This book explores how a group of Victorian literary writers - including George Eliot, Walter Pater, and Matthew Arnold - became interested in the emerging anthropology of religion, which sought to explain religion not in terms of doctrines or beliefs but as a function of race or ethnicity. In his lucid and compelling monograph, Lecourt shows how Victorian studies will profit by a clearer understanding of modern belief. He follows Taylor and the anthropologists Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood to a more nuanced depiction of the 'competing Victorian secularities' that have helped to create the contemporary default intellectual positions . . . Cultivating Belief is thus good to think with, as well as a delight to read - a timely and important contribution to thinking on 19th century culture.