Love Quote by Todd Rundgren

A line like this lands the way a great Rundgren hook does: it sounds offhand, even tossed off, until you realize it’s carrying a whole argument about faith, taste, and the disastrous allure of charisma. “The God that can only love something like this man” is a deliberately skewed construction. It doesn’t just judge “this man”; it shrinks the deity too, recasting God as a partisan fan with a bizarre, narrow type. Rundgren flips the usual religious move (God as the ultimate moral standard) into something more human and therefore more suspect: a God whose “love” reads like endorsement, branding, or complicity.

The second sentence is the punchline and the diagnosis. “And from then on it was all downhill” has the shrugging fatalism of someone recounting a cultural turning point they can’t unsee. It’s not apocalyptic; it’s weary. The downhill run suggests a moment when reverence got attached to the wrong figure and the rest of the story became predictable: followers excusing cruelty, institutions laundering reputations, a community confusing devotion with judgment suspended.

As a musician, Rundgren isn’t sermonizing; he’s doing what pop lyricists do best: compressing a whole climate into a couple of barbed lines. The subtext is less “God is bad” than “watch who gets sanctified.” In an era of celebrity-as-salvation, the quote reads like a warning about how quickly worship - religious or cultural - can turn into permission.