"What if they're like MPs? And there's different gods for different areas, and they all report to a sort of head God? Like... Thor, or somebody?"
— Jane Christie, Coupling, "Faithless" (said to a Christian gathering after claiming to be a Christian)
Religion and religious faith are very sensitive subjects in any age, and as a result, often reflected in many works in nearly any media.
However, while some works seek to satirize the faithful, others shy away from this due to not wanting to draw wrath from the faithful or be seen as being intolerant.
Some will try to veer around this by having a character claim to be an adherent of a particular faith or religion, but then show that they're not as knowledgeable about the faith as they claim.
While this can overlap with As the Good Book Says..., that can also be used with people who genuinely believe, but haven't actually bothered with doing the reading for themselves, and merely make assumptions.
The reasons someone might do this will vary. Some do it to impress a potential Love Interest who is a sincere believer. Some may do so to get in with a particular crowd as a Social Climber. Some may do it to fleece others for their money and wealth, usually then veering into Sinister Minister territory (though, ironically, many con artists do know enough about the faith to pull off a convincing scam).
In most cases, the person's lack of knowledge about the actual religious teachings or practices will be so obvious as to overlap with Blatant Lies. Overlaps with Religious for Benefits.
Expect genuinely religious characters to be disgusted by such a person, though genuinely dedicated adherents will offer Forgiveness, and try to get the person to be a genuine believer. Often a defining feature of the Greedy Televangelist and Fake Faith Healer. See also Bad Habits.
Compare and contrast Hiding Behind Religion, where someone may justify horrible acts by using their faith to justify or at least excuse it, and the person doing so might sincerely believe it. Contrast Good Shepherd, who is almost certainly a true-believer of their faith.
Subtrope of Hypocrite. See also Scam Religion for when the faith itself is fake, whether or not the congregants know it.
Due to the personal and sensitive nature of religious belief and faith, as well as being generally impossible to know if someone's beliefs are sincere or faked for a purpose, this is No Real Life Examples, Please!.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Mobile Suit Gundam 00: In Setsuna's backstory, he and his friends were swindled by Ali Al-Saachez into becoming Child Soldiers, killing their own parents and performing suicide bombings, by pretending to be a religious leader and playing on the children's faith, all for an excuse to carry out acts of terrorism when he's in fact an atheist.
- My-HiME: Joseph Greer heads the chapel at Fuuka Academy, and often gives long-winded sermons to students sent to the chapel by the Disciplinary Committee for punishment on the "passions of youth". However, one will note quickly that Greer never actually quotes or cites specific passages of scripture, and this is because he's actually a roboticist working for the Searrs Corporation, having developed Robot Girl Miyu to serve as a bodyguard for Alyssa Searrs.
Fan Works
- Dungeon Keeper Ami: Inverted; Snyder must pretend to be a fallen priest instead of a faithful one, because knowing his true faith would get him killed by most of his coworkers or at least make them more difficult to work with.
Films — Live-Action
- A Fish Called Wanda: Wanda has to point out to Otto, who is under the false belief that he is Wicked Cultured, that the central message of Buddhism is not "Every man for himself".
- The Mummy Trilogy: When Beni Gabor is face-to-face with Imhotep, he's revealed to have various prayer amulets and recites each prayer in an effort to repel Imhotep. It only works because Imhotep recognizes the Hebrew prayer and decides to use Beni as a slave.
- The sophomore film from Christian filmmakers Dave and Rich Christiano, 1987's The Pretender, focused on a high-school student named Keith who pretends to be a Christian to seduce a girl; with it being inferred that Keith had faked interest in other things to woo other girls in the school.
- There Will Be Blood: Daniel Plainview, after killing a man who pretended to be his dead son is pushed to join Eli Sunday's church, complete with a humiliating public confession of his sins. Ultimately, Daniel goes through with it because he's also promised an easement for a pipeline for converting, which he uses to sneak a pipe into a pocket of oil under Eli's property and "drink his milkshake".
Literature
- Crocodile Tears (2009): Part of Desmond McCain's backstory is how after he got arrested for insurance fraud, he converted to Christianity during his sentence and was released early to become a reverend. As it turns out, while he did learn actual knowledge of the Bible to be able to properly quote it in conversation, his conversion was less than sincere; he mainly wanted to reduce his prison sentence, play into the idea of being a redeemed sinner for the sake of his public image, and become a reverend in an obscure church.
- Making Money: Cribbins is a conman that used to be partners-in-crime with protagonist Moist von Lipwig, who remarked that he learned a lot from spending a year with Cribbins, then spent many years trying to unlearn it. One of his latest cons is pretending to be a priest and convincing a religious woman to take him in for free while quoting his holy book.
