Between 2003 and 2010, some residents of Jeita (Lebanon) embarked on a mystical quest launched by one of their neighbors, a woman named Marsillah, who claims to receive weekly letters from Virgin Mary. Throughout the years, the residents prayed together, interpreted the teachings of the Virgin, built a shrine, published books, and invented a symbolic language meant to transcend the social and political divisions which in their view plague the country. Meanwhile, clergy leaders of the Maronite and Greek Catholic sects grew worried about the “heretical” practices and representations of Christianity entertained by this mystic collective. In 2010, the national police dismantled the collective, banned its activities, and sealed off the shrine. Its female leader was jailed. In 2012, the Lebanese State Council overruled the claim that the police has violated the right to religious freedom, and concluded that the mystics of Jeita had violated the country’s “religious public order.” This paper uses ethnographic methods to revisit this forgotten episode of Lebanon’s recent history. Drawing on fieldwork among members of the now-defunct Jeita-based mystic collective, but also on interviews with clergy members, judges, and lawyers involved in the Lebanese State Council’s decision, I discuss how a set of practices considered heretical by Christian authorities became a concern for the Lebanese state; how mystic interpretations and practices of Christianity became an issue of secular governance; how religious heresy was reconfigured as a threat to public order. Beyond the case of Jeita and Lebanese State Council’s decision, the paper also asks: how does the modern concept of “threat to public order” operate as a secularized version of the concept of “heresy” born in the 16th century? And to what extent can ethnography help us approach what Carl Schmitt and scholars working in the tradition of political theology call the secularization of religious concepts?