Empire’s embrace of secular governmentality called for a rhetoric of state separation from religion. At the same time, however, the state’s promise of religious autonomy and the ideological underpinnings and administrative exigencies of indirect rule translated into the co-option, regulation, and transformation of religion and religious institutions. In the end, therefore, imperial secular governmentality–in its varied spatial and temporal manifestations–entailed an uneasy truce between the rhetoric of state-religion separation, and the everyday intimacy of religion and state authority. The conclusion argues that that paradox is central to the law and politics of the modern state’s governance of religious difference.