While Defoe’s position as a Dissenter in a confessionally divided England is consistent and clear in his work, this chapter probes some of the shifts, contradictions, and complexities that characterized that position. These arose when Defoe wrote ‘about’ religion within specific generic forms, and unfolded in the context of religious controversies and against the rise of religious toleration and the taming of Dissent as Britain moved away from the religious wars of the mid 1600s, through the bitter religious politics of the Stuart Restoration, to the new détente conformity and Nonconformity that supported its identity as both a consolidating nation and a complacently ‘Christian’ empire. Alongside this, Defoe’s early writing as a Dissenting controversialist gave way to quasi-allegorical narrative fiction, home piety manuals, and popular studies of the supernatural. These transformations both reflect and played a key role in an Anglican nation’s transition from ’Old Dissent’ to ’New Dissent’. Yet Defoe’s own religion is ’hard to be found’, perhaps best understood as an ongoing experiment with form at a moment when debates about formal expression shaped English religious identity.