Many secular cult members including agnostics, atheists and cultural Marxists view the medieval period as one long dark age. The opposite is true. The modern world was developed in Christianized Europe. Today the secularist cult worships the union of the church and state, with the religion of the state being post-modern cultural Marxist baffle-gab. Unsurprisingly these people don't see the hypocrisy of demonizing the creators of the modern world – European Christians – and their own prostration to the unified political-theological governance of state power. Part of the growth of modern secular and post-modern Marxist cant flows from the protestant revolution which in the 16^th century divided Europe into 2 religious blocs, and began a centuries-long campaign against the Papist Roman church. Elton's book tries to reveal why this happened, and why it had such a profound impact on our own world.

The corruption of the Papacy and its church minions was rife. High church taxes, indulgences, trinket selling to offset 'sins', the rather ridiculous servicing in Latin and not local dialects, the perceived elitist and opulent lives of the clergy; the elevation of the supernatural over the practical; these and many other issues would have persuaded a large portion of the population that reform was long overdue. Good for them. But as Elton points out, a main impetus for the protest revolution was nationalism, the creation of a viable and unified theology to coalesce interests within a national domain, and the potential to appropriate Church lands and revenue streams:

“..governments enforced uniformity and hence the religion of the ruler was that of his country.”

National interests were valid reasons, along with the need for spiritual reform, to cast off the Papacy and get back to basics.

“In short, the Reformation maintained itself wherever the lay power (prince or magistrates) favoured it; it could not survive where the authorities decided to suppress it. Scandinavia, the German principalities, Geneva, in its own peculiar way also England, demonstrate the first; Spain, Italy, the Habsburg lands in the east, and also (though not as yet conclusively) France, the second.”

There is little doubt that without German princely aid, Luther himself would not have lived long. The Lutheran outburst was always linked with nationalism and even ethnicity. Casting off the yoke of the Papacy and ending the large amounts of transferred monies to Rome, was an early rallying cry for the Reformists and their secular-Nationalist allies. Indeed in the 13^th century the Albigensian revolt and heresy was prompted mainly by not only theological differences but also political and economic. At some point in the development of nation states, political and economic control must reside within the borders. This would mean an evolutionary linkage of politics to national theology and the creation, as Henry VIII so cleverly contrived in England of a national church, dedicated to national aims, and part of the differentiated national character:

“The Reformation was successful beyond the dreams of earlier, potentially similar, movements not so much because (as the phrase goes) the time was ripe for it, but rather because it found favour with the secular arm. Desire for Church lands, resistance to imperial and papal claims, the ambition to create self-contained and independent states, all played their part in this, but so quite often did a genuine attachment to the teachings of the reformers.”

The nexus of spiritual reform, politics, and economic advantage made the creation of a new Church within Europe [or a new set of churches] inevitable. The Roman Church which had saved Christendom from Islam, had outgrown its usefulness. This often happens with supra-national institutions, including today's United Nations Organisation and its affiliates like the IMF and World Bank. Europe's dynamism and the cultural willingness to change, create, re-invent and progress was a derivative of the fast-changing innovative centuries of the Middle Ages. It is a spirit that no longer exists in the Europe of today.