The Limelight of the Idols: Political Theology as Fiction in Renaissance England explores the apparent paradox that idolatry — an object of the highest opprobrium among nearly all early modern Protestants — inspired a series of poets, including Philip Sidney, Spenser, and Fulke Greville, to think about state authority as a poetic fiction. Confronted with the collapse of religious consensus and authority after the Reformation, these poets turned to the idol as a blueprint for how authority could be invented where it was not self-evident. At the same time, the idol was attractive precisely because it was fictional: it created a kind of authority parallel to but separate from the authority of divine truth. Through the idol, the Elizabethans rediscovered civil religion as a poetic fiction. Their work, I argue, would be extended in Civil War-era figures like Thomas Hobbes, James Harrington, Marchamont Nedham, and John Milton, who collectively rethought authority as a product of art and culture. "The Limelight of the Idols" thus bridges the gap between two kinds of genealogies of modernity employed by literary historians. One is largely secular, finding the roots of the Enlightenment in the growth of republicanism and political science. The other, associated with Max Weber and later with Carl Schmitt, argues that the concepts of the modern state are really secularized or, less charitably, corrupted versions of religious concepts. In this view, political theology is the permanent truth of politics. My dissertation demonstrates that a special attention to literature can resolve these opposed theses. The poets in my study are no political scientists in the secular sense; for them, political authority was intrinsically tied to emotions and beliefs associated with religion — in this sense, they were political theologians. Yet their interest was less in political theology conceived as a genuine divine right politics than in political theology built on the explicitly fictional model of pagan civil religion. More often than not, they meant to protect true religion from the compromises and sheer humanity inherent in statecraft and sovereignty. At the nexus of secularity and religion, political science and political theology, we find fiction.