Creativity Quote by Robyn Hitchcock

Hitchcock nails the strange modern condition: the instinct for reverence is intact, but the object of reverence keeps slipping out of focus. He stacks the verbs - religious, worship, build - like a drumbeat, making devotion feel less like a thoughtful choice and more like a bodily reflex. Then he undercuts it with that flat, almost comic kicker: "but nobody's sure in honor of what". It's a shrug with teeth.

The intent isn’t to mock belief so much as to spotlight the machinery of belief. Totems, shrines, icons: he picks physical nouns, the kinds of things you can buy, display, pilgrimage toward. That matters, because it nudges the listener away from theology and toward culture. Even when traditional institutions thin out, the urge to ritualize doesn't vanish; it migrates. Celebrity becomes liturgy. Brands become saints. Politics becomes a moral theater where sinners and the saved are sorted in public. The subtext is that "secular" life didn’t kill religion - it franchised it.

Contextually, Hitchcock comes out of a post-60s, post-punk ecosystem where sincerity and suspicion share the same stage. His songwriting often treats reality as slightly askew, and this line fits: it’s both funny and unsettling. He’s describing a society awash in symbols and starving for meaning, where people keep building altars because the alternative is admitting that longing itself might be the only god left.