Art & Creativity Quote by Richard Morris

A cleric admitting he is irritated by a hymn showing up in a car commercial is doing something more complicated than scolding the culture. He is acknowledging a modern reality: sacred music no longer lives inside a protected ecosystem. It circulates where the people are, and the people are, increasingly, in the marketplace. The line “or some such” carries a weary shrug, a recognition that commercialization is not a one-off offense but the default setting of public sound.

Morris’s real move is triage. He draws a bright emotional boundary (“It bothers me”) and then immediately concedes the strategic point (“for the most part, it’s better”). That pivot is the subtext: purity has become a luxury, survival the priority. The fear underneath “scrap heap” isn’t just aesthetic decline; it’s cultural amnesia. Sacred music, once a communal technology for memory and moral formation, risks becoming museum material - revered, but unused.

The quote also quietly reframes what “reverence” means. Morris implies that being heard imperfectly may be preferable to not being heard at all. That’s an uneasy bargain for a clergyman: accepting that a tune meant to lift the soul might now sell horsepower, yet still believing the melody retains a residual charge. In his calculus, the greater blasphemy is silence.