Conversion in the Age of Pluralism

Religion and the Social Order

An Official Publication of the
Association for the Sociology of Religion

General Editor
William H. Swatos, Jr.

VOLUME 17
 Conversion
in the Age of Pluralism

Edited by
Guiseppe Giordan

LEIDEN • BOSTON
2009
This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Conversion in the age of pluralism / edited by Guiseppe Giordan.

p. cm. – (Religion and the social order ; 17)
ISBN 978-90-04-17803-8 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Conversion. 2. Religious pluralism. I. Giordan, Giuseppe. II. Title. III. Series.

BL639.C659 2009
248.2'4–dc22
2009020449

ISSN 1061-5210
ISBN 978 90 04 17803 8

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 CONTENTS

Preface: The Sociology of Conversion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

Roberto Cipriani

Introduction: The Varieties of Conversion Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Giuseppe Giordan

. The Meaning of Conversion: Redirection of Foundational Trust 11

Anthony J. Blasi

. Conversion: Heroes and their Sociological Redemption . . . . . . . . . 33

Kieran Flanagan

. Elements for a Semiotics of “Conversion” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

Patrick Michel

. For Love of Faith: Patterns of Religious Engagement in a New

Town . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
Kees de Groot

. Pilgrimage and Conversion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115

William H. Swatos, Jr.

. Becoming a New Ager: A Conversion, An Affiliation, A

Fashion?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
Régis Dericquebourg

. Enchantment, Identity, Community, and Conversion:

Catholics, Afro-Brazilians and Protestants in Brazil . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
Roberto Motta

. Convert, Revert, Pervert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189

Enzo Pace
vi contents

. Conversion as a New Lifestyle: An Exploratory Study of Soka

Gakkai in Italy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
Luigi Berzano and Eliana Martoglio

. Conversion as Opposition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243

Giuseppe Giordan

. Making the Convert: Conversions in the LDS Community

Today . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263
Sophie-Hélène Trigeaud

. A Cognitive Psychology Perspective on Religious Conversion

as Told in the Gospels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287
Stefano Federici, Pierluigi Caddeo,
and Francesco Valerio Tommasi

. Conversion and Mission: Missionary Insertion and the Social

Conditions of Christianization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307
Paul-André Turcotte

Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329
 PREFACE: THE SOCIOLOGY OF CONVERSION

Roberto Cipriani

Conversion does not have a long history of study as a sociological subject,

even though it has a long historical tradition (e.g., Gonzáles de Santilla
/; Sanz ). This may be a consequence of the one-religion
specialization of many sociologists and anthropologists of religion, and
indeed, the suggestion offered by Max Weber for a sociology of all
universal religions has largely remained unheeded in practice, even if
it is honored in invocations of his Sociology of Religion as an historic
masterwork in the field. In particular, such phenomena as changing one’s
belief from one religion to another, or from a position of non-believer
to a religious one and vice versa, was hardly investigated as a topic by
sociologists of religion until the s, although psychologists of such
varied perspectives as Sigmund Freud and William James had attended
to the question at the individual level in the early years of the th century
(cf. Freud  []; James ).
Thinking about the s, when sociology had established itself firmly
in post-War America, it is not surprising that much of the sociological
research, theorizing, and debate on the topic of conversion should cen-
ter on the West Coast, not least the Berkeley campus of University of
California. The Berkeley department was particularly fertilized at this
time by the arrival of two sociologists of religion: Charles Y. Glock, a
young faculty member at Columbia University, and Robert N. Bellah, a
new Ph.D. fresh from the tutelage of Talcott Parsons at Harvard. What
would become, in many ways, “the conversion project” (though never
so titled) arose ironically, not out of any sudden sociological interest
in religion itself, but out of reaction to the work of a psychologist who
also had an adjunct appointment at Berkeley: Margaret Singer. She had
developed a “mind control” or “brainwashing” model for understanding
how and why people were being recruited to new religious movements
(although it was also, in its extreme forms, invoked to explain even con-
versions within established traditions—as, for example, when an Epis-
copalian became a Baptist, or vice versa). The bases for Singer’s theory
were such mid-twentieth-century historical events as Stalinist purge tri-
als and the “confessions” of U.S. soldier/prisoners during the Korean War.
viii roberto cipriani

As a practicing clinical psychologist, Singer became a paid consultant in

legal trials wherein the parents of young people who, whether or not they
were of the age of consent, were theorized to be “brainwashed” when
they joined one or another new religious movement on the burgeoning
“hippie” scene of cultural protest (particularly in light of U.S. involvement
in Viet Nam). Through the courts, these parents sought either to gain
specific custodial rights to children who would in other circumstances
have been considered adults or to bring suit against one or another “new
religion” (aka, at the time, “cult”) on behalf of either themselves or their
children for “brainwashing” exploitation.
The birth of conversion research in the sociology of religion today can
be found without question in two articles published by a new Berke-
ley Master’s degree recipient and new Berkeley Ph.D. in : Rodney
Stark’s “Psychopathology and Religious Commitment,” in the Review of
Religious Research, and John Lofland and Stark’s “Becoming a World-
Saver” in the American Sociological Review, followed in  by Lofland’s
Doomsday Cult. As a result of these publications, floodgates of conver-
sion research burst, and the topic was no longer the narrow province of
scholars or religious devotees, but also the courts and the media.
It is impossible to summarize this literature in a few pages. A few
examples must suffice to be added to these pioneers: James T. (Jim)
Richardson, a graduate student of Berkeley doctorate Armand Mauss
at Washington State University, produced a stream of materials, not
least his edited volume Conversion Careers (Richardson ) and his
later chapter, “Studies of Conversion” in the collected essays (Ham-
mond ) entitled The Sacred in a Secular Age.1 (At one point as
a part of his attempt to sharpen his scholarship, Richardson actually
stepped out of his sociologist position to take a degree in law as well.)2
With David Bromley, another significant contributor to this research,
he would also co-edit, The Brainwashing/Deprogramming Controversy
(Bromley and Richardson ). In addition to these scholars should also

1 The publication in the Hammond volume is of particular significance because the

book as a whole was published under the sponsorship of the Society for the Scientific
Study of Religion (SSSR), hence carried its implied imprimatur.
2 Mauss was himself a product of the sociology program at Berkeley at the same time

as the earlier studies by Stark and Lofland were being produced. Mauss’s heritage in the
tradition of the LDS Church, whose sociological analysis has been the primary field of his
own expertise, particularly prepared him to appreciate the significance of the approach
advanced in the early work of Stark and Lofland.
 preface ix

be mentioned Dick Anthony, who mainly focused on the coercive aspects

implied in brainwashing explanations and their consequences in regard
to U.S. Constitutional rights of religious freedom; William Sims Bain-
bridge, who wrote for a period with Stark as well as independently;
the British sociologist James Beckford’s () article “Accounting for
Conversion” in the British Journal of Sociology; and Thomas Robbins,
whose edited volume Cults, Converts, and Charisma () has become
a widely read sourcebook for examining the nature of conversion in
post-modernity. Along with the aforementioned scholars who have done
research on conversion, Robbins is to be considered one of the prin-
cipal scholars of non-traditional religious behavior regarding Ameri-
can pluralism (Anthony and Robbins ), quasi-religious movements
(Greil and Robbins ), and apocalyptic movements with secular, fem-
inist and environmental tendencies (Robbins and Palmer ). Robbins
champions the idea that the novelty of non-traditional religious move-
ments cannot be denied, neither can it be stigmatized as a mere question
of mental illness, but should be considered in its past historical roots—
hence the importance of considering a variety of scenarios in conversion
processes.
A fortuitous coincidence in Anglo-American scholarship also oc-
curred in the same period when, as a relatively young scholar, British
sociologist of religion Bryan Wilson spent a year at Berkeley as well—
when, for example, Stark was also there. Although Wilson’s initial work
(, ) focused more on sect development and an attempt to specify
a typology of sectarian movements—of which the conversionist was but
one—his later work on new religious movements increasingly empha-
sized conversionist themes. Particularly to be noted in this context is his
study of British Soka Gakkai co-authored with the Belgian sociologist
Karel Dobbelaere (; but see also , , , ). Wilson’s
work most diverged from developments in American sociology of reli-
gion by his strong defense of the “secularization” thesis, which increas-
ingly came to be rejected by American sociologists of religion, particu-
larly under the leadership of Rodney Stark and what has eventuated as
the “rational choice” approach to religious action.
A counterpoint to Wilson in the U.K. was David Martin at the Lon-
don School of Economics. Three years younger than Wilson, the two men
nevertheless each began his teaching career in . Unlike Wilson, how-
ever, Martin also took priestly orders in the Anglican Communion and
became a strong critic of the secularization paradigm, particularly in his
volume A General Theory of Secularization (Martin ). He would later
x roberto cipriani

summarize his position as one that considered “one-directional theories

of secularization” to be characterized by “covert philosophical assump-
tions, selective epiphenomenalism, conceptual incoherence, and indif-
ference to historical complexity,” such that “whether in its hard version
as the death of religion or in its soft form as marginalization, secular-
ization should be treated as contingent in particular on the situation in
Europe since the Enlightenment.” Movements in the Middle East, South
and even North America, he argued prophetically, “show how things can
be otherwise” (Martin : ).
One of the ways that Martin’s work most particularly bore continu-
ing fruit was in the work of another British sociologist Eileen Barker,
who both studied and subsequently taught at the LSE. Her first book,
The Making of a Moonie: Brainwashing or Choice? (Barker ), based
on her dissertation research, perhaps did more than any single work to
discredit the “brainwashing” thesis and end the debate that had raged for
twenty years. Her later book New Religious Movements (Barker ) is a
serious and well-documented study, enriched by firsthand materials, in
which the characteristics of the single groups are described in an impar-
tial and scientifically rigorous manner. Barker writes that many scholars
have invested quite a bit of time in the recent past in studying the new reli-
gious movements in the field, living at times in very uncomfortable con-
ditions and finding themselves involved in a myriad of strange activities,
even though, as scholars, there are limits to their participant observation
(such as proselytism or taking part to orgiastic practices). Members of
the new religious movements have been interviewed in depth. With the
exception of Jim Jones’s People’s Temple and the Charles Manson fam-
ily, Barker has been able to talk to members of almost all the movements
cited in her book. Moreover, she has been listening to former members
and to hundreds of parents and friends of members, supporters, enemies,
and whoever could shed some light on the various ways in which a move-
ment operates and on its impact on the external world. As a researcher,
together with her group INFORM, Barker has constructed and analyzed
questionnaires, laboriously tried to master the huge amount of existing
material and has studied “control groups,” in order to evaluate the mate-
rial collected on the movement by confronting it with the data of the
other “populations.”
After having clarified possible misunderstandings of the term “new
religious movements,” Barker defines them as groups that can provide
“ultimate” answers to fundamental questions—such as the meaning of
life or the role of human beings in nature. Barker’s book contributes
 preface xi

in a fluent and understandable style to disproving prejudices and pro-

vides useful information for a better knowledge of the various groups
and movements. Her data furnish information on the different conver-
sions: issues of the persuasion techniques being used, totalitarian author-
itarianism, and tensions between new members and their families. The
book is the result of years of fieldwork, which is the only research method
that allows an in-depth and competent understanding of the problems
together with the possibility of finding an adequate solution—in fact, in
the second part of the text, the Barker takes up the question of “forced
de-conditioning” as opposed to the “intermediate” solution, discussed
together with the convert. Working through INFORM, Barker has not
only produced scholarly studies and conferences but has also worked
with parents, friends, and work associates to enable them to understand
the phenomenon of NRM conversion and both accept genuine conver-
sions for what they are, while also setting limits to the degrees of behavior
that are legitimate and illegitimate within the bounds of civil society.3
In addition to these British scholars, interest in conversion phenomena
have also been particularly on the agendas of two other Europeans:
Massimo Introvigne, formally trained in the law, but especially inter-
ested in cases involving NRMs, is the founder-director of CESNUR, the
Center for Studies on New Religions, headquartered in Torino (Turin),
Italy, with an American center in Santa Barbara, California, in conjunc-
tion with J. Gordon Melton. CESNUR has sponsored annual conferences
from  to the present, including several at the LSE. Although not
strictly speaking a “scholar of conversion,” Introvigne has nevertheless
amassed a large library of materials on NRMs through which conversion
dynamics have been studied, and this remains an important resource to
the study of conversion, especially in the disputed contexts of “coerced”
conversions.
Also worthy of note is the volume, Le pèlerin et le converti: La religion
en mouvement, published by the French sociologist of religion, Danièle
Hervieu-Léger (), sometime rédacteur en chef and now directrice de
la publication of the journal Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions,
and president also of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
in Paris. This work particularly employs the French concept of bricolage
to understand the ways in which postmodern religiosity composes itself

3 Stark. Richardson, Bromley, and Barker (in that temporal order) have each served

as President of the Association for the Sociology of Religion.

xii roberto cipriani

and the differences between it and the Catholic model upon which the
historic religious confessions in France (i.e., Protestant, Jewish, and more
recently Muslim) have been configured in relation to each other and to
the French state. Individualistic bricolage on the part of devotees is dif-
ficult to comprehend within a quasi-political model in which corporate,
rather than personal, devotion has been the primary mode of religious
action and articulation among the historic confessions.
What has been said above is just an introduction to the wide com-
plex of conversion phenomena and aims at preparing the reader for the
variety of observations and issues raised and addressed in this book. Fur-
thermore, a number of individual behaviors, which are often neglected
by current macro-sociological analyses, are here observed with fine accu-
racy and dedication, thus completing the original relevance and success-
ful approach of this work.

References

Anthony, Dick and Thomas Robbins (eds.). . In Gods We Trust: New Patterns
of Religious Pluralism in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
Barker, Eileen V. . The Making of a Moonie: Brainwashing or Choice? Oxford:
Blackwell.
——— . New Religious Movements: A Practical Introduction. London: Her
Majesty’s Stationery Office.
Beckford, James A. . “Accounting for Conversion.” British Journal of Sociol-
ogy : –.
Bromley, David G. and James T. Richardson (eds.). . The Brainwashing/
Deprogramming Controversy: Sociological, Psychological, Legal and Historical
Perspectives. Lewiston, NY: Mellen.
Freud, Sigmund.  []. “A Religious Experience.” Pp. – in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud ,
edited by John Strachey. London: Hogarth.
Gonzáles de Santalla, Tirso. /. Manuductio ad conversionem mahumeta-
norum. Dillingen.
Greil, Arthur L. and Tom Robbins (eds.). . Between the Sacred and the
Secular: Research and Theory on Quasi-Religion Movements. Greenwich, CT:
JAI.
Hammond, Phillip, E. . The Sacred in a Secular Age: Toward Revision in the
Scientific Study of Religion. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Hervieu-Léger, Danièle. . Le pèlerin et le converti. La religion en mouvement.
Paris: Flammarion.
James, William. . The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human
Nature. New York: Longmans.
Martin, David. . A General Theory of Secularization. Oxford: Blackwell.
 preface xiii

——— . “The Secularization Issue: Prospect and Retrospect.” British Journal
of Sociology : –.
Richardson, James T. . Conversion Careers. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Robbins, Thomas. . Cults, Converts, and Charisma: The Sociology of New
Religious Movements. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
——— and Susan Palmer (eds.). . Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem. New
York: Routledge.
Sanz, Manuel. . Breve trattato nel quale con ragioni dimostrative si con-
vertono manifestamente i Turchi. Catania: Bisagni.
Wilson, Bryan R. . “An Analysis of Sect Development.” American Sociolog-
ical Review : –.
——— . Sects and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.
——— . Magic and Millennium. London: Heinemann.
——— . The Noble Savages: The Primitive Origins of Charisma and Its Con-
temporary Survival. Berkeley: University of California Press.
——— . The Social Impact of New Religious Movements. New York: Rose of
Sharon Press.
——— . The Social Dimensions of Sectarianism: Sects and New Religious
Movements in Contemporary Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
——— and Karel Dobbelaere. . A Time to Chant: The Soka Gakkai Buddhists
in Britain. Oxford: Clarendon.
 INTRODUCTION:
THE VARIETIES OF CONVERSION EXPERIENCE

Giuseppe Giordan

Although the theme of conversion is not one that has a long history in
sociology, it constitutes a privileged observation point to study society,
especially the complex framework linking together the individual and
the socio-cultural contexts in which he is included. Change in the per-
sonal biographic route and social and cultural change are very closely
interwoven when we speak of conversion: values, speech, norms, behav-
iors, beliefs, lifestyles, relations, interests—everything becomes open to
potential debate when the individual decides to “convert.”
The experience of believing often originates in or is accompanied by
the experience of conversion, which is expressed in terms of radical
change, a transformation that is almost always described in terms of a
“before” and an “after,” to the point of leading to a kind of “re-birth” and
to the construction of a new identity. It’s a process of re-socialization that
can be described, at least in some aspects, in terms of social mobility, and
since each type of social mobility carries in itself a dynamic of uprooting
and a new rooting, conversion can jeopardize an existing equilibrium in
order to work out a totally new one. This fracture, this caesura with one’s
past, cannot make us forget that, beside the issues of break are issues
of continuity, hence one’s identity actually does not dissolve but is re-
defined, is modified, both on the individual and on the social side: the old
and the new then find a form of co-existence capable of giving meaning
to everyday life. It is a new light that illuminates a previously existing
reality in a different way.
The title of the present volume puts in evidence the perspective from
which the theme of conversion is developed—that is to say, connecting
it to the dynamics of pluralism, which seems to be the most peculiar
cultural characteristic of the contemporary epoch: what does it mean to
speak of “conversion” in a time in which it seems that one only “true”
truth does not exist any more, but in which many different truths live
together, all of them with their own plausible judgment criteria, with
their boundaries circumscribing universes of meaning that are quite dif-
ferent from one another? Is it still possible to speak of conversion in
 giuseppe giordan

a world such as the Western world in which truth seems to have lost
its character of absoluteness and has become relative—not only because
of intellectual currents but equally because of quite different migrant
flows from past centuries? Who is today capable of assessing, in the
religious ambit, the credibility of a value that has universal relevance?
At the same time, however, just this relativization of truth has carried
within itself the need to confirm the necessity of strong identities, even
religiously speaking, and in this perspective conversion may assume
an important role in defining such identities. If on one side pluralism
may lead to more or less stressed forms of relativism, on the other side
its outcome may be the necessity of detecting new religious identifica-
tions.
Religious conversion is to be located on this ground, the contemporary
religious field, which sometimes presents contradictory elements: on one
side secularization with its effects, and on the other side what has been
defined as the “return of God.” Two simple examples, drawn out of the
Italian context, may help us understand how such contradictory features
are verifiable in everyday life.
The first example comes from research carried out among young
people in their last year of the upper secondary schools in the Valley
of Aosta, the smallest Italian “region,” placed at the foot of Mont Blanc.
Almost , interviewees were asked to say whether they agreed with
the statement “every religion is true and leads to God”: about two out
of three subjects stated that they agreed with this statement, without any
relevant differences between boys and girls, or between people belonging
to different economic categories or attending different types of schools.
This attitude is also shared by one young person out of two among
those who attend Sunday Mass regularly. The radicalness of this datum is
heightened when it is inserted in the Italian context where Catholicism
has a quasi-monopolistic position. In the questionnaire there was also
another question that affects our theme directly: “Do you believe it
is right for a Church to try to convert believers of other religions?”
Four interviewees out of five answered “no,” and the remaining ones
were divided into those who answered “yes” ( ) and those who didn’t
answer at all. Through further interview research on this aspect, the
students confirmed how “each one can choose the religion he wants, and
consequently can even change his religion, but it isn’t very correct to
speak of a religion that is more true than others.” In this perspective the
meaning of conversion appears to be fading away, being more connected
with a question of “taste” than a “dramatic” choice between Good and
 introduction 

Evil, True and False. If all religions are more or less equivalent, as these
youth seem to believe, what’s the meaning of converting from one to the
other?
A second example leads us to consider the other side of the coin. On
March ,  Magdi Allam, an Egyptian Muslim journalist who has
lived in Italy for many years, renounced his original religion and con-
verted to Catholicism. The event went around the world because Allam,
deputy editor of the Corriere della Sera, one of the most popular Ital-
ian dailies, was baptized in St. Peter’s basilica in Rome by Pope Bene-
dict XVI during the solemn Easter eve liturgy. On the following day,
Easter Day, the neo-converted journalist wrote a long letter in the news-
paper of which he is the deputy editor, explaining the reasons why he has
decided to leave the Muslim religion to convert to Catholicism. Among
the various considerations, after stating precisely that since that day his
new name was to be Magdi “Christian” Allam, there is a statement that
couldn’t but provoke burning controversies, both within Catholicism and
within the Muslim world:
I have wondered how it was possible that one who has fought bravely and
with great conviction for a “moderate Islam,” as I did, undertaking the
responsibility of exposing himself personally to extremist denunciations
and Islamic terrorism, has then ended being sentenced to death in the
name of Islam and on the basis of Koranic legitimation. I have hence had to
take cognizance of the fact that, beyond the contingent situation recording
the advantage of the world-wide phenomenon of extremism and of Islamic
terrorism, the root of evil resides in an Islam that is physiologically violent
and historically conflictual.1
Owing to the reactions that greeted this last statement, the Vatican itself,
through the Jesuit Federico Lombardi, Director of Vatican Radio and of
the Press Room of the Holy See, had to specify that, if on one side Allam
has the right to express his opinions freely, on the other side they are
his personal opinions and cannot be attributed to the Pope. The lively
and at times harsh discussion following Allam’s letter has offered an
occasion to pass in review all the implications that “conversion” portends
today, from its public relevance to the freedom of religion, from the
right to give evidence on behalf of one’s own beliefs to proselytism, from
the possibility of communicating among the different religions to their
irreducible differences and reciprocal closure.

1 Corriere della Sera, March , , p. .

 giuseppe giordan

But the most interesting point is the one that concerns the mean-
ing of conversion in the context of the contemporary world: a fact that,
although personal and private, cannot but have social and public impli-
cations, and this is true for every type of conversion, as that from one reli-
gion to the other, from non-religion to religion and vice-versa (including
that particular form of conversion that consists in re-discovering one’s
own religion in an active and responsible way). The different social con-
texts have much to say on this subject. If in the more and more secular-
ized and pluralist Western world, as we have already seen, the choice of
being religious is the result of a strictly individual choice, in other socio-
cultural contexts such an option appears to be a way of totally identifying
oneself with the environment. Even the concept of conversion, in other
words, must be interpreted in different ways according to the geopolitical
dimension considered.
Between the attitude of the students of the Valley of Aosta and that of
Magdi Christian Allam we find the various potential meanings support-
ing the choice of conversion today. As paradoxical as it may seem, it is a
fact that just as growing cultural and social pluralism has brought to the
limelight the phenomenon of conversion, it is meant by the subjects as
a chance to re-search questions of meaning. This dynamic, inserted into
the process of de-institutionalization of the traditional religions, opens
up a considerable space to religious mobility where the individual takes
in charge “on his own” the faith which he decides to join.
When religious belief gets out of the “taken for granted” and out of
habitualized sociocultural practices to become the outcome of reflection
and creative research, the individual activates a biographic route whose
outcome can be true metanoia, a radical change concerning the way of
seeing, interpreting and judging the world around him. It’s a complex
movement that gathers not only the faculty of reason, but also, and most
of all, the affective, emotional and aesthetic faculties: these are rather
heterogeneous components that all the same are referable to the freedom
of choice of the subject.
But the individual issue, when we speak of conversion, is only one vari-
able: historically the institutional aspect has played an equally impor-
tant (if not even more important) role. The Christian and the Muslim
religions have much to say on this subject. Cutting a long story short,
and considering the tradition of Christianity, the message “convert and
believe in the Gospel” has inspired the missionary work of the Church
since the first centuries. Throughout history such missionary work has
developed in manifold ways and not without gross contradictions with
 introduction 

the Evangelical message, passing from the crusades to mass conversions

up to the diffusion of Christianity following (and supporting) the discov-
eries/conquests of the modern era from America to the Eastern coun-
tries.
Catholicism, on this specific point, has often run the risk of overlap-
ping the missionary effort of Christianization with the colonizing action
of the European powers, homologizing “conversion” and baptism with
obedience to the Christian conquerors. From a theological and biblical
perspective the mission (and the conversion) have thus shifted to a juridi-
cal perspective, legitimating control of “mission lands” as an expansion
of the colonial authorities. With the de-colonization process this evange-
lization model, especially in the last decades, has re-defined its own role
in terms of dialogue and witness, but has also been put in a critical posi-
tion. Notwithstanding some fundamentalist and evangelical churches, as
well as even some new religious movements, who are continuously claim-
ing their right to proselytism, the historically established churches have
by now put aside an ideal of mission as defined in the aggressive terms of
conquest. Freedom of religion, or the possibility to change one’s religion
(conversion), and even the freedom of not having any religion, are by this
time formally received as principles in the context of the Western world.
The situation is different in certain Muslim environments: to Islam
apostasy is considered not only a sin, but also a crime that, in principle,
anticipates the death sentence. Even if a death sentence is actually rarely
inflicted, the consequences at the level of civil rights and of living together
socially are serious: conversion, in such frame, must then come to terms
with the social control practiced both in the limited sociality of one’s
own group of origin and in the more expanded sociality of the society to
which one belongs. Finally, it is not to be forgotten that many movements
of Eastern matrix, but also networks of New Age style in the West,
have rather different characteristics compared to the historical Western
religions as far as their social structure is concerned: some of them do not
impose either specific belonging nor particular forms of conversion. The
individual implication, in the latter case, is that of “double faithfulness,”
or of multiple belonging, where no “radical demands” are urged, but
simply a sectional agreement that does not present important choices of
conversion.
What has been said thus far is but an outline of the manifold shades
of that particular religious experience that we usually have labeled “con-
version”: a primary event with both individual and social implications,
that is successively interpreted and re-formulated all across the course
 giuseppe giordan

of one’s life. The chapters in the present volume are examples of how
variously this experience can be lived.
In the opening chapter, Anthony Blasi clarifies his definition of con-
version, redirection and functional acceptance in broad, straightforward
and generally received interpretations of these terms. He then proceeds to
focus on a theoretical understanding of conversion and trust. He explores
the kinds of religious phenomena that arise within the ten largest social
realities suggested by Gurvitch as well as the push/pull factor that consti-
tutes the conversion experience, and concludes by considering collective
conversion in the Vineyard Christian Fellowship and the individual con-
version of John Henry Newman from the Church of England to Roman
Catholicism.
In Chapter Two, Kieran Flanagan paints a portrait of the convert with
broad strokes. He asserts that it is religion, not ideology, that marks the
great division of culture. He see conversion as multidisciplinary, includ-
ing psychology, philosophy and cultural studies. The most obvious aca-
demic reference point for understanding the convert lies in religion and
theology along with a consideration of both soft forms of conversion and
hard forms of conversion, as well as holistic spirituality. He distinguishes
between holistic and ecclesial spirituality, as well as hard and soft forms
of conversion, and draws from a large array of religious beliefs to explore
the implications of conversion on the individual once the process of con-
version is complete. He ends his chapter with an account of his personal
conversion.
In the following chapter, Patrick Michel sees conversion as an indicator
of the recomposition of identity and loyalty. Although it is often given
strongly religious overtones, Michel argues that it is rather a sign of the
complex interplay of reciprocal interactions and usages that govern the
relation between religion and politics, religion and ideology, religion and
economy. Conversion is a part of the mixture of forces that indicates a
movement of passage. It is a process in which religion is certainly a part,
but only one part, of many factors leading to a change from one identity
to another.
Kees de Groot turns next to empirical research to address the ques-
tion: Are there patterns of religious development in liquid modernity?
He uses a study based on observation and interviews of a New Town,
conducted between September  and June , to determine the
beliefs of city dwellers. Although religion is far from self-evident among
city dwellers, it seems present in many and varied forms closely based on
personal relationships. Although considered private, religious beliefs are
 introduction 

deeply woven into the social fabric. With little social solidarity to anchor
beliefs, however, they take many and varied forms.
In Chapter Five, Bill Swatos, who has been developing a corpus of work
on pilgrimage over the past decade, looks at the relationship between
pilgrimage and conversion. He begins by contrasting the present-day
concept of pilgrimage with that of the past, and notes that pilgrimage
takes the form of both revivals and historic journeys as well as new
innovations of gathering places that lack direct connection to explicit
religious tradition. The rise of tourism has broadened the concept of
pilgrimage, for it is not always an either/or situation but can certainly
be both/and. The term pilgrim has extended contemporary tourism and
pilgrimage to form part of one broad type of travel. Pilgrimage implies
both motion and change that can be both external and internal, and it is
the internal change that has the possibility of bringing conversion with it.
In a way that has fascinating similarities to and differences from the
geographic kinds of pilgrimages of which Swatos writes, Régis Dericque-
bourg discusses a relatively recent modification to the religious field in
the past forty years as “seekers” find answers to questions of the mean-
ing of life outside the established spiritual paths. They experiment with
several spiritual practices as well as non-spiritual practices which they
find helpful. This assortment of expressions is located under the umbrella
of the New Age. Dericquebourg asks the question “Is entering the New
Age a conversion experience?” He presents an overview of the New Age,
refers to Anthony Blasi’s understanding of conversion from a sociological
viewpoint, and through a guided life-story format and semi-structured
interviews concludes that the New Age is a spiritual “place” where one
adheres successively or simultaneously to ideas or practices put forward
in a market that is in constant evolution.
Roberto Motta, by contrast, understands conversion as a move from
the “iron cage” of rationalization and disenchantment to an enchanted
theology which by being participatory provides a sense of identity. He
uses movements in Brazil from Catholicism and mainline Protestantism
to Pentecostalism and Afro-Brazilian cults to demonstrate this point.
Although he specifies that his writing will deal with conversion as it
appears in Brazil in the abandonment of allegiance to the Roman Cath-
olic church in favor of, first, historical Protestantism, but more recently
and powerfully Afro-Brazilian cults and Pentecostalism, he asserts the
cultural hypotheses of the paper that religious conversion implies every-
where, the refusal of the “iron cage” of rationalization, secularism and
disenchantment as they have came to prevail in the Western world.
 giuseppe giordan

Converts are basically attracted to those religions that have kept an

“enchanted” outlook—that is, to those religions that appeal to something
beyond empirical reference to the “wholly other,” indeed to an encounter
with the very “Holy” itself.
In Chapter Eight, Pace posits conversion as a battle taking place along
the boundaries of systems of religious belief. It is also an indicator of a
conflict going on inside and outside given systems of belief. It is a battle
with winners and losers as well as casualties. It is a weakening of estab-
lished systems. He allows for differences in degrees of conversion and
provides a helpful chart to illustrate ideal types of conversion. Conver-
sion affects not just an individual, but an entire belief system—indeed, at
least two systems of belief: the one the person moves from and the one
the person moves to. One integrates them into its system, while the other
is trying to get them back. Pace examines two movements of return, neo-
Hinduism and Habad (an ultra orthodox Hebrew movement), to demon-
strate the conflict existing between a system of belief and a socio-religious
reference environment.
Luigi Berzano and Eliana Martoglio present further new insights as
they attempt to understand conversion as a new lifestyle. The process
does not necessarily remove or destroy the walls of a former position
but allows an exchange of elements to flow freely into the individual
religious identity. They present a brief overview of four classical types
of conversion and then expand on conversion as a new lifestyle. This
insight is supported with a preliminary overview of the characteristics
and personal accounts of converts to Sokka Gakkai in Turin in .
They particularly raise the question of whether research on religious
conversion has been “overdetermined” by presumptions of the level of
devotion/commitment of “converts” in their prior traditions—that is,
because people say, for example, that they were “Catholic” before they
started practicing Soka Gakkai, it is then presumed that these people
were ardent in their practice of the Catholic faith and highly committed
to Catholic beliefs, which is not necessarily the case. The novelty of Soka
Gakkai is that it is, relatively, a practice “without beliefs”—or to turn it
around, a belief in a practice.
In my own contribution, I analyze a small-scale case of “mass conver-
sion” that took place in an Italian village toward the end of the s as
a result of a controversy with a Catholic bishop. By means of in-depth
interviews, the different linguistic codes are studied as they are used to
describe conversion from Catholicism to Orthodoxy: from the language
of political struggle to that of ecclesiastical reform, from the language of
 introduction 

anarchical and anti-authoritarian culture to the more recent language of

spirituality.
In Chapter Eleven, Sophie-Hélène Trigeaud draws upon seven years
of graduate degree research to depict conversion in the Latter-day Saints
(Mormon) community today. Through field work, questionnaires, and
personal interviews she is able to shed light on the conversion process
and experience of the -year-old LDS Church. She demonstrates that
conversion is both the action of the LDS community who make the con-
vert and the convert who becomes committed to the community. LDS is
neither an historical nor a traditional Church (with some possible excep-
tions in Illinois, Missouri, and Utah), yet this relatively new religious
movement has been able to maintain its growth through conversions.
Since the s, the number of converts baptized in the LDS Church
has on average tripled the number of children born into it. In this chap-
ter, Trigeaud focuses on the phenomenon of the conversion to Mor-
monism and investigates LDS practices and representations, adequate
causes, purposes and effects of the process—including “conversion from
the inside,” through which some proportion of succeeding-generation
Mormon youth re-embrace their original faith tradition.
In the penultimate chapter, Stefano Federici, Pierluigi Caddeo, and
Francesco Valerio Tommasi view religious conversion from a perspec-
tive of cognitive and social psychology, describing those mechanisms
and mental processes operating at the basis of as socially and culturally
complex a system of action as constitutes religious conversion. They use
gospel pericopes and sayings as models for assessing the conversion pro-
cess. The textual references they have chosen have pragmatic relevance
from a historico-cultural point of view.
Finally, Paul-André Turcotte looks at the role of the missionary as a
source of conversion. He is able to capture some of the great challenges
of always being a “foreigner” and of being able to juggle the existing
cultural and religious diversity found in a new land with the objectivity
of Catholic culture and heritage. He is able to do this by a chronology
of the French Viatorian religious order as their missionaries moved
from France to Canada. Catholic missionaries were able to create a
Francophone institutional space. The autonomy of French Canada is
greatly associated with the missionaries. The missionary hence brings
more than a set of religious beliefs. The missionary refashions the culture
in the manner of the primary culture of the institution.
These perspectives on the multiplex valences associated with the con-
cept of “conversion” suggest that a sociology of conversion can be of con-
 giuseppe giordan

tinuing value not only within the narrow confines of specific religious
traditions but also, and with more sociological salience, in relation to
national and international issues of culture, politics, and economy.
 chapter one

THE MEANING OF CONVERSION:

REDIRECTION OF FOUNDATIONAL TRUST

Anthony J. Blasi

The term conversion is often used to refer to a change from one reli-
gious tradition or denomination within a tradition or world religion,
to another tradition or denomination. Surveys usually focus on changes
in religious preference, while ethnographic studies tend to focus on the
process of becoming members. The distinction between preference and
membership is an important one (Hoge, Johnson and Luidens ).
Tamney () identified changes in religious membership for purposes
of research; he acknowledged that such was less than ideal as a defini-
tion of conversion but was the most practical approach (see also Wal-
lace ). Setting aside cases of changes in merely nominal affiliation,
which may turn up in survey data but would not be a genuine conver-
sion (though capable of precipitating such), a conversion in this sense
involves engaging a different context of commitment, meaning, or both.
Conversion is also used to refer to a discovery, personal renewal, or trans-
formation, termed “development” by Tamney (: –); this usually
occurs within one tradition or denomination but can also occur on the
occasion of converting in the first sense given above. Rambo (: xii)
speaks of “genuine” conversion as a total transformation of the person by
the power of God. With Rambo, one would tend to think of conversion
as a religious phenomenon, but there can also be secular conversions. An
anthropologist may “go native,” or someone may leave one political sect
and find meaning in life in another one. For purposes of the present dis-
cussion, I would like to subsume all the meanings of conversion, except
for changes of merely nominal affiliation, under the formula, “redirection
of foundational trust.”
Redirection is to be understood in a straightforward way. Before the
conversion the trust is placed in one entity, and afterwards it is placed
in another one. If foundational trust is taken for granted and neglected
altogether, coming to cultivate and direct a genuine foundational trust
can be seen as a conversion. By foundational I simply mean that the trust
 anthony j. blasi

is pervasive and enduring, not dependent on the presence of an equal.

