In David Coleman’s 2007 book, Drama and the Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century England, he describes how the Reformation’s redefinition of the Christian sacraments (in contrast to how they were traditionally defined by the Roman Church) was essentially a nation-building strategy:
“[S]acraments become a means by which the realm [the commonwealth in this case], rather than the individual, can achieve a state of grace. On one level, this is similar to the vision of a well-ordered society imagined in the late medieval sacramental sociology; but that conception of sacramentality coexists with an extensive ritual system designed to conform to a pattern of individual lives. Edwardian [that is, Reformation era] sacramentality, reduced to just baptism and the eucharist, does not: that is, Edwardian sacramentality privileges the commonwealth over the individual, rhetorically drawing together the mass of individuals into a ‘unified’ whole. It is part of the nation-building strategies of the Edwardian regime, and suggests another example of how sacramental ideologies are employed at various points throughout the century to configure the relationship between the individuals and society.”
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