This chapter introduces a theoretical framework for understanding the book’s central argument and offers a typology of the various expansion strategies that states used to gain traction in education and law. The chapter argues that by either layering state institutions onto the religious edifice and/or initiating the piecemeal co-optation of religious elites into new state institutions, reformers slowly amassed state-centric authority, built a robust cultural machinery for the eventual dissemination of state ideology, and gradually silenced religious competitors. In countries where there was a dominant majority religion, and where this layering and/or piecemeal cooptation process was successful, early state makers could fuse the religious and the national, creating a synthesis that blended modern institutions and concepts of citizenship with religious identity markers. Under these conditions, the state could construct relatively legitimate, domesticated religious bureaucracies that promoted an official religion. Simultaneously the religious establishment gradually adopted a state-centric world view, as the state targeted its leaders and the general citizenry alike for conversion into “disciples of the state.”