Faith & Spirit Quote by Arthur Hertzberg

Hertzberg doesn’t just denounce fundamentalism; he steals its own moral staging and flips the lights. Calling fundamentalists "the enemies of God" is a deliberately provocative inversion of the usual script, where fundamentalists cast themselves as God’s deputized defenders. The line works because it’s framed in the language of theological combat, then aimed at the people who typically monopolize that language. It’s a boundary-drawing maneuver inside the religious world, not an atheist dunk from the outside.

The subtext is a defense of a messier, argument-driven faith: Judaism and Christianity as traditions of interpretation, not frozen rulebooks. Hertzberg implies that fundamentalism isn’t merely wrong on policy or doctrine; it’s a form of idolatry, substituting certainty, literalism, and tribal power for the divine. "All other forms" widens the target beyond familiar interfaith skirmishes to a broader pathology: any movement that treats complexity as betrayal and doubts as contamination.

Then comes the mic-drop: "and I hope you’ll quote me on that". That tag is media-savvy and strategic. He’s not whispering an intra-clerical complaint; he’s pushing a sound bite into public circulation, daring institutions and audiences to repeat it. The context here is late-20th-century public religion, when fundamentalist movements were increasingly visible as political engines and cultural identity machines. Hertzberg’s intent is to deny them the sacred high ground and reclaim a different kind of authority: one that argues, interprets, and admits the terrifying possibility that God can’t be captured by anyone’s slogans.