It is a critical commonplace to suggest that the Gothic is ‘a means of anti-Catholic expression’ (Purves 2009, 3), which, if it has a theology at all, has a single dominant ‘predominantly if not exclusively’ Protestant one (Sage 1988, xxi–xxii). This idea of a monolithic Protestant identity, self-defined in contrast to a feudal and barbaric Catholicism as monstrous Other, leads to the Gothic being read as denominational propaganda with anti-Catholicism as a key ‘Gothic ideology’ (Hoeveler 2014a, 5). However, the Gothic is far from uniformly and universally anti-Catholic. Maria Purves argues for a positive vision of Catholicism and a pro-Catholic impetus in a number of Gothic works and Alison Milbank builds on this by suggesting that the Gothic performs a double movement of ‘critique and appropriation’ (2018, 5) that mirrors the extra-fictional relation of the Anglican to the Catholic Church. These readings add complexity to a binary opposition between Protestant (Anglican) and Catholic and the assumption of a monolithic anti-Catholicism. They also offer insightful readings of a number of key Gothic texts. However, moving beyond the reproduction of a monolithic Protestantism/Anglicanism, arrayed against (or in relation with) a Catholic other allows us to more fully understand the complexity of the Gothic's depiction of the Catholic.

Understanding the Gothic as Anglican retains an implicit emphasis on the Gothic as anti-Catholic by rewriting the Protestant/Catholic binary of anti-Catholic accounts onto a distinction between Anglican and Catholic. The Gothic becomes a form of complex apologetics that justifies the Anglican Church's retention of Catholic elements and emphasises a shared history (and an apostolic succession) at the same time as reinforcing the rejection of Catholicism as an institution and of those Catholic doctrines not supported by the Anglican Church. In reality, however, the period was one of theological diversity within the Anglican Church and among Dissenting groups, involving fierce debates surrounding religious toleration which extended beyond Catholic/Anglican and broader Catholic/Protestant relations. Any focus on the Gothic as representing a single ideological focus risks eliding its engagement with wider questions of theo-politics, theology and institutional critique.