Logo of the movie Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (Warner Brothers, 2024)

Image: Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

If you want to see an accurate but disturbing picture of how ministry professionals are increasingly viewed in American life, you might want to see Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which hit theaters last weekend. In addition to bringing back the eponymous main character and some brilliant, eye-popping aesthetics, you’ll find an ordained priest, Father Damien, as a recurring character.

To be certain, I would not recommend that you take anything profound or meaningful from Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, except perhaps for its penchant at making the afterlife seem byzantine and confusing, overrun as it is with bureaucracy and trick doorways. I’ve always found that bit to be a great insight into the human fear of the unknown that finds us after death. Yet there is plenty here that sheds light on the status of religion in American life.

We find Fr. Damien in two instances where one might need a ministry professional — presiding over a funeral and a wedding. While he seems capable of performing both rituals, he first attempts to console a main character with a list of references from Scripture, offered in King James English. He does manage to get in one passable attempt at making meaning from death, saying that the deceased is now soaring like one of the birds that he so loved to watch, but the audience is right there with the character who responds to his 20-odd-second ramble with “what?” Fr. Damien just doesn’t make any sense, or for him to make sense, you have to be well versed in a type of Christian-speak that clearly labels insiders and outsiders.

One of the key ways Fr. Damien is played for laughs is clear in his statements towards inclusivity — “all are welcome!” — because he simply can’t mean it. On Halloween night he can be found in his car patrolling the streets for “lost lambs” and he looks aghast at someone buying beer, as if he simply can’t fathom the activity. The truth is that when churches and religious leaders make statements like “all are welcome,” they are simply not trusted that this is the case. And who can blame the doubters? There are so often too many qualifiers on that statement. You are welcome, but not dressed like that, not if you’re LGBTQIA, not with your doubts, not with those political beliefs.

It’s not that Fr. Damien and the rest of the church world feel they are insincere when they offer such statements of welcome with hidden qualifications. They doubtlessly sincerely believe that they are opening the doors of the church wide. The problem is that no one believes it. “All are welcome” has become a dig at church hypocrisy and the empty promises of inclusivity. It’s a punchline.

If anything, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice ought to make us consider how that came to be and how we might fix it. The only real answer to that question is to really mean it when we offer welcome to those who believe that religion is increasingly irrelevant to their lives. Jesus had no barriers, but churches certainly do, and that fact is well-known in our society. So well-known that it can be played for laughs.

There is a certain amount of handwringing in church circles these days about the declining amount of affiliation with and participation in religious communities. Simply put, the numbers are not good. Much of that can be attributed to the fact that a whole generation of young adults have no interest in religion. As Beetlejuice Beetlejuice shows us, we have only ourselves to blame for that. If religion wants to carve out a space for itself in American life beyond weddings and funerals, it has to offer inclusivity and really mean it.