"I asked God if it was a sin and He didn't say anything"
About this Quote
A deadpan silence can be the loudest argument in the room. Ernestine L. Rose’s line turns prayer into cross-examination: she poses the accusation that polices so many lives - “is it a sin?” - and then records the non-answer as evidence. The genius is how she refuses to fight on the usual terrain. Instead of litigating scripture verse-by-verse, she calls the court’s key witness and notes that the witness doesn’t show.
Rose, a 19th-century freethinker and women’s rights activist, spoke into a culture where “sin” was routinely weaponized to enforce gender hierarchy, sexual restraint, and obedience to religious authority. Her phrasing mimics the pious script: humility, direct address, the desire to be corrected. Then she flips it. God’s silence becomes an indictment of the human voices that rush in to fill it - clergy, lawmakers, moral crusaders - those who claim divine certainty while delivering social control.
The subtext is both spiritual and political. Spiritually, she’s suggesting that conscience and compassion may be more reliable than inherited dogma. Politically, she’s exposing how “sin” often functions as a convenient label for whatever threatens existing power: women speaking in public, dissenters demanding rights, bodies refusing to be governed by other people’s theology.
The line also works because it’s compact and untheatrical. No sermon, no rage. Just a report. That restraint makes the provocation sharper: if God doesn’t condemn, who benefits from insisting He does?
Rose, a 19th-century freethinker and women’s rights activist, spoke into a culture where “sin” was routinely weaponized to enforce gender hierarchy, sexual restraint, and obedience to religious authority. Her phrasing mimics the pious script: humility, direct address, the desire to be corrected. Then she flips it. God’s silence becomes an indictment of the human voices that rush in to fill it - clergy, lawmakers, moral crusaders - those who claim divine certainty while delivering social control.
The subtext is both spiritual and political. Spiritually, she’s suggesting that conscience and compassion may be more reliable than inherited dogma. Politically, she’s exposing how “sin” often functions as a convenient label for whatever threatens existing power: women speaking in public, dissenters demanding rights, bodies refusing to be governed by other people’s theology.
The line also works because it’s compact and untheatrical. No sermon, no rage. Just a report. That restraint makes the provocation sharper: if God doesn’t condemn, who benefits from insisting He does?
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
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