It is not hard to see why the links between religion and national identity interested historians in the 1990s. To begin with, the times in which they wrote drew attention to the subject. With the collapse of communism, for example, racial and religious conflicts resurfaced in eastern Europe. Yugoslavia crumbled as catholic Croatians, orthodox Serbs and muslim Bosnians took up arms, and in Poland, the catholic church re-emerged as a potent political force. In Northern Ireland, too, both the IRA's war, and the ‘peace process’, threw into stark relief the issues dividing the loyalist and nationalist communities – and as Steve Bruce forcefully contended, religion was central to that conflict. In addition, for historians of eighteenth–century Britain, religion became a subject of immense importance. After the neglect of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Jonathan Clark's English society, 1688–1832 (1985) sought to ‘reintegrate religion into … [our] historical vision’ of the Georgian era. It succeeded in doing so, as did studies by other scholars such as Grayson Ditchfield, Jeremy Gregory, David Hempton, Stephen Taylor and John Walsh. Consequently, many historians came to accept Jeremy Black's judgement that anti-catholicism was ‘arguably the prime ideological commitment of most of the population’ or Linda Colley's statement that ‘Protestantism was the foundation that made the invention of Great Britain possible.’ Such an acceptance would not have been widespread twenty years before.

The main contribution of anti-catholicism to national identity in the Georgian era was to construct the European continent as fundamentally alien. If, in the nineteenth century, protestant Englishmen saw Irish catholics as ‘the other', whose many failings negatively denned and extolled the former's values, continental papists were ‘the other’ for protestant Britons in the preceding century.