Kevin Smith’s 1999 satirical comedy Dogma isn’t the best of films. That isn’t me being unfair or lacking discipline in my harshness. In fact, in some ways, the film is perfectly fine, with a pretty good cast and some sharp writing. Unfortunately for Kevin Smith, his intriguing attempt at tackling Catholic theology and dogma becomes burdensome and banal by the final act. What starts as a philosophical treatise on the purpose and existence of faith in modern, capitalist America slowly and sadly metastasises into a stoner-comedy plagued with rushed plot-points and too many snaking narratives. This is where my criticism is warranted. It's not awful, just a shame.

But I remain confident in saying that Smith’s film serves up something worth reflecting on. Mainly rooted in the attempted ‘redemption’ of two fallen angels, Loki (Matt Damon) and Bartleby (Ben Affleck), and the mission to prevent them from returning to Heaven, the film is built with the idea of disassembling the relationship between the divine and the earthly, prodding and poking at how we as humans relate to our faith in a world where faith is diluted and deterred.The use of Loki and Bartleby introduces a more necessary question surrounding faith. Is faith reserved only for humans? As fallen angels, both Loki and Bartleby’s banishment means they are forced to endure the earth as a punishment for their crimes. Loki’s resignation as the Angel of Death and Bartleby’s questioning of God’s practices evidence that faith for both humans and angels is fragile. Smith’s framing of this links not only to John Milton’s poetic narration of Satan’s rebellion against God in Paradise Lost, but also to the earthly issue of individualism. Since the dawn of Reagan and Thatcher, across the globe and through the lens of neoliberalism, the concept of individualism has flooded the West. Especially in America, the workings of extreme capitalism led many people in the 1980s and 1990s to question their bond to community and religion, replacing their faith in God for a faith in the self. Ironically, this also appears to have exposed Loki to his inebriated rejection of God’s orders. For both the angels, their resistance to God is enabled by their wish for free will. If we are to link free will to the growth of individualism, we can acknowledge that Smith’s film wishes to track the fallout from capitalism’s growth in America, and its consequential dismantling of faith.

Whilst this idea might originate in the presence of Loki and Bartleby in America, it is also exposed with the satirical inclusion of the cartoon-like ‘Buddy Christ’, a friendly, animated statue of Jesus used to represent the rededication of a church in New Jersey. Why is this important? Because it resembles the corporate infiltration of capitalism into the church. The church’s offering of a plenary indulgence (an erasure of punishments) for anyone who attends the site is the destination for the fallen angels’ odyssey to redemption. Their belief that this erasure of sin will gift them a chance to return to Heaven following death reveals the intentions of the church to ‘sell’ redemption for the benefit of increased attendance or ‘faith.’ The satirical element of this exposes the conditions of late 90s America, where faith and religious disillusionment are being scrutinised by the church itself. In this sense, Dogma’s satire is not merely aimed at Catholic doctrine, but at the commodification of belief itself: a culture in which redemption can be marketed, faith can be rebranded, and spirituality can be made palatable through spectacle. What Smith seems most interested in exposing is not religion as such, but the way institutions hollow belief out by turning it into something transactional, performative, and easily consumed. Yet for all its mockery, the film still clings to the possibility that faith might survive outside of dogma and outside of the market.

This scepticism towards organised religion is also channelled through Bethany (Linda Fiorentino) herself, whose reluctant role as the film’s chosen saviour is shaped by her estrangement from Catholicism. Having grown disillusioned with the Church after being taught that her infertility renders her incomplete as a woman, Bethany becomes the film’s clearest example of faith destabilised by institutional failure. Her conversation with Serendipity (Salma Hayek) is particularly revealing here. When Bethany questions what she is supposed to believe in, Serendipity responds that “it doesn’t matter what you believe, just that you believe”, reframing faith not as obedience to doctrine but as an inward act of commitment. This moment invites a reading through Kierkegaard’s theory of faith, especially his insistence that faith is not secured by reason, proof, or institutional authority, but by a subjective “leap” into belief despite uncertainty. Bethany’s journey mirrors this process. She is not restored to faith through the Church, nor through theological clarity, but through confrontation with the absurd: angels, prophets, divine messengers, and a calling she never asked for. In this sense, Dogma presents faith in distinctly Kierkegaardian terms, not as passive acceptance of religious systems, but as a difficult, deeply personal choice made in the face of doubt, alienation, and contradiction.

