Dogma at 25: How a controversial Catholic comedy became practically impossible to see

Religious groups picketed its premiere. Its director Kevin Smith received thousands of pieces of hate mail. You might struggle to actually see it today. But 25 years after its release, the 1999 comedy, starring Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Alan Rickman, remains wildly funny – and secretly profound, writes Kevin E G Perry

A quarter of a century ago, it seemed like nobody wanted Dogma. Kevin Smith’s subversive comedy about a pair of disgraced angels (played by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon) was met with fierce protests soon after it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival. Writer-director Smith, riding high off his 1997 romcom Chasing Amy, received 300,000 pieces of hate mail, including several “bona fide death threats”. Religious campaign group the Catholic League picketed outside cinemas. Critics also sharpened their knives, with The Independent’s Gilbert Adair among those who crucified the film. “Nothing, absolutely nothing, not a single idea, not a shot, not a camera movement, not a performance, not a gesture, not a gag, nothing at all, I repeat, works in this movie,” he sneered.

Some of us, though, couldn’t get enough of the film, which celebrates its 25th anniversary on 12 November. I was a Sunday School-attending teenager when I first stumbled across Dogma on late-night television, and I was hooked from the moment Linda Fiorentino’s beleaguered abortion counsellor Bethany set upon Alan Rickman’s Metatron, the flaming voice of God, with a fire extinguisher. He had appeared in her bedroom to recruit her on a quest to stop Bartleby and Loki, Affleck and Damon’s fallen angels, from making it to a church in New Jersey. There they intend to use a doctrinal loophole known as a “plenary indulgence” to wash away all their sins and sneak back into heaven. What they don’t realise is that in doing so they’ll disprove the fundamental concept of God’s omnipotence and immediately wipe out all of existence.

It was a real-life plenary indulgence that first planted the idea for Dogma in Smith’s still pubescent mind. When he was just 11, his local parish church celebrated its centennial and really did receive, as is depicted in the film, a special dispensation from the Pope decreeing that anyone who walked through the front door of the church would have all their sins erased. “You might not think this would mean much to an 11-year-old kid, because how much sin could he possibly be steeped in?” Smith wrote in an essay in 2000. “But being educated in a Catholic school can make a kid feel that the venial sins (the tiny transgressions like white lies and hurtful sentiments expressed behind your parents’ backs) are one-way tickets to hell.”

Armed with the plot point of a sin-removing doctrinal loophole, Smith began developing the script for a film he at first simply called God while still working on his breakout debut Clerks (1994). It was that shoestring indie that first brought Smith to the attention of the now-disgraced Miramax founder Harvey Weinstein, who bought Clerks at Sundance and helped launch Smith’s career. Smith himself, though, still didn’t feel ready to tackle the religious and filmmaking challenges Dogma presented, so first made follow-up Mallrats (1995) and then Chasing Amy (1997), both of which starred Affleck.

It was the box-office success of Chasing Amy that helped Smith get his ambitious and knowingly controversial dream project off the ground, and aided him in recruiting the killer cast that aids Bethany on her mission from God. Along with Smith regulars Jay and Silent Bob (Jason Mewes and Smith himself), there’s Chris Rock as 13th apostle Rufus (left out of the Bible due to the colour of his skin) and Salma Hayek as Serendipity, the creative Muse responsible for 19 of the top 20 grossing films of all time. (“The one about the kid by himself in the house, burglars trying to come in and he fights them off… I had nothing to do with that one,” she memorably quips at Home Alone’s expense. “Somebody sold their soul to Satan to get the grosses up on that piece of s***.”)

The cast is filled out with George Carlin, playing against his well-known atheism as a Catholic cardinal, and Alanis Morissette, four years after releasing the mega-selling, era-defining Jagged Little Pill. She makes a brief but unforgettable appearance as God. As Smith would later explain: “I always felt that – with her infinite patience – God had to be both a woman and Canadian.”

Sacred ground: Kevin Smith directs Alan Rickman and Alanis Morissette – playing God – on the set of ‘Dogma’ (Everett/Shutterstock)

The real star, though, was Smith’s script, which plays out like a pop-culture-infused catechism. It uses a technicolour version of the Catholic belief system to bring to life a vigorous moral debate, as when Bartleby and Loki hand out righteous vengeance to the board of a clearly Disney-inspired cartoon company they accuse of raising up a false idol, Mooby the Golden Calf. Last year, Affleck recalled reading the screenplay in an interview with Vanity Fair, saying: “Kevin’s very focused on the written word. He’s got a cadence that he likes, but I thought it was a really creative, interesting script. It was a sort of imagining of Catholicism in a very literal sense, and also in a comic sense. I was thinking my kids would actually like that; they have that sense of humour… Kevin’s always had the sense of humour of an adolescent!”

While that’s undeniably true, Smith’s writing also has heart. If there is a message in Dogma, it’s probably best summed up in an exchange between Rufus and Bethany. Rock’s character explains that while God still “digs” humanity, “it bothers Him to see the s*** that gets carried out in His name – wars, bigotry, televangelism. But especially the factioning of all the religions. He said humanity took a good idea and, like always, built a belief structure on it.” Bethany asks if he’s saying having beliefs isn’t good. “I think it’s better to have ideas,” replies Rufus sagely. “You can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier…”

When Smith appeared with Rock on Charlie Rose’s US talk show to promote the film, he lamented the fact that so few movies bother to really engage with religious belief, or the gaping hole that’s been left in society as it’s become more secular. “It’s a funny, funny flick, and it makes you think,” said Smith. “You walk out of the movie and maybe you think about your own faith or your own spirituality, or maybe not, [but] at least you’ve been entertained.”

Ban this filth: Catholic protesters outside the New York premiere of ‘Dogma’ in 1999 (Charles Sykes/Shutterstock)

The controversy that surrounded the film’s release didn’t actually do anything to harm its box-office performance, and may well have helped it to rake in $31m (£24m) worldwide, easily recouping its $10m (£7m) budget. Yet 25 years on, Dogma is not available on any streaming service and last received a physical release when it came out on Blu-ray in 2008. DVDs and VHS copies now change hands for inflated sums online. The reason the film is so hard to find is a direct result of all those Catholic League protests years ago. They kicked up such a fuss that Disney, which at the time owned Miramax, decided they wanted no part of its release. To solve the problem, Weinstein and his brother Bob personally bought the rights to Dogma and set up a distribution deal with Lionsgate. The Weinsteins continued to hold the rights for years but refused to do anything with them, which led Smith to joke of Weinstein in 2022: “He’s holding it hostage. My movie about angels is owned by the devil himself.”

But there is reason to be optimistic. A few weeks ago, Smith revealed during an appearance on podcast That Hashtag Show that the movie rights have been bought by a new distribution company, and plans are afoot to re-release the film in 2025. He went on to say that Dogma could finally get a streaming release, too, as well as new physical versions to accompany a cinema run in the new year. Most excitingly for fans, though, was his suggestion that he could – now that his film is out of Weinstein’s clutches – return to the world of Dogma to tell new tales on a Biblical scale.

“Maybe, at this point, sequels, TV versions… in terms of extending the story [that’s] something we could never do before,” he said. “And all those people who worked on it are still viable. Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, both still working. Salma Hayek, Chris Rock, still slapping – pun intended. So it’s possible!”

Dogma has spent decades in limbo, but its second coming may well be nigh. That’s something worth believing in – or, at least, an idea worth hanging on to.