Abstract
This is an account of the fluctuating spiritual beliefs of my research assistant, Maxwell, and me as we moved through his cultural world side by side—I, initially, as an agnostic ethnographer; he, initially, as the passionate would‐be leader of a revival movement for a marginalized indigenous religion. The article is intended as a meditation on the fine line between belief and disbelief, on the politics and pain of adhering to a stigmatized belief system, and on the underexplored complexities that may arise from the mismatch between ethnographers' epistemology and that of their assistants in the field.