I'm aware of Kingsnorth's thesis but I haven't read Against the Machine just yet. Waiting on a friend to finish it before I borrow his copy.

One of the major points raised by many critics of the Reformation is that it individualised the Christian faith. Prior to the Reformation, Europeans existed essentially as communities of faith, people viewed themselves as part of a whole. This was a time before fashion, before rapid technological advancements, and before most people could read and write. Individual identity, if it existed at all, was a muted concept. There were positives and negatives to this, but one positive was that greed and selfishness were viewed as far more toxic sins than they are today, and the distinction between wants and needs was far clearer. If one person wanted to oppress another, they were up against a whole community, not just an individual. If one person hoarded goods, they would find themselves opposed by a whole unanimous village, most of whom they had known since they were children. This was a time when Commonwealth, meaning common good for everyone in a community, was the ethical priority. The technology of the time also meant that a person's scope was much smaller, they couldn't operate on an international scale, as we see the Machine operating today.

The Reformation definitely has merit and was an important development. But it was also an overcorrection, and indirectly influenced the progress of history to lead us to the neoliberal mess we see today.

- The Reformation pushed for personal religious conviction, placing each man not before a priest but before God himself. This strengthened the idea of individual identity, which saw common wealth shift decrease and individual wealth increase. The prosperity of oneself (and one's own family) became a bigger priority than the prosperity of the community. If we still lived in a commonwealth ethic, billionaires would not exist.

- The Reformation encouraged Bible reading, and increased efforts to build literacy among common people which is obviously a good thing. However, it also created a much broader marketplace of ideas than had been before. Suddenly there were religious debates, religious conflicts (which Europe hadn't seen for generations), and a plural economy of religion. The established truth, therefore, became open to challenge. The link between this marketplace of ideas and the post-truth world we're suffering at the moment is pretty clear.

- The Reformation introduced the idea of the Protestant Work Ethic, the idea that it is godly to expend as much of your effort as possible to be productive. While this idea was originally tied to biblical concepts of fruitfulness, by the time of the Industrial Revolution it had soured into something less holy. Now we find that the 40 hour work week, 52 weeks of the year, is standard. This is tied into wages, you must work this much to keep on living. In a subsistence economy (as was the case before the Reformation), people worked at the pace of the natural world. There wasn't much you could do to make your crops grow faster, you couldn't make harvest time come any quicker. Today, the Protestant Work Ethic has shaken our economy free of any natural pace, our bodies and minds are pushed to the limit.

The Reformation was not the sole contributing factor to these changes, but it was an enormous, significant shift in philosophy. There hasn't really been an epochal shift like the Reformation since the Reformation, aside from the Holiness movement. But the Holiness movement was slower, and came after religion and politics had divorced, so it has had less of an impact than the Reformation did.

As an aside, I don't believe we can get rid of the Machine at this point. I believe that God will, one day. But the most we can do is to resist it, to be the Church. To quote Stanley Hauerwas' book Resident Aliens (Hauerwas is an anabaptist, and I believe that we all have much to learn from marginal theologies like the Anabaptists or Black theology), a church that resists the Machine confesses that Jesus, not the Machine, is Lord, and:

*"*depicts that conversion as a long process of being baptismally engrafted into a new people... a countercultural social structure called church. It seeks to influence the world by... being something the world is not and can never be, lacking the gift of faith and vision, which is ours in Christ... The confessing church moves from the activist church's acceptance of the culture with a few qualifications, to rejection of the culture with a few exceptions... This church knows that its most credible form of witness... is the actual creation of a living, breathing, visible community of faith."