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Stephen Colbert Wears His Religion in His Punch Lines

posted on April 18, 2013

Mary McNamara of the Los Angeles Times looks at the theological and religious influences of Stephen Colbert. McNamara writes that Colbert, a devout and practicing Catholic, uses religion in jokes as a reminder of the absurdity in which religion is often portrayed in politics and popular culture: “The brilliance of ‘The Colbert Report’ is its refusal to dismiss or denigrate the religion with jokes that equate faith with idiocy or churchgoing with bovine surrender. Instead Colbert attempts to extricate what he sees as the essential message of Christianity from the piles of intellectual rot and political carpet bags that have been piled on and around it in the last 10 years.” 

Read at Los Angeles Times