In Canine Redemption Narratives in the American Imaginary, 1981-2001, I argue that contemporary stories about dogs adopt the framework of religious redemption in order to confront issues of race, gender, and species in America. In books, films, and popular culture, canine redemption draws from the structural patterns of Christian conversion, following a journey from sin and suffering to rebirth and healing. In the archive I assemble, from the well-publicized case of Michael Vick to Eileen Myles' recent dog memoir, redemption is reworked as a process of socialization that seeks to bring together human families and communities by rescuing an abused, abandoned, or aggressive animal. I argue that these redemption narratives use tropes of sentimentality to evoke and sustain the myth of an American Dream in which social harmony is easily achieved through sympathetic fellow feeling. By bringing religious studies to bear on questions of race, gender, and species, my project shows how the form of redemption (particularly its Christian iteration) has migrated into new and surprising domains of mass culture, supplying American patriotism with a powerful mechanism for propagating its fantasy of a superior, unified nation. These redemption narratives, in fact, politicize dogs by having them represent an idealized perspective that is blind to human differences construed around race and gender. In response, my project introduces the category of failed redemption as a tool for disrupting this myth. Drawing from the work of feminist scholars and trainers Vicki Hearne and Donna Haraway, as well as the filmmaker Sam Fuller, I argue that stories of failed redemption acknowledge the complexities of human-animal relationships and the struggles of people with marginalized identities, such as queer, female, and non-white Americans in a pluralistic society. Against the optimism of redemption, failures of training and socialization provide opportunities to consider forms of social existence and intimacy that cannot be disentangled from the reality of difference.