The English Reformation was primarily a top-down revolution which aimed to abolish the popular Christianity of the times and replace it with the imagined Christianity of the Reformers.
“The English Reformation was primarily a top-down revolution which aimed to abolish the popular Christianity of the times and replace it with the imagined Christianity of the Reformers.”
Oh, I think you are right to a great extent. I think the Canterbury mission of +Augustine was essentially the same thing, replacing a sort of indigenous Christianity whose monasticism was heavily influenced by the Eastern Desert experience with the Western Roman model. Canonically, BTW, what +Augustine did was of course appropriate and correct, the Pope being the unquestioned Patriarch of the West.
But traces of the Eastern Desert are still there! :)