How to Use heretic in a Sentence

heretic

noun
  • The church regards them as heretics.
  • Galileo was condemned as a heretic for supporting Copernicus's thesis that the earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa.
  • Those who don’t cling to the faith are heretics.
    — Kerry Jackson, Oc Register, 4 Feb. 2026
  • Guston, too, was a heretic in flight from the high priests of culture.
    — Sebastian Smee, Washington Post, 4 Sep. 2020
  • Only a heretic could so do, and they can be burned for apostasy.
    — Evan Waite, The New Yorker, 19 May 2020
  • Each of our perspectives is gospel and those who disagree with us are heretics.
    — Cameron Smith, AL.com, 30 Dec. 2017
  • The bishop has to decide whether to have the minister tried as a heretic.
    — Celia Storey, Arkansas Online, 24 May 2021
  • But both creeds share the fate of being treated as heretics by the Sunnis.
    — Halil Karaveli, Foreign Affairs, 11 Sep. 2012
  • The heathen is the enemy, but the heretic is something worse, a traitor.
    — Andrew Stuttaford, National Review, 11 Feb. 2024
  • Bygone heretic hunters and their enablers have become the hunted.
    — Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, 7 Sep. 2017
  • Keeping the state out of the church’s business meant clerics lost the power to suppress heretics by force.
    — The Economist, 4 Nov. 2017
  • Pageantry was at a premium, even for the auto-da-fé, which involved a single heretic and no fire.
    — Matthew Gurewitsch, WSJ, 16 Oct. 2017
  • The stake, with the hooded heretic, the black man or the witch attached to it, is the burning tree and body of the infernal world.
    — John Ganz, Harper's Magazine, 22 May 2024
  • Soon kingdoms plunged into chaos and war, burning heretics and hanging traitors under orders from popes and queens.
    — Kim Heacox, Alaska Dispatch News, 31 Oct. 2017
  • Giordano Bruno, a like-minded heretic, already had been just a few years earlier.
    — Sun Sentinel Editorial Board, Sun Sentinel, 5 Aug. 2025
  • By 1120, the church council in Jerusalem ordered that sodomites, like heretics, be burned at the stake.
    — S. C. Cornell, The New Yorker, 12 Mar. 2025
  • For that and other writings, he was declared a heretic, which led him to further critiques of the papal system.
    — Mike Ellis, USA TODAY, 31 Oct. 2017
  • Like heretics before him, the quarterback faced an informal ban from the sport for his demonstration.
    — Vann R. Newkirk Ii, The Atlantic, 29 Sep. 2017
  • Of course, the ultrafinitist, as the heretic without stable foundations, has a lot more to prove.
    — Quanta Magazine, 29 Apr. 2026
  • What better way to dismiss or delegitimize the heretics than to smear them as covert members of the opposition?
    — Pamela Paul, The Mercury News, 29 June 2024
  • Cronin, a sort of heretic within this heretic group, has his own idea for differentiating between living and not.
    — Sarah Scoles, Scientific American, 13 Jan. 2023
  • In 1431, Joan of Arc, condemned as a heretic, was burned at the stake in Rouen, France.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 30 May 2021
  • In 1431, Joan of Arc, condemned as a heretic, was burned at the stake in Rouen, France.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 30 May 2020
  • The liberal as heretic, pursued and denounced by the angry children of the liberal ideal.
    — John Kass, Twin Cities, 11 June 2017
  • The liberal as heretic, pursued and denounced by the angry children of the liberal ideal.
    — John Kass, chicagotribune.com, 6 June 2017
  • Added to that, in the eyes of Roman Catholic Europe—and many of her own subjects—the new Queen was a heretic.
    — Literary Hub, 4 Nov. 2025
  • To have reservations about something that is treated as sacrosanct is to be an unbeliever, or worse, a heretic, and thus someone to be cast out.
    — Ian Buruma, Harper's Magazine, 2 June 2023
  • The point of dogma is to define and defend the borders of acceptable opinion, and brand anyone who goes outside them as quite simply a heretic.
    — Arianna Huffington, TIME, 11 Dec. 2024
  • His 1559 index counted any books written by people the church deemed heretics – anyone not speaking dogma, in the widest sense.
    — Joëlle Rollo-Koster, The Conversation, 28 Mar. 2025
  • This approach demands that those who were once secular priests—the leaders of the philanthropic sector—abandon their cassocks and accept the mantle of the heretic.
    — Mark Malloch-Brown, Foreign Affairs, 15 Jan. 2024

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'heretic.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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