Thus one may place great trust in a spouse or friend, but a spouse or a
friend is a mortal equal; one “loses” a spouse or friend who dies, whereas
the kind of trust that is foundational is experienced as permanent and
remains, unless one undergoes a conversion. To place foundational trust
in another mortal would be to engage in a form of idolatry; it would
have something false about it. Worthy spouses or true friends would not
want to be objects of a foundational trust—that is, would not want the
relationships to have the quality of megalomania on their part. Rather,
there would be an equality that would characterize non-foundational
trust. Foundational trust would not necessarily be experienced as greater
than spousal or friendship trust, but it would be experienced differently.
All trust is a confidence and conviction that its object “does well” or is
“for the best,” even absent immediate evidence that such is the case. One
trusts a craftsperson to do quality work, even when one is not looking
at the work being done. One trusts an intellectual tradition to have the
capacity for clarifying an issue or solving a problem, even before one has
undertaken the clarification or pursued the problem.
One might focus a sociological theory of conversion on the redirecting
process. Thus Lofland and Stark () developed a sequential model
of conversion to a religious cognitive minority tradition, and Bankston,
Forsyth and Floyd () constructed a general model of the process of
radical conversion.1 So many personal and contextual factors affect the
redirecting activity that any such theory is likely to be a model “for the
middle range.” Cases of actual conversion may not fit the model; so it is
unlikely that any model could apply beyond a cluster of similar instances
(Greil and Rudy ). The more closely a model fits one case, the fewer
would be the cases for which it would be useful. For example, Downton
() elaborates the Lofland/Stark model and finds that it closely fits the
conversion career of the Divine Light Mission “premies” he studied, but
one would certainly not take “spiritual enlightenment through drugs” as
a universal substage among conversion processes. Indeed, Lofland and
Stark had conversion to a deviant perspective in mind, whereas many
conversions are from minority to majority religions, and these represent
an experience quite different from converting to a deviant perspective
(Rambo : –). Moreover, there is a methodological problem in

1 By radical conversion, they mean a non-institutional, maintained (as opposed to

transitory), and sudden change that is extensive rather than partial.

 the meaning of conversion 

studying conversion by itself in order to develop a model; one needs

to study also non-conversion in order to have a control group (as did
Smilde ).2 Otherwise one may mistake features of something other
than conversion as features of conversion itself (see Staples and Mauss
, who found that features commonly attributed to conversion in the
research literature are features of commitment instead). Gooren ()
develops a minimal model, identifying a number of factors that can enter
into a conversion career, but he does not identify what activates the
different factors.
One might also focus a theory on what I have called the “foundational”
nature of the kind of trust that is redirected in conversion. While focusing
on the redirecting process may be too enmeshed in the particularities of
contingent conditions to engender a very general theory, analyzing the
essence of “foundationness” is likely to be too philosophical to provide
the kind of understanding that is expected from sociological theory.
It would certainly be a useful exercise in the humanistic disciplines of
religious studies and philosophy, just as developing middle range models
is a useful exercise; however, I have something else in mind in the present
discussion.
Here I focus a theoretical understanding of conversion on trust. As
already noted, trust is a disposition premised at least in part on what is not
in evidence. That is to say, trust is not an entirely empirical stance, in the
usual sense of “empirical.” It stands in contrast to the typical mentality of
scientists toward the objects they study. Outside the scientific mentality,
where trust typically occurs, one thinks in terms of natural facts having
usefulness in everyday life:
Natural facts refer to the world as experienced in our everyday thinking. It
is the world of concrete things and events occurring in the medium within
which we carry on the business of living. There, in spite of Copernicus, the
sun rises from the sea and sets behind the mountain; it is now red and now
white, and the earth is the immovable floor upon which we walk. Physical
objects change their size in relation to their distance. Space is articulated as
above and below, before and behind, right and left; time as past, present,
and future. We take it for granted that things will remain what they are,
even if we do not look at them, and that, if we leave the room, we will
upon our return find the objects within it substantially unchanged.
(Schutz : )

2 In general, studies of populations of converts have been beset by the problem of not

having a control group on hand for comparative purposes.

 anthony j. blasi

People assume such a stance in their everyday world because it is

practical to do so; it works. Scientists, in contrast, tend to make a fetish
of avoiding the kind of error that would assert something to be true
when it is false. People in the natural attitude go about their everyday
activities with a balanced awareness of two kinds of error—that which
would assert something to be true when it is false and that which would
assert something to be false when it is true. That their stance works is
itself a fact that, in the manner of William James’s pragmatism or radical
empiricism (:  ff.), cannot be denied. Thus the natural attitude
has a truth within its own coordinates of reality; that taken-for-granted
truth coincides in part, but only in part, with the attitude of the natural
sciences. Foundational trust is analogous to the taken-for-granted quality
of the natural attitude, but it is also analogous to the assumptions that go
untested in the scientific attitude. Science too does not proceed with total
doubt, in the manner of Descartes, but rather systematically applies its
skepticism to a circumscribed arena of experience while leaving all that
is outside this circle unquestioned.
The sociocultural world, of course, including its scientific sector, is a
constituted one. The physicist’s mass is a mental construct based on the
experience of resistance to touch. To attribute the experience of resistance
to an external object is as much a contrivance as attributing the experi-
ence of blue, a phenomenon residing within the central nervous system
of the individual human, to the sky. Similarly the political phenomenon
of power, the aesthetic appreciation of elegance, and the everyday accep-
tance of convention are contrivances. They are made “real” in thinking,
or as W.I. Thomas was fond of saying, things defined as real are real in
their consequences. We need, however, to distinguish among the differ-
ent ways these defining of realities into existence occur. Political power,
elegance, mass, and blue obtain in experience as belonging to different
orders, and these orders align up with one another—for example, in an
elegant Fourth of July concert played by a band seated on a secure massive
platform and under red, white, and blue bunting. The present suggestion
is that alignments and re-alignments of this kind provide an aperture to
redirections of foundational trust—i.e., to conversions. Such alignments
may or may not be “causes” in a philosophical sense, but they can des-
ignate accounts or reasons for conversions, depending whether one is
looking from outside the process and making a scientific account or from
within it and giving testimony.
The sociological theorist who provided us with an intellectual ap-
proach to multi-layered social phenomena such as the alignments and
 the meaning of conversion 

realignments of social constructs that underlie conversion was Georges

Gurvitch. He thought of social reality as comprised of multiple layers that
ranged from that which is directly observable to that which can at best be
hypothesized, from material culture to the internal spontaneity of people
to act or not act, think or not, consider or not consider something, etc.
The number of layers that sort themselves out between the most and least
visible poles varies from one social reality to another, but Gurvitch ()
listed a number of layers that can serve the sociologist as sensitizing con-
cepts. An adequate sociological analysis, in his point of view, required a
consideration of the “total social phenomenon” in all its relevant layers,
the relationships and dynamics among these layers, and the potential for
a change at one level to engender other, often unexpected, changes at
other levels. At this juncture the reader should be able to see my plan of
attack: Trust, including foundational trust, is a social reality that crosses
well beyond material culture into non-empirical, or at least less empirical,
realms (in the usual sense of empirical, not in the sense of William James’s
radical empiricism), and it is thus likely to be taken up into the dialec-
tical processes that occur in the alignment and realignment of social
constructs at different levels.3 Merrill Singer () advocated a similar
approach, though he limited the identified levels to “micro” and “macro.”

Levels in Depth in Religious Phenomena

We can begin with the material culture of religion, its most empirical
aspect. Different religions may have a greater or lesser number of mate-
rial artifacts. A Calvinist church building or a Cistercian chapel may
have fewer artifacts in the sense of paintings, statues, decorous furniture,
and the like, and a Daoist temple or Latin American cathedral may have
more. But it goes beyond art and architecture: In Nashville, Tennessee, a
Catholic Hispanic ministry that had purchased and moved into a larger
former Southern Baptist church found that the pews lacked kneelers; part
of the Latino worship involved public bodily gestures that the Baptist had
not. A spot needed to be constructed for the painting of the Guadalupe
Madonna, as well as platforms to accommodate the banks of flowers that
the Latino families brought to set before it. The clergy had to borrow

3 Dialectics, for Gurvitch (), involved not only polarity, as with the Hegelian

tradition, but also such “operative processes” as reciprocity, complementarity, mutual

implication, and even ambiguity.
 anthony j. blasi

objects from the sponsoring English-language Catholic parish for reserv-

ing the Eucharistic species, honoring the Lectionary with incense, bless-
ing the people with holy water, etc. The inaugural mass—presided over in
halting Spanish by a bishop with crosier, mitre, and festive vestments—
followed a massive mile-long march from the English-language church
to the new Spanish-language one, to the rhythm of drums and haunting
sound of a conch shell horn, Amerindian joyous whoops, and with be-
feathered dancers and a somewhat anomalous honor guard of Knights
of Columbus accompanying the canopy with the Guadalupe painting to
be installed in its new location. The whole throng patiently crowded into
the cavernous building, filling it completely. The service was exuberant,
with the crowd singing, responding to the liturgical texts, and cheering
the homily of the South American priest who served as their pastor. Of
course, the absence of such things is as much a social construct as the pres-
ence of them. The Baptist church was not a cheap structure that simply
lacked accoutrements; it had a state-of-the art video monitor system, pro-
jection booth, sound system, carpeted floors, sophisticated lighting sys-
tem, and elaborate façade with two high spires—all with a sense of Anglo
simplicity.
It would be erroneous to dismiss all this as merely superficial. The
iconoclastic controversy in early Christianity and the resistance of Mus-
lims to the depiction of persons and animals reveal how serious such
matters can be. Pitirim Sorokin (–) was clearly onto something
when he interpreted the history of civilizations in terms of the degree
of materiality or non-materiality of their cultures—whether or not one
accepts his cyclical view of that history. The Calvinist and Cistercian
reforms clearly represented a sense that materiality was not something
to be too much indulged by the desire to pray in one’s native language
and to hear prayer in that language, and to pray with one’s accustomed
body language as well as with others who use that language, is not to
be taken lightly. The American Catholic Church obviously loses Latino
immigrants to other churches when it fails to be present to them with
their accustomed material culture, just as the Latin American Catholic
Church loses people to the Evangelical and Pentecostal churches when it
is present only in a material culture to verbally-oriented upwardly mobile
people.
Religious organizations do not consist solely of material objects, but
they are visible in the social world through signage, meetings, a division
of labor, budgets, schedules, and plans. Organizations clearly have a life of
their own, with their internal norms and practices as well as their involve-
 the meaning of conversion 

ments in the outside social world. Just as there can be a greater or lesser
amount of religious material culture, there can be more or less religious
organization, both in the sense of the degree of structure and in the over-
all size of the entity. A greater degree of organization can make it diffi-
cult for a member to remain within the organization if marginalized by
organizational politics, unpalatable official doctrines, or norms that are
unreasonably confining. Conflicts within a church can lead to schisms or,
alternatively, to departures of members who then convert to some other
religious organization. For example, Ammerman (: ) describes
the options available to those who did not prevail in a conflict within
the Southern Baptist Convention as accommodation, becoming a loyal
opposition, or leaving. A religion that is heavily invested in an organi-
zational apparatus can better undertake such collective ventures as mis-
sions, schools, and social services, but will have difficulty maintaining its
basic functions if the resources required by the organizational apparatus
are lacking. The more organizationally-oriented a religious tradition is,
the more likely it will be that specialized life-style sub-organizations will
develop within it; hence there could be monasteries and orders. Even a
transitory life-style can take an organizational form, as with the adoles-
cent Buddhist monastic apprenticeship and the two Mormon missionary
years.4 The simple size of an organization can also create tensions that
engender conversions. As Simmel pointed out, the thoroughness of con-
trol over members, or “strictness,” becomes less possible as size increases
(: –).
A lower degree of organization may leave the faithful quite dependent
on the entrepreneurial charisma of a clergyperson. The latitude in doc-
trine that may arise absent such charisma may be quite disconcerting.
The maintenance of any meaning may necessitate an even greater doc-
trinal rigidity than occurs with strongly organizational religion. Those
marginalized by the charisma of an entrepreneurial clergyperson, those
seeking structure and tradition where doctrines are too individualized
and diffuse, as well as those seeking intellectual freedom where doctrines
are too collective and rigid for fear of individualism and diffuseness—in
short, those seeking more organization will be ripe for conversion.
Social models cue in kinds of shared activity (Gurvitch : –
). Worship, sacred feasts, orthodoxy, blessings, dietary restrictions,
forgiveness, and donations are all social models. Religious phenomena

4 Cf. Trigeaud, ch. .

 anthony j. blasi

can highlight one or another such model. Someone entering a church

service and expecting collective prayer conducted by unassuming leaders
who do not press themselves forward would be sorely disappointed by
performances of charismatic preachers who make much of their own
verbalizations of prayers and greatly individualize their own take on a
religious tradition. Someone who wants to share in national religious
moods, for example on major religious holidays, will be frustrated by a
sect that makes a point of being out-of-step with national observances.
Someone whose personal issues are not addressed by received formulae
will be alienated from tradition. Someone seeking a blessing will be put
off by moralizing. Someone oriented toward interiority will find dietary
restrictions pointless. Social models thus have the potential to attract,
hold, or repel people.
Often collective conduct manifesting some regularity is simply familiar
and can be employed in a religious setting. The existence of a nobility
was familiar in the secular medieval European world and hence became
common in the religious realm, producing an imperial papacy with a
cabinet of cardinals. American democracy has lent the congregational
pattern to many American religions. Religiously-sponsored charities in
the modern world tend to be set up on a corporate model. Culture lag
may make religions organized in a medieval fashion problematic in the
modern world, just as social services organized in a corporate manner
may be too unfamiliar to be accessed by traditional populations. All such
disjunctures can occasion conversions.
Patterns of social roles are certainly involved in collective actions that
are more or less structured, but roles are often invented, transferred from
one setting to another, and adapted with a certain amount of spontane-
ity (see Gurvitch : –). A religious professional may want to
adapt a role beyond what is allowed within an organizational apparatus;
theologians, for example, may want to explore doctrines while a hierar-
chy may want them simply to engage in apologetics. Or a group of lay
persons may want to be more active than a clericalist framework would
permit. A new, or newly revived, role such as that of the Catholic deacon
or the unordained and often female pastor may be in the process of being
negotiated (Wallace , ; Gilfeather ). When the role of the
Catholic female religious took the form of highly professional teachers,
medical staff, and administrators, its subordination to the male clerisy
became less tenable; women’s conversions (in the sense of renewal, but
also in the sense of joining religions with no such subordination) could
be thought of as leading to other roles with less subservience. The role
 the meaning of conversion 

of the theologically educated minister may occasion conflict with a rel-

atively uninformed congregation, leading not only to wide scale aban-
donment of the ministry but conversions to alternative denominations
or no denomination at all (cf. Ballis :  ff. for an Adventist case).
Sometimes a failure to perform a religious role or to perform a role in a
religiously prescribed manner may lead to a conversion to a religion that
is less prescriptive concerning the role in question (Tamney : ).
Events that disrupt the pattern of social roles and the networks in
which they are embedded can prepare the way for conversions. Migration
and unemployment often do that and have been associated with conver-
sion (e.g., Flora , Singer ). Similarly, events that involve patterns
of social roles that are new to the individual and involve new networks
can do the same; one thinks, for example, of such life-cycle phenomena
as becoming a young adult, marrying, and retiring. These may well be
responsible for age-related variations in religious involvement in general
(Blasi ), one kind of which is conversion to a different religion. The
numerous studies of conversion following a religiously mixed marriage
come to mind; such conversions may be more than mere changes in nom-
inal affiliation precisely because of the changes in role pattern entailed in
family formation.
A very important level of social reality and of religion takes the form
of collective attitudes. Attitudes, of course, are not merely mental states
but rather mental aspects of on-going activity. George Herbert Mead
(: ) saw attitudes as the beginning or earlier phases of actions.
Collective, or shared, attitudes arise in occasions where individuals orient
their respective actions toward one another, against one another, or in
concert with one another. Once formed, attitudes may not stay limited to
the circumscribed activities that gave rise to them. A self-starting and
independent professional in the workplace may not remain a passive
member of a parish or congregation, and a compliant employee who
takes instructions from others in the workplace may be only a passive
member of a parish or congregation. But then on the other hand a passive
member in the religious entity may find an outlet for expression in the
workplace or vice-versa.
Religion and morality often intertwine, not only because religious doc-
trines may have moral content but also because the cognitive openness
to the divine and to value-intuitions may have an elective affinity with
one another (Blasi ). When different sectors of a religious entity are
differently activated by moral issues, one or more sectors may recon-
sider their standing within the religious entity. It is also possible that
 anthony j. blasi

someone can undergo a conversion from one sector of a broad religion

to another sector, as did Alfonso Carlos Comín from Spanish national
Catholicism to a leftist Catholicism (Carmona ). Moral controver-
sies over the civil rights of racial minorities in the United States clearly
affected churches, as has peace activism more than once in the past half-
century. Issues of economic justice will have a similar effect on religions
in a class society. The spark of moral insight as well as the impetus to
maintain convention may well portend conflicts that in turn portend
conversions from one religion or denomination and to another—or to
none at all.
Religions often serve as social symbols. A religion may be a second
embodiment of a nation, especially if a government fails to be fully
legitimate or the nationality is present in a setting that is foreign to it,
such as with an immigrant enclave (so important in contemporary cities:
see the studies in Warner and Wittner , Ebaugh and Chafetz )
or a subordinated nation. Mol () wrote of religion and identity in
this perspective. Obviously, a social process such as assimilation may
spark conversion or apostasy. Or a particular religious site may become
an expression of an economic class within a society that does not have
a clear political expression because of the domination of ethnic identity
rather than class issues over politics (see the case of the working class in
French Canada in Geoffroy and Vaillancourt : –). Similarly,
a site may become symbolic of an ethnic group and lose salience only
upon a rather thorough assimilation (see Orsi ). In these cases, the
site is important as a symbol quite apart from the people for whom it is
symbolic being physically present at it on a regular basis (the latter an
aspect of material culture). Or again, a religion can symbolize a social
movement for liberation from an oppressive government and thereby
draw adherents it would not otherwise have. Once the movement has
run its course interest in the religion may wane; this may well apply to
the Polish situation described by Casanova (:  ff.).
More commonly, religion can reveal a shared sentiment of guilt or
regret for actions, penance, even while embodying at the same time a
sense of local solidarity; nevertheless, the same symbolic phenomenon
can be understood in quite different ways from quite different social
perspectives. Alberto López Pulido () recounts the diverse nar-
ratives of the Penitentes of New Mexico from various external, non-
comprehending, and hostile perspectives and contrasts these to an inter-
nal perspective. In a related way, individual positive life-events can in-
crease the salience of a religion, while negative life-events decrease it
 the meaning of conversion 

(Albrecht and Cornwall ); in such cases the symbolism in question

is that of the relationship of the individual to the environing social con-
text. When such relationships change, conversion or apostasy can readily
occur.
Moments of creative collective conduct, termed “collective behavior” in
some older sociological texts, are important factors in society. We should
speak of conduct rather than behavior because plan and deliberation are
often involved in revolutions, social movements, and mass demonstra-
tions. Behavior suggests mindless or automatic activity, something like a
panic or stampede, whereas in the present discussion it is minded activ-
ity that is under consideration.5 Social movements are obviously relevant
to religion as complexes of activities in which people engage on religious
grounds (for example, see Campbell and Pettigrew , Blasi : –
, on integration and churches in southern U.S.A. communities; Quin-
ley , on the involvement of Protestant clergy in the farm workers’
movement; Smith, , on the sanctuary movement during the Amer-
ican involvement in Central America; Pagnucco and McCarthy ,
on a nonviolent direct action agency; Johnson , on workers quit-
ting defense industry jobs; Holsworth , on anti-nuclear weapons
activism; and Tygart , on clergy in anti-war activism). However,
social movements also set public agendas; they define what is and is not
important in a society at a given time. They are relevant to religion when
the latter is not involved in them as much as when it is, for some people
give up on religion when it fails to engage the issues of the day.
Religion clearly participates in a dialectic with the collective ideas
and values prevalent in a given time and place. This is a layer of social
reality to which the church/denomination/sect typology in the sociology
of religion is relevant, particularly with reference to whether and how
much of the social world is valued.6 Churches would be identical with
or coincide with their host societies, culturally if not organizationally.

5 Blumer () used the expression collective behavior to refer to mindless and

minded behavior both, and in defense of his usage it can be noted that much collective
activity involves elements of both.
6 There are, of course, other types. Troeltsch () added mysticism to church and

sect. Mysticism is not considered here because it is less in a dialectic with collective
ideas and values than are the other two. Becker () and Colin Campbell ()
include mysticism and private religiosity in general in the category cult. There are further
scholarly uses of the term cult, but where they pertain to ideas and values they blend into
the concept of sect.
 anthony j. blasi

Denominations would fit comfortably in their host societies; they are not
in tension with their surrounding cultures. Sects would be in tension
with their host societies and environing cultures. Each of these types can
occasion ambivalence in the individual. Someone who has a misgiving
about some aspect of a society would be ambivalent about a church
or about denominations in and of that society. A sect member who
engages the social world in a friendly manner could experience similar
ambivalence.
Greil (:  ff.) notes that changes in cognitive style, which would
be an aspect of collective ideas and values, often correlate with changes
in reference others (or reference groups, as they are often termed in
the textbooks). Thus an intellectually oriented individual may seek out
reference others who share the cognitive style that the individual has
begun to use. Alternatively, an individual may select certain persons or
categories of people as reference others in the process of participating in
or planning to participate in an organization, and assume the cognitive
style of those others in the process. A parallel phenomenon occurs
when a previously little-educated population becomes a more highly-
educated one (see Tong , on Chinese Singaporeans abandoning
folk religion for Christianity or no religion). What is often interesting
about collective ideas in conversion is the lack of their relevance; most
conversions involve a switch to a denomination within the same tradition
or world religion, usually to one somewhat similar to that which was left
(Babchuck and Whitt ).
The tendency is to understand various mental states and acts—rep-
resentations, memory, suffering, satisfaction, preferences, effort, and the
like—as individual experiences, but they can be borne by an individual,
a subsocietal group of individuals, or the whole society of individuals. In
the latter two instances we can refer to collective mental states and psychic
acts (Gurvitch : ). Religiously, there can be shared sentiments
during a holy day, commemoration, or ceremony, for example, or shared
ethical dissatisfaction or satisfaction over some public event. This would
encompass the civil religious phenomena described eloquently by Bellah
(). The sentiment may or may not be embodied in the same symbols,
and the fact that it may not be provides the rationale for thinking of
collective mental states and psychic acts apart from their symbolization.
It is natural to think in terms of collective mental states and psychic acts
working against conversion from a majority religious stance and to a
deviant one; consequently seemingly deviant ones may go out of their
way to be civic and patriotic.
 the meaning of conversion 

Redirections of Trust and Layers of Social Reality

It might be useful to speak of push factors and pull factors that constitute
the conversion context. Theoretically, push and pull factors can emerge at
any one layer of social reality and have consequences in that same layer or
in any other layer. Thus organizational politics may marginalize a person,
with the result that the person seeks a less structured or at least differently
structured religious organization within the same religious tradition, but
the person may seek instead a collective attitude—for example, contem-
plative reverence for the sacred—and find it in a religious book club held
under the auspices of a different religious entity. Alternatively, the indi-
vidual may seek an opportunity to engage in social service and participate
in a different religious organization’s program of charities, but as a vol-
unteer with a minimum of organizational involvement. In such cases the
push factor would be at the organizational level, but the pull factors that
give character to the conversion that takes place could be at the organiza-
tional level, at the level of collective attitudes, or at the level of collective
conduct that shares some regularity. Theoretically, one could construct
a ten-by-ten matrix of push and pull factors and have a resultant inven-
tory of a hundred kinds of conversion. We need not pursue that exercise
here.
We can consider a relatively new religious entity, most of whose mem-
bers, simply because the entity is new, must be converts. The Vineyard
Christian Fellowship in the Evangelical tradition is an example. A study
conducted in  shows that about a third of the members had been
reared in conservative Protestant churches, one third in liberal Protes-
tant churches, and one third in the Roman Catholic Church. However,
immediately prior to joining Vineyard only fifteen percent had belonged
to liberal Protestant denominations and only six percent to the Catholic
Church; the majority had joined or had been reared in traditional con-
servative Christian churches or independent non-denominational Chris-
tian churches. The Vineyard members rated the members of their pre-
vious churches as less committed and having less missionary zeal than
their Vineyard fellow members, but no less strict or disciplined (Perrin
and Mauss ). Culturally, Vineyard churches attract college-educated
young adults and have a contemporary popular-culture style of wor-
ship; thus they accommodate rather than maintain tension with the envi-
roning culture (Shibley ). A British study notes that once a pas-
tor had introduced the Vineyard style in a Church of England parish,
thereby precipitating the departure of the music minister and choir, the
 anthony j. blasi

ministry grew by constructing “a worldview which brings together a mix-

ture of this-worldly and other-worldly components.” Moreover, the the-
ology was “extraordinarily well designed to confront the challenges of
modernity in simultaneously counteracting and embracing rationalizing
and pluralist forces” (Hunt : ).
On purely statistical grounds, a second or later generation in a church
will be less enthusiastic than a first generation that was enthusiastic
enough to convert, and those who joined Vineyard ministries from more
established religious organizations want enthusiastic expressiveness and
found their former fellow-members’ lack of enthusiasm and zeal a push
factor. The cultural tension with the wider society, “sectness” as it were,
was also a problem. The popular market culture employed by the Vine-
yard is clearly a pull factor. The conversions that populated the Vineyard
involve “social models” insofar as the worship services resembled rock
concerts. The mixing of worldly and other-worldly involves patterns of
consuming popular peer culture even while adhering to the values of the
parental generation, a pattern of activity established with some regularity
by students in secondary school and university years. The popular music
serves as a social symbol of a generation, an age cohort that is of impor-
tance to the members. The simultaneous seeking of peer acceptance and
peer identity and of legitimacy in terms of Christian tradition are collec-
tive mental states or psychic acts. One could recommend entering into an
ethnographic study of this group with these kinds of sensitizing concepts
in mind.7
If the example of the Vineyard converts suggests a change of orga-
nizations that serves to maintain certain aspects of the socially situated
pre-conversion trust patterns, that of John Henry Newman (–)
reveals a restless intellect that is forced to break up and recompose its
social situation. Newman was a solid student in England in an era in
which scholarship focused on religion and classics, and Oxford Univer-
sity was a federation of Anglican citadels. He began studies at an early
age at Trinity College and became a fellow at Oriel College. From –
 he served as Vice Principal of St. Alban’s Hall, pastor of St. Clement’s
parish (founding a school and building a new church), as a Tutor, and as a
disciplinarian Dean who tamed a rowdy set of hard-drinking undergrad-
uates. But in  he had a disagreement with the Oriel College Provost,

7 For a parallel case of a growing church dependent on converts, see Tamney’s account

of “Spirited Church” (: –).

 the meaning of conversion 

Edward Hawkins, over whether tutors should watch over the religious life
of their pupils. From  Hawkins, who held they should not, ceased
assigning him pupils. Newman resigned his tutorship in , when his
last pupil graduated. In  he had also been appointed Vicar of St. Mary
the Virgin parish, which served as Oxford’s church, and it was from that
post that he became an influential personage in the Oxford setting.
What is interesting about Newman is that from a satisfying ministry
in a citadel of the Church of England he began to migrate intellectually
out of the Church, ever so gradually, and into Roman Catholicism. In
 Newman set about reading the ancient Church Fathers in chrono-
logical order (Newman : ). He was particularly impressed by
the Alexandrian writers, whose arguments for doctrinal orthodoxy influ-
enced his evaluation of the state of affairs of his own ecclesiastical con-
text. He was not left satisfied; he wrote that his “mind had not found its
ultimate rest, and in some sense or other I was on a journey” (: –
). He began writing about the ancient Church councils in .
By  the Church of England served a minority of the British pop-
ulace, and its lower clergy were not deeply trained in theology. The gov-
ernment began reorganizing it, consolidating some parishes and elimi-
nating others. The Church was also divided between the High Church
party, which was oriented to the doctrines and sacraments received from
antiquity, and the Evangelical or Protestant party, which was oriented to
scripture alone. “With the Establishment thus divided and threatened”
by the liberalism of the government, Newman wrote, “I compared that
fresh vigorous power of which I was reading in the first centuries” (:
). His convictions were decidedly High Church, but he was more wary
of the rationalism of the liberals than of the emotionalism and biblicism
of the Evangelicals. Thoroughly socialized into the anti-Roman stance of
the times, he conceived of no tenable position apart from the Church of
England; yet at the same time, the (non-Roman) Catholic position forced
him to think of what transcended Anglican boundaries. “ . . . I ever kept
before me that there was something greater than the Established Church,
and that was the Church Catholic and Apostolic, set up from the begin-
ning, of which she was but the local presence and organ. She was nothing,
unless she was this” (: ).
Newman began writing tracts anonymously arguing for the Anglo
Catholic, “Via Media,” position of dogma, sacraments, and opposition
to Rome, and he was joined by others; he served for a time as editor
of a series of position papers, Tracts for the Times. However, he began
to sense that Anglo Catholicism was more a construct than a social
 anthony j. blasi

reality. “Protestantism and Papacy are real religions . . . but the Via
Media, viewed as an integral system, has scarcely had an existence except
on paper” (: ). By  he began to reconsider his stance; he
began to draw comparisons between the Reformation and Anglican
separations from the Roman Church and the ancient schisms that he was
studying. “Alas! it was my portion for whole years to remain without any
satisfactory basis for my religious profession, in a state of moral sickness,
neither able to acquiesce in Anglicanism, nor able to go to Rome” (:
).
It would be tempting to predict that Newman’s intellectual conclusions
would lead him to convert to Roman Catholicism. Such was simply not
the case. He was well networked in the Anglican context of Oxford,
had thrown his energies into the Tractarian cause within Anglicanism,
and had not yet called into question his received anti-Romanism, in
both its emotional and cognitive aspects. An episode in , however,
would strain his network and transform his social context, leaving him
to work out his problems with Roman Catholicism on his own. He
turned to the Articles of Faith of the Church of England, a symbol of
his religious commitments, and wrote a tract giving them a Catholic
rather than Protestant reading. There was nothing particularly Roman
Catholic about his Tract , but it certainly employed a Church Catholic
and Apostolic hermeneutic (: ). It caused a storm of criticism
from the Evangelical party, and his bishop agreed not to demand that
he withdraw it so long as he ceased from authoring or editing any
further tracts. The public uproar continued, however, and other Church
authorities began to condemn him. The result was that Newman was not
only alienated from his larger social context, but also lost his place in
the Tractarian movement to which he had devoted his energies. “I saw
indeed clearly that my place in the Movement was lost; public confidence
was at an end; my occupation was gone” (: ). He left a curate
in charge of St. Mary’s and retired to a small chapel in Littlemore. But
even in Littlemore the critics and the press would not leave him in peace.
Some undergraduates from Oxford went to Littlemore to stay with him
and work through their own issues with the Church of England, and that
led to rumors that he was founding a Roman Catholic monastery.
Meanwhile, the Church of England not only proved to be hostile to
Newman’s brand of Anglo Catholicism, but it also entertained cooper-
ation with un-Catholic factions. Specifically, in a government-inspired
counter to Russian and French influence in the Middle East, the Church
established a bishopric in Jerusalem that Prussian Lutherans and east-
 the meaning of conversion 

ern churches outside the Orthodox Communion joined. From Newman’s

viewpoint, Protestants and heretics were welcome in a Church where
Catholics were not (: –). This was the last straw; he resigned
from St. Mary’s parish in  and conducted no further official activi-
ties for the Church of England. His friends were shocked and dismayed
as he gradually distanced himself from the Church (: –). “If
there ever was a case, in which an individual teacher has been put aside
and virtually put away by a community, mine is one. No decency has
been observed in the attacks upon me from authority . . . ” (: ). “I
would not hold office in a Church which would not allow my sense of the
Articles” (: ). In  he also asked to have his name removed
from the books of Trinity College and Oxford University.
In the same year of , two years after resigning from any function
in the Church of England, he formally converted to Roman Catholicism.
He had emotionally and cognitively overcome his earlier hostility to the
Roman Church, in part by maintaining that his early teachers and even
famous Anglican divines had inadvertently duped him (: ). In
 Cardinal Wiseman invited him to be ordained a Catholic priest,
and he was so in Rome that year. He spent the following years in Birm-
ingham, in an Oratorian establishment. It should be noted that he had no
network in Roman Catholicism comparable to the one he once had in the
Church of England. Within Catholicism he was held suspect by other for-
mer Anglican tractarians who had converted: Archbishop Henry Edward
Manning, William George Ward, and George Talbot (a secretary to Pope
Pius IX). But in  the pope sent him an assurance that he, the pope,
had confidence in his orthodoxy, and he was soon invited to be a theo-
logical expert at the First Vatican Council. In  Pope Leo XIII made
Newman a cardinal.
John Henry Newman followed an itinerary within the social layer of
collective ideas and values, but his intellectual movement from an Anglo
Catholic to a Roman Catholic position did not make him a convert.
There was also the straining of his social network, the exit from his
role at Oxford, his becoming an embarrassment within the movement
to which he had devoted his energies, the public rejection of his take on
the Articles of the Church—respectively at the organizational level, that
of the pattern of social roles, that of creative collective conduct, and that
of social symbols. These as well as his intellectual journey moved him to
convert.
 anthony j. blasi

Conclusion

We began with the simple idea that conversion, especially in the reli-
gious sense, is a redirection of foundational trust. We suggested that a
focus on the redirecting, “process models” as they are usually termed,
allows for theorizing in the middle range but not for a general theoretical
framework. Focusing on the adjective foundational would lead one into
philosophical rather than social theoretical concerns. Trust, however, is a
human personal and social phenomenon in itself—though, when foun-
dational, may be oriented to the transcendent. For purposes of general
theorizing, we suggested that the general nature of social situatedness, as
approached by Georges Gurvitch, could be a useful approach. We then
explored the kinds of religious phenomena that arise within the ten lay-
ers or realms of social reality that Gurvitch suggests, often finding the
potential for engendering conversion within them. However, the align-
ing of events across layers seemed to be the most intriguing approach to
conversion.
We examined two cases of conversion—one of them looking at a
group situation and one of them the conversion of an individual. In the
case of the group study, that of the Vineyard congregations, the use of
social layers in the manner of Gurvitch for purposes of interpretation
enabled us to see the pattern of late adolescent management of peer
material culture and family values being preserved in the kind of church
to which the converts turn. The individuals who converted were no
longer adolescents managing the juxtaposition of peer material culture
and family values but parents creating space for their own children to
do so. In the case of the individual, we saw the trajectory of change of
church membership on the part of John Henry Newman proceeding in
parallel to but not in lock-step with his intellectual itinerary. The change
in church membership was related to the breakdown of his relationship to
the Anglican Church as an organization, of his place in the role patterns
of Oxford, and his suddenly tenuous place in the social movement to
which he had devoted his energies. In this instance, Newman was not
swept up into a social network offering affective bonds, as often reported
in the conversions to new religions of the s, but had to seek out a
new network.
 the meaning of conversion 

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 chapter two

CONVERSION: HEROES AND THEIR

SOCIOLOGICAL REDEMPTION

Kieran Flanagan

A curious facet of Weber’s ideal type has been the expansion of its
use from conceptual categorizations into the construction of person-
ages equally abstract but set as the imaginary friends of sociology, ones
it chooses to designate. These personages of the sociological imagina-
tion give witness to the capacity of the discipline to personify the needs
and cultural practices of the age in ways no rivals can realize. Wrested
from the flux of life and mounted as in tableaux, these personages are
the trophies of sociology, the prizes of its gift to encapsulate the cul-
tural moment. Thus, the flâneur is lodged to signify the idle gazer whose
exercise is so characteristic of modernity; Max Weber’s Calvinist stands
as the manqué capitalist, the unwilling beneficiary of worldly efforts to
resolve his salvation anxiety; the curious figures of Erving Goffman’s
world all stand out enigmatically, an array including the stigmatized,
lunatics, impression managers and gamblers; and then there is Simmel’s
stranger, the image and likeness of the sociologist, the one who passes
with impunity across territories, hearing confessions but giving no abso-
lution. Gazing more closely, one figure is missing: the convert.
Zygmunt Bauman’s diagnosis of the culture of postmodernity might
account for this absence. He has further nominations better fitted to the
times. His exemplary figures for the pantheon are the strollers and the
players, the tourists and the vagabonds, the last two being nominated
as the heroes and victims of postmodernity. These four types sing often
discordantly in a postmodern chorus (: –; : –). They
denote the transience of life in postmodernity, where the indefinite, the
contingent and the ambiguous endlessly expand into limitless uncer-
tainty whose nihilism justifies escape as the motif of the age. Stoicism
reflects the demands of these times of fracture and doubt when it is nec-
essary to accept that the “well constructed identity turns from asset into
liability” and that the “the hub of postmodern life strategy is not identity
building, but the avoidance of being fixed” (: ).
 kieran flanagan

Presumptuously, the convert overturns these diagnoses. He sings with

joy from the one hymn sheet, of belief found, rooted and fixed firm with
an identity constructed on the basis of a character transformed and re-
cast anew. The convert does not wish to escape; he has found what he
seeks. He heals fractures and is blissful in his certainties. But his pres-
ence unsettles the godless. If he does bear sociological recognition it is as
somebody who has taken an ill-conceived turn, one perhaps half-witted
who foolishly acquiesces to what modernity buried and what postmoder-
nity has cemented over: God. To most sociologists, the convert seems a
holy version of Harold Garfinkel’s cultural dope, the creature of Talcott
Parsons’s theory of action and structure. Perhaps he has lost his senses, hit
by a spanner a capricious God has thrown into contemporary works. The
convert’s testimony receives a frigid response from the many in sociology
who desire to conserve the discipline as a God-free-zone, a territory nei-
ther to be visited nor to be redeemed.
But behind this discipline’s dismissal notices lies a fear that the convert
has resuscitated dead theological baggage, and even worse, he now carries
it across the field of culture with an unseemly conviction. For him,
the baggage is not a burden but a resource that affirms the convert’s
transformation and seemingly gives him a mysterious capacity to journey
on paths sociology thought had been well churned up in modernity. But
now that field of culture seems ploughed up with unfamiliar furrows
whose pattern suggests that God is not quite dead. Since / a sense
of the world has changed. It is religion not ideology that marks the great
divisions of culture and it is the boundaries between Christianity and
Islam that occasion distress and anxiety. Those who move between these
boundaries do so in ways difficult to discern for sociologists who see the
world with secular eyes. The convert is the one who comes to unsettle
their vision of the world. Why has he come? What does he seek and what
place does he have in the pantheon of sociology? In an ideal world, the
convert should not be an ideal type, but times change and sociologists
would be the first condemn those who fantasize about what ought not to
be. The convert has arrived. What is his place in sociology? Is he a hero
or a villain? In whatever case, the convert springs from modernity with
distinctive properties of ambiguity ripe for sociological arbitration.

