Nature & Animals Quote by Max Cannon

Max Cannon’s line lands because it treats “religious” less as theology and more as a tell: the moment a preference hardens into identity. “Pet things” sounds small and domestic, the kind of harmless obsession you indulge like a hobby. Then he spikes it with “religious,” a word loaded with devotion, ritual, and heresy. The friction between those registers is the point. Cannon is naming how quickly we upgrade taste into moral posture, especially in creative worlds where liking the right music, the right medium, the right politics-adjacent aesthetic can become a proxy for being a good person.

As an artist, he’s also quietly indicting the culture of scenes: the gallery crowd that treats a style as doctrine, the fandom that polices dissent, the activist-adjacent circles where nuance reads as betrayal. The line doesn’t accuse anyone of faith; it accuses us of craving the emotional payoff of faith - certainty, belonging, righteous heat - without admitting that’s what we’re doing. “We all” is a disarming move: he’s not standing outside the behavior, he’s confessing complicity. That inclusiveness makes the critique harder to swat away as elitism.

The subtext is about scale and control. When life feels messy, a “pet thing” is manageable; you can master its rules, defend its borders, win arguments. Getting “religious” about it gives you a ready-made tribe and an enemy. Cannon’s intent isn’t to mock passion; it’s to warn how devotion curdles into sanctimony, and how art and culture become less about curiosity than conversion.