Life & Wisdom Quote by Sarah Vowell

Vowell’s line collapses American civic religion into a single weary exhale. By stacking Jesus and Moses alongside Lincoln and Jefferson, she’s not just being provocative; she’s exposing how naturally the U.S. talks about politics in biblical tones, and how easily faith and patriotism borrow each other’s props. The genius is in the verbs: “can seem” leaves room for reverence, but it’s a hedge that signals modern skepticism. These figures are still invoked as if they’re on retainer, yet they feel “long gone” because the culture that needs them is no longer sure it believes in anything the way earlier generations did.

The repetition - “so long gone, so unbelievable, so dead” - works like a slow drumbeat against nostalgia. “Unbelievable” isn’t only about miracles or myth; it’s about the difficulty of trusting any grand origin story, sacred or national, in an era trained to fact-check and debunk. And “dead” lands with deliberate bluntness: not passed down, not transcendent, just biologically finished. The line punctures the comforting fantasy that the Founders and prophets are timeless referees who can settle our arguments.

Contextually, this is Vowell doing what she does best: treating U.S. history as a storytelling problem. The subtext isn’t that these people don’t matter; it’s that we keep demanding they matter in ways that spare us the harder work of making meaning - and policy - without saints.