Quo Vadis? The Sociologist and the Convert

In one sense, the convert is invisible in the discipline, with no appear-

ance in the index of the main sociology of religion texts in the United
 conversion: heroes and their sociological redemption 

Kingdom, but in another sense he is one well scrutinized in the U.S.A.

where religious conversion seems pervasive in a culture characterized by
endless transformations and spiritual forms of seeking. Not surprisingly
in this latter context, Scot McKnight observed that “the study of modern
conversions is an industry today, and it takes lots of reading to get a
handle on its complexities” (:). There are no neat ways to classify
the convert and his conversion.
In surveying converts to Catholicism, from Péguy to Hopkins, Charles
Taylor indicates that all the “itineraries” come from different embeddings
(: ), the pathways, the experiences and the settings all exhibiting
a peculiar diversity. As Lewis Rambo well concludes, few processes are
so riddled with paradox, contradiction and elusiveness (: ). Not
only are conversions highly individualized they are also difficult to cal-
ibrate in terms of their consequences and significance. Crossings from
atheism to Catholicism or from Hinduism and Islam can be as porten-
tous in their effects as those between Sunni and Shia forms of Islam or
from Anglicanism to Catholicism. These turnings and the transforma-
tions they effect are laden with potential cultural and religious signifi-
cance. No convert turns alone. He does so with implication, hence the
scrutiny the act of conversion can occasion.
For an act that seems to embody good faith, conversion carries oddly
a dark side of bad faith, one uncovered when an inquest is held on the
convert’s transformation. Did he assent to convert or was he pressured
to do so? Where persuasion is forceful, those converting can be charged
with proselytizing. Likewise, those who abandon a faith can be labeled
as “apostates” by those they have abandoned for whom such conversions
can be marked as treasonable. Likewise, what about those who convert
back to their original faith, who found uncertainty and emptiness tyran-
nical in these cultural times? Reflecting on the contributors to a collection
of essays on women returning to Catholicism, Steichen observed that “an
unexpectedly large percentage were made religious refugees by their par-
ents’ loss of certitude.” Rather than categorizing them as converts, those
who came home to Catholicism could be designated as “reverts” (:
, ). Have these returned in good faith? Who is to certify the authen-
ticity of their conversion? If the study of conversion is multi-disciplinary
covering psychology, philosophy in terms of phenomenology, and cul-
tural studies (Malony and Southard : –), is there a place for
sociology in the account?
The most obvious academic reference points for understanding the
convert lie in religion and theology. They might claim ownership of the
 kieran flanagan

category. But with William James, conversion became a topic of proper

concern to psychology. His interest in conversion formed part of an
ambition to find a spiritual essence common to all religions, something
experiential felt within and devoid of theological accountability. The
contribution of James in placing conversion on the table of the social
sciences cannot be discounted. But his route into spirituality of which
conversion is a part begs questions. His awakening to “the authentic core
of religion” emerged from what Robert Fuller characterizes as a “nitrous
oxide-induced altered state of consciousness” that made him sensitive to
the supernatural (: ). Perhaps as a consequence, the image of the
convert in James is of a passive recipient of a transformative experience
felt deeply but requiring no reference to the domain of the social to
authenticate the conversion. For James, it is subjectively felt, interior in
the transformations it effects and in that way seemingly placed outside
sociological remits for understanding.
Since James, understandings of religious experience have evolved in
two directions that have implications for understanding the link between
conversion and spirituality. The first direction relates to the advent of
holistic forms of spirituality. These can be considered as outgrowths of
New Age religions. Operating in competition with organized religions,
holistic forms of spirituality reflect the expressive individualism of a cul-
ture of postmodernity. They signify transformative powers felt within
that promise to remove barriers to self-actualization and these often lie
in the social. Holistic spirituality operates in a marketplace seeking to
attract consumers rather than converts. Each user seeks to find his or her
own god within. The attraction of holistic spirituality is that a license is
given to the self to shop around without obligation or constraint. Thus,
journeying in holistic spirituality takes on a life of its own, where con-
version is a continual process of seeking but with no necessary ambitions
to find a terminus, an arrival point where the designation “convert” is
to be declared. In these forms of spirituality, passports are not required
for entries and exits in religious territories whose boundaries are crossed
with disregard for the social implications their trespass might occasion.
Its travelers are exempt from such demands to declare their affiliations
and to choose their citizenships. Their conversions are tentative, tempo-
rary and transient.
It is easy to treat these soft forms of conversion as exemplary and ideal
in ways that discount the other dimension of spirituality, where its form
of expression operates through organized religions. These demand hard
forms of conversion that seem pre-modern and out of kilter with present
 conversion: heroes and their sociological redemption 

cultural sensibilities. Yet, it is in these hard forms that the convert takes
on heroic properties as redemption is sought in a world increasingly con-
stituted by reference to sociological argot. Resistance, transgressions and
crossings characterize these hard forms of conversions where turnings
are not to be taken lightly and where the identities so secured reflect striv-
ings and strategies worthy of sociological interrogation.
Organized religions, such as Catholicism offer means of channeling
forms of spirituality in ways where their authenticity can be given credi-
ble and authoritative designations. Its theology certifies what is worthy of
emulation by reference to tradition and to codifications of belief. Thus,
spiritual manifestations that bear on conversion can be contextualized
and placed in an inheritance of discernment of such visits from the Holy
Spirit. What is worthy of emulation can be stipulated in ways that relate
to sociology, notably in the case of Weber’s notion of office charisma.
These two strands of spirituality operate in competition (Flanagan and
Jupp ) but with implications for how sociology is to understand con-
version.
Unlike the case of holistic spirituality, ecclesial forms of spirituality
make definite demands on the convert. He is required to move across
boundaries, from unbelief to belief, from affiliations treated as insecure
to those designated as secure and from forms of spirituality treated as
untrustworthy to those deemed trustworthy. For that reason, the hard
forms of conversion require a factual property, so that the turning made
by the convert is permanent not temporary, is definite and not indefinite,
and the transformation secured requires reference to the social to state
in public that a change in affiliations has occurred. The convert finds in
the authority of the belief system resources that enable him to believe in
his own conversion and to trust that he will become what is promised by
his turning into the occupation of a new identity where the older form
has been cast off.
These hard and soft forms of conversion present matters of choice to
the sociologist. Is the soft version preferable for its agnostic properties
that seem to reflect the professional obligations of the sociologist not to
occupy a definite religious stance? After all, the soft version reflects the
times sociologists are called to refract, but the mirroring has limitations.
The individualism of the soft version presupposes weak structures and
few entailments to use the social as a means of manifestation of belief and
of certifications of its acceptance by converts. On the other hand, the hard
version seems to carry a price of giving some unwarranted credibility to
forms of theology inimical to sociological speculation. But then it does
 kieran flanagan

bear on structures, on authority and boundaries in ways that provide a

definiteness that seems well fitted to sociological needs and aspirations.
In these two forms of conversion, the soft and the hard, can be found
the contrasting diagnoses of Émile Durkheim and Max Weber. The soft
version with its accentuation of individualism overly detaches the quest
for the sacred from rituals geared to structure and refract its properties.
More fundamentally, in this form, the incentive of the convert to invest
in the social is minimized in ways that legitimate the egoism Durkheim
sought to contain. On the other hand, the hard version seems well fit-
ted to Weber’s notion of questing for a truth of affairs in a world that
has to be reutilized and rendered to account. Unlike Durkheim, Weber’s
sociology is built on contrasts between different forms of theology and
religion where choice is presented, but in ways that point to no end game
save the integrity of the sociologist and his calling within. But there is
one point that emerges from Weber that is disturbing. His recognition of
empathy as a critical means of understanding begs questions as to how
the sociologist is to understand the convert, the one who makes hard
theological choices Weber refuses to make. In reference to what theo-
retical orientation is the convert’s transformation to be understood? The
implication presented by the two forms of conversion is that some sort of
choice for each draws out a sociological weakness. In seeking to under-
stand the convert’s resolution of an elective affinity might the sociologist
be faced with the prospect of having to consider his own conversion? This
point emerges in Thomas Kuhn’s approach to paradigms.
Kuhn sought to account for changes in scientific consensus regarding
the natural world, its explanation and the consensual models used to
characterize its properties. His concern was with the transformational
properties of paradigms in terms of switches from old forms to new
versions better able to cope with puzzles that emerge from incommensur-
ability of differing scientific accounts. In these transformations was a
property of conversion, one less based on explanation than assent. Thus
he argued that “the transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm
is a conversion experience that cannot be forced” (: , cf. ).
Kuhn noted the communal and aesthetic facets of paradigm switches but,
perhaps more inconveniently for some, suggested that transformations
can reflect a decision made on faith (: ).
The perplexities surrounding incommensurability found expression in
sociology in three forms. The first form emerged in anthropology over
translations between rational and non-rational forms of thought. This
opened out issues of contextualization and relativism but also the recog-
 conversion: heroes and their sociological redemption 

nition of hermeneutics as a means of expanding understandings of forms

of culture. These were to be deciphered rather than to be explained. The
second form found expression in Lyotard’s notion of postmodernism that
underlined the performative dimensions of scientific endeavor ().
Contingency entered the realm of sociological discourse notably in Bau-
man’s treatment of postmodernity. But it is the third outcome, reflexivity,
that has the most potent implications for sociology’s understandings of
conversion.
Reflexivity suggests that conversion is not just a metaphor but a prop-
erty of awareness arising from self-transformation on a field of inquiry,
sometimes where puzzles emerge whose encapsulation seem beyond
sociological capacities. But these puzzles are not due to lapses in method-
ology alone. They can also relate to ultimate meanings of life, entities
which sociology with humanistic ambitions has no desire to foreclose.
Given this endemic risk of bafflement by the plethora of oddities thrown
up on the field of inquiry, a query might emerge as to what the sociolo-
gist ought to be puzzled by. Or to put it another way, what does he wish to
be puzzled by? These matters of puzzlement become all the more com-
plicated when the focal point of concern deals with religion. Does the
sociologist share the religious puzzles of those he seeks to understand?
Should he? The difficulty with religious puzzles is that they overspill into
theology in ways few sociologists wish to pursue. But the question of
these puzzles becomes all the more pressing when the subject matter of
concern is conversion. A question is begged as to whether the sociologist
wishes to follow the convert’s path of resolution, or in some way to stand
outside it.
The convert can be considered as one who seeks what Longhurst
(: ) denotes as “elective belonging,” a term owing much to Bour-
dieu, Goffman and Weber. The transformation of his identity indicates
what he wishes to become. All the time choices are being made that can
be deemed exercises in elective belonging. This term relates to transi-
tions in life that generate a performative identity secured in the face of
external forces that are fluid in effect and where there is no closure. In
the case of the convert, something new has emerged, hence recourse to
the imagination to understand what has happened. This is not to suggest
that the conversion is a fiction, but rather understandings of the process
might find assistance in a formulation of Cooley “that the imaginations
which people have of one another are the solid facts of society, and that
to observe and interpret these must be a chief aim of sociology” (:
). Given this formulation, how is the sociological imagination to be
employed to understand the social facts of conversion?
 kieran flanagan

The Convert: Strange Perplexities

There is something dramatic about a conversion. Something new has

sprung from the old. As William James indicates, a “sense of clean and
beautiful newness within and without is one of the commonest entries in
conversion literature” (: ). In the Early Church, by his baptism,
the convert was re-born in a ritual where he was given a white garment.
It marked in symbolic form a private assent to be converted and the
confirmation of that desire in public. The convert permitted his identity
to be re-constituted so that he was to be seen a new light, one that set a
contrast of darkness with his life before his transformation. In the rite all
is radically re-constituted. The ritual, therefore, has what Hine regards as
a property of bridge-burning. The convert indicates to those assembled
that his conversion precludes any return to his former identity. By means
of the ritual, the convert provides confirmation to those he has joined
that they too can believe in his transformation. The ritual also enables
him to see in their responses a pledge he makes to himself that matters
are now settled and that he is not going to relapse back to his former self
(Rambo : –).
This radical re-casting of the convert in ritual form acts as a powerful
transfusion to those he has joined. New blood has been given in the
ritual where a sense of revitalization is secured, one that renews the
energy of those gathered to seek converts. In this way, the convert is
both an object and a subject. For those present at his conversion, he is
an object symbolizing hope, but he is also a subject, the one who feels he
is changed utterly and has become somebody else, a stranger to himself,
but a released prisoner called to act on his discharge papers. As the
recipient of a conversion, the convert feels the imperative to act on it.
As Richardson has indicated, this active dimension requires reference to
agency, to choice of outlets for self-realization involving what he terms a
“conversion career” (: ). It is here that a sociological dimension
enters understandings of conversion.
The convert has to live with the implications of his conversion (James
: ). He has left one terrain of belief to cross to another, but in
so traveling he is for a time on the outside of both and is a stranger to
each. His aspirations are for a permanence of affiliation in a belief system
he wishes to make his own, where he no longer has the label “convert”
but is one with those with whom he seeks a rooted affiliation. To use
Rambo’s apt phrase, the convert has to find a means of encapsulation
in the belief system he now occupies. Rituals, rhetoric and roles are
 conversion: heroes and their sociological redemption 

required to secure these ends of assimilation and incorporation (:

–). His ambition is to conform—that is why he has turned. But
what of the cultural and political context that shapes his aspirations for
encapsulation?
These can bear contrasting readings of conformity or resistance as
Viswanathan indicates (: –). She suggests that the approach
of James to conversion exemplified the realization of American values
of democracy that affirmed individualism and self-authentication as the
values of the good citizen. To convert was to conform to a civic ideal, one
that expressed a right and a duty to cross frontiers and to seek and to find
transformations in new territories, in the plains and deserts in the West
where new life was to be found. The settlers, seekers and converts had in
common an urge to fulfill the American dream and to realize it in their
lives. But a different reading of conversion emerges when relationships
with the culture, the state and its legal apparatus are felt to be estranging.
Each setting yields different properties of heroism. One is exemplary
in enacting values of seeking without fear of transgression, but the other
is heroic by nature of the resistance to alien boundaries set up by the state
and its legal apparatus. Thus, depending on the context, the convert has
the power to stabilize or to de-stabilize. This latter capacity suggests a
kinship between the convert and Weber’s charismatic leader.
With the exception of the Protestant ethic essays, Weber otherwise
only once refers to conversion, and that is at the end of an essay on “The
Attitude of the Other World Religions to the Social and Economic Order.”
The closing paragraph of the essay refers to “the fateful conversion” of
Paul and to the emergence of two new attitudes: the expectation of the
Second Coming and the recognition of charismatic gifts. This section of
the essay was marked for expansion by Weber (: ). Yet in two
well-known concerns of Weber, conversion is an issue, at least potentially.
The first is, of course, the Protestant ethic, where conversion arises as
the process whereby the Calvinist channels his salvation into the world in
a manner that recognizes the social to the degree to which it is domesti-
cated for the purposes of calculation, stewardship and self-accountability.
This form of conversion relates to metanoia, the securing of a character
marked by spiritual endeavor, a term of critical importance in the foun-
dation of Christianity (Houtepen : –). To that degree, the con-
vert stands before the world and seeks to fulfill his destiny by reference
to the entailments the social world presents to him for resolution.
The second concern of Weber represents the other dimension of reli-
gious authority: the charismatic, the one whose grace has a factual if not
 kieran flanagan

fateful property. Far from affirming routines, the charismatic comes to

disrupt them. His gift of grace is not something to be found, but is a fact
of his existence. His spiritual credentials, mysteriously conferred, enable
him to stand against the social and in the ensuing eruptions demand that
others re-cast their identities. Nothing in the social is to stand in the way
of his fulfillment of this demand. In this way the charismatic mirrors the
property of the convert as heroic and bears on Taylor’s treatment of con-
version as involving breaking out of a frame of immanence through some
epiphany (: –). It is this breaking out that unsettles sociolog-
ical responses to the convert, for his irruptions stand inconveniently to
the best dreams of the discipline.
This convert seems to nullify the values of pluralism which much
of sociology stands to affirm—inclusiveness, tolerance and dialogue.
Where all is multiple, in culture and faith, then differences need not be
confronted, and the benefit of this postponement is the solidarity and
harmony which sociology believes cannot but follow. An outcome of
the pursuit of religious pluralism, however, is a paralysis in regard to
differences in faith, revelation and authority. These are denoted as divisive
(Flanagan ). For the convert, postponement of the need to arbitrate
on these theological differences is intolerable and the indifference that
ensues is indefensible. He wants the truth now and will turn accordingly
when he finds it. For him, religious pluralism is the handmaiden of the
secularity he despises. It paralyses his desire to turn. But pluralism has
one distinct value to sociology: it enables conversion to be treated as a
matter of opinion. This permits sociology to domesticate, but at the same
time to dispatch, the matter of conversion to the margins of the discipline.
Up to very recently, sociological interest in conversion centered on
recruitment to cults and sects, euphemistically termed new religious
movements (Richardson : –). These sociological interests
reflected public anxieties over questions of whether these converts were
brainwashed or in some way exploited. Study of these movements dom-
inated the sociology of religion in the s and s. Small in scale,
charismatic in leadership, bizarre in their beliefs, these movements pre-
sented to sociologists specimens for study. Limiting interest in conver-
sion to these movements permitted sociology to detach religion from
theology. A purer form of sociology was deemed to emerge free from
imperializing questions of faith difficult to contain. Their study enabled
sociology to indulge in the polite fiction that nobody converted to main-
stream religions, such as Catholicism, and that the vast literatures sur-
rounding exemplary converts to it could be sidelined. Often these are
 conversion: heroes and their sociological redemption 

tales of legend, such as St. Augustine’s Confessions, or the accounts of

Claudel, Newman, Pascal, and Péguy, to name a few. These are difficult
tales to incorporate into sociological understandings. Conversions are
disruptive most especially when they occur in areas that border on socio-
logical concerns. They unsettle sociological fantasies of keeping the world
safe from the intrusions of theological matters.
Modernity is often treated as the cornerstone upon which sociology
is founded, but as a discipline it seldom acknowledges the conversion
to Catholicism of Baudelaire and Huysmans, the main formulators of
modernity (Flanagan b). Other movements go in the “wrong” direc-
tion, a case in point being the conversion of Paul Williams, an impor-
tant Buddhist scholar, to Catholicism (Williams ; Flanagan a).
Those who had abandoned Catholicism for Buddhism felt betrayed by
this turning. Similar perplexities arose over the deathbed conversion of
the prominent English sociologist Gillian Rose from Judaism to Chris-
tianity (Shanks ). What unsettles in these cases is the unexpected-
ness of these conversions. They present a fact of turning that cannot be
wished away by friends and enemies alike and which is all more incon-
venient for just happening.
With the irresistible growth of secularization, sociology might feel jus-
tified by its neglect of the convert to mainstream Christianity. Given the
continual fall in church attendance statistics in the United Kingdom par-
ticularly over the past four decades and the long decline in the number of
converts being received as in the case of Catholicism, it is not surprising
that sociologists should treat testimonies regarding religion in terms of
exit roles from belief (Ebaugh ; Wacquant ).
Such is sociology’s characterization of human nature, that as a disci-
pline it prefers to hear tales from those who descend into vice, for they
live in the cauldron of real life, tested, fallen, but knowing of the limits of
humanity. The virtuous, on the other hand, seem unreal in their lives,
unsullied, boring and devoid of sociological interest (Flanagan ).
The world of vice had romantic allures of deviance and of the underworld
ripe for sociological redemption, but such is the fickleness of deviance
that it is now the virtuous who live beyond the pale. They are the new
deviants in a world where sin is abolished and where those who formerly
lived in underworlds now bask in the light of civil and legal recognition.
Now it is the virtuous and the converts who live unrecognized beyond
the boundaries of social convention. When they emerge from their twi-
light zones, zealous in their heroic virtue, the converts come as strangers
to those who knew them well in their fallen ways.
 kieran flanagan

In the famous essay of Georg Simmel, the stranger was the Jewish
trader, one whose wandering status gave him a capacity for objectifica-
tion because of his travels across boundaries. Being without the need
to root commitment, the stranger receives all manner of confidences.
He does not judge, has no local interests to negotiate, and is not com-
promised by any confidences. His transience enables him to see across
boundaries what those who live within them cannot (Simmel : –
). So, given that the stranger makes no conversion and derives his
enigmatic status from not making commitments, why make a parallel
with the convert?
Both have a property of transience, of moving across boundaries with
a mysterious ability. In that regard they share Simmel’s notion of “the
potential wanderer.” Each begs questions as to whether they will move
on or settle. Each stands enigmatically to those to whom they have come,
each sharing a common position that “is determined, essentially, by the
fact that he has not belonged to it from the beginning, that he imports
into it, which do not and cannot stem from the group itself ” (: ).
It is for this reason the convert unsettles. The basis of his definition of the
situation can generate perplexities difficult to resolve for those he left and
those whom he wishes to join.
The definition of the situation refers to the processes of examination
and deliberation surrounding events and circumstances that need to be
defined. These bear on the personality of the actor for they mark his
whole life-policy. Definitions need to reconciled between those society
invokes and those to which the actor aspires. The discrepancies between
both suggest a disjunction between fact and aspiration (Thomas :
–). The convert has changed his definition of the situation but with
what implications?

Conversion: Unsettling the Settled

The category of the convert is peculiar to Christianity. It is one that has

always unsettled. Without converts Christianity has no means of grow-
ing. Seeking converts follows an imperative to evangelize. This duty sends
missionaries to alien lands to convert and plant the faith. Martyrs spill
their blood in the hope of rendering the soil ripe for more conversions.
As the Roman Empire found, the Christian urge to convert permitted
no civil resistance. Of all the conversions, the one of enduring signifi-
cance is that of Paul.
 conversion: heroes and their sociological redemption 

On the road to Damascus to arrest there men and women to bring

back to Jerusalem, he is blinded by a light from heaven and falls to earth.
He is taken on that same road on to Damascus where he encounters
two ironies: the house to which he is to go is owned by a man called
Judas, and it is on a street called Straight. Paul’s conversion and the
profound impact this had on the expansion and shaping of Christianity
has been the subject of scholarship on such a scale as to cause one to
wonder what sociology might find in the event. Alan Segal provides an
opening.
As a Jewish scholar, Segal offers a novel reading of the conversion of
Paul. He brings into focus an important facet of the convert: his capacity
to throw a common light on what he has left and what he has entered.
From the controversies surrounding Paul’s conversion, understandings
of the beliefs, the cults and sects of Judaism, their dietary laws and reli-
gious prohibitions can be uncovered. These elements enable an under-
standing to emerge of the dilemmas Paul faced over who was the exem-
plary convert. Was he Jewish, one to whom a Covenant was given by God
expressed in the need for circumcision and the observance of dietary
laws? Or was he the Gentile, to whom New Covenant was given? Each
could invoke God’s Revelation but in ways that seemed incommensu-
rable. Segal draws out the dilemmas of Paul well. Was the exemplary con-
vert the Jew who lived the laws of the Torah and felt bound to these, but
who was baptized in Christ? Or were the exemplars those who lived lives
of “gentile impurity” on whom the Torah had no claim as they lived a
“new life of faith”?
In response, Paul sought the seemingly impossible. He wished “to
express how his gentile Christian society could maintain its concept
of community and its commitment without what we would call the
ceremonial laws” (: ). This deeply felt theological imperative to
found a community founded on one faith and one baptism led to the
famous reflection of Paul on his difficulties in Romans , which, as Segal
suggests is “the stuff of tragedy” (: –). The legacy of Paul
lingers over the status of the Jewish People and their Covenant. If it is
still part of the Revelation of God are the Jews exempt from the need to
be converted by Christians? The delicacy of this question gives rise to a
concern with the politics of conversion. But Segal points to something of
more immediate relevance.
In A Secular Age, Taylor seeks to place conversion in the context of
modernity and by implication to point its appraisal in a sociological
direction. Segal offers a crucial means of moving the issue of conversion
 kieran flanagan

from its customary psychological location into a sociological realm

(: ). The dilemmas Paul faced, of reconciling diet, ritual and tra-
dition with a vision of community are those that sociology can well
understand. But Segal brings out another point of enormous sociolog-
ical significance when he suggests that “forces of dissonance are always
unleashed in a conversion because the convert sees a great distinction
between a previous life and a present one” (: ). Far from being
an unreflective conformist, the convert can have dissenting capacities,
for he seems to have the capacity to view with “almost subversive clarity”
homogeneous cultural, secular and religious arrangements best treated
as invisible and not to be made manifest (Viswanathan : ). It is
this property of the convert that so unsettles, for he seems in receipt of a
strange gift, a mysterious capacity to transform his identity in ways that
can revolutionize the perception of the society he inhabits.
There is an implication that the incentive to conversion has been
undermined in the context of postmodernity where the tourist has be-
come the dominant motif. But this would be to ignore the two notable
conversions at the beginning of Christianity: Paul and the Ethiopian
eunuch in the chariot in Acts. Both were travelers (Gaventa : –
), and this notion of transition fits well with Viswanathan’s treatment
of conversion “as a crossing over, a migration or travel from one country,
culture, religion and identity to another” (: ).
Conversions always unsettle, but what is now peculiar is the amplifi-
cation of the process into a category of understanding in ways that are
distinctively modern. As Houtepen indicates, the term conversion in its
typical use became dominant only from the th century onward (:
). With the Reformation comes awareness of a religious marketplace
where differing forms and expectations of conversion emerge between
Catholics and Protestants, which Houtepen explores. Modernity facili-
tated the exercise of choice, and Protestantism with its stress on indi-
vidualism gave theological sanction to these freedoms, which became
enshrined in constitutional arrangements and the conventions of civil
society. Rather than contracting the prospect of conversion, modernity
expanded its possibility and indeed its politicization.
Conversion has always been a delicate matter of state, cases in point
being the Emperor Constantine and Henry IV of France. In the past,
the significance of religion was well recognized, hence concordances
between Church and state. But now matters are different, for the state
takes to itself the powers to sacralise the civil order and to install its
own version of a virtual religion in secular culture. When religious con-
 conversion: heroes and their sociological redemption 

versions occur inexplicably and with all manner of political unsettle-

ments in prospect, then suspicions and anxieties are generated in forms
peculiar to modernity. Those in civil society outside religious affiliations
find themselves wrong-footed and fearful that secularized arrangements
might become unsettled. A case in point emerged in the controversies
surrounding the conversion of Tony Blair, the former British Prime Min-
ister, from Anglicanism to Catholicism in .
Termed a “closet Catholic,” Blair felt unable to convert, for consti-
tutional and political reasons while still in office. Received privately in
Westminster Cathedral, London, the conversion occasioned a muted, if
not weary, response in the mass media. The conversion seemed a mat-
ter of opinion where any cultural, political or constitutional implications
were neutralized. But consider the explosive impact had Blair instead,
on the day of his conversion, with the Cardinal Archbishop at his side,
given a press conference at which he protested at the civil disqualification
increasingly felt by Catholics in the United Kingdom, most famously in
their disbarment in the Act of Succession but also in aspects of civil life in
areas ranging from abortion, adoption and the registration of civil part-
nerships where sexual politics controlled the ultimate court of appeal.
Blair’s conversion was instead unsettling for drawing attention to the
marginality of Catholicism in English society, the fragility of the state
church, and the degree to which religion is increasingly treated as divi-
sive and a threat to social cohesion. It also generated discomfort in liberal
Catholic circles who sought to downplay the term “conversion” in the
interests of sustaining an ecumenical dialogue. Earlier, Cardinal Hume
ordered the Converts’ Aid Society to change its name to a more neutral
appellation to preserve this dialogue. This effort to downplay the notion
of conversion was sabotaged by the influx of clergy from the Church of
England as a result of its decision to ordain women (Howard : –
). An impression has emerged that prayers for the conversion of Eng-
land were politically incorrect, theologically undesirable, and unfashion-
able (Nichols : ). Somehow, conversion has a potential to carry
dangerous implications.
Fears over unfair competition for converts, or as Evangelicals desig-
nate it, “sheep stealing,” have generated a need for etiquette in regard to
conversions within Christianity (Houtepen : –). During his ral-
lies in England in the s and s, Billy Graham went to enormous
lengths to mitigate the threat his evangelical activities posed to the estab-
lished churches by funneling converts back to their denominations of ori-
gin. This self-denying attitude to conversion has increased of late in the
 kieran flanagan

United Kingdom in response to worries over multi-faith relationships.

Thus, a multi-faith center opened recently beside the Anglican Cathe-
dral at Guildford in England provided the largest allocation of space for
worship to Muslims. In the press statement marking this new venture, it
was stated sternly that conversion was a forbidden activity.
It is a peculiar irony that modernity and secularization, which conspire
to treat conversion in terms of extinction, have inadvertently amplified
the significance of the process. As Segal observes in relation to converts to
new religions, they “come disproportionately from the more acculturated
and secular classes of society. It is almost as if the secularization brings
with it a desire to find religious meaning” (: ). At best the rela-
tionship between modernity, secularization and conversion is ambigu-
ous. In one sense the convert is no longer a threat to a secularized, civil
order—the decline in church attendance affirming the assignment of reli-
gious belief to the margins of society—but this very process amplifies
the exceptional nature of those who do convert and the strange unset-
tlements they generate in ways that are peculiar to modernity. Why do
modernity and secularization amplify the significance of what they effect
to despise: the convert?

Modernity, Secularization, and the Shaping of the Convert

As religion is uncoupled from its theological moorings with the onset

of modernity and secularization, a realization dawns that it has become
coupled to service other ends of power, legitimacy and domination.
Against this background, conversion can be treated as a means of secur-
ing compliance, but also of re-casting indigenous cultures in the image
and likeness of the forms held by the colonizers.
Numerous examples of this emerge, for instance in the Spanish con-
quests in South America. This harnessing of conversion to strategies
of colonial domination yields ambiguous properties peculiar to moder-
nity. It supplies its own versions of bad faith. In Ireland during the
Famine, –, Evangelical Protestants who supplied food to starv-
ing Catholics were regarded as opportunists. Catholics who converted
were labeled as “soupers.” Those who converted did so for the “wrong”
reasons. Because modernity amplifies comparison and recognition, the
plight of the starving comes into inescapable focus. They take on a profile
of being worthy of compassion, and those who give aid might supply bod-
ily sustenance but also might feel called to deliver food for the soul, hence
 conversion: heroes and their sociological redemption 

the concern with conversion. Those who buckle before this compassion
and convert might confirm the notion that converts act from positions of
weakness and that they have no “good” reasons for their conversion. But
the powers of modernity yield strange ambiguities. Conversion might
well be an instrument of oppression, but it can also be a resource for
emancipation. It can be invoked by converts who change identities to
liberate the oppressed. Thus, far from being an act of weakness, conver-
sion can also be a gesture of strength, an exercise in heroic virtue, one
occasioned by the particular properties of modernity.
In the case of India, the advent of modernity and secularization gen-
erated a peculiar paradox. Instead of leading to religious indifference,
these processes operated to accentuate a sense of difference between all
the major religions in India. In this context, the convert emerged as an
inconvenient category of considerable cultural, religious and legal signifi-
cance. Almost reluctantly, the legal apparatus of the state was drawn into
judgment on the civil rights of converts from Hinduism to Christian-
ity in relation to marriage settlements and inheritance. Complications
emerged for the state in reconciling indigenous legal frameworks and
customs formulated by reference to Hinduism with principles derived
from English law, based on notions of right arbitrated by appeal to rea-
son but also to Christian principles. To secure civil order, the response of
the state to matters presented for its judgment was to conceive conver-
sion less in terms of religious belief and more as a category of identifi-
cation whose disruptive outcomes the colonizing state sought to control
(Viswanathan : xii).
It is against this background that Viswanathan’s main thesis emerges
“that conversion is a subversion of secular power” (: ). She treats
the conversions of Newman and Ambedkar “as critiques of the failure of
secular ideologies to extend full political rights” (: ). The convert
appeals to a higher authority for his right to cross religious and cultural
boundaries in order to reconstitute their basis in the light of the failure
of the state to fulfill its promise to do so. Appeals to the supreme claims
of reason in matters of law are always thwarted by reference to a higher
court, one whose judgments are formed by reference to religion. When
the state fails, then religion becomes the resource of the oppressed. It is
used to galvanize the marginal and to give to them a vision of ultimate
redress beyond that which the civil apparatus can invoke. The American
civil rights movement illustrates this point.
Religion generates a power to mobilize but also to enshrine what is of
sacred value in a culture. When this sense of the sacred is ruptured as in
 kieran flanagan

the case of colonization, then nationalism emerges as a response. It is a

particular outgrowth of modernity. It facilities choice most especially for
the colonized to disengage from the colonizers and in this way religion
can become an instrument domesticated to that end. But this subversion
can generate confusion between theological claims and the legitimizing
functions of religion harnessed to securing political, cultural and nation-
alist ends.
The fusion of religion with culture generates its own insecurities not
least when conversion is deemed to destabilize a precariously felt sense of
national identity. Thus, at present in Russia it is believed that the expan-
sion of Catholicism and the converts it secures will damage the soul of
a nation whose guardian is the Orthodox Church. Attitudes to conver-
sion in other parts of Eastern Europe are also influenced by these com-
plicated interminglings of religious, cultural and political nationalism
(Vrcan ). Far from diminishing the significance of conversion, mod-
ernization seems to unleash unexpected powers to amplify its impor-
tance but in ways that perplex and disturb.
For some in Indian society, the convert signifies an alien category at
odds with the traditions of Jainism, Sikhism and Hinduism. As Sikand
(: ) indicates, conversion to Hinduism was traditionally “a grad-
ual, largely unorganized process.” As a response to the growth of mission-
ary movements of Islam and Christianity, Hinduism found that its tra-
ditional laissez-faire attitudes to changes in religious affiliation were no
longer tenable. In response, a process of conversion had to be invented
whose form mirrored Christian understandings of the term. Practices
had to be standardized, and Hinduism had to re-invent itself as a religion
re-structured in the likeness of its competitors if it was to survive. Bound-
aries had to be marked, for each religion needed to know who turned and
how they were to be identified for the purposes of return.
The forces modernity unleashed—of better communication, print,
organization and, most important, the right of choice to detach from the
binding ties of religion—all accentuated the significance of the convert
and the unsettlements conversion generated in Indian society. Perhaps
this indicates why, for some, there is in conversion a “phantasm” haunting
national identity and “an endless nightmare of bad faith, a wound to the
spirit of civilization and the soul of the nation.” Yet, on the other hand,
conversion offers a means of escape from what can be deemed “a singular
Hindu order” (Dube and Dube : ). Ambedkar’s conversion to
Buddhism marked a mass movement out of Hinduism by those in the
lower caste. Buddhism was the religion that gave expression to the social
 conversion: heroes and their sociological redemption 

