Ulrickson examines how religion was actually practiced in Haiti during the presidency of Jean-Pierre Boyer, which ran from 1818 to 1843, and asks how citizens pictured their own relationship to God at a moment when the state wanted a national Haitian Catholic church.

The entry point is a lay confraternity in Cap-Haïtien devoted to the Sacred Heart. From it Ulrickson argues that Catholic institutions in the early independence years were built by ordinary believers as much as by officials, and that much of this construction was under way before the government had regularized its standing with the Holy See.

The devotions themselves came from many directions across the Atlantic world. That variety, on this account, fed back into the making of the nation, and particularly into the presidency's ambition for a Catholicism that was nationalized and distinctly Haitian.