"I can't really put it in one sentence because although on one hand Preacher is about faith and yes it is also about, I suppose, the search for God, the search for faith and the manipulation and the abuse committed by figures in whom I suppose people have faith"
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Ennis can barely keep his own premise inside the polite boundaries of a logline, and that refusal is the point. “Preacher” isn’t pitched as a tidy spiritual quest; it’s an argument with the machinery of belief. The sentence starts with the concession you’d expect from respectable religious storytelling - faith, the search for God - then swerves into what Ennis is actually interested in: what happens when faith gets routed through human institutions that crave power.
The repetition of “search” signals a genre expectation: pilgrimage, revelation, meaning. But Ennis immediately muddies it with “manipulation” and “abuse,” words that drag the conversation out of private spirituality and into public accountability. He’s framing belief as something that can be exploited precisely because it’s sincere. People don’t get conned by cynicism; they get conned by hope, by hunger for moral clarity, by the desire to hand the steering wheel to someone who sounds certain.
That “I suppose” cropping up twice is doing quiet work. It reads like a writer distancing himself from piety without pretending neutrality. Ennis isn’t preaching atheism so much as interrogating authority: priests, prophets, icons, any “figure” whose charisma becomes a substitute for conscience. In the context of “Preacher” - a comic infamous for mixing the sacred with the grotesque - this is a mission statement: use blasphemy not as cheap shock, but as a crowbar. The target isn’t God; it’s the men who claim the right to speak for Him.
The repetition of “search” signals a genre expectation: pilgrimage, revelation, meaning. But Ennis immediately muddies it with “manipulation” and “abuse,” words that drag the conversation out of private spirituality and into public accountability. He’s framing belief as something that can be exploited precisely because it’s sincere. People don’t get conned by cynicism; they get conned by hope, by hunger for moral clarity, by the desire to hand the steering wheel to someone who sounds certain.
That “I suppose” cropping up twice is doing quiet work. It reads like a writer distancing himself from piety without pretending neutrality. Ennis isn’t preaching atheism so much as interrogating authority: priests, prophets, icons, any “figure” whose charisma becomes a substitute for conscience. In the context of “Preacher” - a comic infamous for mixing the sacred with the grotesque - this is a mission statement: use blasphemy not as cheap shock, but as a crowbar. The target isn’t God; it’s the men who claim the right to speak for Him.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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