equality he sought for his people. In this way, the category of the convert
facilitated their liberation from economic, occupational and cultural
servitude (Tartakov : –).
Controversies surrounding conversions in India still surface even after
Independence. According a BBC News report () an amendment
to the law relating to conversions was proposed by the Gujarat Gov-
ernment (in the hands of the Hindu party—the BJP) to protect low
caste Hindus. Buddhism and Jainism were re-classified as branches of
the Hindu religion, so that conversions between these were treated as
“inter-denomination conversion,” thus leaving converts to Christianity
and Islam open to fines and imprisonment. The tolerance Christianity
gives to Islam in the West, expressed in laws against religious discrimi-
nation, is not often reciprocated. Converts from Islam to Christianity in
Saudi Arabia and Malaysia and other countries are not legally recognized
by the state. A report from Christian Solidarity Worldwide, entitled No
Place to Call Home claimed that even in the United Kingdom “apostates”
from Islam face “gross and wide-ranging” human rights abuses (Church
Times ).
Modernity seems to have a peculiar power to enhance awareness of
the dangers surrounding conversion. Because it can be subject to politi-
cization, expectations of response and redress increase, not decrease, in
ways particular to modernity. This awareness of the dangers surround-
ing conversion can become all too apparent when attention is directed
to religions that claim a monopoly on Divine revelation as in the cases
of Judaism, Islam and Christianity. As religions of the Book, conver-
sion represents a change in regard to which form of Revelation is to
be recognized. Thus, conversions are not simply matters of changes in
identity, but of switches that go to the heart of theological dispute as to
how God reveals Himself and to whom, with obviously binding conse-
quences. This generates acute worries of over who should be converted
and how those targeted will respond. Thus, much publicity surrounded
a motion tabled for the General Synod of the Church of England in July
 that Muslims should be targeted for conversion. The motion was
eventually withdrawn. Similar difficulties have arisen over the Good Fri-
day prayers of intercession in the revived Extraordinary Rite (Tridentine
mass) where Benedict XVI encountered considerable hostility from Jews
who felt threatened by the notion that they should receive the light of
faith to convert.
The controversies surrounding these prayers can traced back to the
dilemmas Paul faced in seeking to bind Jews into a Christian life. The
 kieran flanagan

prayers go to the heart of the truth claims of Christianity that it has a New
Covenant expressed in a New Testament. The legacy of the Holocaust
hangs heavily in this area, adding a further complexity to the category of
the convert in ways peculiar to modernity. In turn, it generates paradoxes
that are peculiar to the status of conversion, where those who do not
convert might claim a heroic status. The examples one has in mind
are Henri Bergson and Simone Weil who, although wishing to convert,
refused to do so in solidarity with their fellow Jews who were suffering
and dying in concentration camps in Germany and elsewhere. Another
complexity emerges surrounding the issue of conversion. Even though
they did not convert, by being baptized, they could be deemed in Catholic
theology to succeed by default. In their refusal they could be regarded as
having received a baptism of desire. But accepting this form of baptism
might be to endorse the thorny notion that outside the Church there is
no salvation (D’Costa ). Baptism of desire would seem to resolve the
salvation anxieties of potential converts and the worries of those already
converted. In this context, sociology’s handling of conversion enters a
theological minefield, one that is laid out in response to perceptions of
modernity and the need to adjust ecclesial teaching accordingly. Since
Vatican II, if not before, this belief that outside the Church there is no
salvation has been discounted, if not treated as heretical.
But here one encounters a fault-line running between sociology and
theology. Intolerant of the indefinite, as in the case of the application
of rational choice theory to religion, sociology inclines to a far more
hard-line approach than theologians to the matter of the goods requi-
site for salvation. Because sociology inclines towards monopolistic views
of organized religion, it requires sanctions to underpin the exercise of
power and how these relate to the afterlife. Thus, perhaps, unsurpris-
ingly Weber asserted that “extra ecclesiam nulla salus is the motto of all
churches” (cited in Verter : ). This stipulation of Weber flows into
Bourdieu. It will not be forgotten that Weber’s great work The Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was hinged around the issue of salva-
tion anxiety. It might seem that liberal equivocations over the efficacy of
goods for salvation convert a crucial plank of sociological characteriza-
tions of culture into a beam riddled with theological dry rot and unsafe
to affirm. In response, is sociology to formulate its own theology of the
afterlife, but with no authority to do so? A hard-line-position on salva-
tion would greatly simplify sociological characterizations of conversion.
Having uncovered the significance of the category of the convert and
the definiteness of its basis in Indian responses to modernity, it might
 conversion: heroes and their sociological redemption 

seem odd to find that in modern Catholicism the process has become
slightly indefinite but also more complicated for sociological interven-
tions.
In his admirable effort to make consistent statistics on Catholicism in
England and Wales, Anthony Spencer draws attention to the complexities
surrounding the term “convert” which includes baptisms for those over
seven and also receptions of adults (: –). Allowing for a number
of qualifications on the data, his exercise in religious demography in
England and Wales shows a fall in the number of converts from about
, in  to , in  (: ). Spencer well illustrates the
complexities surrounding the category of the convert, notably over who
is to be counted as one.
These complexities further emerge in regard to the form of instruc-
tion now used for potential converts in Catholicism. The Rite of Chris-
tian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) was specifically formulated to meet
the circumstances of conversion in the setting of modernity. Yamane
and MacMillen indicate “its normative candidate for initiation . . . is an
unbaptized, uncatechized adult” (: ). But in their study, only
one third of adults initiated are unbaptized, the remainder being either
reverts or members of other churches. Ecumenical sensitivities might
generate queries as to whether those already baptized are to be treated as
converts. This points to a further complication in recent Catholic under-
standings of conversion.
In Catechism of the Catholic Church, while baptism is treated as “the
first and fundamental conversion,” it is penance that is designated as the
sacrament of conversion (: –). Thus in the subject index of
the Catechism the term conversion is cross-referenced to contrition. This
shifting of the term to ongoing conversion marks a distance from older
understandings of baptism as solely supplying the necessary goods to
achieve salvation. This sense of distancing from baptism as the entry
ticket to heaven finds expression also in the debate in contemporary
Catholicism surrounding the abolition of limbo, the place where unbap-
tized infants went. If limbo is abolished, a well understood right and duty
of lay Catholics to baptize in emergency is undermined with concomi-
tant effects on the wider issue of conversion. Rendering some goods for
salvation unnecessary can mean that some potential converts feel it not
so imperative to be baptized.
The change in emphasis might be a response to the fall in the use
of confession. To counteract this decline in use, it might seem that the
nature of conversion has been changed in a crucial way, one that involves
 kieran flanagan

a shifting of barriers to the heavenly from rites of initiation to the site of

metanoia. A second strand of conversion is added to the first, baptism,
but one that shifts the basis of sociological understandings of the process.
In some senses the move works in favor of sociological characterizations
of conversion that treat it as an on-going process involving a career of
turning, one that requires the stewardship of the goods requisite for sal-
vation in ways that would find approval from Weber. Adding this strand
of culpability renders conversion an accomplishment in both personal
and collective dimensions. The convert needs to treat the definition of
the situation conversion entails as an on-going project. This change in
emphasis would affirm the point of Straus that one should understand
the phenomenon of conversion in terms of how it “comes to be experi-
enced as actuality” (: ).
But there is a difficulty as touched on above: the new emphasis might
undermine the need to be converted in a perverse way: If baptism is
treated by default as the primary resource of conversion and if emphasis
shifts to metanoia, a difficulty might emerge that those not baptized
might be the beneficiary of a culpable ignorance regarding the need to
exercise stewardship over their lives lest they be condemned. Treating
baptism as the primary form of conversion, but sidelining it by making it
no longer the exemplary sacrament, might give comfort to those involved
in multi-faith dialogue. If the need to reflect these values of modernity is
expressed in terms of the expansion of the afterlife (hence the effort to
sideline limbo), then it is peculiar that the already converted run risks
over their heavenly prospects that do not apply to the unconverted.
Nevertheless the convert is still left with difficulties that elicit sociolog-
ical responses. Possibly execrated by those he has abandoned, the convert
has to convince not only himself but also those with whom he seeks affil-
iation that his conversion is rooted, credible and lasting. Encapsulation
is the process of actualizing this new identity. As with the stranger, the
convert has to cross a boundary with tact. The cost of his conversion
might be high so, to yield transformative returns from his investment,
the convert can be zealous and exacting in his new religious practice in
exemplary ways that stand at odds with those whose commitment, worn
by habit, is unreflective and perhaps wearisome. In an odd way, the con-
vert comes to convert the already converted. This paradox emerges from
his need to prove to others that he has indeed been converted. He needs
to find means to display the authenticity of his conversion. To actualize
his conversion in the setting of modernity, the convert will draw from its
resources to accomplish this end.
 conversion: heroes and their sociological redemption 

The Convert’s Hexis: Hexing the Inquisitors

Virtually by definition, any sociological appropriation of the convert to

the entailments of an ideal type leads to distortions. These are the price
of re-setting the convert in a wider conceptual nexus on the alien shores
of sociology and away from the wider theological understandings of the
duties a well-rooted conversion should pursue. That which sociology
emphasizes risks converting the convert into a guilt-ridden, paranoid
entity attending to matters of little theological consequence. Sensibilities
are highlighted, such as those relating to embodiment that might gener-
ate puzzlement. But any sociology has to pursue what it discerns in the
passing moments of culture, and embodiment is a case in point.
As a term, it has come into prominence mainly for the number of facets
of culture it signifies, ranging from body language, deportment, shape
and weight to alterations in cosmetic surgery. Embodiment refers to the
accountability the self places on the body and the language of gestures
uttered to secure the definition of a situation. The notion of bodily display
bears a property of artifice that has a bearing on how the convert secures
the credibility of his turning in the eyes of others.
Little study has been undertaken on “the impact of the conversion on
the individual once the process of conversion is complete” (Carrothers
: ). This underlines again the degree to which the theological shift
of emphasis in regard to conversion toward metanoia has ramifications
for sociology which are little understood. Sometimes the transformation
is so radical that some sort of narrative is required to account for changes
in circumstances. Popp-Baier has explored this area in the case of a
young woman who suffered from bulimia but who had a conversion
experience in a Charismatic Evangelical Church. The self-narrative of
this convert illustrates a switch from the language of clinical encounters
to the new and enabling rhetoric of Christianity that seemed better fitted
to account for her transformation into a new identity, as a believer, but
one cured. By means of prayer and not therapeutic analysis, she had
found her deliverance from bulimia. Popp-Baier suggests that “every
new performance of her conversion narrative” allowed the convert to
enhance her self-transformation and to expand the resources for her
healing (: –; see also Zinnbauer and Pargament : ).
The re-telling of the testimony can have a validating property as Beck-
ford found in his study of Jehovah Witnesses’s conversions. In this con-
text, “conversion is not represented as something which happened to
them: it is framed as something that they achieved” (Beckford : ).
 kieran flanagan

This property of accomplishment relates to the notion of performative

identity mentioned above. It also generates an interesting sociological
insight. Accepting that conversion is a gift of grace, converts still have
to find a way of converting themselves. Kilbourne and Richardson illu-
minate this point well when, using a term favored by Goffman, they refer
to the “passing” that converts seek to realize in their new roles (: ).
This relates to processes of re-socialization and the ambitions these frame
to be as they appear—as converted. The last thing the authentic con-
vert would wish is that “passing” should be considered merely as a form
of impression management. “Passing” enables the convert to present a
façade of belief and affiliation that might be at odds with his private sen-
timents. In “passing,” the potential convert might hope that others will see
in him possibilities of conversion that he is unable to discern. He hopes
that in acting as a convert he might become one. Conversion might well
be a gift of grace, but it is also a process caught up in properties of con-
tagion from the social milieu the convert inhabits. By soaking up sensi-
bilities of sanctity, the convert hopes to realize what he desires in “pass-
ing.”
This bears on a point of Pascal which Michael Raposa has noted (:
). Pascal asserted that habit, not reason, “plays the most decisive role
in religious conversion.” Pascal urged unbelievers “to behave ‘just as if
they did believe, taking holy water, having masses said and so on.’ ” In a
line replete with sociological significance, Pascal asserted “anyone who
grows accustomed to faith believes it.” This comment of Pascal finds an
echo in Simmel’s approach to prayer. Both have in common the notion
of faith, where those who seek either to be converted or to pray must
believe that their actions and words might realize what they hope these
will signify. Thus, Simmel writes: “to be able to pray, one must dismiss
both doubt that God exists and doubt that God is in a position to answer
prayers” (: ).
In this way, understandings of conversion shift to issues of deployment
of resources, and these strategies find expression in Bradford Verter’s
notion of spiritual capital. His notion expands Bourdieu’s concepts of
capital (cultural, symbolic and religious). As a term, spiritual capital
links back to Weber, but also to an unexpected preference of Bourdieu
for medieval forms of Catholicism. His interest was in the power its
forms embodied but not in relation to the images of salvation medieval
theology sanctioned. In these the after-life seemed more vivid, closer
and more harshly drawn than in the pallid images theologians sketch for
the comfort of the occupants of modernity (Flanagan b). In those
 conversion: heroes and their sociological redemption 

former times, fear of damnation was a sound motive to convert. Sin was
felt deeply and the stewardship of the soul was exercised in a scrupulous
manner that now would border on the theologically eccentric. But if in
the light of modernity, theologians have drawn the sting from death in
terms of its fate in the afterlife and have taken the fear away, unexpectedly
sociologists have stepped into the breach to press the claims for the
stewardship of the soul, obligations that find expression in Verter’s notion
of spiritual capital.
In his use, spiritual capital has three forms: embodied, objectified, and
institutional. It is the first one that is of significance here. Verter argues
that the embodied state refers to “the knowledge, abilities, tastes and
credentials an individual has amassed in the field of religion.” Almost
as a larder, this state stocks the goods for salvation which the convert
feels called on to raid, whatever the entailments. These entailments find
expression in the notion of habitus (disposition), “the socially structured
mode of apprehending and acting in the world.” The convert aspires to
inhabit this embodied form of spiritual capital, to naturalize it in terms
of his habitus and to render it his own. This process bears similarities to
Ricoeur’s notion of appropriation in regard to hermeneutics. If zealous,
the convert seeks to consume the resources of spiritual capital in the
most efficacious and competent manner possible. But embodied forms of
spiritual capital need a relational dimension, and this is to be found in the
objectified version. It refers to objects, artifacts and texts of and for belief
(Verter : ). The convert’s desire is to fuse both forms efficaciously.
To actualize his conversion he has to implicate himself in the use of both.
This strategy bears on Verter’s point that “assessing the labor value of
investment in spiritual capital may help to understand the trajectory of
conversion careers” (: ). This trajectory involves reference to the
strategies set to realize the performative identity of being a convert, but
also the embodiment that needs to be taken into account to secure such
“passing.”
A little used concept of Bourdieu, hexis illuminates these processes.
Bourdieu links hexis to Goffman’s notion of decorum and refers to forms
of regulation of the body, its manner of appearing that signifies the
realization of a belief but also its embodiment in a mode recognizable
to others. The term is linked to habitus, where disposition strives to
regulate the body in a durable form of manifestation cast to display the
knowing that constitutes an identity, sexual in Bourdieu’s use, religious
in this context. Hexis refers to the aspiration “to evoke the whole system
of which it is part” (Bourdieu : –). The term signifies a knowing
 kieran flanagan

of a social geography, one that involves a positioning of the body in ways

that connect habit with habitus (Crossley : ). Bourdieu’s notion of
hexis emerges in his sociology of sport, but also in his interest in space
and life-style. The term relates to the deepest of sensibilities, those that
lie recessed at the “most unconscious level, i.e. the body schema, which
is the depository of a whole world view and a whole philosophy of the
person and the body” (Bourdieu : ). Thus, when hexis is linked
to spiritual capital and the convert’s deployment of it, a sense of place in
regard to the religious field can be realized where gestures are made, such
as the sign of the cross. In so gesturing, the convert signifies to himself
and to others that he belongs there as a Catholic and, more important,
that he knows his place in the ritual order. In the management of his
hexis, in all charity, the convert seeks to hex his despisers.
Few accounts exist that manage to fuse hexis with conversion. For
this reason, Jacob Belzen’s study of a conservative Dutch Calvinist tradi-
tion, known as the Bevindelijken, is especially valuable. He uses the term
hexis as a means of understanding how the sect’s members validate their
conversion. Their sombre manner of deportment denotes a sensibility of
experience that validates the authenticity of their conversion. Thus, as
Belzen asserts, “conversion is viewed as a process, not so much as a once-
and-for all, or repeated act. It is the work of God in his chosen” (:
). It is by reference to hexis, in the manner of appearing, that the elect
come to know they are converted and they can demonstrate this state to
others who seek confirmation of their transformation. The convert natu-
ralizes his conversion in an unreflective manner so that it becomes part of
the unconsciousness of his habitus. Belzen summarizes the position well:
“because the believer embodies the bevindelijke spirituality, he can live it,
recognize it and be recognized by it, not because he knows it” (: ).
In short, he has become what he appears to be. But the task of making
the conversion definite through hexis carries a price for the Bevindelijken
who fear that it might convey a property of presumption in their conver-
sion. As in recent Catholic theology that affirms the ongoing property
of conversion in relation to metanoia and contrition, the Bevindelijken
seek to affirm their spiritual struggles to be converted and to be worthy
to manifest its basis. In securing this end, the convert follows a route with
familiar sociological resonances.
As Weber’s Calvinist alleviated his salvation anxiety by means of his
good and productive works in this world, so too does the Bevindelijke
achieve similar ends but by means of fusing habitus with his hexis.
Each has in common a burden of guilt and the fear of presumption. In
 conversion: heroes and their sociological redemption 

striving to employ hexis to Divine ends, both the zealous Catholic and the
guilt-ridden Bevindelijken reveal heroic properties in their conversion as
they struggle against presumption and skepticism in a cultural climate
unfavorable to their efforts to render conversion an ongoing project and
where redemption is to be sought but not assumed to be found in one
solitary act of turning.
In his study Belzen reveals an unexpected point. He writes “I have tried
to get as close to bevindelijken conversion as seemed possible without,
however, ever becoming ‘one of them,’ without any inside experience of
their religiosity of my own” (: ). The study of their conversion
generated a risk that he, the sociologist, would go native, that he would
convert. What if the study of religious conversions generated habits of
affiliation in the sociologist in ways Pascal noted above? One outcome
would be the corruption of the sociological gaze and a breach of Bour-
dieu’s injunction to keep a distance in the study of religion.
But what is presented as a professional stance masks a secular inhi-
bition, one that sociology imposes on itself in the study of religion, not
to convert most especially when the focal point of the research is con-
version. Yet, secularization generates a paradox, one that Bruce Kapferer
claims anthropology is the first to encounter: the limits “to the rational-
ity and reasoning of the demythologized and secular realities integral to
its very invention.” In facing this paradox, “anthropology is secularism’s
doubt” (: –). Matters have taken a more pressing turn with
the admission of reflexivity into the domain of sociological deliberations.
Distance no longer suffices, for proximity to those under study is now a
disciplinary entailment, one that is both moral and methodological. The
need to represent the tribe presupposes an empathy with their sensibili-
ties. If this is so, is it to be argued that reflexivity exercised in the religious
domain requires that spiritual sensibilities be lobotomized lest the soci-
ologist loses his analytical marbles and capitulates to the unthinkable: his
own conversion?

Conversion and Religious Reflexivity: A Sociological Quandary

The revolutionary implications of reflexivity in admitting all manner

of voices into sociological discourse are still being grasped. Feminists
were quick to see the advantage; those with religious voices were slower.
Recognition of reflexivity has changed the basis of sociological discourse.
The voices of the subjects are to be given full expression in a dialogue in
 kieran flanagan

which the sociologist also speaks. Reflexivity enjoins sociology to remove

the barriers that hinder the utterances of its subject matter being heard.
But what if these are religious utterances?
David Hufford grasped the implications of this shift in expectation in
regard to listening to testimonies from the religious. He noticed the way
skepticism about religion had a privileged status where fixed disbelief is
treated as normative and as the crucial value in sociological encounters
with religion. As he rightly recognized, this is an unacknowledged default
position, a set of assumptions sociology is reluctant to appraise critically.
Unease over this enshrinement of skepticism emerges in fieldwork, where
anthropologists studying religious practices find themselves invited to
convert to validate their interest in the belief systems under study (:
). Hufford regards these efforts as unsettling, for they force sociologists
to think about the unthinkable: their own religious beliefs. Sometimes in
the refractions theological images come back to haunt the sociological
imagination which can encounter its own epiphanies (Flanagan a).
If reflexivity relates to the embodiment of the sociologist in the field,
it also bears on the biographical properties of the self of the researcher
and what he brings to the study. His whole self is involved in the study,
not some fictitious part known as the “objective sociologist” who is a
singular refracting instrument with neither personality nor sentiment.
As Hufford rightly indicates, “reflexivity should also free us from the
stultifying fiction that our every belief and action can and should derive
from our scholarly training, or else be suspect” (: ).
It is what resonates back to the sociologist from the convert’s testi-
mony that has profound implications seldom studied. These emerge in
the notion of religious reflexivity, a term Christian Højbjerg uses in his
introduction to a special issue of Social Anthropology. If reflexivity is
about self-awareness, then its coupling with religion can amplify open-
ings to religious belief in ways few have explored. Religious reflexivity is
concerned with “how religious ideas and actions become the object of
reflection among the people holding religious beliefs and participating
in religious activities” (: ). Specifically, it deals with “the internally
reflexive character of ritual action” (: ). Rather than following the
customary direction of sociology by treating disbelief as an act of analyt-
ical faith, in this new form “reflexivity may also be defined as fulfilling a
belief-generating role” (: ).
Such a re-casting of reflexivity marks advances in anthropology that
are inconceivable in sociology as it is presently constituted in its han-
dling of religion. This paradigm shift reflects a break from deference to
 conversion: heroes and their sociological redemption 

the secularism so pervasive in anthropology and so emphatically asserted

in sociology. Charles Stewart articulates well the fear surrounding such
prohibitions when he asserts: “our identity as social scientists claiming
some authority to speak knowledgeably to society would, apparently, be
fatally undermined if we allowed religious commitments and feelings to
influence our work” (: ). But matters have changed as Ruy Llera
Blanes suggests: “ ‘personal belief ’, as contemporary authors have pro-
gressively shown in recent years, can be restaged from a peripheral to a
central position within anthropological and ethnographic projects con-
cerning religious phenomena” (: ). His essay explores the diffi-
culty of undertaking fieldwork on gypsy Pentecostals as a non-believer
where those in the church under study wondered why he had not con-
verted.
If reflexivity demands that the sociologist reflect back on his biograph-
ical relationship to the topic, then the matter of religious choice cannot
but emerge. It might be that the sociologist has no religious affiliation
to fall back on or refuses to consider the matter. But in other cases, this
reaching back into religious memory has its uses, as Paul Clough real-
ized in his study of death among Muslims in Northern Nigeria. He found
it necessary to reach back to his abandoned Catholicism to supply him
with insights to understand their mourning rituals. In making these com-
parisons, he accomplished a conversion of sorts, a realization that “the
enduring reality captured by an ethnographer necessarily results from a
strange collision—between his own mental categories and those of the
people he studied” (: ). For him, reflexivity expanded religious
sensibilities and in a way made him a more effective ethnographer, but
one not afraid to write theological conclusions to his fieldwork.
In his fieldwork on Christianity in Tuvalu (Polynesia), Michael Gold-
smith faced similar difficulties when he excavated his biography to find
“the remains of a religious upbringing” when he had believed. Like oth-
ers before, he encountered discomfort from his anthropological col-
leagues when this Christian past was mentioned, for they worried that
in some unprofessional way he had reverted. While recognizing that he
had gained much from the study of ritual, Goldsmith raises a worry men-
tioned earlier: the “risk” of conversion. In his case, he was happy to con-
clude that “on matters of doctrine, however, fieldwork on Christianity
left me with my anthropological ‘faith’ intact” (: ). Judging from
the virtual absence of testimonies of conversion by sociologists, it would
seem the “risks” they face of disciplinary corruption might be more imag-
ined than real. Yet, some are not immune to seeking a conversion or
 kieran flanagan

finding themselves tipped into one by the nature of their disciplinary

biography. David Preston’s study of meditative ritual practice presents
an unusual case of a sociologist involved in a form of meditation on a
personal basis who comes to develop a sociological framework, one that
emerges from his status as an insider (: ). His study dealt with
what is later recognized as a form of holistic spirituality, one that is inte-
rior and experiential.
But it is to anthropology, not sociology, that one looks for accounts of
transformations in the field that can be designated as forms of conver-
sion. Magic, shamans, and dealings with spiritual forces can have a pro-
foundly unsettling effect on anthropologists in the field. They encounter
unfamiliar phenomena that can be disturbing. Until recently, such as-
pects of fieldwork were disregarded in deference to the claims of anthro-
pology to be an objective discipline. But, as reflexivity percolates into
anthropology, expectations of disclosure have become more acceptable.
These reveal extraordinary experiences that can have a disorientating
effect on anthropologists in the field. Goulet and Miller refer to these
irruptions as “the ecstatic side of fieldwork.” They give rise to the “poten-
tial to step outside one’s taken-for-granted body of knowledge (academic
and worldly) and truly enter the realm of the Other’s life-world.” This
condition of ecstasis enables the anthropologist “to embark on an ethno-
graphic journey that takes us into uncharted territories.” The notion
refers to a lack of control in fieldwork and an incapacity “to follow well-
articulated research agendas.” Indeed, they suggest that ecstasis might be
considered “as a pre-condition of ethnographic knowledge.” (: ).
These disorientations can emerge in some expected locations, such as
in the case of spiritualists or sorcerers where dealings with extraordinary
experiences are the occupational hazards of anthropologists in particular
fields of enquiry. They generate risks of “joining in” in such a way that
“radical participation” opens new and unfamiliar sensibilities difficult
to communicate (: ). Basically there is a risk that in letting go
conversion might occur.
This relates to a curious worry, one that emerges in Fabian’s preface
to a collection of essays, Extraordinary Anthropology, dedicated to Victor
and Edith Turner, two notable English anthropologists who contributed
greatly to the development of the discipline, not least in placing pilgrim-
age and notions of liminality and communitas on the map. Fabian’s worry
was not that the Turners’ had gone native and had converted to shaman-
ism or that they had become believers in native forms of magic. His anxi-
ety was that they had become Catholics. For him, these were conversions
 conversion: heroes and their sociological redemption 

that risked going too far to the point of forgetting the Enlightenment,
which he treats “as part of a movement of emancipation from religion”
(Fabian : xi). There is a Weberian cast to his worry that such conver-
sions breached the integrity of the discipline. In other words, any conver-
sion no matter how bizarre is acceptable as long as it is not to Catholicism!
Here one encounters a willful amnesia. The English character of social
anthropology, valued by so many, doubtlessly was greatly influenced by
Durkheim, but much more significantly, it was shaped more by Catholi-
cism than many now would like to admit. Mary Douglas, Victor and
Edith Turner and, perhaps most notably Edward Evans-Pritchard were
Catholics. Except for Douglas, they were all converts. But did these con-
versions render them heroes for the power they exhibited to cross dis-
ciplinary boundaries between theology and anthropology, or did their
crossing generate unsettlements best not signified by those who act as
guardians of the latter’s sacred identity? The account of the Turners’ con-
version to Catholicism is likely to upset these guardians: It was unex-
pected. It was in the “wrong” direction. It should not have happened,
most especially to two important anthropologists.
Earlier in their career, the Turners had converted to Marxism, so
turning was not an unfamiliar exercise. As an outcome of their first
exercises in fieldwork that dealt with the Ndembu rituals, they returned
to Manchester—not in an ecstatic state but in a state of dissatisfaction.
They wanted to know about religious rituals for comparative purposes,
and the fact that they were in Manchester did not hold them back. After
shopping around various churches in Manchester, they found a Catholic
church that seemed to fit their disciplinary needs. There amidst all the
symbols, the gestures and the atmosphere of a Mass said in Latin, where
the ritual occupied a “strange liminal world,” Edith whispered “Vic! It’s
like Africa.” Thus, it was in a Catholic church in Manchester that they
felt a call to convert. They acted on it. As Edith Turner noted “we went
to see the priest to take instruction. This wasn’t research any more, this
was serious” (: –). After instruction for six months, the whole
family was received into the Catholic Church.
Their conversion, which emerged from what they considered purely
an exercise in fieldwork, had a parallel with the experience of Paul
Claudel, the famous French dramatist. He too went to a service, Vespers
on Christmas Day at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, solely to gather
material for a book he was writing. He had to return to building on
that day as he had attended a High Mass there earlier “without any great
pleasure.” In the midst of Vespers he experienced a profound experience,
 kieran flanagan

an irruption of sensibility that caused him to see the rite in a completely

new light. His conversion was a famous event in French literary history
(Ryan : –).
It might seem that occupation of a God-free zone renders the sociolo-
gist immune to the prospects of conversion. Yet all are not immune, for as
Rambo indicates, if the convert’s testimony is to be heard, then it seems
right that the sociologist’s own tale be told if he too experienced this odd
undisciplinary turning. In making this point, Rambo seems to anticipate
many of the entailments of reflexivity, but set in relation to conversion.
This turning too requires a self-knowing from the sociologist to handle
its testimonies in ways that do not distort their basis.
In a section of his essay, “the phenomenologist as person,” Rambo
argues that the student of conversion must recognize his own assump-
tions, if for no other reason than to guard “as much as humanly possi-
ble against one’s own demands for theological ‘correctness’ ” (: ).
In the section that follows, aptly entitled “braving the waters of self-
disclosure,” Rambo reveals his own conversion career (: –).
At this point, in the interests of religious reflexivity and the testimonies
it entails, I now need to get wet and disclose the peculiar circumstances
of my own turning.

The Author’s Unheroic Epilogue on Conversion

So far recessed in memory was this conversion experience that I could

not remember the date it occurred. The date was needed to place this
account in the context of my biography. The present abbot, Dom Aidan
Bellenger of Downside Abbey, Somerset, near Bristol very kindly found
the date in the guest book. It was on the morning of May ,  at .
a.m. Given the amnesia surrounding the date, why is the time so precisely
given?
The time is engraved in my memory, because the first response to the
conversion experience was to wonder if it was connected to the extensive
breakfast at Downside eaten earlier. Huysmans might have characterized
his own conversion as a digestive experience; mine was not. Most conver-
sions yield testimonies, either in a social setting or to others. Baring occa-
sional reference, I said little about mine. Reticence, cowardice, and per-
haps a wish not to appear in some superior contact with God seemed the
most obvious reasons for not following a predictable sociological path of
disclosure. Perhaps this was the unheroic aspect of my conversion exper-
 conversion: heroes and their sociological redemption 

ience. Yet, this reticence had one advantage: no other sociologist could
hex what was in my mind, for in there the transformation occurred. The
conversion was radical: it was a capricious switching of the self, rather like
what occurs in an old fashioned wall clock, where one figure comes out a
door, vanishes, and emerges as something different. This particular con-
version experience might well have been about two selves, one old that
vanished and one new that came suddenly, all in instance. Kolakowski
describes the process well when he suggests that “conversion is a radical
intellectual or spiritual turning point leading to comprehensive under-
standing of the world, free of uncertainty, resolving all theoretical and
practical questions, and eliminating all doubts” (: ).
Despite impeccably sociological supervisors and already working in a
department of sociology, I have always had a property of being in exile
in the discipline and in occupation of another. Part of the reticence sur-
rounding the conversion might have been due to doing a D.Phil. thesis,
decidedly historical, but sociological in cast. Its title (passed in ) was:
“The Rise and Fall of the Celtic Ineligible: Competitive Examinations for
the Irish and Indian Civil Services in Relation to the Educational and
Occupation Structure of Ireland: –.” Only two external exam-
iners were possible: one mad and the other dead. One did not wish to
add to the eccentricity surrounding the thesis and present a career lim-
iting disclosure of a religious conversion. This was in pre-reflexive times
in the s when disciplinary proprieties had to be observed that ruled
out such startling testimonies. Anyhow, in no sense could the conversion
experience be a projection that emerged during research.
From Dublin, with a middle class background, I studied at University
College, Dublin then went on to the University of Minnesota for an M.A.
in historical sociology, conferred in . In that time, I was impeccably
lapsed from Catholicism. The pseudo-radicalism of the chaplaincy in
response to the Vietnam War fuelled the exit role. Somehow Catholicism
as practiced there seemed cast in clothing donned by self-proclaimers,
broadcasting their angsts for all with ears to hear. It all seemed egoistic,
shallow, opportunistic and deeply hypocritical. It was all like deplorable
sociology but devoid of disciplinary accountability. One’s calling as a
sociologist was even more deeply affirmed; religion had no place in it.
Coming to Bristol, antipathy to religion softened notably in response
to the Gothic but also to choral evensong, where a choir of men and
boys seemed to transform time in ways that undermined resistance to
the aesthetic side of theology. Certainly, I was not a Catholic at the time—
the category would have been refused. Yet, some sliding was occurring.
 kieran flanagan

It had little to do with the gloom of being lost in a D. Phil. thesis or being
insecure in a temporary lectureship at the University of Bristol (later
made permanent). These seemed the stresses of young academic life and
in a lane certainly not pointing in a religious direction for resolution.
Going to Downside in  was part of a general sense of unsettlement
and drift. The flat was drab and dreary; the food at Downside was
supposed to be excellent; all in all it was time for quick exit from the
academic coal-face. But there all things changed unexpectedly.
Frankly, insofar as a sociologist might have a conversion experience,
this one was ill-fitted. It is easier to say what it was not. It did not occur in
the field of study or in a ritual where some effervescence blew the mind
into ecstasis (hence my envy of Claudel); there was no visual or exter-
nal stimulant; there was no petition for conversion. It just happened—
completely and inexplicably in the mind. So baffling was the experience
that on immediate return to Bristol I raided a colleague’s office for a copy
of William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience. Rapidly leafing
through two chapters on conversion, what had happened to me came
into focus. He articulated what I was clueless to express: I had had a con-
version experience. Insofar as conversion involves crossing boundaries,
my transition was one of moving slowly from history into another soci-
ological exile, this time in theology. The conversion experience made the
emergent disjunctions tolerable. One could play with impunity in the
dangerous waters of postmodernity without sociological injury. Some-
how, I could cope with antinomies, ambiguities and signs of contradic-
tion with impunity, for the transformed self was given a shell-like cover
resistant to the acids of postmodernity. The house of the self was secure.
Orthodoxy of belief seemed natural; it was the unorthodox, the liberal
theologians, who seemed “unnatural.” One knew what to believe: it was
in black and white, perhaps reflecting the conversion experience itself.
Walking slowly up to the North transept in Downside Abbey, an
impeccably Gothic building, I went past the little angel lodged on the
pillar in the aisle just before the entrance to the high altar on the left
and on to the Lady Chapel that lay behind the reredos. Even on a sunlit
morning, this area is dark. On the left at the foot of the steps up to the
Lady Chapel was a solitary prie-dieu. In front was a row of lit candles
and above a statue of the Blessed Virgin. I knelt, not bothering to look
up. Shutting my eyes, nothing happened. Then suddenly a cloud of
black filled the mind, angry, vicious and depressive, and it went down
the body like a cold poison. If a monk had come by, so evil was the
feeling that he would have been punched. Before the mind could settle
 conversion: heroes and their sociological redemption 

its senses to this descent, a sense of being lifted up came in an instance.

Light joy, an enormous peace and envelopment filled the mind, almost
like the infusion of James’s gas, but with no pump. I stood up deeply
startled.
There were odd properties to the conversion. It was a complete turn-
ing, but with no image, internal or external. Only in retrospection and
in an effort to find a narrative for what happened, did an image emerge
later of a house destroyed by lightning, where all the floors collapsed,
with blackened smoldering beams lying against the wall, the roof blown
off and a lot of sunlight had come in. It seemed that a dwelling place had
been destroyed, and in the light I was released to go out and to find images
to paint in the colors of sociology. The “conversion career” that followed
involved the nurture of reflexive religiosity directed to the expansion of
this sociological imagination set to turn in holy new directions. In a lib-
eral department of sociology at Bristol, one was left to one’s own devices,
and so hidden one scribbled away and tapped out texts, certainly not a
hero, but suffering the unlikely fate of seeking redemption through soci-
ological means of understanding. Maybe, after all, the convert does not
belong in the waxwork pantheon of sociology, set dead for emulation.
There is a life to lead and a redemption to be found, not of one realized by
escape into the fictions of the sociological imagination, but in the excit-
ing irruptions conversion facilitates. These too have their own tales, and
some of these can be heroic, though not this one.

