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Psychoanalytic theory has taken a guarded approach to religion ever since Freud advanced his view of religion as a collective obsessional neurosis and an illusory fulfilment of infantile wishes. But post-Freudian theory has offered more positive ways of conceptualizing religious experience Hartmann, Winnicott, and Loewald, among others, enable us to recognize creative and adaptive as well as maladaptive and regressive aspects of religion. In addition, the theory of Melanie Klein suggests ways in which religion promotes, rather than inhibits, psychic growth. Although Klein herself does not address the question of the psychological underpinnings of religious experience, and although her theory does not appear to offer concepts immediately relevant to its psychoanalytic understanding, a closer look shows that Kleinian theory can usefully illuminate certain psychological functions of Christianity. In addition to extending Freud's patricentric analysis of religion back in developmental time to include the subject's earliest relations with the maternal (part)object, Klein's revisions permit an understanding of Christian doctrine and ritual in therapeutic and creative, as distinct from primarily regressive and defensive, terms.