God’s own absence until the close of the film (when revealed to be played by Alanis Morissette) is significant also. This absence is used by Smith to heighten the profundity of faith as a mechanism that is reliant on expectation and patience. God’s arrival matters because it proves to Bethany that her faith and trust in something withheld or unreliable in nature is the point of faith itself. Instead of God’s voice being a recognisable reference for Bethany’s faith, the transmission of divinity is found through the prophets of Silent Bob (Kevin Smith), Jay (Jason Mewes), and Rufus. Whilst Silent Bob and Jay exist as unlikely prophet figures, their role isn’t just to provide comic relief, but to relay the value of human figures who, through their flaws, also provide instruction. The stoner culture and the immature mentalities of these two men point towards Smith’s understanding of modern faith. For Smith, the removal of stereotypical holy men as prophets helps him to translate that in modern America, the idealism of traditional priests, prophets, and spiritual leaders is itself problematic. By instead imbuing two examples of the ‘everyman’ archetype with this divine responsibility, Smith suggests that in the modern world, faith and guidance can be articulated in the most mundane of places, where flaws and folly are seen as attributes rather than reasons to doubt.

Rufus (Chris Rock), the ‘forgotten’ disciple, is a poignant character and device within the film. Explicitly, via dialogue, Rufus’ absence from the traditional twelve disciples is explained due to his skin colour. Here, Smith established a vast issue. Rufus is evidence that prophecy, or even divinity, is political. By excluding Blackness, faith becomes reliant on incomplete narratives. In this, Smith asks: who it is that can speak for God? And, in the same breath, who is silenced? This question is particularly resonant in the context of modern America, where religious discourse is often entangled with racial hierarchy, cultural exclusion, and the authority of dominant institutions. Today, that question feels even more urgent. In an era shaped by culture wars, Christian nationalism, algorithmic echo chambers, and the branding of belief through social media, Dogma's critique of who is permitted to speak for God and how faith is packaged for mass consumption appears strikingly prescient. Smith's film may stumble as cinema, but its central concern that faith is continually negotiated through power, commerce, and exclusion rather than existing beyond them has only become more relevant in the twenty-first century.

Faith is therefore rendered fragile, vulnerable to erosion by the exclusions and barriers on which official religious narratives are built. Yet Rufus’ presence also gestures towards the possibility of recovering what those narratives suppress: a broader, more inclusive conception of prophecy that resists the narrowness of institutional religion. In this way, Dogma aligns with Kierkegaard’s suspicion of established Christendom, suggesting that authentic faith may begin precisely where official religious authority is exposed as partial, compromised, and unable to fully contain the divine.

For all of Dogma’s tonal unevenness and narrative excess, its satire remains compelling because it is driven by a serious concern with what faith can mean in modern America. If the film often undermines its own philosophical ambitions through the excesses of stoner comedy, it nevertheless returns insistently to the same central anxiety: that by the end of the twentieth century, belief has become increasingly difficult to sustain in a culture shaped by commodification, individualism, and institutional distrust. In this sense, Smith’s 1999 America is one in which religion has been hollowed out by spectacle and market logic, where Buddy Christ can rebrand Catholicism and plenary indulgence can be transformed into something resembling a promotional offer. Yet Dogma does not simply lament the decline of organised religion; rather, it asks whether faith might still survive once the authority of the Church, and even the certainty of God’s presence, has been destabilised.

In this way, the film gestures towards a Kierkegaardian understanding of belief as something sustained through uncertainty rather than secured by doctrine. Across Bethany’s reluctant spiritual journey, God’s prolonged absence, and the flawed prophetic authority of Jay, Silent Bob, and Rufus, Smith repeatedly suggests that faith must persist even when certainty cannot. Ultimately, however, it is Loki and Bartleby who most powerfully crystallise this idea. Their fall from grace, resentment towards divine authority, and longing to return to Heaven expose faith not as a stable possession, but as something vulnerable to alienation, doubt, and the desire for autonomy. In them, Smith finds the clearest image of a modern spiritual crisis: beings who know God exists and yet still struggle to believe in the justice of His order. If Dogma remains a flawed film, it is at least a thoughtful one, because beneath its irreverence lies a serious recognition that in late-1990s America, faith is no longer a certainty guaranteed by the Church or by divine presence, but a fragile and often painful choice made in the aftermath of their decline.