Faith & Spirit Quote by John Oldham

"Lord of myself" is swagger dressed up as scripture, a self-coronation that tries to make personal autonomy sound not merely permissible but ordained. Oldham’s line works because it fuses two impulses that often compete: the desire to be untouchable and the need to be seen as morally legible. He doesn’t say he answers to no one, full stop. He curates his exemptions. No institutions, no peers, no earthly court - just conscience and God, the two authorities you can’t subpoena.

That’s the trick, and the subtext. Conscience is private, elastic, conveniently inaudible to everyone else. God is absolute, but also rhetorically deployable: an unappealable judge whose verdict conveniently arrives through the speaker’s own certainty. The phrase turns accountability into something internal, even aesthetic - a matter of personal integrity rather than public consequence. It’s independence with a halo.

Context matters: in a culture where status, patronage, and religious legitimacy were intertwined, declaring yourself "accountable to none" is a provocation. It reads like a refusal of hierarchy while still borrowing hierarchy’s language ("Lord") to elevate the self. For a celebrity figure, it’s also instantly recognizable as brand-making: the promise of authenticity, the claim of being answerable only to a higher calling, a preemptive defense against critics. It’s a manifesto of sovereignty that anticipates pushback and neutralizes it by moving the argument to an invisible courtroom where only he holds the evidence.