Creativity Quote by Tom T. Hall

Hall’s line lands like a campfire confession delivered with a songwriter’s calm: tender toward the human need for meaning, unsparing about what we do when meaning hardens into moral certainty. “Strange, wonderful” isn’t throat-clearing; it’s a deliberate feint. He grants religion its emotional utilities - community, solace, a vocabulary for grief - before pivoting to the real target: righteousness as a permission slip.

The phrasing “in the name of” matters. Hall isn’t tallying crimes committed by religious people; he’s indicting the rhetorical shield that turns violence into virtue. Righteousness, in this frame, is a costume that lets power feel holy, conquest feel like duty, cruelty feel like discipline. The subtext is country-music plainspoken, but the critique is sophisticated: the more airtight your moral story, the easier it becomes to stop seeing the people on the other end of your actions as fully human.

Contextually, Hall came from and wrote to a world where religion is less an abstract debate than a daily atmosphere - church as social hub, moral authority, political weather. In that setting, calling religion “wonderful” reads like insider language, the kind that keeps listeners from shutting down. Then he slips in the blade: the greatest danger isn’t belief, it’s the intoxicating certainty that you are the righteous one. That’s how you get crusades and lynch mobs, yes, but also smaller violences: shunning, coercion, the casual confidence of “God told me.” Hall’s genius is making that indictment sing without sounding like a lecture.