The book describes how the Reformation dismissed the fullness of Christ's mysterious but real Presence in the Eucharist, yet how this sacramental Presence continued to re-emerge in other discourse, particularly in politics and literature -- to use crude imagery, it's repression developed into a type of sacramental "wack-a-mole" -- the doctrine of the Real Presence of God in Christ in the materiality of the bread and the wine re-emerged in the language even secularized authors.

And I do mean repression. The theological shifts of Reformation theology away from the fullness of Christ's Eucharistic presence was accompanied by a rise in the state's co-optation of these Christian symbols like a Saturday Night Live skit. Schwartz, drawing on the best historical scholarship of 16th century England, writes:

Representations of the monarch proliferated at the same time as the systematic destruction of statues in churches, the tearing down of crosses, smashing of funerary monuments, melting down of silver plates, burning of exquisite tapestry and carving, and obliteration of fine art. While Church iconography was destroyed and Church ceremonies were strongly curtailed, the state was simultaneously embracing images and processionals full of pomp and ceremony. . . . Even as it attenuated the substantial character of the Church, the state constructed itself as a substantial entity. If the once-material body of Christ was now a metaphor, conversely, the metaphor of ‘the state’ was now materialized, in spades" (p. 31).

Christopher Dawson, and more recently, Michael Burleigh, have documented a similar, but much more violent shift, in the secularized theological agenda of the French Revolution a century later. The rise of the legitimacy of the contemporary nation-state depended upon, and still depends upon, the sacramental legitimacy stolen from the rites of the church.

The implications of this should be noted for Christians: it is not that Christians are hostile to the modern(ist) European nation-state; it is that the nation-state has lived -- and still lives off its sublimated antagonism that it has towards the church, particularly if the church refuses to sustain its own life by refusing the legimate a transcendental agenda for the state. Schwartz, who does not mask her Jewish commitments against idolatry in her work, continues to help thicken our understanding of the roots of Western secularism: it originated in late medieval shifts in sacramental ecclesiology and exists as a Christian heresy through active coercive repression of the life of the church.