Neither Jeremy nor I were very impressed with Bill Maher’s pro-atheism documentary Religulous, though we both did groove to the film’s cool soundtrack.

One of the things that I didn’t much like about the film was its ambush-style interviews and heavy editing to make its subjects look stupid, tactics I’ve always found distasteful no matter who does them. Now one of those subjects has sued the company that produced the film:

Following in the footsteps of various figures of ridicule in “Borat,” an Orlando, Fla., preacher has sued the distributor of “Religulous” for inducing him to appear in the Bill Maher documentary under false pretenses.

Rev. Jeremiah Cummings’ $50 million lawsuit against Lionsgate -– which even alleges “racial profiling” — is the first to be filed over “Religulous” since its release in October.

Cummings is not likely to see much satisfaction from his lawsuit. As the article notes, most the similar lawsuits filed against the Borat movie’s producers were dismissed. And the judges were almost certainly right to do so, since a ruling for the plaintiffs could have had negative impacts on journalism and free speech.

What fascinated me about the story though was Cummings’ explanation of why he agreed to appear in the movie in the first place:

The producers, he says, told him he had been chosen to appear in a PBS documentary called “A Spiritual Journey.”

“I was not aware at that time that I would be cast in a motion picture … entitled ‘Religulous,’ nor was I told that I would be interviewed for a motion picture called ‘Religulous,’ in which my true character was distorted onscreen before millions of viewers for laughs,” the complaint, which Cummings filed himself, says.

I suspected at the time that the interviews were done under false pretenses. Despite the director’s best efforts to edit them out, some scenes still had interview subjects making stray statements to that effect.

Stephen Waldman has been tracking this story on his blog at Beliefnet. He has previously contacted some of the other subjects of the film, who all said pretty much the same thing as Cummings. Waldman even has an introductory e-mail Maher’s people used to gain interviews, which does misrepresent the nature of the film and doesn’t mention Maher. You can read it here. Maher has apparently boasted of this in interviews.

As Waldman notes:

[F]or a movie that draws blood by accusing religious figures of dishonesty and hypocrisy, it’s more than a little ironic that deception was such a central part of their modus operandi.

I’ll just end this post by reprising the one thing that stuck out the most for me about Religulous:

If anything, I came out of the film with a new respect for Mormons, who — apparently alone among the faith groups that Maher sought to interview — recognized early on what he was up to and shut him out. Maher is ushered off of church grounds and is forced to do his Mormon bit from what appears to be a hotel room.