The old stone facade on Our Lady of Perpetual Hope turns a sickly shade of yellow as late-afternoon thunderclouds loom over the bluffs of Highlands, New Jersey. It's Friday, the 13th of August, and Kevin Smith, the patron saint of slacker-turned-Macher filmmakers, is talking about religion, the subject of his latest movie, Dogma. We're sitting in Smith's forest green Jeep Grand Cherokee, parked outside his childhood church, where he still attends Mass every Sunday. For a moment, though, I'm not listening to Smith -- just my internal sound track, which has switched over to that demonic chanting from The Omen. Indeed, I half expect a pack of snarling Dobermans to crash through our windows and do the telepathic bidding of this 29-year-old blasphemer.

Even though Satan and his minions have been laying siege to the multiplexes for much of this year -- in Stigmata, End of Days, The Blair Witch Project and Sixth Sense -- it is the affable Smith who has drawn the ire of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and stands accused of "profanity, violence and taking aim at the faith." His sin? Mixing Catholicism and comedy in a movie that stars Ben Affleck as Bartleby, an angel who has been damned to Wisconsin ever since he convinced his buddy, the Angel of Death (Matt Damon), to stop killing people. When the duo discover a loophole in canon law, they try to scam their way back into Heaven. The only one who can stop them -- and stave off the Apocalypse -- is Bethany (Linda Fiorentino), an abortion-clinic worker who is descended from Christ.

Admittedly, Dogma does have its share of tasteless riffs, including the Golgothan Shit Demon, a poo-poo-flinging variation on Ghostbusters' Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man. But in Smith, the Catholic League has picked the wrong target. Like Martin Scorsese's "controversial" The Last Temptation of Christ, Dogma is not a mocking of religion, but simply one Catholic's meditation on faith. Although some might view it as Davey and Goliath on crystal meth, the film is a sincere attempt to graft flesh -- warts and all -- onto abstract entities such as apostles, prophets, angels, God and Christ.

"I'm doing what God told me to: spread the Word," Smith says as he takes a last look at the church. He turns the keys in the ignition: the engine rumbles, and for a moment I forget about the Omen sound track. "Granted, Christ traded in parables, and I work with dick and fart jokes."

The remark is vintage Smith: he has always been happiest when he cam appear simultaneously smart and puerile. He loves playing both ends: He likes Hollywood's respect, but he hates leaving New Jersey. And he has an adolescent's gift for pulling incendiary stunts, then being "surprised" when people get upset. To wit: Clerks included jokes about a variation of oral sex known as "a snowball," yet Smith was outraged when the film initially received an NC-17 rating. Likewise, he was shocked when ABC, for whom he is developing a series based on Clerks, asked him to excise a Dr. Seuss parody called "Horton Hears a Hymen" from an episode. And in Dogma, he cast Chris Rock as Rufus, the thirteenth apostle, who announced that he nearly "got over" on Mary Magdalene because "she had a thing for dark meat."

It's such moments that have made Smith the apostate du jour in the Catholic League's long-standing crusade against Disney -- a battle that dates back to 1995, when the company's subsidiary Miramax released Priest. Since the spring of 1998, when the league's president, William Donahue, read a mention about Dogma in one of the Hollywood trade papers, he has been waging a letter-writing and leaflet campaign -- looking to suppress the film, even though he has never seen it and declined to meet with Smith.

Had Donahue spoken with the director, however, he might have learned that Smith wrote the movie as a love letter to God. "What happened with Clerks and my career -- there is no better proof that there's a God," he says, referring to the fact that seven years ago he went from working at a Quick Stop market to taking the Sundance Film Festival by storm, all within the space of a week. "I'm hard-core blessed."

A drunk bearing more than a passing resemblance to Bluto weaves up Jackson Street, a run-down block in this run-down blue-collar shore town. Smith, the youngest of three children, grew up here, and as we drive past the modest home where he was raised by his postman father and appraiser mother, he scowls at the pink aluminum siding the new owner has slapped on the structure. Nowadays Smith lives twenty minutes away, in the leafy, more upscale suburb of Oceanport, and he recently bought his parents a house a few towns over. But it's clear that the town, and the church, still have a hold on the former altar boy.

As a kid, he went to school at Our Lady of Perpetual Hope and attended Mass six days a week. Smith's first memory of ever questioning church doctrine occurred in the late '70s, when Father David Delzell, his childhood priest at Our Lady of Perpetual Hope, told his parish they should boycott Soap, the risque ABC comedy. "I remember thinking, Does God call up somebody and say, 'Don't watch the Billy Crystal show'?"

