This article investigates how Moroccan public high-school students experience religious pedagogy. Probing the linguistic ideology that underpins their religious training, the article exposes the ambiguities inherent in educational Arabization, a project set on safeguarding the state's sacredness while mediating an agenda of indigenous modernization. Student skepticism toward the state's moral authority indicates that religious pedagogy must be explored through the lenses of process and approximation with an attention to paradoxes, ironies, and unanticipated outcomes.