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 chapter three

ELEMENTS FOR A SEMIOTICS OF “CONVERSION”

Patrick Michel

Faith is the key. It moves mountains and

all sorts of fields, particularly those that
allow property speculation.
Eduardo Mendoza (: )
Although we cannot exactly assess his awareness of the twists and turns
that led him there, which cannot be without a somewhat puzzling char-
acter to anyone who takes an interest in his writings, Samuel Hunting-
ton, after raising the specter of a “clash of civilizations,” asks Who Are
We? In this book, he turns his attention to the process of “integration” of
Latin American immigrants—particularly Mexicans—into North Amer-
ican society, and he endeavors to apprehend identity in its relation to
integration. Acknowledging the difficulty of assessing the changes in this
field, he decided to retain “conversion” as the privileged indicator to mea-
sure the degree of integration: “The available evidence is limited, and in
some regards, contradictory. Unquestionably, a most significant manifes-
tation of assimilation for Hispanic immigrants is conversion to evangel-
ical Protestantism. This development parallels and is related to the dra-
matic increase in evangelical Protestants in many Latin American coun-
tries”. Returning to the lack of precise data on the number of converts,
he quotes Ron Unz who claims that “a quarter or more of Hispanics have
shifted their traditional Catholic faith to Protestant evangelical churches,
a religious transformation of unprecedented speed, and one obviously
connected partly to their absorption into American society” (Hunting-
ton : ).
The role given here to conversion as an indicator of the recompositions
of identity and loyalties might also well be a recognition of the functions
they have in the logics of recomposition that run through the contem-
porary world. Consequently, it results in thrice emphasizing the impor-
tance (renewed, from the perspective of the secularization thesis) of the
religious, in the fact that it constitutes a resource, hence, thirdly, it is more
of a resource than other possibilities (or instead of other possibilities).
 patrick michel

Similarly a French television program recently broadcast a news report

showing its interest in the phenomenon of conversion and, consequently,
in the role of religion in the current social developments. A young
woman, “of French origin” as some would say, who lives in one of these
“tough neighborhoods” (to continue with the same phraseology) in the
periphery of Paris, explained in front of the cameras why she had con-
verted to Islam. The emphasis was naturally put on the strictly religious
nature of this choice. But briefly: what she insisted upon was her weari-
ness, before her conversion, of being constantly bothered whenever she
moved around in the “housing estate” where she lived. Since she had
become a Muslim, adopting all the external attributes of her new iden-
tity, i.e., the scarf, no one had ventured to be disrespectful toward her
anymore. She emphasized being very satisfied with this.

Experiencing Contemporary Conversion

Beyond the genuine or supposed role played by religion in adapting to

a milieu and in verifying this adaptation, a role to which we will return
later, “conversion” can assuredly appear as the modality of experiencing
the religious which is the most adapted to its contemporary features: indi-
vidualization, pluralization of the religious supply, and the possibility for
the “believing subject” to maximize the advantages sought in conversion
because of the highly competitive nature of the religious market. Such an
approach partakes of an analysis centered on the religious supply, as it is
worked out and offered, eventually adapted, in order to take into account
the specificities of the ground where it happens to be projected. It relies
on the postulate that religion can be endowed with a relevance that would
exclusively belong to it, whereas what seems to be questioned is not so
much “religion” as the simultaneous and sometimes contradictory uses
of which it is the object. Therefore it does not rely so much on confor-
mity to a proposed model (whose interpretation would be the object of
a monopoly, more or less disputed) as on the capacity of some actors to
mobilize symbolic resources indicated as available (that is to say, as made
mobile in order to appropriate them) and to display them at the service
of competing strategies aiming at inhabiting and orienting the contem-
porary movement.
As a result, we may prefer another type of reading to this one, no longer
determined by the supply but by the use of the religious, and being part
of a political sociology of the use of symbolic goods. In this perspective,
 elements for a semiotics of “conversion” 

the issue is no longer to think of conversion as a modality that is partic-

ularly adapted to the religious recompositions induced by pluralism and
movement. The issue would be to know of what “conversion” is the sign
in the complex interplay of reciprocal interactions and uses that govern
today the relations between religion and politics, religion and ideology,
religion and economy.
Echoing the difficulty in putting forward a definition that would be
likely to create a consensus on “religion” (see Michel ), there is no
agreement on “a theoretical definition of the concept or of the methodol-
ogy applied to the study of ‘conversion’ ” (Mossière : ).1 Moreover,
regarding conversion, the difficulty is increased, since this “conversion”
(which we do not know how to define) is expressed in a religious regis-
ter, and therefore religion (which we do not know how to define either)
would be supposed, if not to exhaust its meaning, at least to recapitulate
it. This very difficulty undoubtedly explains why the dominant hypoth-
esis in social sciences nowadays relies on the idea that any conversion
would be “the result of a singular experience, whatever the religious or
social order in which it is inscribed” (Mossière : ). We will come
back to this irreducible singularity of conversion later. For the time being,
we should content ourselves with observing that “to turn away in order
to turn towards,” in the words of Christian Decobert ( [quoted in
Mossière : ]), partakes of an approach centered on the individual, in
line with a tendency, which can be observed everywhere, toward a radical
individuation of the construction of a relation to the self and to mean-
ing, but which can only fuel a sure propensity to psychologize the phe-
nomenon. From that perspective, the widespread resort to a methodol-
ogy that favors “life’s stories” is very revealing. Knowing that this method
has immediate limitations insofar as the narrative of conversion is “more
a biographic reconstruction than a corpus of objective facts, the sociol-
ogist must thus apprehend these narratives for what they are: a narrative
development during which the orator is trying to develop his personality
in his new identity” (Tank Storper  [quoted in Mossière : ]),
which means that more is learned about the convert as a person than
about conversion itself.

1 This is the conclusion to which Géraldine Mossière came after a study of works on

conversion. Mossière notes in passing that “it is not uncommon to see the authors of
these works being personally involved in their object of study, either being themselves
converted (Jules-Rosette, Rambo), or belonging to a religion of which they study the
newcomers (Köse, Setta)” (: ).
 patrick michel

Thus, after a study of religious conversion based on the case of Roger

Garaudy, Brigitte Fleury (: ) noticed that this type of study did
not provide “for the time being, a definite profile of data that can be ver-
ified to improve the understanding of this phenomenon. We may partly
remedy these constraints by analyzing other conversions than religious
ones, such as changing one’s political allegiances or scientific paradigms.”
In the same way, which amounts to taking note of the epistemological
limitations of the heuristic tools that have been developed so far in the
study of conversion, other authors such as Greil and Rudy advised “not to
restrict the field of conversion to the religious field, but to extend it to situ-
ations of radical changes in someone’s identity” (; cf.  [Mossière
: ]). Moreover, these authors and others (Meintel ), come to
contest even the scientific relevance of the concept of conversion.

The Pilgrim, the Convert, and the System

Nonetheless, for many authors, “conversion” has a descriptive capacity

that makes it an indispensable tool to account for contemporary religious
life. Danièle Hervieu-Léger () writes, for example:
As far as it involves at the same time a comprehensive reorganization of
the life of the person concerned according to new standards and his/her
incorporation in a community, religious conversion is a remarkably effi-
cient modality of construction of self in a world where the fluidity of plural
identities is dominant, where the mechanisms of meaning are fluctuating
and where no core principle organizes the individual and social experience
any more.

I have noted previously () how Hervieu-Léger’s two figures of the

“pilgrim” and the “convert,” though supposedly allowing us to describe
the contemporary landscape of believing, in fact result in perpetuating an
approach to this landscape through strictly religious categories, precisely
disqualified by its evolution. Hervieu-Léger, by isolating these models of
the “pilgrim” and the “convert” in order to describe the contemporary
religious situation, places herself in the perspective of setting up instru-
ments of analysis that come from the movement and are likely to con-
tribute to work it out. The models are even appealing, insofar as they
straightaway refer to a dynamic, to a movement: the path of the pilgrim,
the radical transformation induced by conversion.
Yet, does not, in fact, the sole association of these two models go
against the enterprise under whose sign it is placed? Each is certainly
 elements for a semiotics of “conversion” 

indisputable. There is no doubt that contemporary believing is felt, in

its very fluidity, as a quest and search for a path—as a result the figure
of the pilgrim tends to account for this perfectly.2 The fact that this
path can be marked by a conversion (or, what seems more accurate, by
successive “conversions,” experienced as stages, therefore by definition
operating and non-definitive) is the obvious consequence of this. Finally,
it is obvious that it is in the interest of the religious institutions to seize
this dynamic in order to feed on it. But here the problem is one of a great
difference in scale: The figure of the pilgrim, in the sense that it evokes
modalities of the confrontation with meaning, concerns more or less all
the contemporaries. He is a giant figure. The figure of the convert, which
in the final analysis refers to an institutional logic that contemporary
believing precisely seems to be giving up, is a tiny figure.
Associating the dwarf to the giant corresponds to an approach that,
starting with an exact description of reality, can lead only to its inaccurate
representation. We start with the religious to arrive at the religious, as
if we were in a closed circuit. Moreover, this leads to the institutionally
religious, as the convert adheres to a more or less stable “form,” in which
the quest would wear out and come to an end, as if the institution
remained the privileged space to sanction a path of meaning. Thus, it is as
if from the moment a conversion was at stake, an institutional mechanism
would ultimately be targeted, as this system could have the function
of framing conversion, by providing in advance a content of belief to
which the convert can adhere, by controlling afterward the conformity
to belief—and of the practice that stems from it—to that content.
Moreover, in this perspective of analysis, even though it is admittedly
true that “the dialectics of the standardization of goods put on the mar-
ket and the ultra-personalization of the forms of their presentation to
the believers is one of the majors characteristics of the new spiritual
movements that are spreading within and outside the great Churches”
(Hervieu-Léger : ), we can observe that once more (and always)
the analysis starts with the producer—the transmitter of the believing—
and not with the receiver-consumer of this believing. It returns to a “min-
imum creed,” a “theological minimalism,” and a “religiosity reduced to

2 Even though this figure takes place in a context that is already strongly connoted. A

pilgrimage sets itself a goal straightaway: Rome, Compostela, Mecca, and so on. Therefore
the pilgrim has a relation to space in which space is immediately organized, mapped,
“finalized.” I would thus prefer to the models of the “pilgrim” and the “convert” the figures
of the “wanderer” and the “member,” which are more neutral (cf. Bertrand ).
 patrick michel

effects” that “pulls the relation to transcendence down to affective and

personalized proximity to the divine being” (Hervieu-Léger : 
[italic added]).
Three observations must be made at this stage:
The first of these is purely common sense: If conversion is a passage
from one state to another, then it fundamentally concerns, to restrict
ourselves to the situation in Europe, an a-religious posture: one converts
to non-religion. I confine myself to the European stage so as not to
enter the debate opened by the thesis developed by Peter Berger, Grace
Davie and Effie Fokas () of European exceptionalism—“secularized
Europe” being opposed to the rest of the world, and of course first
to the United States, whose society is known for being simultaneously
modern and religious. I would simply note that until a few years ago,
the exception was American and not European, the shift noted being
the result of evolutions that partake more of ideology than of fact (and
moreover show the power and durability of resorting to stereotypes in
social sciences).
The European stage is thus characterized by the regular progression of
the number of people “without a religion.” In the European Values Sur-
vey, .  of the French answered “no” to the question “Do you believe
in God?” and .  claimed that they belonged to no religious determi-
nation. “It is a fact”—the German theologian Eugen Drewermann (:
) noted—“that in Western Europe three quarters of the population
remain outside the different forms of religion, as they are displayed and
institutionalize themselves.” This acknowledgment is easily ascertained
empirically. If we follow the European Values Survey, religion is only
“little” or “not at all important” for .  of the people polled in the
Czech republic, .  in Estonia, .  in Denmark, .  in Ger-
many, .  in Latvia,   in Sweden, .  in France, .  in Slove-
nia, .  in Great Britain, .  in the Netherlands, . in Hungary,
.  in Finland, .  in Spain, .  in Luxemburg, and .  in
Belgium.
But who does sociology talk about, when it specializes in the study of
religion? Is it the individual who defines himself as having no religion
(  of the – year-olds in France,   in Great-Britain,   in the
Netherlands) part of this? (cf. Bréchon : –) These people “with-
out religion” have obviously their own “beliefs,” outside the existing tra-
ditions, that they may use, by combining them—and without necessarily
worrying about being in a “believing tradition” or by refusing the idea
of doing it, in the very name of the believing in which they recognize
 elements for a semiotics of “conversion” 

themselves. And without searching either for a “community niche,” since

their search for meaning can also be placed under the sign of a complete
irreducibility of the individual, or by choosing for oneself a community
niche which is likely to be given up anytime, according to one’s needs and
desires.
Thus it seems indeed that what was yesterday a marginal behavior
now tends to become a major social fact, as far we reallocate the fact of
being “without a religion” not necessarily to an activist refusal of God,
which still concerns only a few of our contemporaries, but to a more or
less profound indifference. This is does not mean that the question of
the existence or the non-existence of God has been resolved. But it has
lost its organizing capacity. The radical individualization characterizing
the contemporary modes of the believing amounts, as far as religion is
concerned, to the obliteration of the centrality it claimed it embodied.
Such an evolution, on the background of a massive distancing toward
any institution of belief, leads to the loss of meaning for the distinction
between believer and non-believer from the moment that there is no
longer, or only in theory, at least de facto, any “content” of belief likely
to be a reference.
In this context, the very concept of conversion is highly problematic
in a believing landscape that is entirely shaped by the full legitimation
of the individualized construction of the relation to meaning. This is
not only because the sociology of conversion would be, by force of
circumstances, a sociology of the minority—the only identifiable one—
and would be characterized by the coincidence, or at least a relative one,
between a displayed individual believer and an established content of
belief. It is also because, and this is my second point, this sociology of
conversion takes place within a tension that cannot be removed between
the approach of its object as an irreducibly singular phenomenon and the
fact that conversion makes sense only in the passage to the social. Indeed,
conversion is and can only be personal. Besides, its attestation stems from
its individual display: the testimony of the person for whom conversion
represents a decisive break and opens, if not to another world, at least to a
new being-in-the-world. There is no conversion without a community or
institutional witness. Indeed, because conversion is supposed to partake
of a purely individual logic, it can be constituted into an indicator. But
as soon as it is accepted as such, its meaning no longer comes under the
register of the individual but of the social.
Finally, conversion could not have the same meaning in a fragmented
field, organized into spaces of identification where, partly via the
 patrick michel

religious, the belonging were given as territorialized on a field in which

supplies of believing, all of which are considered to be legitimate, circu-
late. This amounts to saying that “conversion” cannot be separated from
a global religious landscape whose transformations it confirms. “Mass”
conversions, resulting from heavy constraint—for instance, the at least
formal adoption of the religion of the conqueror belong to the past (even
if some “massive” conversions can today still stem from a more subtle
form of constraint).

Political Sociology and Religious Resources

Now that these remarks have been made, I will set out to present, without
any claim to an exhaustive list, some elements of a political sociology
of the use of the religious resources and of the meanings of this use.
In this perspective, conversion can be apprehended as an indicator and
modality of the management of a new relation by societies enmeshed in
pluralism, the set up of this relation being experienced as a destabilizing
and multiform crisis of traditional points of reference (or references
presented as such).
Michel de Certeau (: ) has noted that
Religion provides a global symbolization of their uneasiness to scattered
men, who are all the more separated from each other as their common
references are broken and they react to the pressure of a foreign culture
without order, without common courses of action, and without any means
to compensate for the anomie and disintegration. Whether it is egalitarian,
eschatological or revolutionary, a new use of religion concerns the whole
of human experience. Religious language opens on to a disarray (which
has often remained nocturnal)—an exit, like a day enlightening the nature
of the experience problem: it is the whole.

Consequently, any new visibility of the religious on a given stage (and

we can consider that today this visibility takes place on a stage whose
dimensions coincide with the world’s) constitutes as such an indicator of
the intensity of the movement affecting this stage.
Governed by subjectivity, the contemporary world of believing is en-
tirely one of fluid circulation and is immediately restive to any structuring
reference to any stability, except if one locates this stability as being purely
operative. The objective of contemporary believing is not to lead to a
“religious identity” (thought as “stable”), but to feel itself as belief-in-
motion.
 elements for a semiotics of “conversion” 

In fact, the concept of “religion” and the concepts associated with it,
such as “secularity,” or even those that can be drawn from theses on “de-
secularization,” become, in a situation of the complete social legitimacy
of the construction of a relation to meaning, more and more obscure
concepts, and therefore largely unusable, at least as long as we persist
in recognizing a relevance that would be specific to them. As a result,
“religion” is only the indicator of larger recompositions, in which it
moreover takes part as an instrument of management. Thus it makes
sense only as an intermediary object, an analyzer, which, once it is
contextualized, can turn out to be quite invaluable.
What is at stake here is the revelation, due to the dissolving work of
the global, of the loss of relevance of the criteria “traditionally” used to
justify the stable nature of identity patterns. But it is not an absolute loss:
the criteria are somewhat recycled, given a new meaning because of the
very circulation to which the loss of relative relevance gives rise. In other
words, this oscillation doubly constitutes a strong indicator of the identity
deregulation and the space where the work of redefinition takes place.
The oscillation thus becomes the major characteristic of a landscape
where identities are felt to be simultaneously waiting for organizing
centralities, in a situation of ceaseless circulation between the different
supplies of articulated centrality and of the inevitable relativization of the
content of these supplies. This, of course, does not imply that joining—
converting—such and such supply cannot take place at a given time
and for a given time. Individuals acquire, in the words of Marc Augé
(: ), “cosmologies portable”—individualized cosmologies that can
be made to fit a person’s situation as circumstances require.
Of what, in this landscape, is “conversion” the sign?
First, conversion shows the unbridled pluralization of the religious
supply. This is obvious, but it has nonetheless to be emphasized. For, so
that one “can turn away in order to turn toward,” there needs to be an
opportunity. But this pluralization of the religious supply must here be
understood as one of the facets of a larger process in the evolution of soci-
eties, where the fiction of homogeneity tends to substitute itself for the
obviousness of pluralism. This can be verified in all the registers, whether
the issue is the acceleration of the passage to so-called multi-racial or
multi-ethnic societies; claims aiming at taking into account and respect-
ing the rights of more and more visible minorities, whatever the displayed
criterion of difference (sexual, skin color, origin, denomination, specific
memory); the outbreak in the number of family “models” that can be
observed; or more simply the capacity felt by an individual to establish
 patrick michel

himself as the ultimate authority to interpret any discourse, wherever it

comes from, thus challenging any pretence made by any institution of
the believing to stand on what Bourdieu called a “monopoly of interpre-
tation,” therefore sending back at the same time “the worried discipline
of the admitted enunciation” to the purely pointless soliloquy (Certeau
:).
The massive arrival of migrants has largely contributed to the speeded-
up diversification of the religious supply. All the European states are con-
fronted by a pluralism perceived as new, insofar as cultural and religious
worlds that used to live in an apparent separation (and in its apparent
stability) can no longer believe in it, nor make people believe in it. The
emphasis on the fictional nature of this separation, of this “insularity,”
operates out of the weakening of symbolic geographies. Hence occurs the
difficulty, logically expressed in an identitary mode, to find one’s place in
a world which is probably more than ever felt as if set in motion. For
instance, when in numerous “global villages” of the industrial regions
of “old Europe,” the mosque or the Sikh or Hindu temple have started
to emerge next to the parochial church, these new edifices of cult may
have challenged the “familiar” nature of a space in which most people
had become used to living and being represented collectively, before a
background of the oscillation of the other social bearings of the “being
together” (cf. Pace ). The generalized oscillation of all the markers
that had been “classically” considered relevant in the constitution of an
identity pattern can see different treatments being opposed to it, aiming
widely at alleviating its effects, at feeling comfortable in it or, on the other
side, at denouncing it. “Conversion” is part of this pharmacopoeia, as a
means to face the present, by putting it into a narrative that tends to re-
verbalize the world, and consequently to ensure a level of control whereas
this relation to the world used to be perceived as fragmented and endured
as domination.
It thus means that “conversion” hallmarks the existence of a crisis. It is
a rupture and a passage, a display of a new availability and a reposition-
ing according to this claimed availability. Conversion involves a process
in which the religious does not intervene before but after—i.e., the adop-
tion presented as sudden emergence of a paradigm in which the religious
plays only the role of an inscription register—since it provides the lan-
guage necessary to the articulation of a new corpus, to the construction
of a revised autobiography, and to its validation in regard to its confor-
mity with the codes governing the current narrative. Aiming at a new
organization of the relation to time, space and authority, in order to find a
 elements for a semiotics of “conversion” 

solution to the uneasiness generated by the loss of stability of these meta-

references due to the acceleration of the contemporary movement, “con-
version” has certain similarities with the construction of myth as defined
in the mode of Levi-Strauss: a vigorous protest against the absence of
meaning. In this respect conversion might very well be weighing on the
social and political order.

Conversion in the Global Arena

The distinctive feature shared by the two religions that are rising the
fastest at the international level—neo-Pentecostalism and Islam—is that
they both have a specific relationship with the process of globalization,
which is reorganizing the world stage. Both authorize the articulation of
a renewed relation to the world in its transformations.
Renovated Pentecostalism does not try very hard to hide its close links
with a specifically North American conservative conception of society
and the world. In this conception, of which it is one of the major vehicles,
the frontiers between politics, religion, economy and ideology tend to
fade or even disappear. The collapse of communism has most certainly
deprived this movement of the enemy that endowed it with a certain
meaning, but insofar as it is interpreted as a sign of a godsend, this
very collapse draws the horizon of a planet painted with the American
colors—a project that is given form by a “prosperity theology” at the
service of the “mission” that America would have to carry through.
According to this vision, the relation to Islam is essential, since radical
Islam appears just as well to be the other religion and the religion of the
Other, which would back up the existence of a “clash of civilizations” in
which, like the East-West axis before, the United States would embody
Good.
This parallel with radical Islam is also likely to make sense in the reg-
ister of contemporary identities and of the generalized oscillation they
would experience because of the recompositions induced by the global-
ization of the economy and culture. As this radical Islam would be a pure
product of the confrontation with Western modernity that is simultane-
ously desired and rejected, a privileged space where fantasies and frustra-
tions are articulated, the progress of conservative Evangelicalism would
constitute, as such, an interpretative grid to approach the modalities of
management of the reconstruction of identitary mechanisms allowing
it to come to grips with the movement. And, in the final analysis—
 patrick michel

coming to a full circle—the increase in power of opposite fundamen-

talisms would prove that religion is coming back with a vengeance on
the interior, transnational and international scenes.
Neo-Pentecostalism is the place where an individual is produced as
compatible with the logics at work in globalization and at the same time
the privileged space to verify the conformity of this neo-individual with
the rules governing the working of the globalized world stage. Further-
more, by emphasizing again the theological constitution of economic
success into an indisputable sign of “election,” and thus of the preference
given by God to the neo-individual, neo-Pentecostalism comes to sacral-
ize the market itself—i.e., to adorn the mechanism of the capitalist market
economy with the divine seal.
At the same time, the globalization of Islam partakes of the possibility
of building Islam as a privileged space to challenge a world order domi-
nated by the United States and more widely by the West. Turning Islam
into “the religion of the underprivileged” amounts to constituting it as
an operating register of enunciation and denunciation of an order pre-
sented as unfair, and into an effective instrument to dispute the hege-
mony of the West. But this Islam can simultaneously “open itself to all
the key themes of the world market” and become the vehicle of “the
emergence of demands for individual autonomy” and of a “new integra-
tion in the world that is somewhat inspired by American televangelists”
(Donnard )—as evidenced by the famous televised sermons of Amr
Khaled. The market Islam described by Patrick Haenni is admittedly not
the religious expression of the underprivileged, and its desire for moder-
nity “makes it tilt toward a conservative America” (Haenni : ).
Both religions are thus mobilized, sometimes in a contradictory man-
ner, in the service of an essential redefinition of reference points in a sit-
uation of the upheaval of those, presented as stable, of a world on the
way to exhaustion, where it still seemed credible to convey the assertion
of a belonging through territorialization. For the still vivid reference to
cujus regio, ejus religio is substituted the transnational religious, adapted
to the organizing modalities of a contemporary world structured by the
circulation governing it. In this landscape, the erosion of the positions
of Catholicism would result from the inability of the institution to adapt
itself to the multiform movement that shapes societies and to get univo-
cally involved in a radical transformation of the structure of these very
societies. This contrasts with neo-Pentecostalism and Islam, which are
supposedly able to follow the movement and to direct it in order to put
individuals, bewildered by its extent, in phase with the new forms of the
contemporary.
 elements for a semiotics of “conversion” 

But this reading through discontinuity once again does not do justice
to a complexity that is greater than one might think by looking at only one
chronology. For example, the failure in Latin America of “Liberation The-
ology,” hostile to mainstream liberalism, led to a “Prosperity Theology”
in phase with North American neo-Conservatism. The true continuity
lies indeed in the tenacious effort made by societies to create the modal-
ities allowing people to live as comfortably as possible in the world that
is taking shape. The social movement toward which Liberation Theology
tended also constituted a privileged space of invention and experience
for the individual.
Conversion to neo-Pentecostalism, which opens the horizon to Pros-
perity, also aims, still on the basis of Latin American experience, to allow
the emergence of the individual, by extricating him from the constraints
of the community, which have supposedly stifled him. But this means
that he is even more subjected to a real formatting, which implies the
gathering of all the available information on the convert, who is called to
subject himself to the institution and is totally taken charge of, as far as
both his schedule (Bible reading, prayer, singing, sermons, group activ-
ities) and the reorganization of his social relationships are concerned.3
How can someone be excluded when the submission to God required by
Prosperity Theology does not eventually constitute a stage in a process
in which this submission would potentially become an instrument in the
hands of an individual who is likely to invent his autonomy thanks to it?
In fact, when one considers the world-wide rise of neo-Pentecostalism
(, conversions a day throughout the world),4 as when one speaks of
globalized Islam, does one talk first of religion or of the way globalization
can been seen through the particular prism of the religious, that is to say,
and more precisely, through the way it is being mobilized?
Regarding the French example, the conversions of original Christians
play a marginal role in an evolution that leads Islam to be the second reli-
gion of the country as far as the number of believers is concerned. The
only “statistically significant phenomenon” concerns, as Claude Dargent

3 His budget is also checked. This formatting of the individual, which is the result

of practices rather than of indoctrination, seems to be different according to the age of

the convert. Each age group is made autonomous, the model being handed down by the
Church, knowing that observance occurs inside the family.
4 “From  million Evangelicals in  (out of  million Christians) they are now

 million out of  billion Christians; it is estimated that , conversions happen
everyday. There are already , evangelical denominations consisting of  million
Churches, led by  million ministers working full time” (Zeghidour ).
 patrick michel

(: ) notes, young Blacks (West Indians, French-speaking Africans)

or “Whites” of Christian origin, living in housing estates with an impor-
tant immigrant population. And if they choose to adhere to Islam, expe-
rienced as a “religion of the suburbs,” it is because “these new converts
share with the original Muslims the same sentiment of exclusion, justi-
fied by the lack of security in their professional and social situation.” Dar-
gent adds that this process, “incidentally limited, is in part compensated
by the conversion to Christianity of original Muslims.”5
Conversion seems to be calling into question a society someone be-
longs to but that denies the person the possibility of being a full member.
The answer to the opposition to difference is to display the choice of a
difference thought to be absolute. But Islam is not as such the space of
an indictment of the West or of society; it is not even the place where an
alternative identity can be built, allowing one to reassert one’s dignity,
and thus likely to heal the wound inflicted by being looked down on
by the dominant. Islam becomes so through the construction of a social
imaginaire of conversion, where the individual conversion becomes and
is characterized as a social reality (and, potentially, as a social asset).
Conversion allows the individual to reintegrate a movement from which
he was excluded, to relocate in a totality, and to constitute himself as the
very origin of change (as this change is being oriented).
However, the fact that the medium of this display is religion does not
imply that the religious is centrally at stake. The Polish workers in the
great  strikes on the Baltic coast used religious songs and symbols in
their struggle against communist power. Was the use of these songs and
symbols equivalent to their supporting the specific contents of Catholi-
cism or did they constitute an operationalization of what implacably the
communist power could not ideologically integrate, for fear of putting
its very essence at stake? In other words, although the Poles displayed
their Catholicism, it was not necessarily because they were Catholics, but
because the authorities were not and could not become so.
Let us adapt this: if young people from the suburbs in France (or
Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands) “(re)convert” to Islam, it is
not necessarily because they feel and want to be Muslim, but because

5 Regarding these conversions of Muslims to Christianity, Dargent refers to Farhad

Khosrokhavar (: ), who “mentions the case of young women seduced by the
relative freedom that exists in Christianity, in particular in its Protestant version, and of
young men who also converted—for instance former drug-addicts who converted after
undergoing treatment for drug addiction in a Christian facility.”
 elements for a semiotics of “conversion” 

France (or Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands) are not Muslim and
are not supposed to become Muslim. Although conversion is a process
of (re)identification, it is also and eventually based, between metaphor
and euphemism, on verifying the capacity of the religious to make this
(re)identification possible. Although conversion constitutes the space
where one can construct a reference exteriority that has to be invoked
in order to be used to take a stand on the movement (and therefore the
emergence of the individual in line with this), no essentialism appears to
be involved here—that is, there is no need to call for contents of belief.
What is centrally at stake is the operationality of this exteriority.
In a situation of oscillation, the identitary claim prevails, de facto,
over any adherence to content or to a definition of identity through
the content. This content—which is always presented as stable, but is
in fact always the result of a process aiming at inventing it, since this
alleged stability is an integral part of the process of invention, of which
it simultaneously is a major condition—is always simply the medium of
the information. As such, it is of course likely to be reinterpreted, in order
to submit it to the constraints that a modification in the context would
put on the initial assertion. In that sense, as Nathalie Clayer (: )
notes in the case of Albania, “ ‘conversions’ are like many sociopolitical
assertions. Thus, for instance, ‘conversions’ to Christianity are often a way
of expressing one’s adhesion to the Western world. The reassertion of
a Muslim identity is often a request to re-assess a sociopolitical status
rather than a religious assertion as such.”
In conclusion, this is another way of saying that thinking “conversion”
is solely a religious assertion partakes of the same logic as the one we can
imagine inspired Robert M. Pirsig when he gave the title Zen and the Art
of Motorcycle Maintenance to a book in which he only allusively treated
the issue of Zen and even more incidentally referred to motorcycle
maintenance. But after all, although it is very hard to find a black cat in a
dark room (especially when there is no cat), the most difficult thing is still
to understand how someone can, in such a situation, suddenly exclaim:
“That’s it, I have found it!”
 patrick michel

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 chapter four

FOR LOVE OF FAITH: PATTERNS OF

RELIGIOUS ENGAGEMENT IN A NEW TOWN

Kees de Groot

Conversion is about change. Whether one defines it as a “redirection of

foundational trust,” as Anthony Blasi does in this volume, or as a “com-
prehensive personal change of worldview and identity,” as Henri Gooren
() puts it, the term “conversion” refers to a process of transforma-
tion. Often, this process is thought of as a sudden instance, but research
into individual cases in the modern era has given impetus to the con-
cept of conversion career. This approach not only refers to conversion as
“a level of individual religious activity” within a larger process, but also
implies the possibility of several conversions within the life cycle (Gooren
: ). It even makes it possible to conceive of parallel trajectories of
involvement within different religious groups.

Conversion in Liquid Modernity

This concept of conversion is particularly interesting when it comes to

societies in which the construction of identity is a continuous project
(Giddens ). Does this condition imply that people may experience
several conversions, or would it rather foster the ever-searching attitude
of the late-modern pilgrim (Hervieu-Léger )? In the latter case,
conversion does not actually take place. Rather, the role of the visitor,
the traveler, the seeker is cherished as a permanent state. (Yet, from
the perspective of Gooren this state may be regarded as the “level of
preaffiliation.”) Transforming one’s religious identity several times and
plural religious involvements are phenomena that are congruent with
“liquid modernity,” a stage in the process of modernization in which
crossing boundaries, flexibility, and ambivalence are endemic (Bauman
). The present-day discussion on the topic “conversion” raises the
question as to which patterns of religious involvement can be discerned
in liquid modernity.
 kees de groot

Besides being associated with a highly reflexive project of identity

construction, liquid modernity also refers to a consumer economy (as
opposed to a production economy) and to high levels of geographical and
social mobility. A liquid-modern perspective on religion would, there-
fore, not have organized religion as its starting point, but would rather
focus on individuals in their more or less mobile context (De Groot
, ). Elsewhere, I explored participation in events and service-
organizations (De Groot ). In this contribution, the focus will be on
individuals in a dynamic spatial context, the inhabitants of a New Town.
New Towns “are those human settlements that were founded at a certain
moment in history by an explicit act of will, according to a preceding plan
and aiming to survive as a self-sustaining local community and inde-
pendent local government” (www.newtowninstitute.org [accessed --
]). By definition, all inhabitants are new. Thus, my aim is to dis-
cern patterns of religious involvement among the inhabitants of a New
Town.

A New Town in the Netherlands

The specific town under consideration here is located in the Netherlands,

a country with a strong tradition of a planned shaping of the physical
environment. The New Town, Zoetermeer, is a medium-sized city close
to The Hague that has grown tremendously over the past four decades.
While the residents of Zoetermeer may boast a history that goes back
to the eleventh century, the city as we know it today was created over
an extremely short period of time after the village of Zoetermeer was
officially designated a so-called “new town” (groeikern) in . Then
a village of , inhabitants, by  Zoetermeer had a population of
,.
New towns are inhabited by people from a wide variety of back-
grounds. They share an environment that breathes “newly created by
human hands” wherever one goes. Zoetermeer is a “here and now” in
which people live together, each with his or her own “elsewhere,” includ-
ing other countries, each with his or her own history, including a religious
biography.1 In the s Zoetermeer became synonymous for “nothing is

1 In , when the data were collected,   of the inhabitants were of foreign origin

(www.zoetermeer.nl).
 patterns of religious engagement in a new town 

happening here.” This is illustrated by the fact that the Dutch Genera-
tion X writers (including, for example, Ronald Giphart) took the city’s
name as the title for their literary magazine. Even now, the city has a
reputation for being staggeringly boring: “An exhibition of postmodern
architecture without a city life.” “A city without roots.” “A city without a
face.” However, as urbanization increases, urban issues such as vandalism
and idling, troublesome youngsters also increase.
Concerned about the social cohesion in their urbanizing suburb, the
municipality of Zoetermeer subsidized a research project of the Uni-
versity of Amsterdam to investigate the supposedly problematic situa-
tion. According to the researchers there were no severe societal prob-
lems. Yet, they advised investment in projects to strengthen ties between
inhabitants (Strengthening ties). In a scholarly article, Amsterdam urban
sociologists focused on the construction of the situation as problem-
atic and referred to this phenomenon as the tragedy of suburban resi-
dents (Van Ginkel, Deben and Lupi : ). After all, crime, street
noise, pollution, vandalism—in short: the experience of insecurity—are
the exact reasons why these people fled the big city. Tensions between
ethnic groups and between adults and youngsters spoil the suburban
dream, they concluded. Incidentally, youngsters have to do little more
than make some noise and gather in groups on the street to be consid-
ered problematic. Suburbanized people, they claimed, are simply more
sensitive to situations that interfere with their idea of peace and quiet.
Not only the absence of a sense of urgency, but also the absence of
interest in the role of religion stood out in this report. It was mentioned
neither as a source of disruption, nor as a potential for cohesion. This was
remarkable—and noticed as such by the Christian Democrats in the city
council—against the background of the growing tension in multicultural
Dutch society. After a period in which multiculturalism had dominated
public discourse, a more critical discourse about (descendants of) immi-
grants, especially from Turkey, Morocco and the African continent as a
whole took hold (Vellenga ). Global Islamist terrorism, such as the
religiously motivated attacks on New York’s Twin Towers (//),
started to influence the interpretation and evaluation of the project of
multiculturalism. It enforced the tendency to perceive immigrants as
Muslims, and to evaluate the presence of Islam in the Netherlands as neg-
ative (cf. Bauman ).
 kees de groot

Suburban Theory

Amsterdam urban sociologists in this context basically followed Mary

Pat Baumgartner’s () image of the American suburb where people
morally withdraw from each other’s actions.2 Atomistic individualism is
the term the British theologian Timothy Gorringe (: ) used to
refer to the “sin” of the suburb whereby residents fail to identify with
other residents. Part of this image is the development of small, intro-
verted communities. Commitment to religion then becomes looking for
connection by gathering into groups of people with the same ideas. The
question, however, is whether this stereotypic image of the gentle and
good American suburb is correct and whether or not it applies here, too.
Life in the suburb is very easily identified with white, middle-class “sub-
urban bliss,” as shown in a Dutch thesis by David Hamers (). In films,
novels and scholarly articles alike, this has become a cliché.
Hamers points to another prevailing image as well. Everybody is a
newcomer in suburban residential areas and new towns. In this respect
the inhabitants are considered as exponents of late-modern society in
which both social and geographical origin have little predictive value
regarding the life that is to follow. Mobility has never been greater. In the
new cities, an exciting mix of widely varying cultures and subcultures is
emerging. Does this make these suburbs a breeding ground for creativity?
Some people believe so, backing their opinion up with the names of
musicians and artists who came from some suburb or other. Others
counter this by saying that it required a move to the big city before
these suburban talents could develop. Perhaps a New Town inspires
a creative handle on tradition. Zoetermeer could be a laboratory for
a society in which each individual composes his or her own unique
mix of religious elements. The Dutch theologian Frits de Lange ()
identified the inhabitant of new suburban projects with Richard Sennet’s
() “flexible man,” living in Anthony Giddens’s () network of
abstract systems. This interpretation of late modernity corresponds with
Bellah’s () famous Habits of the Heart that was published in . A
female character named Sheila Larson said that she put together her own
religious menu, which she called Sheilaism. Since then, she has become
a model for the believer of late-modern times.

