Althouse on Colbert on religion

This post, over at Professor Althouse's (excellent) blog, is well worth a read, particularly for "Daily Show" and "Colbert Report" watchers.  She reproduces (and comments on) this exchange, between Steve Colbert and Terry Gross (of "Fresh Air"):

GROSS: Now you grew up in a family with--What?--11 children?

Mr. COLBERT: Yeah, I'm one of 11 kids. I'm the youngest.

GROSS: And was it a religious family? You say you go to church and...

Mr. COLBERT: Oh, absolutely.

GROSS: Yeah.

Mr. COLBERT: We're, you know, very devout and, you know, I still go to church and, you know, my children are being raised in the Catholic Church. And I was actually my daughters' catechist last year for First Communion, which was a great opportunity to speak very simply and plainly about your faith without anybody saying, `Yeah, but do you believe that stuff?' which happens a lot in what I do.

GROSS: Can I ask you a kind of serious question about faith?

Mr. COLBERT: I've been turning all of your funny questions into serious things for an hour or so. I don't see why you can't do the same to me.

GROSS: In the sketch we heard earlier from "This Week In God," you talked about the Christian pharmacist who refused to fill a prescription for birth control.

Mr. COLBERT: Right.

GROSS: Now the Catholic Church opposes birth control, which...

Mr. COLBERT: They do.

GROSS: ...I presume you do not and...

Mr. COLBERT: Presume away.

GROSS: ...so how do you deal with contradictions between, like, the church and the way you live your life, which is something that a lot of people in the Catholic Church have to deal with?

Mr. COLBERT: Well, sure. You know, that's the hallmark of an American Catholic, is the individuation of America and the homogenation of the church; homogenation in terms of dogma. I love my church and I don't think that it actually makes zombies or unquestioning people. I think it's actually a church that values intellectualism, but certainly, it can become very dogmatically rigid.

Somebody once asked me, `How do you be a father'--'cause I'm a father of three children--`and be anti-authoritarian?' And I said, `Well, that's not nearly as hard as being anti-authoritarian and being a Roman Catholic,' you know? That's really patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time. I don't know. You know, I don't believe that I can't disagree with my church and I'll leave it at that.

It seems to me that "anti-authoritarian" needs to be unpacked a bit.  I mean, it is hard to see how a Catholic, a father, or anyone else, can really be "anti-authority" in any kind of across-the-board way.  But, I guess I don't immediately see the conflict between being Catholic and being "anti-authoritarian" in the sense that Colbert is (or seems to me to be) "anti-authoritarian" -- i.e., being irreverent, being willing to puncture myths, platitudes, and pieties, being suspicious of power and "political correctness", etc.

UPDATE:   Cathy Kaveny kindly called my attention to this piece, by Celia Wren, in the latest Commonweal, about Colbert, his show, and the Faith.  While I suspect that Ms. Wren and I might disagree about the extent to which Colbert actually shows "the sheer inanity of some right-wing beliefs" -- as opposed to the inanity of beliefs that some people imagine conservatives hold -- I think the essay is a good complement to the Althouse post.