During the nineteenth century, pioneering anthropologists like E. B. Tylor and William Robertson Smith began to theorize religion not as a matter of personal belief but rather, as Smith put it, as "a part of the organized social life into which a man was born." This study explores how such theories circulated through Victorian literary culture and came to inform the thinking of writers like Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, Walter Pater, Andrew Lang, Robert Louis Stevenson, and the young W. B. Yeats. I examine what was at stake, for these figures, in shifting the normative locus of religion from inward conviction to collective inheritance; in particular, I consider what it had to do with their liberalism---their commitment to ideals of self-cultivation, disinterestedness, and cosmopolitanism. Recent commentators like Talal Asad have argued that historically the rise of the self-bracketing liberal subject turned upon the compartmentalization of religion as a matter of personal belief. What figures like Pater and Eliot show us, however, is that for a growing number of Victorian liberals valorizing religion as something that one did not choose served as an alternative strategy for transforming it into a resource for the reflective self. This strategy emerged first among literary thinkers because it grew out of the aesthetic ethos called "many-sidedness," which saw yielding to multiple, even contradictory commitment as the path to self-enrichment. In its very opacity to reason, religion, understood as something that inscribed one prior to choice, could help build up an eclectic self, a self whose internal heterogeneity made it more complex than reason alone.My chapters form a series of case studies that explore how Victorian literary liberals drew on anthropological models to think through such issues as religion's place within the state, the relationship between religious conversion and cultivated individualism, and the place of nationalism within a globalizing literary public. My first chapter uses the monogenesis-polygenesis debates of the 1840--60s to explore how, for Victorian humanitarians, treating religious differences as the acquired products of custom, environment, and language---what we would call cultural differences---could be seen both as an alternative to racial determinism and as a form of determinism in its own right. My second chapter explores how Matthew Arnold's religious essays of the 1860s and 1870s drew upon racial anthropology to construct a complex analogy between race and religion as modes of narrow commitment that represent both dangers and resources for the liberal state. In my third chapter I read George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) and Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean (1885) as conversion novels against conversion---novels in which what might appear to be the protagonist's religious change is in fact a return to some ground of collective identity that has been driving his character all along. My final chapter explores the comparative roles of religion and race in late-Victorian literary nationalism. I juxtapose the work of Scottish man of letters Andrew Lang and Irish poet William Butler Yeats to examine how a primitivist conception of religion could take on the same aesthetic role as national voice within a cosmopolitan narrative of progress that rejected ethnic exclusivity.Perhaps the broadest goal of my study is to suggest a reframing of the question of secularity in Victorian studies. Victorian anthropological debates about religion, I argue, reveal a cultural moment, not of religious decline, but in which religion "as such" was increasingly seen as one particular department of human concern whose relation to the others could be questioned. Although critics have long debated whether nineteenth-century Britain was a place of weakening faith or one of proliferating religious activity, the more useful question to ask is not whether religion waxed or waned but rather what different meanings Victorian writers attached to religion as a cultural universal, where they drew the line between religion and non-religion, and how those distinctions reflected different understandings of human agency and its relationship to the social body.