 Stirner’s account of the historical development of modernity largely revolves around a single event, the Reformation. He attempts to show that, from the perspective of the individual, the movement from Catholic to Protestant hegemony is not a liberating one, but instead constitutes both an extension and intensification of the domination of spirit. The Reformation extends, rather than contracts, the sphere of religious control over the individual because it refuses to recognise the distinction between the spiritual and the sensuous. Rather than preventing priests marrying, for example, Protestantism makes marriage religious, thereby extending the sphere of the spiritual to include the sensuous. The Reformation also intensifies, rather than relaxes, the bond between individuals and religion. The more inward faith of Protestantism, for example, establishes a perpetual internal conflict between natural impulses and religious conscience. In a typically vivid and combative metaphor, Stirner describes this internal conflict in the individual as analogous to the struggle between the population and the secret police in the contemporary body politic.