Creativity Quote by Juliana Hatfield

Hatfield’s line lands like a thrown beer bottle: blunt, loud, and aimed at the sanctimony that survives every era’s attempt at “spiritual renewal.” The phrasing matters. “As long as” isn’t casual; it’s a grim prediction, a conditional that reads like experience. She’s not arguing religion is rotten. She’s arguing it’s useful - a durable cover story - and that any system with moral authority will attract people eager to launder their private damage into public virtue.

The key move is “hiding their rottenness.” That word choice refuses polite abstraction. She’s not talking about “hypocrisy” in the airy way pundits do; she’s talking about decay, something intimate and unglamorous. Then comes “the veil of religion,” a metaphor that frames faith not as a source of light but as fabric: something that can drape, soften outlines, and make hard scrutiny feel taboo. A veil doesn’t have to be fake to be used; it just has to be socially respected enough that others won’t tug it back.

Contextually, it fits a late-20th/early-21st century pop-cultural reality where institutions - especially religious ones - keep getting caught in cycles of scandal, denial, and reputational management. Coming from a musician, the intent isn’t to draft a policy brief. It’s to vent a moral impatience that listeners recognize: the anger at being preached at by people who, behind closed doors, are doing harm. The subtext is a demand for accountability that doesn’t stop at the church door, and for a skepticism that treats piety as a claim to be tested, not a shield to be respected.