I just keep noticing that the film was indeed full of perverse sexual relations, erotic religious fantasies, misbehaving nuns, cross-dressing courtiers, and harrowing depictions of exorcism and torture, and a day later I'm still thinking about politics, feminism, and the difference and overlap between seventeenth- and twentieth-century ideas of right and wrong.

Exactly! So to concentrate on one to the exclusion of the other is to disembowel the film as a whole, but the fact is, you have to have actually SEEN the film to make that distinction, and very few people have, comparatively. More people by far are qualified to talk about the influence of The Devils on films which came after it--or were prevented from coming after it, by its very example--than they are to talk about The Devils itself.