This project studies the contemporary meaning and function of Protestant confessional practices within American society by comparing two cases: a liberal Protestant institute of Pastoral Care and an evangelical spiritual formation group. Once an integral part of Protestant spiritual formation, confession has suffered a decline in practice. By comparing early modern to contemporary confessional practices a central question emerges: has the practice of confession within Protestantism become a casualty of secularization’s acids or has it instead been transformed and re-inscribed within institutions of everyday life? I will answer this question through a comparative ethnographic study. Research methods include participant observation, ethnographic interviewing, and content analysis of internal literature. The project’s objective is three-fold: First, to provide a detailed description of the practices of confession within their evangelical and liberal Protestant locations; second, assuming that conceptions of sin, salvation, society and selfhood go together, to understand and convey the relationship between the religious practices of confession, the operative cultural representations of reality, and the structure of the practitioners’ moral identities; third, to situate the contemporary Protestant forms of confession within the larger context of American social institutions.