I knew I wanted to keep doing history professionally. I thought I would go to Harvard to study soldiers' diaries. And my advisor, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, was a recognized expert on colonial diaries. But I got sidetracked in my second year of graduate school. I took Joyce Chaplin's research seminar on race in early America. As I was selecting a topic, I happened upon William Waller Hening's early nineteenth-century edition of Virginia's colonial laws. Almost immediately I noticed that early Virginia lawmakers conflated what moderns would call religious and racial descriptors. So they used the words "English" and "Christian", and later in the seventeenth century, "white," interchangeably. They also conflated words like "black," "tawny," and "savage" with "pagan" or "heathen." Though sometimes Hening introduced these categories in his marginal notes, it was pretty clear that he was picking up on seventeenth-century categories. And so I wondered: what did English people think they were doing when they used the words "English" and "Christian" interchangeably? This was the early 2000s, so race, class, and gender were hot topics. In seminar everyone was talking about the obligatory "Foucault footnote" (my book doesn't have one!). Kathleen Brown's deeply influential book Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (1996) was only a few years old. But what bothered me about a lot of that literature was that religion was incidental....a mere cultural artifact that illustrated the influences of other analytical categories (e.g. race and gender) on the creation