This chapter explores the many secular factors that might accompany or outweigh the spiritual in shaping religious identities throughout the life cycle in early modern England. For adolescents and young adults, religious identity was often influenced by tensions with their fathers. Ambitious men might be ready to abandon the faith in which they had been raised for the sake of an advantageous marriage or to advance a career at court, in the law or even in the Church. A wife might be prepared to submit her judgement to her husband’s for the sake of marital harmony. The practice of subordinating religious commitment to worldly self-interest can be found at every level of society, from Charles II suppressing his Catholic beliefs until his deathbed, to felons in Newgate feigning a conversion to Anglicanism in the hope of a last-minute reprieve. A final strand of the chapter addresses the phenomenon of English captives enslaved in Barbary ‘turning Turk’ – adopting Islam in the hope of securing more lenient treatment, or in order to join the corsairs themselves. Even in an ‘age of faith’, the power of material self-interest was ever-present.