Faith & Spirit Quote by Rick Moody

Moody’s line performs a neat little sacrilege on the reader before it even gets to “blasphemy.” “I suppose” is faux-modest throat-clearing, the kind of hedging you use when you’re about to say something socially impolite and you want the impoliteness to land anyway. It’s also a wink: the speaker knows how sanctimony polices language, so he wraps his defiance in a shrug.

Then comes the real inversion. Blasphemy usually depends on faith; you can’t profane what you don’t take seriously. Moody flips that dependency into a value system: blasphemy isn’t a lapse from belief, it’s a belief - “a faith of the highest order.” The phrase weaponizes religious diction (“treasure,” “faith,” “highest order”) to argue that the most sincere ethical posture might be the refusal of sacred cows. It’s not atheism-as-absence; it’s dissent-as-devotion.

The subtext is literary as much as theological. Novelists live on the right to say the unsayable: to puncture the stories a culture calls holy - nation, family, purity, success - and to expose how those stories justify cruelty or self-deception. By calling blasphemy a “treasure,” Moody frames provocation as stewardship: not edgy vandalism, but a disciplined practice of testing idols for rot.

Contextually, it reads like late-20th/early-21st century American unease with inherited authority, where irony becomes both shield and scalpel. Moody isn’t celebrating mere offense; he’s defending the moral necessity of disrespect when reverence turns lazy.