Monty Python and the Problem With Religion

The six members of Monty Python on the set of The Life of Brian in Tunisia, 1978

My target audience largely catches the reference when I write: “He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!” Brian Cohen's climactic sermon in Monty Python’s 1979 classic The Life of Brian is among cinema history’s funniest scenes. Brian desperately wants the crowd that has adopted him as Savior to think for themselves, but they won’t listen. Brian’s domineering mother just wants the crowd to go away, but inadvertently riles them up.

Brian’s only fully-developed homily turns on one statement: “You’re all individuals! You’re all different!” But his followers respond, in the paced unison viewers remember from hearing congregations pray together: “Yes, we’re all different!” To the Monty Python members, all unbelievers, this statement probably summarizes the ways religion encourages groupthink and steals autonomy. But rewatching the movie recently, for the first time since VHS days, something struck me about his crowd:

They’re all Jewish.

Jews have maintained their collective identity since the Late Bronze Age, in substantial part, by maintaining their rituals. Jewish religious observance doesn’t rely upon individual belief, the way Christian and Muslim rites do. Instead, Jewish traditions involve reënacting pivotal moments in Jewish folk history, like the Passover or the Maccabean rebellion. Whether these events happened as enacted doesn’t much matter, though; what matters is, they do them together.

This doesn’t mean Judaism has always benevolently maintained that authority. By the late Second Temple Era, when Jesus preached, Judaism had developed stark sectarian divisions over “correct” observances, divisions only closed when the Second Jewish War saw most sects destroyed. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus’ repeated complaint against religious leaders holds that Jewish observance had become robotic, and deaf to the cries of the poor and dispossessed.

Monty Python mocks this robotic tendency through the “People’s Front of Judea,” a revolutionary sect comparable to the Zealots. We can encompass everything wrong with the PFJ in leader Reg’s legendary line: “All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?” Life under Roman occupation sounds pretty nice.

Brian Cohen (Graham Chapman) approaches his denouement in The Life of Brian

I might find this less jarring if it weren’t spoken by John Cleese, who was born relatively rich and attended Cambridge University, a bastion of British imperialism. The parallels between the feuding Jewish revolutionaries, and divisions within separatist groups like the Irish Republican Army, are too obvious to not support deeper analysis. Under Monty Python’s analysis, freedom fighters look ridiculous, while the empire, though hardly benevolent, never hurt anybody who didn’t deserve it.

Because of its strategic location along trade routes linking Africa, Europe, and Central Asia, empires have repeatedly conquered Judea and attempted to assimilate its people. Though Jewish ethnic identity arguably dates to Moses, Jewish religious identity dates to Jeremiah and the Babylonian Captivity. The Maccabees revolted against the Greek-speaking Seleucid Empire because the Greeks tried to forcibly assimilate the Jews, pollute their temple, and defile their women.

These tactics sound remarkably similar to techniques the British (English) Empire used to conquer other peoples. Closer to home, they’ve been remarkably successful, as Irish and Scots are minority languages in their homelands, and Cornish is extinct. Further afield, British forces caused native nations of India, Africa, and the Americas to abandon their separate identities and local wars, and create racial and ethnic allegiances to expel the invading empire.

Please don’t misunderstand: I’m not suggesting Monty Python is objectively pro-Empire. That exceeds the remit which the movie provides. However, like Agatha Christie or Roald Dahl, the Pythons emerged during the British Empire’s dying wheezes and, as a bunch of White, male, mostly heterosexual Oxbridge boys, realized the dying Empire was taking their privilege with it. To them, the dying Empire was their culture’s ambient background noise.

Yes, religion can steal followers’ individuality and autonomous thought. But turning people loose hardly works better, as post-Christian Western Civilization demonstrates. Without religion’s catechistic approach to building a soul, atomized individuals glom onto whatever political party, commercial enterprise, or pop-culture fandom offers them a desirable group identity. Despite Nietzsche’s claims, no person becomes fully individualized without a foundation to build from.

Brian’s followers aren’t stupid and mindless, as the movie implies. They’re simply an occupied people, seeking a leader to offer them a shared identity, goal, and strategy. Without their devotion to Brian, they have only commerce, arena sports, and worst, Roman imperial politics. There’s no guarantee Brian could’ve saved his people, certainly. But the alternative is assimilation. Look around you and ask how that’s working out.