In "Religion and American Education," Warren Nord grapples with one of the most difficult aspects of teaching religion: how to help American students, whose religious literacy tends to be severely impoverished, understand religious experience. He writes that "The best substitute for firsthand personal religious experience is autobiographical or literary accounts of such experience." Nord goes on to call out autobiography in particular, separating it from literary narratives and grouping it with apology, scripture, and theology. In this article, the author argues that there are two main limitations with assigning autobiography as a tool to teach something outside the context of the literature classroom. The limitations include the following: first, assuming that autobiography can be assigned as a conduit for affective experience precludes attention to its generic boundaries and affordances, which threatens and limits any pedagogical aim. Second, using one person's personal narrative to represent a religion's experiential aspects can distort the understanding of the religion as a whole. In order to ground the discussion, the author weaves autobiographical theory throughout the argument. The article concludes with a brief consideration of how these arguments might be extrapolated for educators who want to use autobiography to teach content or skills in non-literary disciplines.