The Introduction develops the main arguments of the book through readings of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (1893) and Tennessee Williams’s Thank You, Kind Spirit (1941). It explores the constitutively modern aspiration to create a “drama after religion,” in which the conjoining term “after” designates both succession and resemblance. As I reveal, modern dramatists turned to religion to register their apprehensions about modernity without relinquishing their claims to it. They engaged creatively with religious texts and practices while rejecting inherited scripts of religious belief. The unfolding of this transgressive religious imaginary in the modern theater is what I call “profaning religion.” Throughout the Introduction, I contextualize the slippery terms “religion” and “profanation” in the fields of religious studies and theater studies. Further, I show how the narrative of drama’s ostensible origins in religious ritual has been as transformative for scholars as for theater artists, shaping theories of performance that circulate even today.