When Frank the hotdog prowls the closed store at night for answers, he bumps into the Imperishables – a bottle of Firewater and a Twinkie – a kind of unofficial clergy of the foodstuffs. Photograph: Photo Credit: Sam Urdank/PR company handout The gods are evil and monstrous, and must be stopped, he says, to widespread scepticism. Instead, all the products in the store are doomed to be eaten, after every imaginable kind of sadistic “preparation” – skinned alive, sliced and diced, boiled, baked or simply flung down the gullet of some sharp-toothed human. One day a pot of Honey-Mustard (Danny McBride) is returned to the store with a terrible tale to impart: there is no Great Beyond.

The movie opens with a musical number extolling the virtues of the purchasing gods and the glorious life after check-out (which suddenly sounds terribly ominous). In Sausage Party, the denizens of a giant supermarket long for the day when they will be purchased by “the gods” – customers – and taken out into “the Great Beyond” to begin a wonderful life that none of them knows anything about. Atheism was on the map and up for discussion in a way it had never been before in the US – and now comes the belated cultural trickle-down. The figures suggested not that atheism was growing exponentially, but that people felt less community peer-pressure, and were emboldened to admit they had no god. The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey found that 15% of Americans had “no religious belief”, which isn’t quite militant atheism, but almost double what it was – 8% – in 1990. And even more so since the publication about a decade ago of a trio of tracts on non-belief – The End of Faith, Sam Harris, 2004 The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins, 2006 and God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens, 2007, all of which drew massive audiences on promo-tours and ignited widespread debate – and the release of Bill Maher’s anti-religious comedy-doc Religulous.Īt the same time, religious adherence has plummeted, especially among the young and millennials, only 48% of whom, according to a survey by the Banda Group last year, are inclined to believe in any god at all.

But in the wider culture, the spectre of atheism has been haunting us since the internet showed the wider world to the backwoods and the boondocks. It wouldn’t be quite true to say that the dam has finally and irrevocably broken, that old-time American religious practice is about to be engulfed by a tsunami of unbelief. The jam’s had it … Peanut Butter and Jelly in Sausage Party.

A game of sausage party