The professional wrestling industry has shown itself more than willing to push the boundaries of taste if it might lead to a spike in viewership. Over the years the WWE has tackled many a 'hot-button' issue: race relations, terrorism, incest, necrophilia, disability, sexuality, all have found themselves shoe-horned into characters and storylines as appropriately and comfortably as a potato into a shoe. Why would the thorny and complicated subject of religion be any different? What's interesting about the canon of religion-based WWE gimmick characters is that they're almost all heels. In the still quite god-fearing land of America, one could expect that those wrasslin' for Jesus might be pushed as faces, exalted as heroes, but, despite one famous icon encouraging children to 'eat their vitamins and say their prayers', those characters whose raison d'être is religion, they're almost always villains. Perhaps it's the piety, the holier-than-thou attitude often generally associated the religious, that fills the WWE writers with such bile? Maybe it's the obsequiousness of unconditional love that they object to? Maybe Vince McMahon dislikes the idea of any God other than him? It's probably the third one. These are the religious characters that either left a sour taste in the audience's mouth or, far worse, left no taste whatsoever.