2 This is the purport of Baumgartner’s Moral Order of the Suburb. Her account is still

regarded as being characteristic of today’s suburbia (cf. Savage, Warde and Ward :
).
 patterns of religious engagement in a new town 

A third possibility that allows for religion in a suburban setting is

the active engagement with a particular community, a new sociologi-
cal development according to Grace Davie (: –). She finds
“articulated belief ” characteristic of suburbs. Religious groups are sub-
ject to trends to operate on the market. Believers must be recruited from
miles around. These individuals often have a clear preference and make
deliberate choices as to which church, mosque or temple they wish to
attend. Their communities are characterized by a multitude of activities
and working groups that apply a clearer distinction between members
and non-members than is used elsewhere in society.
Suburban theory in general seems to suffer from the identification of
the suburb with middle-class residents. Bearing this in mind, these three
approaches suggest three different hypotheses as to what a New Town
like Zoetermeer could be expected to do with its residents’ faith. The first
approach would predict the continuation of existing social and religious
ties, and therefore a relative absence of conversions. Suburbanites would
simply not show much interest in groups outside their own subculture.
The second approach would predict a minor role for religious traditions
and a prevalence of religious shopping among the respondents. The third
approach focuses more on the institutional level, but on the individual
level it would expect people to have made deliberate choices in their
religious preference. These suggestions were not tested in a large-scale
survey, but have served as initial guidelines for the interpretation of a
selected sample of  interviews with Zoetermeer residents.

Soul and Conscience of a New Town

The data upon which I will draw were collected during a project (Septem-
ber –January ) that was initiated by the staff of the Zoeter-
meer City Museum. This direct context has influenced the selection of
the respondents. In order to understand the nature of this influence, it
is necessary to explore the wider cultural and political climate in which
this project took place (Van der Ploeg and De Groot ). “What do
our city dwellers believe?” is the intriguing question staff at the Zoeter-
meer City Museum asked themselves—intriguing not only because it is
only recently that modern times have become a topic in museums, but
also because Dutch public institutions used to leave matters of religion to
others (Kennedy ). This has been the case since the collapse of the
system of institutionally organized religious diversity known as “pillar-
ization.”
 kees de groot

During the s, Dutch public culture transformed quite rapidly

from overtly religious to overtly secular. In the last years of the second
millennium, however, the religious climate once again changed. Reli-
gion has made a comeback in the public domain, symbolized by the
Dutch  Book Week under the ambiguous title “My God.”3 Journal-
ists, artists, and writers who had largely ignored religion as a contem-
porary, relevant issue no longer assume the end of religion. Religion
is no longer exclusively regarded as the terrain of religious institutions
and movements, but is increasingly being recognized by secular public
institutions—for example, as an aspect of urban cohabitation. The polit-
ical climate at this time was dominated by the rapidly evolving politi-
cal career of sociologist and debater Pim Fortuyn, who articulated an
aversion against the role of Islam in Dutch society, and more generally
the ambivalent wish of late modern individuals for a communal life and
individual freedom (Pels ). In an intriguing version of a populist
politician, this “dandy in politics” dominated the discussion. An oppos-
ing viewpoint that also received attention, however, addressed the role of
organized religion in a more favorable manner.
At the New Year’s reception in , the mayor of Amsterdam, Job
Cohen, addressed this re-introduction of religion in supposedly secu-
lar Dutch society.4 Surprising many supporters of Huntington’s “clash
of civilizations” thesis, he suggested involving religious, in particular
Islamic, communities in his mission to “keep the citizens of Amsterdam
together.” Meanwhile, it appeared that Fortuyn’s attempt to become the
prime minister of this country would be successful. The shock that fol-
lowed his assassination on May ,  was only slightly tempered when
it appeared that the offender was not a militant Muslim, but a militant
ecological activist. His death generated a general sense of danger. The
Dutch tradition of religious tolerance seemed to melt away. The prag-
matic approach of Job Cohen had to stand up against the growing con-
viction that Islamic religion was an obstacle to integration of immigrants
from Turkey and Morocco. Job Cohen’s view, however, did appeal to the
staff of the museum. The initial idea of director Jouetta van der Ploeg was
that the religious diversity of Zoetermeer would appeal to the curiosity

3 Journalists recurrently announce the end of the “God is dead” age, e.g., “God Lives”

was the title of a news feature about the “return of religion” (Vrij Nederland,  April
).
4 Job Cohen elaborated his viewpoint in the Cleveringa Lecture ( November )

and the Willem van Oranje Lecture ( June ).

 patterns of religious engagement in a new town 

of the public. What if we were to provide the opportunity to glance into

one another’s homes, to have a look at an aspect of life considered as pri-
vate as one’s faith? From the beginning, a journalist of the local news-
paper (Haagsche Courant), René Lamers, was involved. Both he and the
director of the museum soon linked this project with their concern about
the social cohesion in the town in which they were working. Inspired by
Job Cohen, they were strongly motivated not only to pay attention to the
religious orientations of the inhabitants of this New Town, but also to
encourage people from various cultures and religions to meet and to get
to know each other.5
Soon, a third party joined them, Jaap van der Linden, a minister
from the local Dutch Reformed Church. He perceived the opportunity
to make use of the secular space of the museum to organize the inter-
religious meetings that had been his wish for a long time. Together
they planned a half-year program centered around a portrait gallery
of inhabitants from various religious backgrounds, photographed with
an object that symbolizes their devotion and accompanied by a quote
that expresses their personal faith. The photographs and selections of
the interviews were to be published in a catalogue, with a scholarly
introduction and a report of a local survey on the relation between
religiosity, Christian orthodoxy and holistic spirituality (Van der Ploeg
and Van Dijk ). After the opening event, a series of activities were to
follow: “World Cycle Tours in Your Own Home Town,” visiting various
places of worship on the way; “Foreign Food,” having a meal in an
ethnic environment; weekly lectures and inter-religious meetings; and
two projects for religious education (primary and secondary school).6

Collecting Believers
The aim of the project was to have the religious diversity (including non-
believers) of Zoetermeer represented in the sample. The aim was not,
therefore, to provide a representative image of the population as a whole.
An accurate representation would have required a good-sized, random
selection from the Zoetermeer population register, with all people thus
retrieved being required to cooperate. In this procedure the focus was on

5 Presentation of the museum director Jouetta van der Ploeg at the closing event

( December ); journalist René Lamers in an email to the author ( May ).
6 The continuation of the project is described in De Groot .
 kees de groot

one’s individual faith, and qualitative diversity was the leading principle.
Part of the selection procedure, furthermore, was the question whether
people would be prepared to appear with their name and their photo in
the City Museum. A  February  article in the Haagsche Courant
launching the project was accompanied by three interviews: with a Mus-
lim, a Hindu, and a “spiritual” individual. Seven people, practicing believ-
ers or people with very outspoken views, responded to the appeal printed
in the article. Apparently, an appeal in a general medium was not enough
to recruit other respondents, including somewhat less highly profiled
believers.
Letters went out to religious groups, welfare organizations, and foreign
national organizations inviting them to give publicity to the project
among their followers. Fourteen people responded, mainly from the
Bahá"í community (who had just acquired a piece of land in Zoetermeer
to build their temple for North West Europe) and the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints. Almost all respondents who were approached
via their religious communities played a leading role or were well-known
within their communities. However, the majority of the respondents
were invited personally: they were relatives of friends of the interviewer,
people he met in Zoetermeer, even a lady who served his meal in a Greek
restaurant. He did not manage to get in contact with people from the
Buddhist Asian communities and from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Three
Jewish respondents decided to call off their cooperation, because they
disliked the idea of exposing their story and their picture to anti-Jewish
sentiments. One non-denominational evangelical later withdrew from
the project. The aim to have representatives from the different religions
as well as bricoloeurs and non-believers was largely successful.

A Selective Sample
Compared with the population in general, this group shared some unique
characteristics. The age of the Zoetermeer residents who were inter-
viewed ranged from eighteen to seventy-seven. Their average age was
forty-eight. The sample is not representative, therefore, of the young
municipality of Zoetermeer. There were equal numbers of male and
female participants, and almost as many Zoetermeer respondents of for-
eign, Indonesian or Surinam, origin (), as Zoetermeer respondents of
Dutch origin (). The share of Zoetermeer residents of foreign origin in
this exhibition is therefore three times as high as the overall Zoetermeer
population ( percent).
 patterns of religious engagement in a new town 

Figure .. Religious Affiliation

While the interviewees included people from all districts in Zoeter-

meer, there was a relatively large () number of residents from an area
built in the s, with low houses and “stacked” homes (Rokkeveen-
Oost). This area has both rented properties and homeowners, and accom-
modates many foreign nationals who moved away from areas that are
dominated by blocks of flats (Palenstein).
The traditional faiths and their sub-groups were well represented. The
majority of people referred to one of these when they were asked about
their belief. A third of all interviewees were Christians. They included
Catholics, mainline Protestants, Orthodox believers, and members from
Pentecostal churches.
Another third belonged to one of the other mainstream religions:
Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism. The Muslims came from Suri-
name, Morocco, Turkey, Iraq and the Netherlands, and distinguished
themselves in different directions. The Hindus were all Hindustan Suri-
namers. The Buddhist respondents were Dutch Christians who became
attracted to the religion at a later age. One Jewish woman came from the
Netherlands, the other from New York.
One quarter were followers from other religions, movements or spiri-
tual leaders, including Bahá"ís, Mormons, Freemasons, and Neo-Sanny-
assins (disciples of Osho, formerly known as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh).
Three people had a broad, more or less esoteric interest, while two oth-
ers wanted nothing to do with religion. Since random meetings were
also used to invite people to talk about their beliefs, the study was not
 kees de groot

restricted to merely “overly religious” believers, deliberate disbelievers,

or religious seekers. However, it is fair to assume that the religious inter-
est among these people was relatively strong. People who took time to
respond or to be interviewed were, to some extent at least, involved with
the subject. Moreover, during the interview or during the period preced-
ing it, people were stimulated to reflect on what they actually believed.
People perhaps felt invited to share more of their ideas than they would
normally do with others, which in turn also made them think themselves.

Method and Analysis

The interviews were set up to take twenty minutes, but in practice this
soon became thirty minutes. The first interviews took just under an
hour. Afterwards, a photographer would visit the interviewees to take
their picture with an object that symbolized their religion or worldview.
The interviews were recorded integrally and typed up. I analyzed the
transcriptions, experimenting with various codes, until the codes “fit”
the data.7 (The text fragments that were displayed in the museum and
the accompanying catalog were selected later).
The first remarkable characteristic of the interviewees was their con-
siderable religious diversity. Secondly, all respondents presented a unique
religious biography. While quite often “traditional” believers, the respon-
dents did not act as representatives for their particular belief. Most
observed some distance regarding the “religious institution.” They were
keen to show that they believed in their own, personal way. One respon-
dent said that she did not accurately observe the clothing regulations, the
other that she disagreed with the teachings of her highest spiritual leader.
Important for these people was that they felt happy with a particular
belief, finding peace and comfort as well as direction in their lives.
Reasons for disaffiliation (“apostasy”) were the preaching of fear of God
or gods, aversion toward the religious institution, or grief concerning a
plea that went unheard. Their religious development appeared embedded
in a personal life-world and life-cycle, and their religious careers were

7 I went through the material several times. In the first round, I used only a few

standard pre-assigned variables. During the second round I developed new ones, focusing
on the individual’s attitude toward the supply of religion and alternative worldviews. In a
third round this was corrected on the basis of a central metaphor: the relation toward
a tradition. Each relational type received its own specific items. These items together
constituted the codebook for the following rounds.
 patterns of religious engagement in a new town 

influenced by parents, grandparents, friends, and loved ones. Accepted

notions were questioned under the influence of school projects, love
relations, marriages, or national or international moves. In some cases
old beliefs were abandoned, in others the ties with the religious traditions
were reinforced, and sometimes an attraction to another tradition invited
them to follow a wonderful new path.
The interviews presented a particular image of religion in suburbia,
differing in various degrees from the concepts I discussed at the outset.
Do these people lock themselves up in their own club of believers? No—
only a minority is part of a religious group that sets itself somewhat
aside from the rest. Yet, the whole project may be regarded as an offence
against religious closure, and in fact, the journalist encountered severe
difficulties in approaching some religious groups.
Do we find confirmation for the hypothesis that people in suburbia
are into so-called religious shopping? In the Town Hall Lecture, Joep de
Hart, who is a researcher from the Social and Cultural Planning Office
of the Netherlands and a Zoetermeer resident, interpreted the stories
of the respondents as a confirmation of his thesis that late modernity
tends to promote a pragmatic, experience-based, “disembedded” style of
spirituality.8 Knowing the deliberate search for “exotic” believers, one has
to modify this conclusion, but several respondents did stress the fact that
they were not representative of their religion and included beliefs from
other religions.
Did we find “articulated belief ”? Certainly not all interviewees were
active and fully committed believers, but what interviewees held in com-
mon was that they spoke from a situation in which it was no longer obvi-
ous that they were part of a particular religion. Where so many religions
come together, every belief is special. The Zoetermeer context stimulates
both believers and disbelievers to realize that they either believe or not.
The relationship with one or more beliefs becomes a personal matter.
All three concepts contributed to my own understanding of their
faith stories. During the analysis, the model of choosing for or against
a religion or religious elements appeared to provide a less than perfect
fit. The term choice fails to illustrate adequately the experience that
faith is also the result of an appeal made on people by the tradition in
which they grow up, certain elements of a religious culture, or a certain
community of believers. People not only choose actively, they are also

8 Haagsche Courant,  September ; cf. De Hart ().

 kees de groot

predisposed to respond to appeals to get involved.9 Faith is not just a

personal choice, but a personal relationship, comparable to a relationship
with a partner.
While the image of the religious supermarket adequately expresses
the relative importance of personal choice, it fails to stress the serious
intent with which these choices are made, or the experience that it is a
particular tradition that presents itself, either as part of one’s upbringing,
or, somewhat less often, following a meeting, reading a book, or visiting a
religious meeting. People are attracted to a particular belief, a particular
ritual, a particular image. Respondents rarely describe finding a new
belief as if it they had picked it from rows and rows of shelves stacked with
religious goods. While there was great diversity, this was not so much the
result of various deliberate choices, but mostly the respondents’ widely
ranging backgrounds.

A Relational Typology

These findings have inspired me to construct an alternative typology,

based not on an economic metaphor, but on a relational metaphor.10
The attitude people have toward religious traditions is best compared
with their activities on the marriage market. What applies to love also
applies to religiousness. We are all involved, but we all shape it differently.
Monogamy, or marriage to a single partner, is common in many cultures.
Traditionally, these are arranged marriages. A variation is romantic mar-
riage, whereby a love relationship precedes the marriage. This involves
a so-called free partner choice. The partner is not arranged in advance,
but is newly discovered. A neologism would describe it as “neogamy.”
Some meet their future partner and will stay with this partner for the
rest of their lives; others may spend a certain period of their lives with one
partner, and then with another. This pattern is now referred to as “serial
monogamy.” Others do not commit to a single partner, but have several

9 Both the approaches of Gooren () and Blasi (in this volume) are meant to find

a balance on the active-passive dimension. My critique is directed against the popular

idea of “religious shopping” (Zock ), which has to be distinguished from a market-
theory, such as Stark and Finke’s rational choice approach. Their interest in contextual
(migration) and institutional factors (recruitment strategies) rather downplays the role
of the active individual.
10 The construction of a formal typology based on qualitative analysis has been in-

spired by Hijmans ().

 patterns of religious engagement in a new town 

or continue to date (polygamy). Finally, there are people who turn down
any form of relationship—out of choice or because they see no alterna-
tive. They are single.
When this diversity is applied to the religious sphere the following
pattern is shown: Many people are religious because that is how they
were brought up, although they may later also make a conscious choice
to follow this belief. While this belief may fade, it will remain part of
one’s identity (the monodox). People may also come into contact with
a belief by choice and then stick to this belief for the rest of their lives
(the neodox). After a while they may discover that their love for this
belief has worn and that another belief suits them better, perhaps inspired
by a meeting, a geographic move, or a different social circle (the serial
monodox). Others refrain from making a more or less definitive choice,
but continue to choose and combine. They continue to select from the
abundant religious supply (the polydox). Finally, there are people that
do not follow any religious traditions, but seek their own more or less
individual path (the singles). All of these religious relationship patterns
emerged during the interviews.
Before I present these, three remarks should be made. First, this soci-
ological approach distinguishes structural differences in the way indi-
viduals position themselves toward religious traditions, alternative tra-
ditions, or secular worldviews (all called doxa). It does not distinguish
between religious contents, as conventional typologies in religious stud-
ies do. Secondly, the typology is exclusively developed to interpret these
data. Usage in other contexts might prompt the addition of other cate-
gories that now remain empty and therefore unmentioned. The following
systematic account of the types will make this clear.
The typology involves three basic categories: a relation with no, one or
several traditions (single, mono, poly). Only the second category (mono)
has been refined, based on the criterion “choice” (no/yes). The latter
option has been refined again, using the question “one change or sev-
eral?” Other data might make it necessary to differentiate between indi-
viduals who are polydox through their upbringing and those who have
chosen to be so themselves, or between disaffiliated singles and singles
due to their upbringing. In this sample, the monodox prevailed, which
made it more urgent to refine this particular category. A third comment:
this categorization of individuals reflects a biographical account of one’s
religious career at a particular moment in time. Over the years, individ-
uals may receive different categorizations.
 kees de groot

Figure .. Typology of Religious Engagement

The Monodox
More than half of all interviewees were religious due to their upbringing.
While there was more to their stories, upbringing did form the basis for
their religious identity. A woman, fifty-four years old, tells how she was
reared by parents who were active in urban ministry. She has received
several signs that God exists. Now, she prays to “the big boss” in her own
private “little church,” upstairs in her house: “The incense, the flowers,
the music serve to comfort me. There’s also a bracelet. It was on the table
when I asked God to give the people a sign” (Stijntje Bregman). She made
a commitment later in life, while others remained fairly inactive, and one
or two had snatched bits from other religions as well. All had been reared
by their parents in a particular religious tradition.
The distinction between the culture from which they came and the
religion that went with it was often difficult to make. A forty-one year
old woman states: “was reared in Greece as an Orthodox Christian. I
went to church with my mother, though not every Sunday. When I am
in Greece, I go to church. That’s something that is a part of me, like my
native tongue” (Anna Vokorokou).
Others came from multi-religious societies, such as Surinam or In-
donesia, or were brought up in more or less oppressed minority reli-
gious communities (including the Coptic Christian minority in Egypt
or a Bahá"í family in Iran). Religion also represented ties to family and
population for these respondents.
 patterns of religious engagement in a new town 

Figure .. Patterns of Religious Engagement

Those who used to live in a religiously homogeneous environment are

now settled among people from other faiths. This accounts for Catholics
from the southern provinces of the Netherlands and for Muslims from
rural areas in Turkey, who moved or migrated to Zoetermeer. The Bahá"í,
on the other hand, finally found kindred believers here. While the reli-
gious dedication of some migrants in the Netherlands grew stronger, oth-
ers, like Anna Vokorokou, attend church only in their country of origin.
Characteristic of New Town Zoetermeer is that people who move here
find no coherent religious culture. Things were different in . One of
the first Moroccan Muslims to arrive, Mohammed Chhayra, seventy-five
years old, who now calls himself “one of the old Zoetermeer residents,”
encountered a Christian Zoetermeer, neatly divided into Catholic and
Protestant residents. On Sundays he would go to Catholic church. Nowa-
days, there is no dominant culture; there are only religious minorities.
There is little to show that they form a public and multi-religious society
in which people sit down to enjoy each other’s celebratory dinners, for
example. A report of a failed attempt to continue the exchange, as was
common practice in Surinam for example, suggests that Zoetermeer’s
residents do not really mingle. Rather, believers live alongside each other
in a secular environment.
Although most respondents did not talk about believers of other reli-
gions or about non-believers, there was little to suggest that they dig
themselves in within their own communities to protect themselves from
others. Often the relationship with fellow-believers remained in the back-
ground. It’s about good behavior, observing religiously motivated dietary
regulations, and miraculous help in the event of illnesses. One believer
 kees de groot

said that his pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella inspired him to do

something for refugees.
The religious symbols and rituals are equally personal and diverse:
a cross appeals to people not to revenge evil, a bead on a chain averts
disaster (nazar), a statue of the Virgin Mary offers comfort, an image of
(an actor representing) Jesus hangs amidst family photos “as the portrait
of a loved one” (Mary Winailan). Religion seemed to be a personal matter.

The Neodox
The “new believers” at the exposition happened to be Zoetermeer resi-
dents of Dutch origin who at one time came into contact with a partic-
ular religion or denomination, wanted to become part of it, and stuck
by it. Six people told about being brought up with little or no religious
input while two others had never been able to do much with what they
had been offered in church. The presence of mosques, temples, and a
Pentecostal community in and around Zoetermeer contributed to their
change.
A wide range of events in their lives preceded their conversion: a
personal crisis, meeting a life partner, a long search for the meaning of
life, or a sudden and extraordinary experience. The transition itself was
equally different. Still, three familiar patterns of conversion stories can be
recognized in these unique and highly personal histories (McGuire :
–; cf. Burke ).
The first pattern is the story of sudden change. Such is the story of
a thirty-eight year old man whose parents got involved in a Pentecostal
congregation:
My mother was about to go there alone and I can remember I was in my
bed and suddenly I received this inspiration: “Go with her.” Which was
kind of bizarre, because I didn’t fancy the idea at all. I wasn’t happy about
my mother going there alone. I went with her. I entered the place and
had an experience with God. I realized: God is here. I felt the presence
of God’s spirit so strongly that it sent shivers down my spine. Electricity
went through me; it was like having a warm blanket put over me (Lodi
Kuijvenhoven).
Life prior to the introduction to a new world perspective changes com-
pletely, while the future takes on an entirely new dimension.
The second pattern stresses continuity. It was like meeting with an old
acquaintance. A forty-five year old woman makes it quite clear how her
experience of conversion should be understood:
 patterns of religious engagement in a new town 

Some four years ago, the penny dropped: I was a witch. I had been working
with herbs, gemstones and energies, such as in Reiki. I didn’t know that
Wicca existed. Then, I read about this book in a newspaper and I knew it.
I could gather it all under one denominator and that was Wicca! It was a
great sensation; a kind of confirmation (Eveliene de Bakker).
People of this type felt instantly “at home” in the new religious tradition
they encountered.
Another respondent decided to become involved with a new faith
following a period of introduction: “I did not get baptized head over
heels. I started an easy-going investigation. I went to meetings, received
teaching, studied the Scriptures. You have to be touched. Another person
cannot push you into it. I wanted to be part of that” (Patty Brouwer).
Her story followed the pattern of individual choice. She finally made her
choice after weighing up all the pros and cons.
The new faith has an impact on many aspects of a neodox’s life. Besides
spiritual growth, it involves material aspects such as finding a house and a
job. With regard to others, some believers see it as their role to contribute
to their environment’s happiness, while others see it as a witness of God’s
love. Others found the relationship with nature very important.
For some, dedication to this one religion implied distancing them-
selves from other religions and movements, under the heading “Only this
road leads to eternal life” (Lodi Kijvenhove) or the desire that everybody
follow this road: “If we were all Buddhist, there would be no more war”
(Marian Koek). For others their own (Bahá"í) community represents a
synthesis of the good found in the various religions (Peggy Hoek). A third
road is the road of respect for another person’s convictions and whose
relationship with his or her belief is probably the same as theirs (Tycho
Huijts).

The Serial Monodox

Serial believers were once involved with a religion, usually the one with
which they were brought up, but in time this commitment faded and they
found new spiritual shelter elsewhere. Occasionally, this was once again
abandoned for another. Eight out of ten serial believers were of Dutch
origin. They found salvation in movements and small communities that
appealed to them. One sixty-year-old woman tells about her switch to
Buddhism:
I was reared as a Catholic. I practiced it really strong—until I went to Paris.
I remember it well: I was twenty-five years old and I went to a Mass in the
 kees de groot

Sacre Coeur and they were “dusting.” I mean: they were celebrating Mass as
if they were dusting. I thought: this can’t be. That was one of the last times
I said: I believe in Jesus. I had always been interested in the East. [ . . . ] It
took a while before I became a Buddhist. I am not the kind of person who
thinks: I don’t like this. I’ll go for something else (Ewalda Buiting).
A sixty-one year old man found Zen Buddhism via Bhagwan. He had
been a Catholic since the age of six. Before that he was “blank.” He
switched to orthodox-Calvinist Protestantism in order to marry a Dutch
Reformed girl. The marriage ended in a divorce: “Already during my
marriage, I was looking around. At first, I began to read books by Osho,
by Baghwan. I couldn’t do that when I was in that Protestant marriage”
(Ruud Bruggeman).
A sixty-three year old woman of Jewish origin tells how she ended up
in the Bahá"í Community:
When I was ten years old, my parents were baptized into the Mennon-
ite congregation, but they did not become practicing members. When I
was sixteen, I started searching. I went along with my friends to vari-
ous churches. Some time later, I met my, now, ex-husband and I stopped
“doing” religion. In about , I came into contact with the Bahá"í Com-
munity (Anneke de Lugt).
Compared with the neodox believers, the move of these respondents
was fairly undramatic. In their own perception they often did not so
much transfer to another religion, as come to the conclusion that the old
religion was no longer theirs. They wanted a religion that suited them.
In order to remain loyal to themselves, they felt it right to say goodbye
and make a fresh start. This change was sometimes inspired by school,
migration, marriage, divorce, or a deeply-felt death. Some interviewees
met other people, sometimes in Zoetermeer, who introduced them to the
new belief. In their newly found belief they found happiness, enjoyment
of life, and an insight into their lives.

The Polydox
This type does not conform to a single tradition, excluding all others, but
values one element in one tradition, something else in another tradition,
and even more aspects in a third. This so-called bricoleur was expected to
be found frequently in Zoetermeer, but this appeared not to be so. There
were only three “Sheilaists,” strictly speaking, among the respondents.
They were freely liaising with all sorts of cultures and traditions. One
woman, forty years old, devoured books about spirituality:
 patterns of religious engagement in a new town 

My grandparents were still Catholic nd Dutch Reformed, but their children

were no longer into that. Myself, I believe in a certain power, in love. To me,
the word “God” is [too] heavy. [ . . .] This esoteric inclination has always
been simmering. Some seven years ago, it came to a head. I came home
from work and thought: “What am I doing here?” At a certain moment, I
knew I had to buy a book. In the store, a title, Spiritual Growth, caught my
eye. I bought that one (Anita Bavelaar).
Another woman, fifty-four years old, runs a shop with her daughter in
New Age items and ‘goddess’ clothing (called “The Goddess Within”).
She is a Reiki-master, lays out Tarot cards for people, and is also involved
in Wiccan celebrations of nature:
This started to emerge when my ex had left, when I was about thirty-eight
or forty years old. After that, I started searching. I really came in contact
with everything: Egyptian teachings, Reiki, the Tarot, singing bowls, crys-
tals. You experience spiritual growth. You want to know everything about
the universe, the hereafter, the world of spirits (Trudie Liebe).
Although these religious combinations look very individualistic, they
contain familiar elements from the holistic milieu. “It may seem individ-
ualistic, but it’s like bird’s nests: it reflects the entire environment,” psy-
chologist of religion Jacques Janssen once said about people’s religious
gleaning behavior (: ). Those who are more or less familiar with
the holistic milieu will immediately recognize some of the elements used.
However, the exposition did not display people who, to give an extreme
example, combined singing psalms in whole notes with the ritual invo-
cation of the moon and revering Elvis as the King.
While only a few interviewees took what they wanted from what
traditions have on offer, there were several believers who were averse to
dogmatism, who were actively interested in other religions, but who, in
the end, regarded a certain tradition as their own point of departure.
These include Christians who believed in reincarnation or that God
is a woman. One traditional believer, the Muslim woman Ivy Sadhoe,
went very far in her inter-religious ecumenicity: she posed with Buddha
statues, statues of Ganesh and Krishna, claiming to possess statues of
Jesus and Mary as well. She expressed her fervent wish that one day all
of these religions would merge, as she was doing already. So, there is a
thin line between the polydox and some of the believers in one particular
tradition, especially the more inclusive ones.
 kees de groot

The Singles
While many were critical of the church as an institution and of the
authority of the Pope or the imam, only a few talked about distancing
themselves entirely from religious traditions and what they have to offer.
One man, thirty-seven years old, regarded religious belief as a weakness:
I am an atheist and very much against faith, because I observe that a lot of
people are being indoctrinated by leaders. Believing is a sign of weakness;
when times are rough, people seek refuge in the church. My parents were
already non-practicing, and I went to church only at Christmas or on
holidays. I reach out for support from friends, acquaintances and relatives.
Communication is important to me—television, music, the Internet—
because it provides answers to your questions. I talk to myself as well.
[ . . . ] If you try to make conscious what’s unconscious, you can feel things
happening that you want to prevent (Reinier Groeneveld).

Strong traces of atheism and psychoanalysis can be detected in his story.

Yet, the leading motive is a refusal to be a follower of any tradition. While
he labeled himself as an atheist, another used the term agnostic. It turns
out that he is nonetheless quite firm in expressing his disbelief, primarily
because he thinks believing is meaningless. This man, forty-five years old,
says:
I was reared in a thoroughly Catholic society in M. in Limburg. [ . . .] It was
a lot of mumbo-jumbo. Faith isn’t part of my life whatsoever, nowadays. I
don’t believe in a hereafter or a god. I am agnostic, a not-knower. I believe
in things that men can understand or that they have made. It’s all from our
hands and our minds, not from elsewhere. People often say: “But Frans,
there must be something out there!” No, there is nothing out there (Frans
Muijzers).

Both of these men said one had to “enjoy life and not let anyone tell you
different.” These two men went through life without having contact with
one or more religious traditions. They remained or had become single.

Conclusion: No Longer a Matter of Course

Belief thrives when it is a matter of course, when nothing needs explain-

ing or discussing, where one simply attends a house of prayer as always,
makes the usual sacrifices, carries out the old rituals, and observes the
rules of life as best one can (Groot and Maas ). It’s an image that is
even evoked by some of these interviews. Yet, religion is far from self-
 patterns of religious engagement in a new town 

evident in this context of pluralism. In a New Town, people from var-

ious religious backgrounds are drawn together. Here, individuals have
lost their anchorage in a religious culture, either through migration or
through the immigration of others. Even people who have lived in this
area all their lives and who have retained the faith of their fathers are
becoming individual cases. They are all in the same boat: they are con-
fronted with people of different beliefs. These circumstances inspire ques-
tions. Apparently there are more roads that people may take to life’s hap-
piness and salvation. How about this belief of mine? What does it make
me? This reflection is not a theoretical affair but takes place within an
urban context and within a biographical context. Religious traditions
transform into candidates for enduring or temporary relationships.
The analogy with personal relationships that is deployed here is appro-
priate for two particular reasons. First, the respondents talk about their
(absence of) being religiously involved much in the same way as they
would about a personal involvement. Their own vocabulary is connected
with the typology that is presented here. Second, changes in the religious
biography are often connected with falling in love, marriage and divorce.
A new partner or the loss of a partner often gives an impetus to explore,
join, or convert to a particular religion—or to withdraw from it. The
monodox stick to their own tradition. The neodox enter into new, endur-
ing relationships. The serial monodox swap religious community once or
twice. The polydox continue to choose, and the singles stay far from any
kind of religious tradition. Each belief is irrevocably a belief to which
they have committed themselves personally, even if it implies following a
clearly described religious pattern, continuing habits taught as a child, or
answering a call heard elsewhere. As to their contents, the beliefs vary as
much as candidates on a marriage market do. The diversity is abundant.
The analogy with the partner relationship expresses that religious
engagement is a phenomenon of the private sphere that has received a
position in the public one. Every person experiences his or her belief in
his or her own manner. In the privacy of one’s own home and community
it offers peace, strength, support, and comfort. Usually, there is little
discussion about one’s faith in the public sphere. Yet, religion is vital to
the urban social fabric. This exposition stimulated the dialogue between
believers by conveying the message that all individuals cherish their own
“love of faith.”11

11 I would like to express my gratitude to René Lamers for providing the transcribed

interviews that are presented in this article, and to Jaap van der Linden and Jouetta van
 kees de groot

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 chapter five

PILGRIMAGE AND CONVERSION

William H. Swatos, Jr.

Continuing from the last quarter of the twentieth century into the
present, experiences that participants consider as “pilgrimage” have
undergone enormous growth. Pilgrimages take the form both of revivals
of historic religious journeys and new innovations of gathering places
that lack direct connection to explicit religious traditions (see Swatos
). Both forms, in turn, have also acquired a touristic component, as
people choose to go “see” pilgrimage venues, without necessarily them-
selves taking on the expressed identity of “pilgrim.” They remain in their
own eyes “tourists” (sometimes expressed as “just a tourist”) who pri-
marily watch the pilgrims on the one hand and view the site on the
other.
At the same time, the definition of “pilgrim” as a term-in-use seems
to have extended to going on a tour of sites, especially those of religious
significance, in the company of a church group or religious sodality—
without reference to any set of specific requirements or performances
required to fulfill the mandate of an identifiable religious body (like the
Roman Catholic Church) for performing a “true” pilgrimage. While these
differences may cause conflicts at specific sites and/or during specific
times, as John Eade () has pointed out, it is equally true that the
Turners’ dictum “a tourist is half a pilgrim, if a pilgrim is half a tourist”
(: ) more accurately captures the give-and-take of activity at most
sites most of the time. It is difficult to imagine that pilgrimage in this
period could or would have come about without the tourism industry, yet
at the same time, it is hard to fathom how the tourism industry could have
“sold” sites to customers if there were not some interest in the religious
or the spiritual as a category of both being and acting. Contemporary
tourism and pilgrimage form part of one broad type of travel “package,”
built on the broader foundations of both leisure time and quests for
meaning, purpose, and well-being. It is in this context that it can make
some sense to talk about pilgrimage and conversion, and this represents
a new twist to historic pilgrimage phenomena, at least in the West.
 william h. swatos, jr.

