Catholicism, Wow!: Kevin Smith’s ‘Dogma’ turns 25

Smith’s controversial satire about faith, while hit-or-miss with its comedy, is smarter than you might remember.

Last week, Kevin Smith announced a sequel to Dogma. Except he didn’t really. Kevin Smith announces sequels to his ‘90s movies roughly five times a year, and aside from the occasional new Clerks movie, they rarely happen. He also said that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were on board when he hadn’t even gotten around to speaking to those still-very-busy actors. 

But sequel or no sequel, Dogma marks its 25th anniversary this month. Like a lot of popular culture of that time, and not just Smith’s, I was curious how well Dogma holds up. 

It turns out, mostly well. 

Coming off Chasing Amy in 1997, which was a fairly big indie hit for that time, Smith set out to make something even riskier: A satire about Catholicism and religious faith, featuring murderous fallen angels, a female God, George Carlin as a cardinal, and a “13th apostle” who kept claiming Jesus was Black. 

Smith was also working with a much larger budget than ever before, as well as some pretty major talent- Affleck and Damon, fresh off of Good Will Hunting, and Chris Rock, in the season of “Bigger and Blacker,” as well as the likes of Alan Rickman, Salma Hayek, and Bud Cort, alongside such Smith mainstays as Jason Lee, and both Jay and Silent Bob and Dante and Randall. 

Sure, Smith isn’t the greatest director of actors, and it can’t be denied that he never tried anything this ambitious ever again, although his The 4:30 Movie earlier this year was Smith’s best movie in quite a few years. 

There are some great ideas, here like God coming to the Jersey Shore to play Skee-Ball, but not quite everything works, starting with the “Shit Demon.” But overall, the film is very funny and has something to say about religion, even if it’s not anything particularly deep or original. 

Smith, who as always was the writer and director, puts in motion a complex plot that largely hangs together. Affleck and Damon are a pair of angels on Earth who realize they can take advantage of a Church loophole and return to heaven. 

This sets off an interdimensional battle, in which a spokesman for God (Rickman) and a muse (Hayek) fear that angels’ stunt will negate all existence. Abortion clinic employee Bethany (Linda Fiorentino, in a less-than-charismatic performance) is the heroine, who starts out as having lost her faith and turns out has more of a religious pedigree than you thought.