The movies have made a fortune out of religion over the years – and avoided the subject of atheism. But in Seth Rogen’s sweary CGI comedy Sausage Party, the idea of God is challenged. Will it cash in on America’s surge in non-belief?

It’s not every day we see a movie whose main characters declare violent war on their own gods, and then triumphantly destroy them. It sounds like something out of mid-period Ingmar Bergman or late Tarkovsky; po-faced, grim, unbearably pessimistic. But with hotdogs.

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s Sausage Party, with its frathouse title and leering phallic poster tagline (“A Hero Will Rise ...”) has been marketed as the first truly adult, stoner-friendly, sex-filled, scatological and foul-mouthed CGI-cartoon comedy, nominally about a frankfurter (voiced by Rogen) who wants to get it on with his hot hotdog-bun girlfriend (Kristen Wiig).

Sausage Party review – Seth Rogen's surprisingly tasty supermarket sweep Read more

Well, it’s all that, certainly. But it also comes with a surprisingly sophisticated side-order of philosophising about the nature of religion and why we believe – or, in this case, why we don’t. To all the sex and profanity and other outrages, add atheism, something Hollywood has avoided embracing, or even discussing, for nearly a century.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The jam’s had it … Peanut Butter and Jelly in Sausage Party. Photograph: Courtesy of Sony Pictures

It wouldn’t be quite true to say that the dam has finally and irrevocably broken, that old-time American religious practice is about to be engulfed by a tsunami of unbelief. But in the wider culture, the spectre of atheism has been haunting us since the internet showed the wider world to the backwoods and the boondocks. And even more so since the publication about a decade ago of a trio of tracts on non-belief – The End of Faith, Sam Harris, 2004; The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins, 2006; and God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens, 2007, all of which drew massive audiences on promo-tours and ignited widespread debate – and the release of Bill Maher’s anti-religious comedy-doc Religulous.

At the same time, religious adherence has plummeted, especially among the young and millennials, only 48% of whom, according to a survey by the Banda Group last year, are inclined to believe in any god at all. The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey found that 15% of Americans had “no religious belief”, which isn’t quite militant atheism, but almost double what it was – 8% – in 1990. The figures suggested not that atheism was growing exponentially, but that people felt less community peer-pressure, and were emboldened to admit they had no god. Atheism was on the map and up for discussion in a way it had never been before in the US – and now comes the belated cultural trickle-down.

In Sausage Party, the denizens of a giant supermarket long for the day when they will be purchased by “the gods” – customers – and taken out into “the Great Beyond” to begin a wonderful life that none of them knows anything about. The movie opens with a musical number extolling the virtues of the purchasing gods and the glorious life after check-out (which suddenly sounds terribly ominous). One day a pot of Honey-Mustard (Danny McBride) is returned to the store with a terrible tale to impart: there is no Great Beyond. Instead, all the products in the store are doomed to be eaten, after every imaginable kind of sadistic “preparation” – skinned alive, sliced and diced, boiled, baked or simply flung down the gullet of some sharp-toothed human. The gods are evil and monstrous, and must be stopped, he says, to widespread scepticism.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ricky Gervais in The Invention of Lying. Photograph: Photo Credit: Sam Urdank/PR company handout

When Frank the hotdog prowls the closed store at night for answers, he bumps into the Imperishables – a bottle of Firewater and a Twinkie – a kind of unofficial clergy of the foodstuffs. Firewater (Bill Hader) admits – spoiler alert – that the whole framework of gods and great outdoors was something he made up to ameliorate the despair that would assail the products if given full knowledge of their coming fate. Their religion has been a lie all along – a consoling, comforting lie, to be sure, but a lie nonetheless. It’s as if they’re in the Matrix. Or are like Aztecs, groomed unknowingly for human sacrifice – at the moment they find out what horror awaits them at the top of those steep stone stairs.

Here, there are comparisons with Ricky Gervais’s less successful The Invention of Lying (2009), in which Gervais tells one lie, the first ever told in his society’s history, to comfort a woman whose mother is dying, and to his own great dismay accidentally invents God. And also with Paul (2011), which Rogen stars in but didn’t write, in which his alien character is able to transmit the entirety of human knowledge into another’s mind with the merest prod of his ET-ish index finger. After that, religion is just not an option. Kristen Wiig plays a one-eyed backwoods evangelical true believer, and her loss of faith – and acquisition of full-sightedness – on finger-contact is instant and total. If there’s no god, why is she not swearing like a sailor, huffing spliffs and having loads of irresponsible sex? Fear not, she soon will be. Atheism will do that to an upright gal.

When you look at American churches, in particular the more fire-breathing, Old Testament types on the religious right, you have to wonder why atheism isn’t skyrocketing nationwide. Every day, another homophobic preacher is found diddling boys (see also: Catholicism), basking in motel sleaze with hookers and meth, or abusing little girls. When they appear on cable news, the religious right talks only of hell, never of heaven, and preaches a religion full of hatred and bigotry. It cries the blues about how bone-deep prejudice is among godless liberals against people of faith. It’s nonsense, of course, with a huge side-order of projection, but the net effect is to make us ask why anyone would want to affirm a religion of such negativity and loathing. The atheism figures cited above start to become clearer.

And what of Hollywood itself? Religion made the studios a tonne of money for most of the 20th century, with things easing up a bit after the tumult of the iconoclastic 1960s. It also made a good cover story when the studios instituted the Hays Code. In one of the odder religious moments in movie history, the nervous, half-assimilated immigrant Jews who built the studios handed over the moral invigilation of their product to Catholics – Joseph Breen, et al, at the Hays Code Office – before releasing them to an overwhelmingly Protestant audience. The Hays Code retarded the development of American movies for 40 years, but in the meantime, the age of the religious epic got under way: Quo Vadis, Ben-Hur, King of Kings, The Greatest Story Ever Told, some of the most expensive and (mostly) successful movies ever made. The Catholic audience was also vast enough to support a whole subculture of vaguely religious movies: ones in which Loretta Young or Ingrid Bergman played nuns, or Bing Crosby and Pat O’Brien played lovable Irish priests – a genre that seems entirely foreign now, after Vatican II, the abortion wars, clerical child abuse and everything else.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Greatest Story Ever Told, 1965. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/UNITED ARTISTS

Religious adherence has been on the wane for a century in the west, but the process has been slower in the US, despite upticks such as the born again movement of the 60s and 70s, which is now slowly playing itself out after pushing its luck too far for too long. Hollywood does occasionally reach out to this demographic – most recently with Miracles from Heaven, for instance – but that market isn’t going to grow any larger, while the atheist demographic has increased hugely in a single decade. It’s a younger, smarter, probably wealthier market, too, not a moribund one.

Ah, you say, so Sausage Party and Paul are atheist in temper? What about This is the End, made by and starring exactly the same people? That movie ends with the breaking of the Seventh Seal and all the appurtenances of Armageddon and Apocalypse – with the Book of Revelation as handy guidebook to the Last Days. How is that not religious, or Christian? Well, think of Christianity as just another genre, with rules and tropes and iron laws, like sci-fi or film noir. If you can ascend into heaven thanks to being good-hearted, and the saints in heaven will magic up a Backstreet Boys reunion for you on arrival, does that actually make your movie religious?

Not at all. It’s no different from obeying the pre-existing laws of gravity or time-travel in science-fiction. It’s all grist to the Rogen-Goldberg mill – and they don’t give a sausage.

• Sausage Party is released in the UK on 9 September.