Studies on religion in philosophy and the human sciences have been focusing increasingly on the relationship between religion and media. In much of this work, a key concern has been to understand what constitutes mediation and, concomitantly, the lure of immediacy that drives some types of religiosity. In this essay, I link Alain Badiou's philosophy to this concern, examining in particular how his approach to number and appreciation for Saint Paul are fueled by a similar lure of immediacy. To illustrate this claim, I juxtapose Badiou's work to the ways in which nineteenth-century British evangelicals (who had their own, distinct reverence for Paul) used numbers and statistics to imagine what we might understand today as a “global Christianity.”
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