Faith & Spirit Quote by Ethan A. Hitchcock

“Religious” is doing double duty here: Hitchcock uses it as both a description and an indictment. He’s not praising faith; he’s exposing a kind of piety that thrives when belief has been hollowed into performance. The line’s core move is a contrast between spirit and scaffolding. Religion, in his telling, has been “buried” inside rituals that look devout but function like a lid on dissent. The word choice matters: buried suggests something once living, now entombed, and it quietly accuses the faithful of participating in a funeral they refuse to acknowledge.

The real target is the alliance between clerical authority and the state. When “the priesthood had armed itself with the civil powers,” Hitchcock is pointing to an old political technology: turn moral legitimacy into legal force, then call repression “order.” He’s describing religion not as private conviction but as an institution that can conscript courts, police, and social penalties to make disagreement feel like treason. That’s why his list of suppressed freedoms escalates: intellectual first (control the mind), civil next (control public life), religious last (control even the terms of salvation). The sequence implies a comprehensive lockdown, a system where you can’t think, act, or worship outside approved channels.

Contextually, this reads like a 19th-century American soldier’s wary intelligence about power dressed up as virtue. Hitchcock isn’t anti-religion; he’s anti-theocracy-by-proxy, skeptical of any “forms and ceremonies” that become a costume for coercion. The subtext is blunt: the loudest religion often appears precisely when genuine freedom is most in danger.