by David Boldt / Alarms and Diversions

While it apparently needs no help from me, I wanted to get in my own words of praise for the surprise hit Dogma, and to salute the film's writer and director, Kevin Smith, as one of the most interesting moralists of our time.

His theological tract, which has been fraudulently (albeit successfully) marketed as a comedy, has been accused of being talky, profanity-filled and juvenile - all of which is true and probably a good thing.

If you're going to make a movie in which the climactic moment has an abortion clinic nurse asking God why we are all here, there is going to be a lot to talk about.

And if you are aiming a film at a young, postmodern, skeptical, and morally deconstructed audience - which Smith clearly is - then the profanity and sometimes silly ironic twists are required. But one is willing to forgive a lot in a movie that clearly wants people to leave the theater thinking big thoughts.

How big? Really big. While there have been a lot of films with religious themes lately, I haven't seen one take on so directly, and answer in such a complex manner, the question of why an all-knowing deity would permit so much tragedy to occur.

Along the way, some smaller puzzles are dealt with, many of them being attributable to the fact that God has a sense of humor. (Kurt Vonnegut has argued the same idea, suggesting that when Christ said "the poor will always be with us," He was just making a small, ironic joke, not a policy declaration.)

Ever wonder why God hasn't been so wrathful lately? It's a question that has engaged Billy Graham, who once commented that if God doesn't do something to the United States soon, He will owe Sodom and Gomorrah an apology.

In the film, Smith suggests that this change in divine tactics might have occurred because Loki, the Angel of Death, was expelled from heaven by God shortly after the Passover, together with the fellow angel who talked him into turning away from violence.

The two of them (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) have spent the millennia since wandering around what is today Wisconsin, and the film's plot involves their effort to get back to Heaven.

My purpose here, however, is not to offer a review of the film. Rather, it is to pay homage to the reverse psychology Smith uses to make his case for a reverential (and quite conservative) Christian cosmology.

I became an admirer of Smith because of the way he presented his moral message in an earlier film, Chasing Amy, a boy-meets-lesbian flick whose lesson was that one can become so sated with sin that redemption becomes impossible. (Or almost impossible; the ending is ambivalent and ambiguous). But this message, which Smith has acknowledged, is buried so deeply in the plot that many viewers are unaware of it. It operates like a computer virus viewers accidentally download, unaware until it starts evangelizing the hard drive of their minds.

Dogma uses the same method, and it may well be what the world needs now.

I went to see the film (for the second time) on Sunday, the same day, as it happened, on which I'd tried to go back to church. This is something I try to do once or twice a decade, although it's hard because I am that lowest of all forms of religious life, the fallen-away Unitarian.

The trouble with ever having been a Unitarian is that its indoctrination about the ultimate importance of The Search makes you into such a spiritual skeptic that belief becomes impossible. Beyond that, the permissible radius of the search has gotten shorter and shorter.

In any event, the service on Sunday had revolved around whether a church can grow that is composed of people who enjoy sacred surroundings, but don't want to have to believe in God. My own reaction: I don't think so. This is niche marketing carried too far.

In Dogma, Smith takes shots at organized religion, especially the Catholic Church he grew up in. (It might be worth noting, though, that everything the Catholic Church teaches is vindicated in the film. Even a golf club blessed by a cardinal proves its sanctity when it successfully smites one of the devil's demons.)

If the choice had been up to me, I would have gone after mainstream Protestantism - Unitarianism by itself being too minuscule a target - for diluting the power of religious faith by draining the blood out of it, leaving it lifeless and boring.

And as I left the theater Sunday, I was struck by how much more I had gotten out of the film than the service.

David Boldt's column appears on Tuesdays and Fridays. His e-mail address is Dboldt@compuserve.com