YMMV / The Simpsons S4 E3 "Homer the Heretic"

• Accidental Aesop: Not going to church every Sunday isn't harmful by itself, but getting so caught up in hedonistic indulgences that you forget basic personal health and safety (like taking a nap while smoking a cigar surrounded by flammable magazines) will catch up with you eventually.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: When Homer worries that his house catching fire while he was napping was due to God punishing him for not attending church, Reverend Lovejoy counters that it's more like God was present in the form of his neighbors of different faiths (Flanders: Christian; Krusty: Jewish; Apu: Hindu) coming together to save him. Taken a step further: while Homer skipping church wasn't bad in and of itself, his getting so caught up in the hedonistic indulgences (skipping work by making up a phony religion, or taking a nap while smoking a cigar surrounded by adult magazines) was what got him in trouble.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • At the end of the episode, when Homer is impatient to learn what the meaning of life is, God is bewildered Homer can’t wait six months. Several episodes in Season 4 later (or six months), Homer has a very close call.
  • During the scene of Homer trapped in a house fire, it seems as if Santa's Little Helper is going to save him, only for SLH to grab some food from Homer's pocket and leave instead. A later episode would have a very similar scenario happen, except Homer (who had to be saved by the cat because the dog was a coward) is furious with SLH for his cowardice, disowns him, and almost loses him to his original owner for good. For bonus points, the fire can also be seen as karma for Homer's blasphemousness (just like in this episode), as the fire was started in a treehouse that Homer built for Bart and proudly described as "an affront to God himself".
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • One of the things Homer does at home after skipping church is make his "patented moon waffles". He enjoys them (and the rest of the things he was able to do due to skipping church) so much that he declares that he's never going to church again, eventually leading to him having a nightmare about God being angry with him for forsaking his church. An episode in the following season would have Homer inexplicably mistake a waffle on the ceiling for God and eat it, calling it "sacrilicious".
  • One of Homer's arguments for not going to church is that he might have picked the wrong religion, thereby making God madder and madder each day (to which Bart agrees). Another animated sitcom would later have an episode which followed up on the very idea; the only correct religion turned out to be Mormonism, and everyone who didn't follow said religion went straight to Hell, regardless of how good or bad they were in life (to the point that Ghandi and Hitler are both in the same afterlife), making Homer's arguments in this episode even more valid.
• Strawman Has a Point: While Homer does provide a few good arguments about his views on organized religion (or just Reverend Lovejoy's congregation), he is ultimately treated as being in the wrong and returning to the church at the end of the episode. However, some fans have argued Homer's points make a very compelling argument in his favor, not to mention that in this episode Homer is probably at one of his most spiritual, actually looking inward and reinforcing his faith in God as opposed to just miserably attending Lovejoy's church and ignoring his bland sermons. To alleviate it slightly, that technically still is what he does in the end, sleeping through church and having spiritual dreams of God, making Marge pressuring him into following religion her way a very Pyrrhic Victory.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Homer's unwillingness to go to church every Sunday, and the outsized reaction it gets from everyone else, seems extremely out-of-place today, when church attendance has declined and is no longer such a strong social institution outside of the most religious of families and locations (which the Simpsons as a family and Springfield as a whole are certainly not). Also, Homer mentions the St. Louis football team (the Cardinals) having moved to Phoenix. Until 2015, this line probably confused some fans of the St. Louis Rams (who have since moved to Los Angeles).
• Values Dissonance: Many modern viewers are surprised at the idea that Homer not going to church every Sunday is treated as a big deal—polls have suggested that as of the 2020s, only about 20% of Americans attend church weekly, and the majority of Americans—including Christians—don't go at all. Much of The Simpsons is based on the childhood of the writers, where going to church every Sunday was almost socially mandatory even for nonreligious types, and even in the 90s, it was a lot more common, but nowadays attending church so stringently in a family like the Simpsons would be very odd. Made apparent when the show tried a similar premise with a different family member a decade later, and Marge and the other Christians' aggression towards it is treated as far more close minded and hypocritical.

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