Kevin Smith’s ‘Dogma’ Is Still Being Protested in 2025
While their feelings about Clerks and Mallrats were less clear, the Catholic Church really seemed to hate Kevin Smith’s Dogma.
As with Monty Python’s Life of Brian two decades prior, when Dogma first hit theaters back in 1999, humorless religious fanatics relentlessly protested the film. Even though Smith himself claimed to be a believer in the church’s teachings, clearly many folks weren’t happy that the Chasing Amy director turned scripture into a wacky comedy starring the Good Will Hunting guys as murderous ex-angels, Alan Rickman as a genital-less deity and Chris Rock as the 13th apostle.
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They probably weren’t super-thrilled with the “Buddy Christ” stuff, either.
Smith was even sent death threats at the time, just like Jesus would have wanted. And keep in mind that this was back when sending a death threat required putting in the effort to leave your house to buy a stamp and mail an envelope. But that didn’t stop the director from ing a picket line outside a New Jersey movie theater, and telling local reporters that he heard the film doesn’t “stand for anything positive.”
While Smith was finally able to wrestle the rights away from real-life shit monster Harvey Weinstein, the only reason why the incarcerated former Miramax head owned the movie at all is because of the controversy. Disney opted not to release the film after the Catholic League obtained an advanced copy of the script, and complained about how it suggested that “Joseph and Mary (had) sex and a descendant of theirs is a lapsed Catholic who works at an abortion clinic.”
Now that the film has been re-released in theaters, in the year of our lord 2025, one might expect that the controversy has completely died down. But that’s not totally true.
Smith recently told The Los Angeles Times that there have been “no death threats” and “very little in the way of protests” this time around, but during his Dogma Q&A tour he did encounter one lone teenage protester outside of a theater, holding a sign reading “‘AMC Blasphemes’ or whatever.”
And, once again, Smith ironically endorsed a Dogma protest. “I laid on the horn to show , and the kid holding the sign was so excited,” Smith recalled. “He looked around for the – and then he looked at me, and instantly his face drops, and he shuns me.”
But this wasn’t the only protest. One fan claimed that a Catholic prayer group was gathered outside of their theater, holding umbrellas in the rain and carrying a banner that read, “We vehemently protest the blasphemous film Dogma showing in this theater. Reparation! Reparation! Reparation!” And there’s even photo evidence of this less-than-intimidating demonstration.
There were also protests outside of an AMC theater in Manhattan in early May, a full month before Dogma’s release.
Which sure showed all of those people trying to go see A Minecraft Movie.
