This chapter intends to retrace Foucault’s original contribution to the profound religious origins of the state, to the question that is sometimes called theologico-political. Ultimately, it comes back to the two paths that Foucault embarked on in the 1970s: 'dissenter' Protestantism on the one hand, and the Christianity of Late Antiquity and the invention of pastoral power on the other. The latter, in particular, takes on central importance in his genealogical investigation, to the point of making it the matrix of both disciplines and biopolitics. By reconstructing the context in which the concept of pastoral power emerged — the Second Vatican Council, the beginnings of the Iranian Revolution and the need to understand totalitarian phenomena, particularly communism — we can grasp the originality of Foucault's proposals while exploring a path he did not follow: the encounter of the Father and Pastor figures in the early modern era's apparatus of sovereignty.