Faith Quote by C. Kilmer Myers

Myers comes in swinging at the aesthetic prison we’ve built for holiness: saints as kitsch. “Pink and blue and gold” isn’t just color; it’s indictment. He’s describing a devotional palette that turns charged, unsettling figures into nursery decor, a safe consumer product. “Plaster statuary” does the heavier work. Plaster is cheap, brittle, mass-producible, the opposite of living presence. The saints aren’t gone; they’ve been relegated - domesticated, downgraded, filed away into a museum of bad taste.

The rhetoric also reveals a modernist impatience with inherited religious imagination. Calling it a “hangover” frames tradition as a bodily aftereffect: the faith isn’t chosen, it’s endured, and it makes you feel a little sick. “Relic” doubles as clever wordplay, since relics are sacred objects, yet here the relic is the whole sentimental apparatus of saint-making. Then comes the real provocation: the “Dark Ages” jab. Myers leans on a familiar (and historically sloppy) progress narrative - medieval equals childish - to position modernity as adulthood, rationality as moral maturation.

Subtext: he’s less interested in theology than in power and taste. When saints become pastel ornaments, they stop being models of disruptive courage, poverty, erotic mysticism, political resistance. They become proof that religion is outdated. That’s the intent: not merely to mock devotion, but to argue that a culture can neutralize its own spiritual radicals by trapping them in cute, breakable objects - and then congratulating itself for outgrowing them.