- Warrior Cats: Mothwing, RiverClan medicine cat, spent most of the series not believing in StarClan and lacking the ability to communicate with them. As a large role of medicine cat work is to interpret messages from their ancestors, this lack of faith was a big deal, and she knew it; she hid her true beliefs from most and tried to just blend in as a normal medicine cat, and was even forced by her brother to present fake dreams and omens for his benefit. The fear of the secret getting out troubled her deeply, and she believed that her clanmates would turn on her if they knew. Eventually, she settles on believing in their existence, but not putting any actual faith in them and maintaining her skepticism about their usefulness and motives.
- The Wise Man's Fear: When Kvothe is charged with malfeasance, he learns the Tehlin liturgical language well enough to impersonate a priest, thereby claiming the right to argue his case properly in ecclesiastical court rather than face the whims of a Hanging Judge in lay court.
Live-Action TV
- Blue Mountain State: In "Born Again", BMS football goes to a church service as part of a PR goodwill tour. Alex complains about "spending prime drinking hours at church", with Thad joking that religion is a whole crock of shit, further adding that he bets God doesn't even exist. Radon in return offers his perspective, that you can do whatever you want, so long as you apologize to Jesus afterwards, and that he's been a believer ever since. Thad then repeats "Crock of shit" to Alex, only for the media to approach him asking for a few words about the game on Saturday. Thad responds by pretending to be a devout Christian, even going so far as to fake a sign of the cross.
Thad: ...I'd like to thank my Lord and Savior for making me such an awesome football player. In the name of the father, and mother and both of their sons.
- Chucky: Discussed in "There Will Be Blood"; when face to face with Damballa, Charles tries to bargain for his life by pointing out the number of sacrifices he made, but Damballa simply points out that Chucky has "cheated" on them with other faiths, including Catholicism.
Damballa: Well, of course, I wasn't paying attention. You cheated on me with other gods. Catholicism? Seriously?
Chucky: That was an accident. - Coupling: Towards the end of season 3, Jane meets and is smitten with a deeply religious man who invites her to his church. While Jane claims to believe in the faith, her Attention Whore tendencies and history of sleeping with any male she finds attractive (and her claims she's done this with women as well), have her advocating for premarital sex and promiscuity in the middle of the discussion on faith.
- In the CSI: NY episode "Yahrzeit", the Villain of the Week pretends to be a Jewish holocaust survivor, claiming that his time in the camps robbed him of his faith in order to cover up his lack of knowledge about actual Jewish religious customs.
- Dad's Army: In the episode "Getting the Bird", Corporal Jones reveals that he knows how to play the hymn "Onward Christian Soldiers" on the church organ. When Cpt Mainwaring questions him about this, he tells a story in which he taught himself how to play it when he was younger, in an attempt to appear more Christian to a very religious woman he wanted to court.
- Drop the Dead Donkey: In "A Blast from the Past", Alex comes into contact with Les, her ex-husband, who claims to have become a born-again Christian following their break-up. In truth, he was actually lying about his turn to Christianity, having made it up to regain enough of Alex's trust for her to tell him about Damien's not particularly journalistic practices and stop a negative piece on his slum landlord company Rochester Holdings.
- Leverage: Zigzagged with Nathan Ford; Nate, we quickly learn in season 1, attended Jesuit school to become a priest, though he also left and became an insurance investigator instead. One of Nate's friends, Father Paul, calls Nate out on several of his behaviors that fly very much in the face of the beliefs of their Catholicism, such as thinking that the ends justify the means. He flat out tells Nate, "God looks at how we do a thing!" Despite this, in a season 5 episode, when Sophie, marveling at their latest con, says that it's a good thing the team doesn't believe in Hell, Hardison reminds her that "Nate believes in Hell. Hell, I believe in Hell." This calls back an earlier conversation where it was revealed that Hardison was raised by a devout Jehovah's Witness, but he tends to base his faith on whether or not his "Nana" said something was okay to do or not.
- M*A*S*H: Inverted and Played for Laughs in one episode; after a pregnant Korean woman is shot en route to the 4077th, the surgeons manage to save the baby, then set to work on the mother. Father Mulcahy asks for a moment of silence for the young mother, and notices that Klinger is bowing his head.
Fr. Mulcahy: Klinger, I thought you were an atheist.
Klinger: I gave it up for Lent. - Orange Is the New Black: After learning from a new inmate, who falsely claims to be Jewish and keeping Kosher, that Kosher meals are much better quality than regular prison food, a rash of inmate change their religious status to Judaism, but the prison administration decide to quiz them to see who's serious. Only Sister Ingalls passes, because she is a nun, but Black Cindy also find inspiration in Judaism during the whole ordeal, and ends up converting.
- Reno 911!: In "Raineesha X", Raineesha claims to have joined the Nation of Islam. That she believes that the Nation is the same thing as mainstream Islam should probably have been the first hint that she wasn't sincere about her conversion, but throughout the episode, it's shown that she knows only the most surface things about her new faith and has no intention of looking any deeper. At the end, Dangle discovers that she put in a request for thirty days of leave, ostensibly to observe Ramadan, but that she also received a brochure for a cruise that just happens to coincide with the month. Raineesha admits that she faked her conversion just to try and get time off without using up her personal or sick days.
