Haven’t two hundred years of failed missionary work overseas taught anybody anything? You can’t convert people to anything - whether religion, or something as inane as our flicks.

In this remark, Kevin Smith uses the history of Western missionary efforts as a blunt analogy for the limits of cultural persuasion. The point is less about theology than about the arrogance of assuming other communities are waiting to be “converted” to one’s values, tastes, or entertainment. By pairing religion with “our flicks,” he collapses high-stakes ideological export and low-stakes pop culture evangelism into the same critique: people rarely adopt beliefs or preferences because outsiders insist they should. The quote reads as a warning against cultural imperialism and against marketing fantasies that audiences can be engineered into enthusiasm rather than met on their own terms.