Still, Smith managed to keep the faith -- until winter of 1988, when he entered college at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan to study creative writing. Freed from the zealotry of parochial school as well as his insular neighborhood, Smith soon found doubt percolating in his brain. He was unable to reconcile his wish to be a man of faith with a world in which he now was hanging out with people who swore, drank and engaged in premarital sex yet seemed to be good people. "I was confronted with a bunch of things that just didn't match up -- like reading in the Bible that the Jews condemned Christ or the way the church was coming down on gay people so hard," Smith says.

He dropped out after his first semester and transferred to film school in Vancouver, British Columbia. En route, he dropped into a Seattle church on a grim January day, sought out the priest and asked if he would hear his confession. Smith confided that the Mass had ceased to be a celebration for him; he feared his faith was slipping away. The priest told Smith, "Think of faith as water in a glass. When you're little, you're the size of a shot glass, so you're easy to fill up. The older you get, the bigger the glass gets. But the liquid level doesn't change." (A variation on the priest's speech finds its way into Dogma has advice one abortion-clinic worker offers another.) Smith left feeling somewhat better but spent the next year trying to refresh his spiritual highball, wandering to other denominations, attending services at a Pentecostal church and a Cavalry Ministries church.

After four months, he dropped out of film school, moved back in with his parents and worked odd jobs. In his spare time, he started writing Clerks. He also kept searching. Ever the autodidact, he pored over apocryphal religious texts such as those in Elaine Pagels's The Gnostic Gospels. He read Dante, Milton and "a lot of crappy books about angels." And he turned over spiritual questions in his mind: Since the Bible offers no account of Jesus' adolescence, Smith wondered, What was Christ like as a teenager?

Then, in 1994, adrift on the festival circuit with Clerks and looking to maintain his sanity, he started alchemizing these bits of spiritual inquiry into an early draft of Dogma. Other influences soon found their way into his script: From Neil Gaiman's graphic novel The Sandman, he took the idea that damnation was a lonely exile rather than the usual fire-and-brimstone imagery that Christianity appropriated from the pagan version of Hades. Seeing Pulp Fiction at the Cannes Film Festival was another epiphany altogether. Since that movie careened between comedy and violence, Smith reasoned he could mingle comedy and religion -- even though audiences are more accustomed to the latter genre as the underpinning for horror movies such as The Exorcist.

He turned in a draft of the script to Miramax in the fall of 1994, but it was not until the Sundance Film Festival, in the winter of 1997, that he got the go-ahead -- after the premiere of Chasing Amy. Over dinner, Miramax cochairman Harvey Weinstein told him he could make the film for $2 million. But there were a few catches: One, he needed bankable names; two, Smith could not cast Chasing Amy's star and his then girlfriend, Joey Lauren Adams, in the lead. That evening Smith returned to his condo thinking, This is going to be a tough conversation, because I told Joey all along, "I can't make this movie without you."

Adams dropped out of the cast and eventually out of Smith's life. Meanwhile, Dogma's dramatis personae would eventually swell to include not only Affleck and Damon but also Salma Hayek, Janeane Garofalo, Alanis Morissette (as God) and George Carlin, who plays a cardinal who wants to replace the "dour" crucifix with a creation he calls Buddy Christ, a finger-snapping Rat Pack-ish rendering of Jesus. Carlin, the godfather of Catholic comedy, likens mixing comedy and religion to playing with gasoline and matches. "The people who are going to be bothered by it get really bothered," he says. "I didn't see the script as a cheap shot. But I knew the kid was taking a risk with the giant turd."

Aside from the Golgothan Shit Demon, the Catholic League's Donahue took particular offense at the notion that Joseph and Mary have an active sex life prior to the Annunciation. Donahue has also declaimed the fact that Dogma's abortion-clinic-worker heroine is a descendant of Jesus -- and Catholic. When he and the league's 350,000 members threatened last spring to create a public-relations nightmare for the Walt Disney Corporation, Miramax's cochairman, Bob and Harvey Weinstein, wrote a $14 million check out of their own pockets and bought Dogma back. (A smaller company, Lions Gate, will distribute the film in the United States.)

