Faith & Spirit Quote by Florence King

Florence King lands the punch where American self-image is softest: our insistence that we’re a meritocracy while still craving pecking orders. By pairing creativity with physical beauty, she drags “genius” out of the saintly realm and back into the body - a lottery, a phenotype, an accident of birth. It’s a deliberately ungenerous comparison, and that’s the point. If creativity is treated like cheekbones, you can admire it, envy it, and submit to it without having to ask who got opportunities, time, training, or the right gatekeepers.

The line “elitism without guilt” exposes a cultural trick. Americans like hierarchy, just not the kind that sounds like class. So we spiritualize certain advantages: talent becomes destiny, charisma becomes “authenticity,” and success becomes a sign. “God did it” is King’s scalpel. Invoking the divine doesn’t just excuse inequality; it launders it. If the best artists are “gifted,” then the rest of us can stop demanding structural explanations - underfunded schools, nepotistic industries, the economics of who can afford to fail for years while “finding their voice.”

King, a contrarian essayist with a taste for heresy, is also needling the romance of the creative class. When creativity is worshipped, it becomes non-negotiable authority: you don’t critique the work, you revere the maker. Her subtext is less anti-art than anti-mystification. The real target is the American need to turn taste into theology so admiration can keep its smug edge while pretending to be humble.