From Marginalia-At some point in the second half of the twentieth century, England somewhat unexpectedly ceased to be a Protestant nation. It has been undergoing a seismic cultural shift of a similar order to that which it experienced in the sixteenth century, when it even more unexpectedly ceased to be a Catholic nation. Both of these profound changes were intimately linked to epoch-making technological innovations in the media: the Gutenberg Revolution in the early modern era, and the rise first of television and then of the internet in recent times.
The strange death of Protestant England, not to be confused with English Protestantism, which still flourishes in diverse forms, has had major implications for our understanding of that earlier cultural shift, which we label “the English Reformation.” On the one hand, with English identity no longer so tightly bound up with Protestantism, more critical approaches to the Reformation have been able to gain a wider hearing, enabling some hallowed myths to be challenged. On the other, with all forms of Christianity more muted in public discourse and consciousness, and with the differences among them less clear even to Christians, let alone to the rest of the population, it gets daily more difficult for people to understand what was going on and what was at stake four or five hundred years ago. A modicum of critical distance has been achieved, then, but the gain in criticism is to some extent offset by the increase in distance. That increased distance is best measured by a change in the terminology of historical periodization. For the Reformation as a whole has, in living memory, been relegated from “modern history,” within which it still tended to be located back in the 1950s, to what is now called “early modern history.”
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http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/disenchanting-english-reformation/
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