Most people I know are not hard-core religious people. They are what I would call ’lightly religious.’ So I don’t buy the notion that we can’t laugh about religion in America.

Parker contrasts “hard-core” religiosity with what he sees as a more common, casual or culturally inflected faith—“lightly religious”—to argue that religious belief in the U.S. is not so uniformly intense that it must be treated as untouchable. The remark defends satire’s social function: if most believers are not absolutists, then humor about religion can be a shared civic language rather than an act of persecution. Implicitly, he frames comedy as a test of pluralism and free expression, suggesting that the ability to joke about sacred topics signals confidence in a society’s tolerance and in individuals’ capacity to separate personal faith from public discourse.