In this essay explores the role of religion in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. How does religion function in the novel vis-à-vis other discourses such as capitalism, colonialism, and Crusoe’s supposed “wandering inclination”? What is the specific ideological utility of religion for Crusoe? This essay argues that the best way to explore these questions would be to think of religion as an ideologeme, in Fredric Jameson’s sense of the term. Rather than thinking about religion as ideology, a broader network of beliefs that seeks to preserve unequal power relations, we suggest that the ideologeme, “the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective discourses of social classes” (Jameson 61), enables a more pointed analysis of religion as a type of narrative that provides “imaginary resolution [to] objective contradictions to which it thus constitutes an active response” (104).