- In the first season of The Righteous Gemstones, blackmailer Scotty infiltrates the Gemstone compound by claiming to be a friend of Gideon's, who "saved" him and made him turn to Jesus.
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Kai Winn, the leader of the Bajoran religion, is a complicated example. She clearly has been a faithful clergywoman her whole life, but it's revealed that the Prophets have never spoken to her as they have to others, and while she believes in them (to be expected when your deities are objectively existing Sufficiently Advanced Aliens), privately she's resentful of and cynical about them. She betrays them and flirts with the Pah-Wraiths, before a last-second Heel–Face Turn leads her to tell Benjamin how to imprison the Pah-Wraiths at the cost of her own life.
- The West Wing: Discussed and averted in the second season episode "Shibboleth"; a group of Chinese refugees have crammed themselves in a ship headed to the U.S. to seek asylum, claiming religious persecution, since they're Christians. The INS tells Josh and Sam it's not uncommon for Chinese trying to request asylum in another country by claiming to be Christian. However, when President Bartlet meets the leader of the refugees, he becomes convinced their faith is real, and arranges for them to get asylum by having them "escape" from prison.
Video Games
- ARMA II: Prizrak is the warlord of the Chernarussian National Party, and he takes on the role of Father Fyodor. He uses the priests robes to manipulate others though allegedly peaceful messages, while he remains brutal when wearing the uniform - and when confronted, he says the robes are just another of his tools.
- Crusader Kings II:
- Characters may falsely profess faith to appear as a more acceptable religion, secretly convert to another religion, and even start a secret cult.
- Priests with inappropriate traits who are unable to exercise discretion (Diplomacy ≤ 3 or Intrigue ≤ 3) are at risk of being identified as wicked, meaning they have a reputation of having faked their faith.
- Fallout 4: During a likability conversation with Piper, she'll tell a story about stumbling into a contingent of the Children Of Atom irradiating Bunker Hill's water, saving herself from execution by pretending to have a divine vision of Atom himself. The congregates were suitably gullible and spared her because of it. After a few days of pretending to be a new convert, she escapes.
Web Animation
- The Debbie and Carrie Show: Diana Kalli is an explicit example of this, telling her Arch-Enemy Sandy Smith (who is an atheist) that she has learned to quote the Bible and make references to Jesus to impress Sandy's relatives, with whom she intends to marry into via one of Sandy's brothers. Sandy herself rejected Christianity because of the hypocrisy in this same family.
- Helluva Boss: Paulie Paesano in the short "Mission: Whacked Off" claims himself to be "Catholic or something", but it's clear right away he doesn't actually understand Christianity in the slightest as he believes that angels grant wishes. By the end, he shows just how unreligious (and ungrateful) he is when he boasts about getting to take over the family business due to his father sacrificing himself for him to the very angel he thought he was talking to (actually a very pissed-off Moxxie), resulting in his death from getting crushed by the angel statue.
- OverSimplified: While discussing the saeculum obscurum
during "War of the Bucket", Pope John XII was shown gambling while pleading to Zeus for luck. When the clergy around him gasp in shock, he corrects himself and pleads to Thor instead, then Ra, before asking "Dang it, who is it we worship?!"
Webcomics
- Family Man (Dylan Meconis): Discussed in the 18th-Century setting when Luther reveals that he was expelled from university for being non-Christian. Rector Nolte counters that he wasn't the only one there to have had a crisis of faith, but it was silly of him to confess it in his doctoral defense when he could have quietly gotten his credentials and then begun to challenge the orthodoxy.
Nolte: You were impatient. You could have muscled your way through on an accepted topic, worn your sheep's clothing for ten years or so... and then scared the hell out of them as a senior faculty member.
- Surviving the Game as a Barbarian: Worship of the evil god Karui is strictly banned, but he grants his priests unique powers to help them impersonate priests of other gods.
- Unsounded: The Inak were forced to convert at sword point after being forced from their homes by humans looking to steal the valuable First Materials there. The Inak under Litriya Shrine claim to be Gefendur, but secretly maintain their worship of senet beasts and even keep an alter for Shaensigin who was once their tribe's patron.
Western Animation
- Bob's Burgers: In "The Secret Guardin'", Teddy has to pick up his girlfriend Kathleen's Irish mother from the airport and decides to wear a cross to pass himself off as Catholic. Not knowing how they're commonly worn, he picks one entirely too big to be worn around the neck.
- South Park: Eric Cartman frequently does this when he wants to exploit Christianity as part of his latest money-making scheme.
- In "Probably", after a sermon from Father Maxi in the previous episode left the boys paranoid about going to Hell, Cartman starts his own church to profit off of that.
- "Christian Rock Hard" has Cartman start a Christian rock band, thinking that appealing to devout Christians will let him easily sell albums.