Donahue, who is a trained sociologist and a Heritage Foundation alumnus, has no official connection to the Roman Catholic Church. However, he makes people nervous. Last year, by putting pressure on advertisers, he persuaded Disney to drop the series Nothing Sacred from the ABC prime-time schedule. During his attempt to shut down Terence McNally's Broadway play Corpus Christi in 1998, the Manhattan Theater Club received bomb threats. So far, he has confined the league's activities to distributing pamphlets urging a boycott of Dogma and threatening to picket the movie. When asked whether Smith's attempt to get the MTV generation to discuss religion might be a positive thing, Donahue responds, "Inasmuch as Amos and Andy got us talking about black culture or The Merchant of Venice gets us talking about Jewish culture."

All of which has made for some strained nerves. But everyone in Smith's camp is standing by the film. Especially Affleck. As the self-proclaimed lapsed Episcopalian says, "Dogma is a lot more accessible than any sermon. This movie has a real chance of getting younger people talking about faith. If the Inquisition were around, they would undoubtedly brand Kevin a heretic and light him on fire. Luckily, all he gets is some flak from Donahue, whose stock-in-trade is to drum up frenzy in order to fatten his own checkbook."

After pulling into the driveway, we let Smith's two blond labs, Scully and Mulder, out of his modern four-bedroom house. Everywhere there are the trappings of domestic bliss: an indoor pool, laser discs, baby toys and lots of comic-book art. In the kitchen, animation cels of the Trix rabbit and Frankenberry stare down from the walls. Out the window, Smith watches Scully and Mulder take turns relieving themselves on the front lawn. Despite the summer's drought, the lawn is green, and the director is not pleased about the marks Mulder has been burning into the landscaping job.

We've stopped in to spring his wife, Jennifer Schwalbach, from watching their six-week-old daughter, Harley Quinn (yes, she's named after the Joker's girlfriend). The two met when the pretty Floridian interviewed him for USA Today. He subsequently asked her to the 1998 Independent Spirit Awards, and last year she quit her job in Los Angeles and moved to Jersey so they could be together. Three months before their daughter was born, they married in a Catholic ceremony at George Lucas's Skywalker Ranch with a Benedictine monk officiating. This fall they plan to have Harley Quinn baptized at Our Lady of Perpetual Hope.

This cushy little life might be more fragile than it appears, however. Just a few weeks ago, one of Smith's fellow parishioners brought the Catholic League's anti-Dogma literature to Smith's parish priest, Father John Dobrosky, hoping he would denounce the movie from the pulpit. The priest refused, explaining there was no word from Rome or the archdiocese about it, and besides, he thought Smith was a good guy.

If push does come to shove this month, Smith will make his stand a few minutes away, at his own slacker variation on the Batcave -- namely, the Red Bank, New Jersey, office park where his View Askew Productions is housed. The office walls are papered with movie posters and animation cels, and there is an Avid editing machine in back, where he and his partner, Scott Mosier, cut their movies. The vibe is strictly BYOG (bring your own goatee), and upon our arrival I am greeted by Jason Mewes, who's wearing a black wool ski cap. In each of Smith's four films, Mewes and the director have had minor parts as Jay and Silent Bob, and the cult figures nearly steal Dogma as two toking buddies aiding Bethany on her quest.

Smith and Mewes have been friends since Mewes, the affable town dirtbag, started showing up at the Quick Stop to help Smith assemble the Sunday papers. Now they have their own line of comic books, and their images are on the marquee of Jay and Silent Bob's Secret Stash, Smith's comic-book store five blocks down the street. Created bya comic fan for comic-book fans, the shop is staffed by buddies of the director's from his collecting days.

But it is here, in the company of Red Bank's own Justice League, that Smith will wait for the protesters and the pharisees to attack him. He has no qualms about still attending his old church, he says. All he wants is for the demagogues to let his movie be judged on its merits.

We step into Smith's office and he lays Harley Quinn on a blanket by his futon and settles in behind his desk. Roller-hockey skates like in one corner, and Smith anxiously awaits my reaction to some new armchairs he purchased at great expense from the Disney collection. Mouse ears compose the backrests. Mickey's yellow pants have been abstracted into the seats. The legs are the mouse's feet.

"I bought them the day before Disney dropped the movie," he says, flashing that familiar "Mom, there's nothing in Playboy that you can't see in an art museum" grin. "Do you think Eisner has chairs like this in his office?" And it dawns on me: Maybe Smith can remain in a state of suspended adolescense forever, and maybe, just maybe, he can get away with serving God and Mickey.