The Religion of Sites

With Max Weber we may categorize religions foundationally as display-

ing one or another of two basic types: the congregation of believers or
the specialized center of religious devotion. Historically, Western reli-
gions have tended toward the former, while Eastern religions have tended
toward the latter. It is important to recognize that these are only tenden-
cies, especially in the Western case, inasmuch as all three of the major
Western religious traditions have incorporated pilgrimage centers into
their practice at least at some times and in some places. Calvinist Protes-
tantism and its outgrowths represent the strongest historical effort of a
faith tradition to detach itself entirely from the meaningfulness of sites
of religious practice.
The purposes of pilgrimage and pilgrimage routes, however, have also
altered dramatically. At least in the Christian tradition, pilgrimage was
frequently associated with penance in earlier times, especially where
travel involved a significant investment of time and money as well as
significant danger along the way.1 One might almost say that successful
completion of a pilgrimage in medieval times served a credit-worthiness
function similar to that which reception into a Protestant sect would
have served in the seventeenth century and thereafter—or such as that
characterized being “a veteran” in the United States at least up until the
Viet Nam debacle. Removing the individual from his home locale for
a period allowed tempers to cool, while the successful accomplishment
of a pilgrimage gave the returnee a new standing in his community.
The Crusades were in effect a mixture of pilgrimage and battle. Rather
than American soldiers fighting battles to “make the world safe for
democracy,” the Crusaders could convince themselves that they were
making the world safe for piety. Eternal life was sure and certain to
the Crusader. The language of pilgrimage similarly carries over into
evangelical Protestant circles today, where people are exhorted to move
from “talking the talk” to “walking the walk.”
Early pilgrimage was neither the European “grand tour” of the nine-
teenth century nor the vacation-time experience of our own day. Chau-

1 This has not entirely been displaced. Frey (: ) reports that “Since , in

conjunction with the Belgian Ministry of Justice, a nonprofit group called Oikoten . . .
has used the Camino de Santiago as a path of rehabilitation of young social reprobates.
In an attempt to reintegrate these young people into society, Oikoten . . . sends one or
two young people with one or more monitors on a four-month version of the pilgrimage
for reflection and repentance.”
 pilgrimage and conversion 

cer, on the other hand, reminds us that even in what some medievalists
might think of as the best of times, there were plenty of mixed moti-
vations to go around among pilgrims—and this was certainly true of the
Crusades as well.2 Nevertheless, one might anticipate that in earlier times
there were some commonalities that could be counted on—not least, that
pilgrims to Christian holy sites would be Christians, pilgrims to Muslim
holy sites would be Muslims, and so on. That is, at least at the level of
“conventional religion,” pilgrims to a religious site would be people who
shared the religious profession both of those who operated the site and
of other pilgrims they might meet both on the way and upon arrival.
There was, in a sense, a religious lingua franca to a given site that was
shared among all the participants—mixed motivations notwithstanding.
I remember quite clearly that a great deal of the class time in my high
school English class that included Canterbury Tales involved explaining
details of Catholic faith and practice to a class that was majority non-
Catholic. I think that was my first introduction to Catholicism—and the
teacher was a good Methodist! Conflicts in Islam, by contrast, swirled
over who was holy and who was not, whereas the Protestant disdain for
the power of saints laid that particular locus of conflict to rest—but didn’t
prevent the destruction of significant sites in the process.3
What made holy sites so reprehensible to Protestants, however, was not
who was interred in any one of them nor what specific miracles associated
with them were or were not “genuine,” but rather the generalized belief
that earth and heaven were forever separated. Thus no physical remains
of anyone had any power whatsoever (or, in limited cases, might be
argued to have negative power [viz., Satan’s power]). Going to the tomb
of this or that saint was just as idolatrous as praying before this or
that statue. Indeed, the extent to which Catholic shrine devotion had
become involved with images of saints, simply extended the Protestant
objection all the more, inasmuch as such practice was taken as an explicit
violation of the Second Commandment. The rise of nationalism only

2 While there were females who went on pilgrimages in the early Christian centuries,

as time passed geographic pilgrimage was more and more restricted to men—in turn
giving rise to one of the earliest forms of “virtual pilgrimage”: Stations of the Cross (see
Adler ; Kaelber ).
3 A current acknowledgment and attempt at reparation for the desecration of impor-

tant Marian images connected to English shrines, not least Our Lady of Walsingham, by
Lord Privy Seal Sir Thomas Cromwell in , is the proposal by the Art and Reconcilia-
tion Trust to fund and place a memorial sculpture by Paul Day in Chelsea Embankment
Gardens. The sculpture will center on the Virgin and Child image, but also embody in its
design depictions of the culturally destructive effects of iconoclasm.
 william h. swatos, jr.

further hardened the effects of the Reformation, as travel to pilgrimage

sites became far less easily facilitated than was the case as long as Catholi-
cism represented “the universal Church,” at least as far as Europe was
concerned. European colonial divisions of and influences in the Mus-
lim world had somewhat similar effects, though local devotion remained
much stronger, whereas it was largely extirpated in bastions of European
Protestantism—or turned into folk superstition of the hearth rather than
sites related to publicly acknowledged religious authority.

Enter the Tour

Exactly when “tourism” began can probably be debated into eternity. In

some respects this is a function of the locus of which we are speaking. As
Luigi Tomasi (: ) has pointed out, the tourism of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries emphasized a secular “search for truth,” which
could take place on several levels—artistic or archeological creations, cul-
tural achievements, comparative civilizations, or such physical phenom-
ena as mountains, rivers, deserts, or glaciers. These kinds of activities
were largely restricted to the wealthy or to scholars. The development
of the railroad in the nineteenth century began a process of change that
has continued to the present day through the airplane. Trains allowed far
more people to go far greater distances in far less time. Hence the “tourist”
was born, and travel became a form of recreation as greater time was
afforded the simultaneously emerging modern middle class that more
and more lived its workaday existence in cities from which it tried to
escape for periods of leisure.
The railroad did far more for human social relations than contribute
only to leisure travel. On the one hand, business and commerce was
extended from local or regional to national and international in scope.
Savvy entrepreneurs could not only take their products to distant locales
to sell but could also set up branches of their businesses on a far more
extensive basis. At another level, however, travel enhancements could
also contribute to religious experience itself. Suzanne Kaufman ()
particularly emphasizes the coincidence of railroad travel and the devel-
opment of the Roman Catholic shrine at Lourdes, which simultaneously
contributed to not only a new pilgrimage-and-healing culture in France
but also to a debate about science, especially in regard to both medicine
in general and psychiatry in particular, at a time when medical science
was itself relatively unstable in its own identity. For example, while the
 pilgrimage and conversion 

visions of Bernadette Soubirous began in , the Flexner Report that

largely standardized medical “science” in the United States was not issued
until . The second half of the nineteenth century left the questions of
body/mind and faith/science open to considerable debate. Huge crowds
flocked to Lourdes, and the shrine precincts early on created a “medical
bureau” to verify the circumstances of persons who experienced cures.
The Lourdes experience for some, then, was not merely a pilgrimage
experience but a conversion experience, either through personal cure or
through accounts from observing persons who had been cured and/or
through testimonies circulated not only in religious books or pamphlets
but through newspaper wars and public debates conducted by those on
both sides of the issue. In this respect, Lourdes might well be argued to
be the first “modern” pilgrimage site, inasmuch as it combined religious
and touristic elements through the railroad which made access possible
in a relatively rapid, relatively convenient way simultaneously for the reli-
giously devoted, for those seeking to be cured of ailments, as well as for
the curious and doubting.
Thus the return of pilgrimage in its contemporary form is inextricably
tied to the material conditions of modern life—greater and more flexibly
allocated leisure time along with the modern transportation modes that
underlie “tourist” culture. Nevertheless, it would be a great mistake to
reduce pilgrimage simply to a category of “tourism,” and indeed it is the
case that at most pilgrimage sites, as Eade rightly observes, there is some
level of disjuncture between the expectations/needs of tourists and the
expectations/needs of pilgrims (as well, sometimes, as within these two
categories) which can be relatively clearly distinguished, especially by
those who tend the sites. I have suggested, however, that there are a few
characteristics that particularly distinguish the “pure tourist” type that
can allow us to set him or her aside: The person is most interested in
having his or her own picture taken at the site. The person seldom knows
anything about either the history or present character of the site—that is,
why the visit is actually occurring. The person may, in fact, not visit the
site itself at all, but souvenir shops and restaurants around the site. At a
religious site, the person will not participate in any of the religious rituals
of the site nor observe any religious protocols. Obviously, when people
in this mode literally stumble into the middle of a religious rite, one can
reasonably expect some level of conflict, though this need not necessarily
lead to hostility.4

4 I remember, for example, being at Sacre Coeur in Paris for First Friday (i.e., Sacred

Heart) Benediction one afternoon when a terrific rainstorm broke out, and hundreds of
 william h. swatos, jr.

The Many Valences of Religion,

Spirituality, Pilgrimage, and Conversion

If we leave aside the tourist as just described, we still face problems in

assessing the relationship among the experience constellations detailed
above. A number of these are dealt with in one way or another in
Danièle Hervieu-Léger’s pathbreaking Le Pèlerin et le converti: le religion
en movement (), wherein she points out that if one asks a person:
“Are you religious?” the likelihood of a positive answer is likely to be less
than it was a generation or two ago. But as we have found again and again
in various surveys that allow people to express themselves with more than
a yes-or-no answer, people offer some expression to the effect that they
are “more spiritual than religious” or “a spiritual person.” It is hard, at
the same time, to nail down what this means, and this is especially so for
the American sociological tradition that has often identified religion with
denominationalism, hence has presumed that if a person is “religious,”
she or he will then be able to check off a denominational label that will
enable us to do a quick categorization among the major “families” and
thereby “know” something about the person’s character or disposition—
whereas in fact persons now less and less identify with organizational
families and more and more choose to identify with groupings of persons
whose religious-expressive “style” fits them.
Hence it is one thing to identify with an organization and quite another
to identify with a spirituality, and this has become all the more so in
what we might call the “post-ecumenical age”—in the sense that since
denominational affiliation has little specific meaning, trying to effect a
merger of denominations seems void of significance except in respect to
organizational cost saving. People “take communion” where they “feel
good,” rather than in terms of organizational affiliation. This even under-
mines traditional uses of “spirituality”—as, for example, Ignatian spiri-
tuality, Franciscan spirituality, Dominican spirituality, Wesleyan spiritu-
ality, Orthodox spirituality, and so on. That is to say, when most persons
refer to themselves as “spiritual rather than religious,” they really are not
connecting with “spirituality” as religious traditions generally have con-
ceived it in the domain usually referred to as ascetical theology. Iron-
ically, in this respect, it may well be people who have identified with
a spirituality outside their own culture (e.g., Zen spirituality) who are

tourists came inside, making it impossible for the Benediction procession, which tends
to be relatively crowded with worshippers anyway, to move through the basilica.
 pilgrimage and conversion 

closer to adopting a position that might be recognized as having con-

sistency with the traditional usage of “spirituality” than those who use
the phrase within what they perceive is a common cultural framework
between themselves and others.
The spirituality-religion/spiritual-religious distinctions are in many
respects carried over into issues that pertain both to pilgrimage and
tourism and to pilgrimage and conversion. That is, while there certainly
are persons who will freely categorize themselves as “just a tourist”—who
can then be fairly excluded by their own self-definition from the category
“pilgrim”—those who say they are “pilgrims” or “making a pilgrimage”
are not as easily handled. This particularly becomes the case in multi-
plex situations—for example, when Pope Benedict XVI visited Lourdes.
What brought people there? Lourdes? The Pope? The Pope “doing” Lour-
des?5 And where do we draw the line on pilgrimage in such a case? If
they received a pilgrim’s badge and the necessary stamps to complete
it, did that make them a pilgrim?6 Certainly, it suggests that they were
willing to invest more time in the site than simply catching a glimpse of
the Pope or attending one of the liturgies at which he officiated. Some of
the big-screen, multimedia aspects of the events more closely resembled
those associated with Lee Gilmore’s depiction of the Burning Man festival

5 The Pope’s visit aside, it is significant that Eade’s “conflict” theory of pilgrimage is
based on his fieldwork in Lourdes—in the sense that Lourdes’s explicit significances are
at least two-fold: on the one hand is the significance of the site to the Roman Catholic
dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which especially
draws ultramontanist Catholics, inasmuch as this belief and that of papal infallibility
were both promulgated at the same Council (in the th century); on the other hand
are those who come to the spring which was revealed to Bernadette and is understood
(“documented”) to have healing powers, hence underlies the medical bureau and hospital
that is a continuous part of Lourdes life. While these twain certainly do meet, it is
not necessarily the case that they all do so for the same purposes or with the same
presuppositions. To these must be added, of course, both townspeople trying to carry
on ordinary livelihoods and “pure” tourists who are mainly present to see the Pyrenees
or kayak on the river.
6 The badges we received, for example, were written in neither French nor English, but

Portuguese. When we joined a group saying the prayers required at one of the four sites at
which one or another of the stamps was to be obtained, they were said in either Polish or
Italian. Two things that we found especially interesting were that Italians came to Lourdes
in considerable numbers for the papal visit and that the first requirement on the list of
requirements that all had to be completed to obtain a plenary indulgence in connection
with the pilgrimage was to go to confession. Inasmuch as going to confession is among the
activities that has declined most dramatically among Catholics in the last quarter century,
not only requiring the pilgrim to go to confession to obtain the indulgence, but putting
this requirement first on the list suggests a specifically conservative piety underlying the
promised favor.
 william h. swatos, jr.

() than what might only a decade or two ago have been anticipated
by a papal pilgrimage to a holy site, and there was an almost Disneyesque
character to the Pope standing in the Popemobile waving from one side
to the other. Yes, it really was the Pope, not a mannequin, but the “con-
tainerization” of the person within the object was also and in the same
measure a dehumanization of the Pope that had a mechanical, rather than
extraterrestrial, quality. Mais oui, the Pope did wave, and we waved back.

Conversion as Process

If conversion is seen as a process rather than an all-or-nothing expe-

rience in an instant of time, then there is much to connect conversion
and pilgrimage. The pilgrim can become a convert and the convert a pil-
grim. Models of instantaneous conversions often point to the experience
of Paul of Tarsus, recounted most fully in the New Testament book of the
Acts of the Apostles. Yet, if we look at the Acts account we see immedi-
ately that Paul was on the Damascus road. It is indeed the case that he is
said to have been on the road in order to persecute Jews who had turned
Christian, but be that as it may, he was engaged in a mission of seeking
out. The long-term result of this experience was, furthermore, a career
largely spent traveling to recount his vision and what sense he made of
it. It is certainly true that missionary zeal is not the same as going to a
holy site, yet it could be argued that his persistent progress to “complete
a vow” and go “up to [the Temple at] Jerusalem,” had pilgrim qualities.
It is helpful in this respect to examine Hervieu-Léger’s distinction
between the religious practitioner (that is, the person who “practices”
a religion, as in a “practicing Catholic”) and the pilgrim. She creates a
series of binary oppositions (:  [my translation]):
The Practitioner The Pilgrim
Devotion is Devotion is
Obligatory Voluntary
Institutionally Normed Autonomous
Fixed Malleable
Communal/Congregational Individualistic
Localized Mobile
Ordinary/standardized Extraordinary/exceptional

While dualistic distinctions such as these can certainly be overstated, it

is nevertheless the case that if we examine these we can see the ways in
 pilgrimage and conversion 

which two different kinds of religiosities occur hence why in the United
States, for example, exceptionally large, nondenominational “seeker”
churches make “converts”—viz., their converts are pilgrims! That is, the
megachurch has much more in common stylistically with the pilgrim
model than it does with the historic religiosity of the practitioner type.
Rather than “get lost” among the crowd of the megachurch or the mass
of thousands or millions on pilgrimage, the pilgrim “finds himself or
herself ” in the processes that occur in the dynamics of expressive wor-
ship. The pilgrim-convert constructs a self that resides in the kernel of
the religious dynamic which the individual experiences among other
selves as communitas. This is not, however, community at all in the his-
toric sense of an ongoing interactive set of individuals sharing a common
space—e.g., as in monastics “living in community.” Communitas rather
transcends limits of time and space, albeit imperfectly. Because it is an
experience that transcends the mundane, it is transitory and always at
one and the same time both in the process of becoming and yet fleeting.
Different in form, yet consistent in results, is the labyrinth as both a
devotional tool and a pilgrimage destination, as described by Lori Bea-
man (). The labyrinth involves a walking-out or walking-through
that enables the person to re-think or think-out a situation. The walking
is a known pilgrim style but occurs within a confined, potentially med-
itative space that allows the participant again to engage in the finding-
self process that is characteristic of the elements of the pilgrim style as
Hervieu-Léger enumerates them. The unique characteristic of this form
is that it adds the dimension of motion to meditation. There can, how-
ever, also be a double pilgrimage experience—that is, both an inner,
labyrinthine journey and actual travel—as when someone goes to
Chartres in order to walk the labyrinth of that cathedral. Walking a
labyrinth in a medieval cathedral may bring experiences and emotions
that other settings could not generate.
These practitioner and pilgrim types, though clearly different, need
not, however, be oppositional. Parish groups, for example, can go on
pilgrimages or rallies and still return to a parish religiosity that at least
has affinities with the practitioner style. Just as it is possible to play touch
football with the same group of guys each weekend but also make an
annual trip to see a Bears game, so a person can be both a loyal local
parishioner and go to Lourdes. Pilgrimage experiences can provide rites
of intensification that enhance the local experience, hence should not be
seen in a contest for possession of the self.
 william h. swatos, jr.

From Pilgrim to Congregation and Back Again

For an American, it’s a fascinating irony to reflect on the process by which

a group that called themselves “Pilgrims” should end up as founders
of what was once called the Congregational Church (now the United
Church of Christ [UCC])—a denomination that has lost a particularly
high percentage of its membership over the past thirty years. The back-
ground idea of the congregation as the Pilgrims conceived it was one
of relative equality among “converted” persons. Not just opposition to
lordly bishops but a lifestyle of clearly recognized righteous living char-
acterized the congregational brother or sister.
What happened to classic congregationalism? How could the idea of
pilgrimage have been so thoroughly undermined in both faith and prac-
tice? Some commentators, looking particularly at the s and s,
will likely point to specific instances of support for left-liberal politi-
cal causes. Some leaders of the UCC in those days genuinely thought
they were storming the gates of heaven, while what they achieved insti-
tutionally was something far closer to the Heaven’s Gate commune—
that is, institutional suicide. They simply failed to read both the Amer-
ican temperament and the dynamics of religious growth accurately. In
particular, the involvement of institutional religion in secular political
causes was at the opposite pole from not only the “new religious move-
ments” that emerged during the period but the evangelical-charismatic
revival in both the Roman Catholic and Protestant camps. In the abyss
of postmodernity, the idea of spiritual pilgrimage, the miraculous, direct
encounter with the divine, life-changing religious experience provided
fertile ground for the seeds of conversion experience to begin to flower
in semi-deinstitutionalized contexts that affirm a reality beyond instru-
mental rationality—even for those whose daily life-world is caught up
in the networks of instrumental rationality, but more so for those whose
life-worlds operate under the radar of instrumentality and yet seek some
form of encounter that both underwrites and overarches the banality of
everyday existence.
Contemporary pilgrimage sites provide enchanted gardens. Conver-
sion experiences occur when instrumentality is overtaken by enchant-
ment. Pilgrimages are not the only settings for enchantment to break
through instrumentality, but in many cases they are particularly well-
structured in this direction and provide a comprehensive and long-
standing narrative through which the breakthrough can be articulated—
an historic foundation of miracle. The ambience of place, persons, sights,
 pilgrimage and conversion 

sounds, and smells—not least the ex votos of generations past that con-
cretize the reality of the miraculous—create an ambience through which
conversion may be heightened. Some of these in turn become devotees,
hence reinforcing the “truth” of the experience for others, and in so doing
enable the potential for a new pilgrimage/devotional cycle to begin.

Conversion as Motion

Conversion is to turn or turn around. This root meaning implies some-

thing physical, though more often than not the word has been taken
to mean an interior turning. A convert is a person who “turns his life
around” or has “really turned himself around.” These implicit notions of
motion, though not characteristic of the standard understandings of the
conversion process, which interiorize the dynamic, can be helpful in con-
necting contemporary religious experience and the pilgrim quest—viz.,
“religion in motion.” That is, there are a number of ways in which both
the traditional world religions and other quasi-religious styles have his-
torically connected intentional bodily action to religious experience.7 I
am thinking here of genuflection, prostration, bowings, yoga, signs of the
cross, hands lifted with the index finger pointed up, and so on. Converts
learn these actions either through explicit training or by observation, and
there is an oft-generalized observation that there is “no one as religious
as a convert.”
In this respect, a case can reasonably be made that a convert is on a
“faith pilgrimage” in a sense in which someone born into a faith tradi-
tion may never realize. Every convert is in some sense a seeker, and the
interior pilgrimage of the convert is almost certainly connected to exter-
nal movement. “Changing churches” involves motion, not just ideas. The
convert does not “become a Catholic” without going to a Catholic church,
for example, and that church represents an “other” in the way that it does
not for someone reared in the tradition. Even those who have some form
of life changing or “born again” experience that leads them to return to
active participation within their own tradition will speak of starting to
go to church again or start looking for a church. This is not, of course,

7 By introducing intention, I am trying to bracket such religion-and-body issues as

menstruation sanctions, infant circumcision, etc., in which the participant has little if any
control. This would also pertain to those experiences in which a participant is placed into
a trance state or takes hallucinogens.
 william h. swatos, jr.

pilgrimage in the classic sense. Nevertheless, the idea of making a bodily

effort to seek out a site for religious experience is not without signifi-
cance within the context of the sociology of pilgrimage and pilgrimage
religiosity. Similarly, those who are successful will say they have found
a church. Going, looking, finding are seeker-type activities, and in that
sense the seeker church, broadly speaking, has an unmistakable cultural
connection to the same spirit that enlivens the current increase in pil-
grimage religiosity. Both are, relatively speaking, infused with a potential
for spiritual bricolage that engages the participant in constructing his or
her own religious experiences and convictions in the company of others.
Rather than learning received dogma, the pilgrim and the seeker-convert
collect and interpret experiences in a particular life-context, sometimes
articulated in the instrumentalist phrase “it works for me.”
In the midst of the late-s “God is dead” controversy, an article
appeared in the New York Times Sunday magazine entitled “It’s not God
that’s dead, it’s Daddy,” the point of which was that the father-figure had
dramatically changed against its historical norm across the first half of
the twentieth century. Without adopting the Freudian foundations that
partially underlay that article, we can nevertheless see that there has
been a sea change in lifestyles that has affected both work and family
life. The settled community, distinct gender roles, procreative sex as
normative and so on that characterized the religious life of men, women,
and communities in the early years of sociology of religion are no longer
characteristic of the lives and lifestyles of the rising generations within
postmodern societies. What the “God is dead” movement failed to grasp,
however, was that a constituent part of the life-worlds of human beings
seems to be what is currently most commonly known as being “spiritual”
or as “spirituality.”
Some historic religious have more easily accommodated this change
than others, but in any case the spirituality is itself far more multi-
dimensional, because it has more space to accommodate the idiosyn-
cratic, than have been the historic congregational forms, though some
of these have been more capable of adjusting to the shift from struc-
tured religion to semi-structured spirituality than others. The Roman
Catholic and Orthodox churches, for example, which have had stronger
folk/pilgrimage traditions have been more capable of readjusting their
styles in some contexts to postmodern pilgrimage experiences than have
been some of the more staid historic Protestant churches. In Protestant
circles, by contrast, seeker churches have usually developed out of more
innovative spiritual dynamics rooted in a combination of strategies from
 pilgrimage and conversion 

early twentieth-century mass evangelism and neo-Pentecostalism—

teamed with such cultural resources a big-screen TV and surround
sound. Many seeker churches certainly do seek to build a member-
ship infrastructure through house groups or prayer cells, but these are
quite different in character from the quasi-political structure of church
“boards” in the historic denominations. Whereas the “boards” have had
a quasi-political administrative character, the house groups and prayer
cells create a fluid environment for personal religious expression
removed from the constraints of organizational decision making. The
comparable size of the seeker church frees its people from the level of
mundane maintenance tasks while opening a foreground for experiences
that are at once immanent and transcendent—the former in the sense
that they are able to be immediately apprehended in the worship expe-
rience, the latter in that by the sheer size of the crowd and dynamics of
presentation they move beyond the local and mundane.
Contemporary pilgrimage experiences to a considerable extent mir-
ror these dynamics. They raise the pilgrim from the pedestrian concerns
of congregational or local church maintenance to an encounter not only
with the holy other but also with the holy miraculous. Pilgrimages and
pilgrimage sites are not only “set apart and other,” but they also evince a
religious experience that has the power to alter the worlds of individuals.
The healing of the sick, the mending of the broken, the overwhelming
presence of ex votos that testify across time and space to the power of
the spirit of the place stand as a testimony to the Beyond—yet one that
may be individually appropriated and integrated without doctrinal for-
mularies or the politics of religious organizational life. Change happens.
Religious “authority” is deconstructed in the moment of the experience
and reconstructed in the apprehension of inexplicable power. As one of
my colleagues in our research during the  papal visit to Lourdes (in
the context of the th anniversary of the apparitions): “I am still very
impressed by the testimonies of the people whom I interviewed there! It
is going to be difficult to work on it sociologically, but religiously, there
is rich material. Who could have no faith after that!”8

8 The Lourdes research is part of a larger project on contemporary Marian sites,

principally the Chapel of the Miraculous Medal in Paris, and in Lourdes. The project
has been supported by the Association for the Sociology of Religion through its Joseph
H. Fichter Research Grants program. Sophie-Hélène Trigeaud and André Sleiman have
collaborated with me in this work.
 william h. swatos, jr.

Yet it is not necessarily in the categories of traditional religion that all

“spiritual” dynamics in pilgrimage become expressed. Santiago de Com-
postela, in particular, is especially likely to energize accounts of trans-
formation that move beyond the characteristically religious, particularly
because the “official” pilgrimage involves walking several hundred miles
to reach the shrine (which is not to prohibit pilgrim “tours” from reach-
ing the church by bus). Frey (: , –) writes of the ways in
which the Pilgrim’s Office has worked both to liberalize the granting of
the Compostela—a certificate that authenticates an individual as having
made a true pilgrimage—yet continues to control it. On the one hand,
beginning in the s the requirement that the applicant state a “reli-
gious” motive was enlarged to encompass a “spiritual” motive, yet also as
late as  a Japanese pilgrim wrote to the Spanish national daily El País
to complain about being denied a certificate because he failed in the eyes
of the Pilgrim Office to have made a spiritually adequate pilgrimage in
spite of having completed all the steps.9
More recently, Eduardo Chemin has studied English persons on the
Camino. He finds a series of differences and argues for moving away
from “the view that sees pilgrims as static objects of study, to one that
sees them as embodiments of the subjectivization of religion as well as
communicators,” that is, “[s]elf-reflective individuals seeking ‘authentic’
experiences.” These, “in turn, reflect a conscious or unconscious uncon-
scious evaluation of the circumstances surrounding [post?]modern liv-
ing” (: ). Specifically, he finds three “basic pilgrimage subsystems
or fields”:
. The spiritual or de-traditionalized pilgrimage field . . . a structure of dis-
courses that predominantly attracts members of the new middle classes
who display characteristics such as having a romantic world-view involv-
ing culture, adventure and challenge that could be traced back to broader
anxieties in relation to the subject’s position in the world. In this field, self-
spiritualism is preferred as an alternative to traditional religion.
. The religious or traditional pilgrimage field [which] inspires those who
attach importance to the shrine of the deity. Those motivated by this
narrative are committed to a particular ideology or theology, which in the
case of the Camino is Christian . . . .

9 During our research at the Chapel of the Miraculous Medal we similarly encoun-

tered Japanese persons who explicitly denied being Christian yet also were buying Mirac-
ulous Medals to take home to many friends.
 pilgrimage and conversion 

. The touristic pilgrimage field or ‘religious tourism’ [which] brings subjects

who aim at visiting sites but who do not usually engage in the full pro-
cess of pilgrimage (i.e., walking extensively, being self-sufficient). Subjects
engaging in this practice usually travel by modes of transport [bus tourism]
between sites of interest and use private accommodation. (: –)
Although Chemin notes that Santiago may well be “seen as an exceptional
case,” he also uses it wisely to argue:
that pilgrimages should be viewed as complex and isolated phenomena
that change in character according to prevailing habitae and their rela-
tionship to the many fields that underlie each individual pilgrimage cen-
ter. Sociocultural, economic, religious and spiritual fields form the struc-
tural skeleton of most pilgrimages, however, their intensity and scales are
diverse and particular to each one of them. Pilgrims on the other hand are
attracted to certain types of pilgrimages as a result of the engrained affini-
ties or the different habitae that are pertinent . . . to the different social
classes that constitute cultural spheres. (: )
When we examine pilgrimage and conversion, therefore, we cannot do
so outside of particular sociocultural contexts, hence it may well be that
there are actually several “pilgrimages” going on within a particular pil-
grimage center, just as the megachurch allows for multiple spiritualities
to find expression in the dynamics of a large, relatively anonymous collec-
tivity where emotional effervescence is neither necessarily uniform nor
motivated by singularity of motive—i.e., multiple “conversions” as well.
The character of the postmodern is such that multiple layers of multiple
meanings can be taken on and let go as personalistic criteria may require,
but this is not to say at the same time that variables such as social class,
status, and power do not enter into these engagements of the spirit.

References

Adler, Judith. . “The Holy Man as Traveler and Travel Attraction: Early
Christian Asceticism and the Moral Problematic of Modernity.” Pp. – in
From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism: The Social and Cultural Eco-
nomics of Piety, edited by William H. Swatos, Jr., and Luigi Tomasi. Westport,
CT: Praeger.
Beaman, Lori G. . “Labyrinth as Heterotopia: The Pilgrim’s Creation of
Space.” Pp. – in On the Road to Being There: Studies in Pilgrimage and
Tourism in Late Modernity, edited by William H. Swatos, Jr. Leiden: Brill.
Chemin, Eduardo. . The Pilgrim’s Discourse in the Milky Way: A Study on
the Religiosity of British Pilgrims on the Road to Santiago de Compostela. B.Sc.
(hons) thesis. Thames Valley University, London.
 william h. swatos, jr.

Eade, John. . “Pilgrimage and Tourism at Lourdes, France.” Annals of Tour-
ism Research : –.
Frey, Nancy Louise. . Pilgrim Stories. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Gilmore, Lee. . “Desert Pilgrimage: Liminality, Transformation and the
Other at the Burning Man Festival.” Pp. – in On the Road to Being
There: Studies in Pilgrimage and Tourism in Late Modernity, edited by William
H. Swatos, Jr. Leiden: Brill.
Hervieu-Léger, Danièle. . Le Pèlerin et le Converti: La Religion en Mouve-
ment. Paris: Flammarion.
Kaelber, Lutz. . “Place and Pilgrimage: Real and Imagined.” Pp. –
in On the Road to Being There: Studies in Pilgrimage and Tourism in Late
Modernity, edited by William H. Swatos, Jr. Leiden: Brill.
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age and Tourism in Late Modernity. Leiden: Brill.
Tomasi, Luigi. . “Homo Viator: From Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism via
the Journey.” Pp. – in From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism: The
Social and Cultural Economics of Piety, edited by William H. Swatos, Jr., and
Luigi Tomasi. Westport, CT: Praeger.
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Culture. Oxford: Blackwell.
 chapter six

BECOMING A NEW AGER:

A CONVERSION, AN AFFILIATION, A FASHION?

Régis Dericquebourg

Belonging to a religion looked like a relatively simple question in the

Western world until the s. A believer belonged to a church by birth.
He or she was socialized in it as a part of growing up—i.e., he or she
adopted its lifestyle and values. Believers sometimes left their religion
to join a sect or a denomination in the Protestant realm, but they were
relatively small in number, even though those minor religious groups
were by no means negligible. Within Catholicism, some of the members
strengthened their faith and went further on the way to salvation through
a deep inner spiritual experience. Others revived their faith after having
gone away from it; they are “converts from the inside” (Hervieu-Léger
: ). For a Catholic, similarly, the experience of priestly vocation or
that of the choice of monastic life may also be interpreted as a conversion
from the inside. In the first case, the ordinary believer becomes the holder
of a “charisma of function”; in the second case, she or he enters the circle
of religious virtuosos. In both cases, the person’s lifestyle thoroughly
changes by reaching the role of priest and/or the role of monk/nun.
On the Protestant side, the nineteenth century religious “awakenings”
brought hundreds of thousands of American Protestants to return to
their faith (cf. Bruns ).
The religious field has been differentially modified within the last
forty years of the twentieth century. On the market of salvation goods,
more intense proselytism by minor religious groups, as well as their real
successes in some cases, multiplied conversions. Similarly, the presence
of many immigrants in the Western world gave Islam visibility. Chris-
tians converted to Islam and vice versa. We also witnessed a greater
proselytism of Buddhist and Hindu missions (belonging to a different
type of Buddhism or Hinduism from the popular forms of the Asian
immigrants). Soka Gakkai and different branches of the Ramakrishna
mission, for instance, made disciples. The phenomenon is in itself not
new. There were always conversions to “exotic” cults—Hinduism, Sufism,
 régis dericquebourg

Buddhism—but they were more rare, and only a few intellectuals were
concerned. This is no longer the case now, because, from the s to
the s forward, these religions have been attracting people from the
middle classes and drawing correspondingly more disciples. Thus, socio-
religious mobility in a space where alternative propositions of mean-
ing are extensive has renewed the interest of researchers in the phe-
nomenon/a of conversion. Among the public, the word caused uneasi-
ness. We witnessed a shift in meaning because, under the influence of
the anti-cultists and the media, conversion was considered the result of
mental manipulation or brainwashing due to a weakness of the individ-
ual and to the action of unscrupulous “gurus” (Anthony and Introvigne
).
Religious mutation does not concern only the religious denomina-
tions we just evoked. From the decade – on, the whole reli-
gious landscape was altered. Many Westerners do not find or do not seek
the answers to final questions upon the meaning of life in a church or
even in a sect or a denomination. Moreover, they refuse to belong to
organized religious movements. They examine multiple propositions in
the religious field. They learn different doctrines. They experiment with
several spiritual practices. They sometimes devote themselves to non-
spiritual practices and consider them as useful elements for their quest
for salvation here and now or post mortem. All this is simultaneously or
successively accomplished in a system of thought and practice popularly
dubbed the New Age. Some researchers call this spirituality a “free-choice
religion” and the itinerary of its disciples “gleaning.” Even though these
expressions may seem caricatured, it is nonetheless true that it is an atyp-
ical religiosity where one cannot a priori discriminate a religious conver-
sion such as generally described by sociologists and psychologists—i.e.,
as a rupture in life.
How can we define entering the New Age? Is it a new conversion,
when New Agers go from one group to another? Is there such a thing
as a global conversion to the New Age? Is the latter a form of spirituality
without conversion? Is it a path without any culminating experience? In
this chapter, we will examine those questions through the life stories of
three followers.
 becoming a new ager 

The New Age: A Gathering, A Social Movement

In order to discuss the ways of joining the New Age, we must briefly
consider what it is.
This is not easy because, among the sociologists who constructed
it as a social reality, it is a nebula made of study groups, movements,
training courses, training seminars, bookshops, music concerts, festivals,
relations to masters, with the whole thing in constant evolution.
In his book devoted to the New Age, Massimo Introvigne (: –
) tries to define the trend: “it is rather a climate, an environment,
an atmosphere, a body of realities that have a family likeness among
them, but which also present ‘differences and contradictions’.” For this
reason, the New Age can be more easily be described through differ-
ent angles than propositionally defined. From the philosophical point of
view, it rests on the idea that a radical change in all the domains of exis-
tence (including scientific paradigms) is happening or is going to take
place. From the sociological point of view, it is a network of networks (a
“metanetwork”) in which a group pf people, who are not formally affil-
iated “Members of the New Age,” participate. In that respect, it is not a
structured movement, even though it includes movements or organized
groups that sometimes existed even before its appearance. From a doc-
trinal point of view, it does not comprise any unique thought system.
Everyone can create his or her own image of the world. The rational sys-
tem underlying this one has no importance: New Agers have teachings
validated through personal experiment and experience.
Martin Geoffroy, contrary to Introvigne, argues that the New Age is
a full-fledged social movement, structured as a varied “gathering space”
where disciples can go from one group to another relatively easily. The
individual is only one side of the New Age movement, which cannot be
studied as a union of individualisms “even though the cult of the individ-
ual occupies much space in it.” Geoffroy enumerates three tendencies in
the New Age: the socio-cultural trend, the esoteric-occultist trend, and
the bio-psychological one. As a social movement, the New Age broadens
spaces of autonomy within civil society and can involve social protest.
Its disciples want to change the social system progressively, basing them-
selves on “harmony and inner serenity” (Geoffroy : –)—i.e., on
a conversionist pattern. According to that use, following Bryan Wilson’s
pattern of sect types (), the world improves as people become better.
The rallying of New Age disciples to the “Cultural Creatives” (Ray and
Anderson ), in particular the “Alter Creatives” (Cultural Creatives
with a path in spirituality), illustrates this. Protest sometimes comes to
 régis dericquebourg

take an anti-authority stand politically: New Agers are seen generally

supporting environmentalists (in the name of the pursuit of a healthy
life and respect for our planet)—and in France, they protested against
the French Medical Association in the name of the liberty to practice
alternative medicine—as well as to support green candidates in political
contests.
From a recent survey of a sample of advertising messages on the
Website of a French New Age advertiser, I was able to identify five
kinds of proposals for experiences and training: psychotherapy and self-
development, gnosis, wellness, alternative medicine, and spirituality
(Dericquebourg ). Statistically, after eliminating doubles, the first
category contains the greatest number of advertising messages, which
shows that the network of the New Age is a social space in which people
look for a remedy to their psychological and social ill-being. In addition,
Gnosis is at the root of a certain number of spiritualities and psychother-
apies, as well as some alternative medical practices. Inside spiritualities,
Gnosis statistically comes first. New Agers do not “tinker about” with
major religious traditions but are situated in “other” thought systems,
Gnosis in particular. Adam Possamai (: ) calls this new genre of
spirituality “perennism,” which he defines as “a spirituality which inter-
prets the world as Monistic and whose actors are attempting to develop
their Human Potential Ethic by seeking Spiritual Knowledge, mainly that
of the Self.” Doing so, he emphasizes the esoteric side of the underlying
philosophy of the New Age. This does not mean, as Introvigne (:
–) rightly states, that the New Age can be reduced to Gnosis. Geof-
froy () points out that this movement becomes institutionalized by
appropriating scientific language, entering the market of training and
creating firms. He asserts that a minimal institutionalization is necessary
in order to last. Is the New Age coming to a change, or does the appear-
ance of the new institutionalized forms mean the movement has already
disintegrated? (see Rivière ).
The question of the conversion—or not—to the New Age is even more
intricate because it refers to a gathering of movements that the followers
successively or simultaneously join. What are they “converted” to? Is
it to a global system that would be the social trend of New Age? Are
they “converted” anew each time they follow a group activity or choose
a new spiritual master? Can we talk about a “conversion” when people
come to practicing a New Age popular method of self-improvement, and
will practice another in the future? In this case, is the disciple merely
following fashion, or does he or she let himself or herself be guided
 becoming a new ager 

by underlying rationality? The answer also depends on a sociological

definition of conversion.

