Swift hated religious dissenters. This chapter explores how Swift expressed that hatred. The first section introduces who Swift meant by dissenters and the essential contexts for understanding their position in the early eighteenth-century social order. The second section demonstrates the degree to which Swift’s hatred of dissent and religious enthusiasm imbues A Tale of a Tub. The chapter argues that the Tale left itself open to accusations of impiety and irreligion by refusing to offer a norm within the text by which religious heterodoxy could be judged. Swift’s characteristic impulse to invade the design of other literary forms and subvert their premises led him not only to anatomise sectarian folly but to parody the voices of anti-sectarian literature.