A Kantian image of Stevenson as a writer who was more interested in moral and ethical questions than in religion per se has been the scholarly consensus of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. In his influential biography, J. C. Furnas explains that ‘What [Stevenson] meant by “God” was at most a metaphysical possibility necessarily implied by certain hypotheses that were probably as tenable as any others. His basic moral axiom has no backing from so tenuous a support.’ The idea that Stevenson was a believing Christian was not unknown around the turn of the twentieth century: the Free Church clergyman John Kelman asserted in 1903 that Stevenson's ‘faith is to be taken seriously’ but, even then, admitted, ‘I have felt myself advocating this against a considerable body of common opinion.’ Revisionist accounts of the Victorian era ensured that other aspects of Stevenson's life and work would be prioritised while mainstream scholarship continued to neglect religion as a serious subject of study. The attack on the apparently damaging effects of Calvinism on Scottish culture was another prong of the general assault. Furnas offers a fair illustration of how religion has tended to be portrayed as a negative yet creative force, which caught Stevenson in its doctrinal and emotional shackles: all his life the Metrical Versions of Job's despair, the close inquiries and bleak replies of the Shorter Catechism, the arbitrary, legally unimpeachable pessimism of the Westminster Confession, put phrases in his mouth and shaped his thinking. According to the established interpretation, one should look to sources other than religion to find the key to what Stevenson truly believed and admired.

As the preceding chapters have demonstrated, in the Pacific Stevenson found sufficient reason to think carefully again about the relationship between religion and culture. But to move beyond the established analytical framework requires us to pay attention to the importance of institutional religion in Stevenson's mental world. Ideas about the form and the functions of the church were just as important to him as were morality and ethics. The 1891 letter to his friend Adelaide Boodle, discussed in Chapter 1, testifies to how much he continued to think about the church into his later years.