Even though the Christian roots of the proto-psychiatry that developed at the beginning of the 19th century are well known (Foucault, Goldstein), it is generally considered that this influence was then overshadowed by the rise of the psychiatric power. And yet, the following decades were marked by an acme of the clerical power. Using Certeau’s criticism of Foucault’s analysis, this article thus aims to describe the asylum institution of the years 1830-1870 in the light of this historical influence. There was redemption for the insane outside the asylum world. The patients’ voices and the medical discourse were both impregnated with a Christian anthropology, which, vice-versa, could very well do with the idea of a “moral treatment”. Far from declining, religion played in fact a growing role in the laic and public asylum of the French Second Empire.