Make It Stop!

The suspicion of metaphysics would be more persuasive if, for another example, we imagine that religiously informed governments follow a pattern that invariably ends in some form of the Inquisition, granting civil police powers to religious authorities. ~Joseph Bottum

Mr. Bottum’s entire essay would be more persuasive if he didn’t pepper it with bizarre phrases like “the Counter-Enlightenment of the Left” and bizarre statements like the one quoted above.  The punishments meted out in “the Spanish Inquisition” were carried out by the secular arm.  Religious authorities were never vested with “civil police powers.”  The Inquisition investigated into whether people were heretics, infidels and the like, whereupon it fell to the secular authorities to carry out whatever sentences the law required for profession of heresy or apostasy, and so on.  The ecclesiastical office itself did not carry out any of the punishments that followed from these investigations.  This may seem like a minor point, but Bottum’s essay is riddled with these sorts of lazy claims.