A revised version of the introduction to my own Entanglements: Marking Place in the Field of Religion (Sheffield: Equinox Publishers, 2014), this essay identifies some of the rhetorical techniques and institutional conditions that make possible the establishment of an exclusive orthodoxy in the modern academic study of religion - an orthodoxy that polices the limits of the field by determining not only what counts as legitimate methods, data, and findings but also who counts as a legitimate practitioner. A revised version of the introduction to my own Entanglements: Marking Place in the Field of Religion (Sheffield: Equinox Publishers, 2014), this essay identifies some of the rhetorical techniques and institutional conditions that make possible the establishment of an exclusive orthodoxy in the modern academic study of religion - an orthodoxy that polices the limits of the field by determining not only what counts as legitimate methods, data, and findings but also who counts as a legitimate practitioner.