"There was nothing wrong with shouting at God"
About this Quote
The phrasing matters: "nothing wrong" sounds like a rebuttal to someone else's judgment. The implied scene is a world where people equate faith with quiet compliance, where anger equals failure. Duvall flips that. Shouting becomes a form of engagement, a refusal to go numb. The subtext is almost parental: if God is real enough to love, God is real enough to blame.
It also works because it rejects the clean narrative arc we expect from religious language. It's not "I found peace". It's "I stayed in the fight". That posture has cultural range: from biblical lament to Southern stoicism to the modern therapeutic permission slip to feel what you feel. In a moment when public religion often performs certainty, Duvall's line gives doubt and fury a kind of dignity. It argues that faith isn't proved by calm - it's tested by contact.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
|---|---|
| Source | Verified source: The Apostle: An Interview with Robert Duvall (Robert Duvall, 1998)
Evidence:
There was nothing wrong with shouting at God. (Section: "Both loud and soft"). The earliest primary-source instance I found is in an interview with Robert Duvall about his 1997 film The Apostle. The page identifies the interview as occurring in April 1998 in the Journal of Religion and Film. In the interview's "Both loud and soft" section, Duvall says: "You’re sure right. It did. Sonny shouted as loud as Job ever did. There was nothing wrong with shouting at God." This appears to be Duvall speaking in his own voice about the film, not dialogue from the movie itself. I did not find evidence that this exact wording was first spoken in the film script; instead, it appears to have been published as an interview remark tied to discussion of The Apostle (1997). |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Duvall, Robert. (2026, March 17). There was nothing wrong with shouting at God. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/there-was-nothing-wrong-with-shouting-at-god-134564/
Chicago Style
Duvall, Robert. "There was nothing wrong with shouting at God." FixQuotes. March 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/there-was-nothing-wrong-with-shouting-at-god-134564/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"There was nothing wrong with shouting at God." FixQuotes, 17 Mar. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/there-was-nothing-wrong-with-shouting-at-god-134564/. Accessed 27 Mar. 2026.








