Following the Second World War, many scholars writing on Shinto were also priests; they wrote from the perspective of active proponents. The result of this practice was to depict the actual history of a dynamic and diverse set of beliefs interacting with knowledge and religion from mainland China as static and unchanging formed by the imperial family centuries ago. Some secular scholars accused these individuals of blurring theology with historical analysis. In the late 1970s and 1980s the work of a secular historian Kuroda Toshio attempted to frame the prior held historical views of Shinto not as a timeless "indigenous" entity, but rather an amalgam of various local beliefs infused over time with outside influences through waves of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. Part of his analysis is that this obfuscation was a cloak for Japanese ethnic nationalism used by state institutions especially in the Meiji and post war era to underpin the Japanese national identity.