"Before I knowed it, I was sayin’ out loud, ‘The hell with it! There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do. It’s all part of the same thing. And some of the things folks do is nice, and some ain’t nice, but that’s as far as any man got a right to say.’"
– John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 4. The former evangelical minister Jim Casy rebels against classical religion. He dismisses the traditional black-and-white idea of virtue and sin as taught by Christian churches. How humans should or shouldn’t act is a gray area, where people don’t have a right to judge what is right and wrong, he feels. Conventional Christianity is not fit for purpose, as he sees it. It is not capable of helping people in their misery at a time of national crisis such as the Dust Bowl catastrophe.