The subject of atheism in the Reformation era is caught awkwardly between two ill-fitting facts. First, ‘atheism’, strictly defined, was rare if not actively impossible in this period. Second, accusations of atheism, and moral panic about its spread, were nevertheless ubiquitous. It is in trying to reconcile these two facts that we can reach some understanding of how the Reformation era proved to be a decisive phase in the history of unbelief.

The claim that atheism was inconceivable in the Reformation age is usually associated with the great French literary scholar Lucien Febvre, and it is conventional for modern historians of the subject to begin by ridiculing this claim as overblown, but in fact Febvre’s position was subtler than is usually allowed.

The myth of the Church of England is that such a thing exists. That the institution which goes by that name is more than just ‘an English church’, more even than ‘the church by law established within England’; that it is now, and has been since time out of mind (for the date is contentious), ecclesia Anglicana, the definitive national Church which constitutes, or at least ought to constitute, the religious life of England’s Christian people. Like most myths, it seems futile to ask whether or not it is factually accurate. It has a persistent importance quite separate from the question of whether it is true or false.

The Church of England’s shifting and contested identity, and the meaning and boundaries of ‘Anglicanism’, have been recurrent themes in Diarmaid MacCulloch’s scholarship and continue to provoke rich and profound historical and theological discussion. This essay attempts something altogether more modest and superficial. It looks at the myth of the Church of England from the perspective of terminology, looking at two labels which, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, acquired new meanings and hardened into orthodoxies: ‘the Church of England’ and ‘Anglican’.

Christianity is, as Diarmaid MacCulloch has observed, not so much a ‘religion’ in the conventional sense as a personality cult: an extraordinarily diverse and quarrelsome family of faiths which agree on almost nothing except putting the figure of Jesus of Nazareth at their centre. But there are a handful of other features very widely shared across that family, one of which, ironically enough, is the concept of orthodoxy: literally, ‘right opinion’. As historians, it is not our role to assess which doctrinal truth-claims are right; nor can we responsibly assume that they are all wrong. We can, however, observe that Christians see the matter as profoundly important. They may never have been able to agree on the doctrinal expression of their beliefs, but they have generally agreed that they ought in principle to be able to do so. The notion that there is a ‘catholic’, or universal, Christian faith – that which, according to the famous fifth-century formula, has been believed everywhere, at all times, and by all people – is itself an act of faith: to reconcile it with the historical fact of persistent division and plurality requires a ruthless willingness to exclude some self-professed Christians, or an indulgent readiness to include others, or (more commonly) some combination of the two. And yet, if Christian orthodoxy and the one holy, catholic and apostolic church which is its custodian are more visible to the eye of faith than to the historian, historians cannot avoid the persistent power of the ideal of orthodoxy, which Christians have never (yet) attained but for which they have always strived. This volume is about the pursuit of that ideal and its consequences for the history of Christianity.

This gap between a universally recognised Christianity throughout all ages and places and the myriad competing conventions of its widely diffuse local embodiments is so persistent that it seems to be not an aberration but part of the very nature of Christian faith itself. The missiologist Andrew Walls has argued that the Incarnation was a ‘divine act of translation’. The Word becoming flesh accepted one local human culture as suitable for the particularisation of universal truth. Ever since, each Christian community has believed that in Scripture ‘God is speaking to its own situation’.