In the later nineteenth century, British, Canadian and American Evangelicals set up transatlantic religious networks to fight the Catholic Church and to affirm their Protestant Anglophone identities. Accordingly, Evangelical militants perceived their struggle as being transnational despite the diametrically different State–Church relationship contexts—which went from full separation in the United States to British church establishment, along with the intermediary Canadian situation ( de facto disestablishment). When nineteenth‐century Anglophone States took over from the Churches the responsibility of educating the youth, militant Evangelicals seized the prospect to ensure that public schools would preserve the essence of a broad Protestant spirit. Furthermore, Evangelical activists relentlessly fought against any form of public subsidies for Catholic schools. This article focuses on the issue of education and reconsiders the wars on religion in the schools, bringing into light the similarities and parallels of said quarrels set in different national contexts.

The anthropologists of religion Mary Douglas (d. 2007) and Louis Dumont (d. 1998) developed analytical concepts that can illuminate aspects of the medieval Church which are articulately distilled into a letter of Pope Innocent III (d. 1216). Mary Douglas associated “high grid” (meaning thoroughgoing social classification) with “condensed symbolism.” The combination can occur in both literate and non‐literate cultures. She found the combination in her own fieldwork on the Lele of the Kasai, and Victor Turner's work on the Ndembu of Zambia. It is also strikingly evident, once one looks, in a letter in which Innocent III abandoned genre restraint to write an essay on anointing and hierarchy in the Church as he understood it, which was quite well, since he was not only an observer, but a participant with great power over the system. Dumont, an approximate contemporary of Douglas, provides insights, supplementing those of Douglas, that further enhance understanding of Innocent III's letter and the whole social system which it instantiates. With the help of Mary Douglas, Louis Dumont and Innocent's essay on unction, we can identify a social form which, without being universal, transcends particular regions and periods.