A version of this piece was originally published some six years ago on my now-defunct Wordpress blog. But if you’ll forgive the reusing of an old piece, I think it is worthwhile enough to share here with significant updating. Religious experience has long had a privileged place in American Protestant thought and practice. The particular way in which religious experience is discussed varies, of course. On one hand, you have Evangelical talk about one’s personal relationship with God and emphasis on the emotional and experiential drama of conversion. On the other side of the theological spectrum, liberals are often wiling to reformulate or even revise doctrine or practice based on contemporary experiences of God, especially the experiences of those of us who have been oppressed or marginalized based on race, gender, sexuality, or other identity category. Yet for all their differences, the red-faced revival preacher and the gentle, nonjudgmental Mainliner share a commitment to an understanding of individual religious experience as the unmediated, unalienated, authentic “stuff” upon which Christian faith (or religion as such) is founded, the base (to borrow a Marxist term of art) upon which the superstructure of theology, religious practice, ethics, and the rest depend. But what if that commitment was wrong, and wrong in a way which makes the genuine good of religious experience bear more than it can, turning it from a gift to a requirement? I will sketch out an argument that this notion of religious experience is anthropologically and theologically suspect, and offer an account of the Christian life that seeks to properly situate religious feeling within a broader