Justice & Law Quote by Jonathan Lethem

Lethem frames a liberal, late-20th-century American upbringing in the language of devotion, and the word choice is doing almost all the work. “Religion” isn’t a compliment here; it’s a diagnostic. By calling the arts, civil rights values, and “the overwhelming virtue of diversity” a faith, he suggests these commitments operated with the intensity, certainty, and identity-making power once reserved for church. That’s both affectionate and faintly skeptical: “worshipped” implies reverence, but also a habit of sanctifying ideas until they become immune to scrutiny.

The subtext is generational. Lethem’s parents stand in for a cohort that traded inherited doctrine for a secular canon: museums instead of cathedrals, protest history instead of scripture, pluralism as the central moral narrative. It’s a portrait of how postwar urban intellectual life built meaning after traditional belief loosened its grip. The arts aren’t just entertainment; they’re a moral training ground. Civil rights isn’t merely politics; it’s a story about what kind of person you’re allowed to be.

That phrase “overwhelming virtue of diversity” is deliberately emphatic, almost baiting. It nods to the way “diversity” can harden into a slogan, a ritual word that signals righteousness even as its content gets fuzzier. Lethem isn’t disavowing the ideals; he’s pointing to their cultural function: they became a liturgy for people who needed a religion but couldn’t stomach religion. The line captures both the beauty of that inheritance and its blind spot: when values become sacred, disagreement starts to look like heresy.