being, for example, as opposed to every other being in the universe conceived of as a contingent, non-necessary-existing being, has at least as much explanatory value as the Big Bang theory with the universe having sprung into existence literally out of nothing in a type of naturalistic, if arbitrary, creatio ex nihilo—neither hypotheses, the religious one or the seemingly more scientific one, being empirically verifiable or falsifiable.
Yet, despite the evocative feelings and sense of purpose the Christian narrative spawns in those who feel that their little lives and souls are in need of salvation, and despite the substantive contributions Christian theology has made to our philosophical vocabulary and conceptual toolbox, to borrow a metaphor from Wittgenstein, the Christian narrative has none of the hallmarks of good drama. Rather than giving human protagonists the tallest mountains to climb and obstacles to overcome, Christianity razes both the mountains and the humanistic ambition that goes along with them in favor of believers being rescued like some helpless Princess Peach held captive in Bowser’s castle awaiting rescue by some Supernatural Mario Brother (to use a Nintendo metaphor from my childhood), while deemphasizing the fact that, if man is in chains, it’s only because the creator placed the bait—and the trap it concealed—before his eyes in the first place. The real scandal of religion is that Mario himself (God, for all of you literalists out there) is the one who imprisoned Princess Peach (humanity) in Bowser’s castle in the first place so he could come running to the rescue, as much as we love to hate on Koopas, serpents, and devils alike.
Don’t even get me started on other sects of Christianity. Mormonism, Seventh Day Adventism, Catholicism, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, are even more laughable than mainstream Protestant or Evangelical Christianity—as if there even is such a thing as “orthodox” or “mainstream” Christianity anymore in this day and age of fractured denominations, of splintered and self-interested theology and religious groups. Each new sect of Christianity adds its own special absurdity to the stories and fables that came before, serving only to magnify the laughableness of the doctrines they champion and making the sheep easier and easier to control—while the pastor, priest, or prophet (pick your poison) drives a Mercedes, if not a Ferrari, to church every Sunday morning. How lucky the average Christian is to have such noble benefactors watching out for their fragile souls!
In reality, I do injustice to the many good-faith religious leaders I have known over the years. Yet I have always cringed a bit inside when the most patently absurd statements would flow from their mouths like a river of cream, oh so smoothly, seductively, and convincingly—as long as you don’t ask too many questions! Even worse, those sheep who have remained followers of those leaders remain subjugated to this very day; they are held captive not only by the oppressive hierarchy of religious organizations, even the most Presbyterian and democratic of religious organizations, but by the mental, emotional, moral, ethical, political, theological, and conceptual prison that they themselves, and others, have built around their minds, brains, hearts, and lives. Like all prisons, it’s safer within the walls than without, with three hot meals, a bed, the assuredness of your place in heaven, and no hard decisions or challenges to face in life. Only the strong manage to escape the prison of religion. The weak stay content and docile, endlessly awaiting rescue from above while telling themselves that they are satisfied with their chains, and that everyone else should be satisfied with theirs, too.
So Christianity needs a good dose of laughter aimed squarely in its direction, right between the eyes, the best medicine for shattering illusions and breaking free of imaginary chains, from the fairy tales of youth, and from the self-deprecation latent within the perceived need for salvation in the first place. Both Nietzsche and The Coneheads thus play a valuable cultural role: they draw attention to the absurdity of the things that lay-believers take for granted or as a fundamental part of reality, pulling back the curtain to reveal the maniacal and self-serving wizard behind the childish daydreams and fantastical illusions of faith. As Nietzsche himself put it, “I refuse to be a Saint; I would rather be a clown” (Nietzsche, Ecce Homo). For it is only by laughter and by accepting the absurdities of the Christian faith as genuine absurdities, not an eternal or sacred mystery but an eternal farce, even as a game of manipulation carefully crafted to enable kings and bishops alike to capture pawns (to employ a chess metaphor), that humanity can move beyond this cultural state of infancy to—as Nietzsche claims it did in ancient times before the dawn of Western philosophy and Christianity—rise to adulthood and stand on its own two feet.
