This paper questions the shift from a view of insanity imprinted by the religious understanding of madness, towards an aspect of religion as it is seen in the nascent psychiatry, especially french alienism, for which these kinds of madness that include a religious overtone are, strangely, very difficult to cure. I first sketch what has been a traditional religious framework for understanding madness, that has been exemplified among others by Pascal. Then, I demonstrate that in several entries of the Encyclopédie dealing with madness, such a view is quite salient, while in some other entries (where a more medical understanding of madness that can be traced back to the physiology of french vitalists is present) it is less`np pagenum="070"/b relevant. Then I argue that in the alienist frame that Pinel has elaborated on these vitalistic foundations, the religious view of insanity vanishes. Eventually I question the status of these lunacies with a religious component by Pinel, then by Esquirol, for whom the religious mania is explicitly a vestige from the past, but, implicitly, religion is in a discrete manner a hard to cure component of many mental conditions.