Conversion from a Sociological Viewpoint

To give a brief survey of what conversion is sociologically, I will refer

first to the sociological angle offered by Anthony Blasi in this book. His
reflection gives tools to answer the question of conversion within New
Age. Anxious to put in order the profusion of definitions for conversion,
Blasi suggests that we () subsume all definitions of conversion, except for
changes of merely nominal affiliation—for instance, the change from one
evangelical group to another—by the expression “redirection of founda-
tional trust,” and at the same time () consider that religion is a total
social phenomenon, with diverse interacting empirical levels that rule
social behavior. After all, conversion partly or totally modifies behav-
iors by “reorienting” them. One or the other of those behaviors could
in its turn be questioned. This then entails a defection and a conversion
to another group that will better suit the believer. Of course, Blasi does
not enter the error of behaviorism, which explains the whole of psychic
life by acquired behaviors not requiring consciousness, nor does he dis-
miss the fact that faith is linked with a non-empirical phenomenon. He
simply studies, on an empirical basis, how conversion reconstructs indi-
vidual and collective behaviors.
Accordingly, religion, seen as a constructed social reality, comprises:
() material elements (religious buildings, decorum); () an organiza-
tion and an organized life; () social models (participation in religious
celebrations, diet, interdictions, etc.); () collective behaviors such as
respecting a temporal hierarchy or the primacy of egalitarian horizon-
tal social relations; () roles, role conflicts, and aspirations to playing a
part (like the will to be admitted among the elders in the assembly, to be
a deacon or a minister for women); () attitudes and values; () social
symbols, for instance, identity for a minority; () times when the mem-
bers invent collective behaviors, sometimes being the concern of socio-
religious protest—e.g., the denunciation of a war or the protest against
strengthening nuclear weapons in a nation, or more intimately, the con-
demnation of medical practices thought incompatible with their beliefs;
() collective values and ideology; () a collective intellectual and emo-
tional life which is made manifest during commemorations, ceremonies
or holy days.
 régis dericquebourg

My research on Jehovah’s Witnesses () illustrates Blasi’s remarks. I

observed that persons who are converted to Jehovah’s Witnesses redirect
their conduct:
. As far as religious symbols are concerned, they take down any cru-
cifix that is hanging in their homes, because they adopt the idea
that Christ was not crucified on a cross, but to a post. They do not
introduce a symbolic post in their homes and do not wear any, how-
ever, because in the views of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, worshipping
an instrument of torture is absurd.
. They learn to know a huge organization, ruled from the Brooklyn
headquarters, which passes its orders and its writings through verti-
cal levels onto the local congregation. They respect this spiritual and
material hierarchy. They agree to the fact that the interpretation of
the Scriptures (the “Truth”) should be done by the central college,
which looks like the curia-order heading Tibetan monasticism.
. After having been converted, they neither consume blood any
longer (blood sausage or animals that were not bled), smoke, or con-
sume too much alcohol. Theoretically, they try not to resort to blood
transfusion.
. They respect the administrative hierarchy and agree to the manage-
ment of the local congregation by “elders.”
. They participate in functions that make the local congregation live,
by playing different parts (person in charge of the publications, in
charge of the study of the book, etc.) and accept the principle of
preaching from house to house.
. They become pacifist and refuse military service, do not take part in
military commemorations or in official patriotic celebrations. Until
, they did not go to the polls to show that they did not believe in
human beings trying to solve social problems. All in all, they express
socio-religious protest throughout the important acts of their lives.
On the other hand, they do pay income taxes to “render unto Cesar
the things which are Cesar’s.”
. Jehovah’s Witnesses are recruited within all immigrant and under-
privileged populations. When persons belong to at least one of these
categories, they are more likely to be converted to Jehovah’s Wit-
nesses than are top executives.
. When the end of the world is forecast as imminent, they will take
part in the eschatological waiting with fellow believers. As a rule,
the Jehovah’s Witness is still waiting for the end of this world and
 becoming a new ager 

the Second Coming, but they will do it with a greater thrill if the
announcement made by the leaders of the movement concerns
a precise date. If the anticipated event does not occur, they will
participate in the collective rationalization of the failure.
. With conversion, Witnesses will separate from the State and from
the world of work, to make greater room for Jehovah in their lives,
something they did not do before.
. The elders will advise the neophyte not to be too much engrossed in
worldly affairs, to choose “moral” leisure, not to gamble and to break
off relationships with people that could lead them far from Jehovist
morals. They no longer model their lives on the national calendar
or the Christian calendar. Witnesses do not celebrate Christmas
any longer, because Witnesses think its date is not relevant. They
commemorate Christ’s death on the fixed date of the th of the
month of Nizan, not on the Easter cycle like other Christians. They
do not take part any more in national commemorations in other
countries because they are not Christian. Thus, a breach will take
place in the cultural festival calendar of Jehovah’s Witnesses in
whatever society of which they are a part.
The sociological construction of conversion, in terms of modification
of social behaviors on the basis of “redirection of foundational trust,”
proposed by Blasi, is totally relevant for Jehovah’s Witnesses, which is
typical of the convert organization. This is similarly illustrated by Max
Weber’s famous account of a Baptist convert in North Carolina, whom
Weber mentions in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(: –).1 The man wanted to open a banking business and
his conversion to (and acceptance by) the Baptist church could show
everyone that he could be expected to be reliable in life and in business,
because of the conscious directing and leading that lay behind “the entire
organization of the believer’s life” (Lebensführung [: lxxix, ]) that
the conversion to Baptist standards should produce. According to Weber,
life behavior refers to a structured body of behaviors and practices. In the

1 The original the Protestant Ethic essays appeared in German in /, but were

later supplemented by a  revision that included a  extension of the original, with
special reference to the United States. It is in the  material that the North Carolina
baptism first appears. The classic English-language translations are those of the original
essays by Talcott Parsons in , plus the additional materials, first published in English
by C. Wright Mills and Hans Gerth in . Those translations are here supplemented by
the third Roxbury edition, at the hands of Stephen Kalberg.
 régis dericquebourg

narrow sense of the term, it refers to a system of actions in a determined

social field: an “economical life behavior,” for instance. In a broader sense,
it refers to a practical relation to the world in general: for instance, the
“modern life behavior” as defined by Weber as embodying “a practical-
rational manner” (Weber : ). We can say that a religion is a “life
order” (Lebensordnung) made out of life behaviors, and that a change of
religion modifies them.
We can also see a link between Weber’s discussion and Berger and
Luckmann’s thesis on conversion (: –). This one, called alter-
nation is a thorough transformation (compared with lesser modifica-
tions) of the subjective reality. Yet, for the authors, “to have a conversion
experience is nothing much. The real thing is to be able to keep on taking
it seriously: to retain a sense of its plausibility. This is where the religious
community comes in. It provides the indispensable plausibility structure
for the new reality.” For the authors, “it is only within the religious com-
munity, the ecclesia, that the conversion can be effectively maintained as
plausible.” The structured social reality Blasi describes is a consequence
of the conversion, but it is also a structure of plausibility given coverage
by “other signifiers” following the same ways of salvation. Thanks to it,
the individual maintains his or her belief and membership in the com-
munity he or she choses. “Therapeutic procedures” can be put in place
in order to prevent his “backsliding” to his old world. One can also refer
to Max Weber’s chapter on the ways of salvation “from the outside” and
their influence on life (Weber : –).
I have concentrated on Blasi’s contribution because of its heuristic
value. It clearly shows that, in order to analyze the paths of the New Agers,
one must study the behavior modifications to know whether, at a certain
time, a conversion took place or a mere participation in training events,
seminars, and meetings. Going to an institution like school certainly
alters life behavior, by fostering a sense of civic responsibility for instance.
It is not, however, “redirecting” behaviors, but in learning new ones, that
the teacher will evaluate in terms of success. The same is true within
the churches that socialize youth. In religions, imposed or advised life
behaviors and their modifications are considered an element of salvation.
If there is such thing as a conversion to the New Age, we will notice
among the new disciples a redirection of their faith and social practices.
They are then wished for and accepted as elements of salvation. If not,
there isn’t more than a passage through the experiences or training. We
are back to the choice: pilgrim or convert?
 becoming a new ager 

Methodology

To study conversion as a possible way to enter the New Age, I employed

the guided life story format, under the form of semi-structured inter-
views. Several sociologists support the use of the biographic method. For
Thierry Mathé, the life story is a method in social sciences that moves
away from totally objective methods, which were invented to conform to
hard science methods but which do not answer the questions of “why”
and “how.” Following Franco Ferraroti (: ), Thierry Mathé under-
scores how collecting life stories “helps grasp the subjective meaning of
‘religiously oriented action’ in a group of individuals with their stories
and their life cycles” (: ), because it sheds light on long-lasting
processes. Through the analysis of the discourses and the singularities
of what each one has lived, permanent features can be discriminated,
that will enable us to capture a specificity in thoughts, in attitudes and
in expectations. Mathé (: ) also recalls that, for Daniel Bertaux
(), the “scandal” caused by the biographical method is to “attribute
to subjectivity a value in knowledge.” The method implies acknowledg-
ing the other as a total and singular experience. It is neither a recognition
of reality, an information medium, nor an illustration of reality.
The life story is a construction that allows the one who tells it to
disclose a “biographic ideology” and to take it in its synthetic unity. Then,
how can we avoid describing the social actor’s life in his own words? No
doubt by making it a heuristic fact. In the end, it’s turned over to the
researcher’s distanced analysis. The individual gives meaning to his or
her past experiences in relation to his or her present one. We noted it in
the stories of converts to Jehovah’s Witnesses that what they experienced
before is reconsidered in relation to the present Truth that, according
to the believer, must guide life. The story is in fact told as prerecorded.
Reconstructed a posteriori, the past, chronologically intertwined, makes
sense after the experiences end. For us, only a past story can describe
joining the New Age. It appears that the closing of their path allowed
those New Agers to grasp the meaning of their progression. The social
actor is not necessarily entirely ignorant of the meaning of his experience.
It cannot be said that, on the one hand, an actor is telling his story
and is systematically mistaken when he draws hypotheses concerning
the meaning of his life experience, but on the other, sociologists deliver
the only analysis of a life story, stamped by the “Spirit of Truth.” A
social actor can also distance himself from his biography and objectify
it.
 régis dericquebourg

Within religious movements, a believer telling the story of his path

before his fellow-believers sometimes follows a ritual. In his study about
Buddhism, Mathé considers the function of those repeatedly told con-
version stories. We find them elsewhere, in movements like Alcoholics
Anonymous for instance. In this case, the stories of a past life under the
influence of alcohol and of a present, abstinent one reinforce the heal-
ing processes of the narrator and his fellows. The New Ager is accus-
tomed to life stories. He has produced such ritualized discourses within
the groups he saw, relating the steps in his quest and emphasizing the
benefits he drew or the hardships with which he was confronted. Yet,
facing the sociologist who interviews him, he can also produce another
narration because he no longer stands within the same register. The way
the sociologist talks or his questions can bring the interviewee into a
frame of speech other than the one that is expected by a group of experi-
ence companions or the leader of a self-improvement or spiritual devel-
opment session. The encounter between sociologist and narrator brings
us to the junction of two interpretations. An article by Fabrice Desplan
(), stemming from his thesis () illustrates what can be done to
work upon that junction in order to avoid emisme, the bias by which the
interviewer makes as his own the interpretation the social actor gives of
his own behavior. Desplan analyzed the content of  interviews, twice
repeated, to come to the conclusion that, first, there is rather plain evi-
dence that conversion brings a disruption, with a “before” and an “after”;
second, establishing a typology of converts inspired by Le Pélerin et le
Converti (Hervieu Léger, ). By putting converts into categories based
on similarities and differences in the stories, the author objectifies life
courses and builds spaces of meaning.

The Project and the Data

I studied oral biographies in order to understand whether frequently

attending New Age circles brought the disciple to break off with his life
behavior, keeping in mind the perspective in which Blasi stands. As in
clinical analysis, a few cases are enough because we wish to spot a socio-
cognitive approach, not to draw a typology of the different ways to the
New Age. We chose people we consider to represent the typical French
New Ager, belonging to the middle-class, who were religiously socialized.
They reached the end of their path after different experiences, and they
are able to assess a situation that is in itself material for us to interpret.
 becoming a new ager 

We looked for people who had for a long time frequently seen groups
that we may classify among the New Age cadre, and who took an active
part in them. Being active means they were regular in attendance and
took responsibility as organizers or teachers of doctrines and techniques
they had been taught and with which they had experimented. Three were
accepted. Two of them think their course has come to an end. Another
one elaborated his own synthesis. He is teaching and sees only the circle
he founded. He has become a spiritual master. He also devotes himself
to the fight for religious freedom, because the groups he belonged to, as
well as his own circle, were under the accusation of being “sects,” with
the result of disastrous social consequences, on the personal, professional
and family levels.
In the interviews, each person was asked to relate his or her path within
the New Age (an expression they accepted). We then asked questions
about the “illumination” experience itself, questions about the changes
frequenting those groups had produced in their self-perception and in
their lives. Moreover, we asked them whether they perceived an under-
lying quest in themselves, what their relationship was to the mainstream
religious denominations, whether each group they belonged to had
brought them anything, and whether these possible contributions added
up—i.e., whether they had reached a philosophy of life at the end of these
experiences. We asked them whether they had the feeling that, at a certain
time, they had been “converted.” Interviews were recorded and translit-
erated. They are provided as a basis for analysis, after removing all verbal
tics, slips, pauses, etc.

J.P. Age . Professor in Mathematics.

(Recorded at home and transliterated July )

I remember that when I was eighteen, I felt confined because I came from
a modest background. I had no life experience. We didn’t have a tele-
phone at home. I was very shy, and I joined a tennis club at that age.
It was my first social experience. I did all the possible jobs: secretary,
tournament organizer, chairman in my club for eight years. I then taught
tennis for ten years. It all began when I was twenty. I am sixty now, and
have been playing tennis for forty years. Then, as I began teaching math-
ematics in high school, I saw people who went to the university parish.
The woman who introduced me was called Martine, she taught history
and geography. I joined the group, we met once a month with a priest,
 régis dericquebourg

Father R., who is still alive. We met once a month and debated about a
subject which was chosen beforehand, society facts for instance. There I
met a priest who taught mathematics in a denominational high school
and who was friends with a neighbor of mine who studied mathemat-
ics. We did a lot of talk. At a certain period, he was a surrogate father
because I had grown up fatherless. This priest was full of questioning.
He wondered why he had become a priest. Then we began to build a
group of self-improvement and therapy with a priest who was a psychi-
atrist.
In fact, when I studied math at the university, I was interested in the
subconscious. I wanted to know what deep forces were. I wondered if my
choices were guided by rationality or by the unconscious. I knew there
was a world to discover. It was a passion for me. I wondered why I had
this passion. My mother worked as a cleaning lady, my great-aunt had no
culture at all. I don’t know what brought me to that rage for discovery,
but it was deep-rooted. Therefore, I registered for that therapy group that
taught to discover oneself—a discovery of one’s unconscious through the
body. It thrilled me. I attended it for about two years, with a session about
every two months. In that group, I met a girl who practiced yoga. She
invited me to yoga training during the month of August. Ultimately, I
went to it and I discovered yoga with Jacques H. During that fifteen-
days training, I experienced an extraordinary feeling of relaxation, and it
brought me a lot. Then I took weekly yoga courses for two years. Then,
as I experienced anguish while deeply relaxing, I stopped for one year,
to get back to it afterwards. After that, I didn’t stop it, except when my
children were born, for two or three years. I have been practicing yoga
for about thirty years. Jacques H. was chairman of the CISL. He was
heavily into therapies and groups, and looked for clients in yoga groups.
I was a bachelor then, and this took the weekends, with a passion for self-
discovery and entering deep into meditation. He got me into something
else, another life out of the movement, out of social life. I felt as if I
had done something enormous that brought me maybe near the state
of death. I am very interested in that question: what does happen after
death, and I feel I tame . . . (a silence).
I followed courses in self-development based upon bio-energy with
hyperventilation and catharsis. So when I discovered that, that was such
an extraordinary thing in terms of beatitude. I remember times when I
stopped at red lights in a state of utter happiness so I went to that kind of
group for three more years.
Then I went to Tantra groups, or rather neo-Tantra because we reach
 becoming a new ager 

neo-Tantric meditation that is far from the Indian Tantra. I followed

courses like that in Paris, in Liege, but meanwhile I didn’t go to the yoga
school because it took too many weekends. But afterwards, I came back to
yoga lessons, three hours long on Tuesday evenings, with one and a half
hour postures, followed by breath control and meditation. I followed it
all till the Yoga school closed. The teacher was becoming a swindler and
tried to enroll us in all that. I attended those courses with my wife. Inside
those groups, I got to know some people quite well, that I kept in touch
with.
After that, I stopped going to the therapy groups. There I met Françoise
and when our children were born, I stopped everything: choir singing,
yoga lessons . . . I was teaching in high school and working at the Educa-
tion Offices. I was very busy. I kept only tennis. I waited for my children
to become a bit older and then I looked for a club of Yoga. I tried some
of them that didn’t suit me, then, one day I found one that was nearby.
The teacher didn’t fit into my canons for the teaching of Yoga, but, dur-
ing six-seven years, she brought me what I looked for. After having been
teaching Yoga for twenty-eight years, she decided to retire and proposed
me to take over. Therefore, I am now a teacher at the Yoga club of L. There
are forty-five students and three teachers.
I began to play golf five or six years ago. Why? I just didn’t know. From
years on, I had been wishing to play golf. When I was twenty, tennis was
in fashion, when I practiced Yoga, Yoga was in fashion, like getting in
tune with nature, and when the fashion went to playing golf, I began
to play golf. So, I like to keep in fashion, I follow the latest trend. It’s a
child’s happiness for me to learn new gestures, to progress in the sport,
to mix with people. At the tennis club’s, I began getting the group set out,
arranging tournaments, so I built up a strong social environment. I am
now going in for a few golf events.
R.D.: To sum up your path, did frequenting these groups transform you
in depth? Or was it beside you?
J.P.: Seeing those groups built me socially speaking. I was starting from
a great lack of self-confidence, then, a sort of social identity was built.
People trust me. I feel like I am working for the benefit of the club or
something else. This has given me a social weight.
R.D: You practiced Yoga. What, with your spiritual life?
J.P.: The spiritual side of these processes? For me, Yoga is the mind, but
I can see that all that is together: the body and the spirit. Yoga is a door
 régis dericquebourg

towards the spirit, the body is a door towards the spirit. It is also true with
tennis or golf.
R.D.: Do you think you followed a spiritual path?
J.P.: Yes. At a certain point, I felt I was more of a Buddhist than a Christian.
Tantra gives a perfect example. The body brings transcendence. What
interests me in tennis or in golf is the learning process. I am a spiritual
student, always discovering, going ever deeper in self-knowledge, in
order to develop my potential, I wouldn’t say in a pathological but in
a childish way. It’s the “know thyself,” too. This spiritual path is all the
same very near the religious quest because I have a blind and simple faith
that is family heirloom. I went to mass Sunday mornings until twenty-
five, and the belief in a God helped me much. Then with yoga, my quest
became more spiritual. I looked for transcendence, what is divine in me.
Buddhism brings a godless answer. I find a divine part in myself like a
grain of the universe without the presence of an outer God and it’s a bit
hard for me to make all that live together. I made up my own religious
truth. I feel near the Christian God, but at the same time, I wonder. For
me, all religions have good sides. What is immanent? What can survive in
what I am at present? I haven’t found out, except that in deep meditation,
things happen that I can’t explain. It’s an emptiness that isn’t a void. It’s
comforting though, to come back from meditation to living my everyday
life.
R.D.: Does everything each group brings you accumulate and do you
theorize your experience?
J.P.: The experiences accumulated. Maturity is a series of experiences that
accumulate, I am therefore more able to answer to new experiences. The
richer and more varied the experiences are, the more comfortable I feel
in my everyday life.
R.D.: Did it change your lifestyle?
J.P.: No, I didn’t bring myself into question. My vision of the couple didn’t
change. Not even the side of consumption.
R.D.: What about detachment?
J.P.: It is actually advocated by Buddhism, and from this perspective, I
haven’t changed. Eventually, at twenty, I owned a “deux-chevaux” [an
economical car by Citroën]. If I had not owned one, I would have
managed otherwise. If I had had a bigger car, I would have been pleased,
 becoming a new ager 

but I am from a modest background. I don’t want to spend more. I make

do with what I have. I didn’t change. I can spend more because I have
more money, but my behavior is the same basically.
R.D.: Did you, at a certain point, have an illumination?
J.P.: I’ve been looking for it for a long time; I experienced some “numinous
moments,” as Graf Dürckheim says. It fell on my head, regardless of what
I could do.
R.D.: Did you develop a philosophy of life that you could write down
someday?
J.P.: A bit, it’s rather an outcome. Life is rather feeling well socially
speaking, yet to feel socially well, you have to eliminate some inner
contradictions, and find them first. It’s useful to feel at ease with others,
but I think parental patterns are crushing in this respect.
R.D.: To hear you, I feel as if your quest was more a social than a religious
one.
J.P.: Maybe. I had the feeling, during many years, that my spiritual quest
was essential, that it was my whole life. Now at sixty, I don’t feel so sure,
maybe because it came to an end. It all was many discoveries, well-being,
relaxation. It seemed to me to be the fuel for my whole life, yet now, if
I have the prospect of meditating half an hour a day, it’s to teach yoga
better, it’s not a primary quest. Maybe it all changed between fifty and
fifty-five, maybe because I had children and much to do. My aim is now
to equip my children to deal with the difficulties of life.
R.D.: Did you teach meditation to your children?
J.P.: Yes, I sometimes practiced relaxation on them. My daughter attended
Yoga lessons. If one of them can’t go to sleep, I help him or her to relax.
Maybe they don’t want it? I taught them to play tennis. I let them alone
when I saw it didn’t really please them.
R.D.: Did that path change the way you envision the world?
J.P.: Yes. At fifteen, God and fate managed it all, and afterwards I got
the impression that I held the reins in my hands and I felt more self-
responsible, and in that way, self-knowledge was giving me a more acute
sense of concrete reality. Afterwards, the Buddhist view of the world gave
me a more cosmic vision by telling that I was a grain of the universe. I
thought things were important inside my small environment, which in
 régis dericquebourg

fact weren’t. In fact, I managed to distance myself from all that. In fact,
when I see a contradiction, the very fact of unearthing it, of getting to
know it, changes my actions.
R.D.: Is it a distance towards conflicts?
J.P.: Yes.
R.D.: Did your path bring you nearer to religion?
J.P.: No, it drove me away from it.

Commentary

We should avoid giving a psychological interpretation of J.P’s path, be-

cause we did not choose that kind of approach. We are interested in an
itinerary that we link with its context. J.P’s progress is motivated by a
triple quest: a quest for social links, a quest for learning, and spiritual
quest. They are all intertwined to build an itinerary inside which he
puts on the same level tennis, golf, yoga, Tantra, personal development
and therapy groups, meditating. Some activities were left out, others
accumulated and belong to his life.
As far as life is concerned, J.P. does not talk about noticeable changes,
as regards consumption, family life, or on the professional plane. One
cannot find the usual behavior manifestations of a conversion. In short,
J.P. belonged to a modest Catholic family, he passed an academic degree,
became a professor, founded a standard family and is now retired. He still
teaches yoga and practices golf.
On a spiritual level, he starts from an intense Catholic faith (he states
a “blind and simple faith”), he regularly went to Mass till he was twenty-
five. At that age and in the years –, many French students
were no longer regular churchgoers (Delestre ). It is even within
the precincts of the university parish, under the impulse of a priest he
saw, that he goes to a therapy group directed by a priest who is also a
psychiatrist. At that time, psychotherapies were in fashion, and many
Catholics wished to examine their faith closely to the light of the uncon-
scious and the body. Several priests who were also psychologists led ses-
sions of “Faith and Psychology” or “Faith at the Risk of Psychoanalysis.”
It was a fashion, as were tennis and golf when he took to practicing those
sports. Tantric Buddhism also came into fashion. He asserts that he kept
in fashion or rather followed the trend of the day. Yet we cannot draw the
 becoming a new ager 

conclusion that he voluntarily kept in fashion. His choices greatly depend

on his relations who draw him toward what they practice and thus give
him access to certain answers to his quest for well-being and improve-
ment. There were other trendy movements during his life course (inter-
personal astrology, symbolism of Hebrew letters, vibratory singing) that
he did not get to know or did not wish to practice. One can be doubtful
about his interpretation of fashion.
J.P. relates an experience of the numinous that translated into a feeling
of well-being, but it is not an illumination that will fix him in a special
spiritual way. He does not become a Buddhist. He takes to psychotherapy
and self-development; nevertheless he does not begin a long-run per-
sonal psychotherapy and self-development process like the patients of
analysts or psychiatrists. He gains a satisfying well-being. One cannot say
that there is a conversion that includes a disruption between a time before
and a time after, nor even a progressive conversion or an initiation that
gives a “new man.” He has found sociability in an environment. Through
his practicing sports and through his spiritual practices, he aimed at a
self-improvement that satisfied his will to learn: the same that drove him
to achieve an academic degree in mathematics, then to acquiring well-
being. However, even though we do not find a conversion, there is no
void. J.P. lived an inner life that brought him, in fine, to develop a spe-
cific wisdom for life. This is expressed through his distancing himself
from events and through the conviction that one must improve oneself
by solving one’s conflicts every time one is confronted with hardships. In
short, he won a sense for introspection and self-reflection in the conduct
of life. To us, though he says he withdrew from religions, the Catholi-
cism of his youth was not replaced by another strong commitment, it is
implicit.

Jacques V. . The taming of an intense Catholic experience through

practices of the New Age. Comes into contact with the New Age at
fifty. He is the author of two books about spirituality. (Recorded
in a home for retired people and transliterated, July )

My path is a relatively simple one. I was born in a family of staunch

Catholics. I am the fifth among twelve brothers and sisters. In , at
, I was advised by my family circle to go to the university. I achieved
a Science degree in mathematics, physics and chemistry, and as I had
a religious vocation, I entered the seminary. I was a teacher and then,
 régis dericquebourg

as I was kind of stubborn in my path, I took up residence among the

monks at the Grande Chartreuse monastery, where I stayed two years
because the old body wouldn’t take it. I came back down on dry land
where I served for twenty years as a teacher and organizer, and at the
same time, thanks to a brother who was near the world of the disabled,
I got near all the associations, such as the Association des Paralysés de
France [Association of the French Disabled], or the association against
myopathy. I forgot to say I have always been a fan of tennis, from the age
of twenty-five till my seventy-fifth birthday. It helped me.
At fifty, I made an encounter through a radio show. I listened one
night, on France Culture, to a broadcast by Karlfried Graf Dürckheim,
an outstanding man who writes magnificent books like Hara and who
utters that prestigious sentence: “every situation can become the occasion
of meeting the numinous, the divine, God’s presence.”2 Not only did he
say that, but he also gave the method for making the encounter: the first
place is the wilderness, the beautiful, all what lies within nature, getting
in tune with nature; the second place, is art and creation; the third place
is eroticism in the deep sense of the word, that is the social link through
all the people I can meet in my life; and the fourth one is high liturgy, the
singing of the monks. In the same way, I met the Eastern world through
the practice of yoga.
At fifty, following my encounter with Dürckheim, I followed sessions,
weekends of reflection, one in particular which comes from the United
States and is called Creativism. It makes you understand that what you
believed beforehand will lead to the experience that follows. When I say:
“today, the weather is fine, today, the sun shines, I go out in the sun to
experience it; if, I say, on the opposite: it rains, it’s the same for me because
I will be able to read a while. It’s my belief, maybe influenced by my
environment, which brings me to consider all things in my life as pieces of
positive experience and teaches me to eliminate the negative beliefs too,
that prevent us from living.” It’s a major thing that I lived during a week.
I got accredited to teach that course, which I did with several people.
After I was fifty, I took yoga lessons with an accredited teacher. I
can myself teach yoga. This teaching helped me come back to a kind of
serenity in my life by total conscious breath.

2 Hara is the vital center of the human, the seat of one’s spiritual energy in Japanese

and Chinese energetic representation of the body. Hara is located in the belly. Some
practices centered on the hara could increase well-being.
 becoming a new ager 

R.D.: Did you go to other sessions and other training?

J.V.: At the same time, together with a group of about fifteen people,
we went to weekly weekends of learning to meet prayer, with monks,
and with what we call Zen. It’s about becoming conscious, through a
simple posture and through conscious breath, and to experience an inner
encounter.
R.D.: Were you transformed in depth by those trainings?
J.V: They allowed me to pass on all I had received during the two years
I spent in the monastery of the Grande Chartreuse. Communicating
with the disabled and the paralyzed taught me to bring a rather mental
knowledge into body-soul-mind experience through breath, through a
yoga experience, to inscribe in one’s body everything one has understood
with his brains. It’s what yoga passed on to me, as well as an outstanding
man: Gérard Blitz, the man who introduced yoga and the Hindu reality
in France.
R.D.: What about “Reliance,” the group you participated in?
J.V.: During ten years, I attended a group founded by Annie F. and
Richard X., in a spirit like what I just told you.
R.D.: Do you consider that you lived a conversion, since you turned fifty,
or that you rather joined groups?
J.V.: I can’t say I joined groups. I participated in a quest with people
from those groups and, progressively, to a discovery which was my own.
The others with whom I exchanged ideas made a discovery that can be
similar or different, but those groups were a way of getting deeper into
my first encounter which took place when I was twenty and left for the
Carthusians. My deep conversion dates back to when I was eighteen,
when I left and did my theological training, eventually in the Grande
Chartreuse monastery, but as in a love relationship, there is, say, love at
first sight, and then, as years go by, it grows deeper, and it comes back
under different forms, and it leads to conversions, deepening. When I
say that, at fifty, the encounter with Graf Dürckheim was a starting
point, I mean that this man can become for other people an element of
conversion, like growing out of today’s materialism and consumerism
to discovering the inner mystery of things, what I would call to be
converted.
R.D.: Did it change the way you perceived other people?
 régis dericquebourg

J.V.: I think that, by and by, I concretely realized what I knew in my head,
and I was still in my head. A thought by the mystic Ruysbroek comes to
my mind: if you were in prayer and very deep orison, if somebody told
you your brother was sick, leave your orison and go have a bowl of broth
warmed; thus, you leave God for God. The God of orison may be illusory.
The God of love never is. If you ask how I work with Graf Dürckheim to
build my own perception of the other, I can say that all this demanding
personal work taught me to be awakened to the other, at the best, to pass
on what he is: his human touch, and that it will be communicated by what
you may call friendship or a kind of love.
R.D.: Did you experience an illumination?
J.V.: I will answer by referring to the two years I spent as a Carthusian.
Every night, we sang the Hours. It was a great period of deep inner light,
and after two years, on a st of August, the whole office was devoted
to the Holy Virgin Mary. I spent two hours, not in the air, but in a kind
of state of euphoria; it wasn’t an ecstasy in the out-of-the-ordinary sense
of the word, but total euphoria, at the end of which I sensed my body
didn’t follow. I left the following week. The old body wasn’t able to live
this Carthusian life for a long time and stay in full balance, and I can say
this total inner experience keeps me on my feet. I gained through it a
kind of serenity in the painful events I underwent. It is a light that holds
me but is within human relationships.
R.D.: So, you had this illumination in a Catholic surrounding?
J.V.: Definitely. This light, received in the heart of the Catholic faith and
inside the inner, spiritual path of the monk I was for two years, through
singing and concrete life. So there!
R.D.: You joined the Carthusians when on a quest?
J.V.: That’s it, and in fact, I entered the monastery at twenty-five, thinking
that my calling was to live in the Church’s vision of the spiritual union.
I can say, nevertheless, that at fifty, that is twenty years later, I was
converted a second time, from that encounter with Graf Dürckheim on.
R.D.: Did each group you met successively bring you new material?
J.V.: What I received took place between thirty and fifty, when I met dis-
abled persons. I was lucky enough to meet during these twenty years
men and women who, in the heart of disastrous physical, psychologi-
cal, moral conditions, disclosed to me the inner mystery of things and
 becoming a new ager 

people—which the Gospel calls “the mystery of poverty, smallness,” and

God reveals himself through this. They lived life’s essentials and revealed
it to me. I will tell you this in a very concrete way: a twenty-eight year old
woman, suffering from myopathy, told me this: “when I pray, I am con-
scious that God talks to me. He tells me: I am the one who loves you, your
mother, your brothers, your sisters.” She revealed to me, through her con-
dition, through her speech, that she was truly a personification of God,
of Jesus Christ his son who, through her, met me and that I met. This is
the fundamental mystery of the Gospel that I was lucky enough to live
during a twenty-some years, and then, after that the encounter with Graf
Dürckheim, but there was the mystery of the Gospel. It is to the smallest
that God reveals himself.
R.D.: How do you stand, here and now, toward mainstream religions?
J.V.: I have immense respect for the great religions, because every human
being has his own path, according to the place where he lives, his story,
his encounters, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity. By meeting
the Eastern world, yoga, the spirit of Buddhism that I came to know,
by thinking over and through people that followed that path, let’s say I
learned to see that every human is religious, even though he doesn’t know
it. Not necessarily in the sense of performing liturgical acts alone or in
the company of other people, but by his simple breathing, his deep being
is already drawn to a mystery that is overwhelming. So, if that person is
a Buddhist, he (or she) will go toward a spiritual awakening, overcoming
desires to meet mystery. If that person was born in North Africa, he or
she will have the thrice holy God of Islam. If he or she is a Christian, he or
she will meet the Catholic Church or different Protestant denominations.
Anywhere, there will be transcendence.
R.D.: Then, it didn’t draw you nearer to religion, it put you a bit apart
from religions?
J.V.: I remain a Catholic, and I live in the spirit of the Catholic faith.
I live in permanent contact with the life of the Catholic Church in my
neighborhood, and with liturgical prayer on Sundays, together with the
few who stay believers in that with deep conviction. It is the mystery of
the sacraments in the Catholic Church, with all its richness (or even the
corruption comprised in it, if you do not understand its meaning).
R.D.: Did it bring you a philosophy for life?
J.V.: Yes, and a kind of wisdom too. In that wisdom enters at the same
 régis dericquebourg

time the experience I just expressed in my convictions, in my personal

story, a little legacy from my mother, who gave me a sort of serenity.
My philosophy consists in welcoming what comes—for instance, you,
today in this interview. My philosophy stands in welcoming the coming
event. There is this beautiful saying by Péguy, which fairly well transcribes
my philosophy of events: “God is I who come, I who cajole you, I who
castigate you. Do not fear, every instant, everyday, it is always I.” This does
not mean that everything that happens to me, that falls on my head like
a blow is something God sends to me. My philosophy is considering that
whatever comes teaches me life and makes me meet the mystery of things.
R.D.: Was your life changed by what you gained within the New Age?
J.V.: I can surely say that my life was changed by several elements: my
personal faith, the two years among the Carthusians, twenty years among
the disabled, an encounter with a woman during six or seven years, the
encounter with my present wife.
R.D.: Did that course in the New Age alter your existence?
J.V.: In my curriculum vitae, it made me give all up, then I came down
again. I started again, and for twenty years I have been taking it up again,
then, for that woman I left everything including my family who didn’t
know where I was living for seven years. I left everything to enter the
Carthusians, I left everything for a woman, then I was a bachelor again.
Then I left it all to live with my present wife. I think that there is a moment
when, because of . . . because of a human encounter which I believe I
see God’s calling in, because of . . . I bugger off. Besides, that’s what the
Gospel says: “you’ll have to leave everything because of me” Jesus Christ
says “and you’ll be refunded a thousandfold.”

Commentary

Jacques V. is a Catholic who discovers the New Age at fifty and who in
the end stays attached to Catholicism. Within the church, he is outstand-
ing. He does not just have a regular practice of his religion. He wants to
become priest. He follows training for priesthood. Then, aiming to more
than the charisma of function, he adopts the way of the mystic and joins
the order of the Carthusians, where he meets with a mystical experience
that scares him so much that he flees from monastic life. Of course, he was
a Catholic, so he did not need to join that Church after being converted.
 becoming a new ager 

Yet, though he talks about a conversion at the age of eighteen, we find

a strengthening of religious membership around the age of twenty-one.
One cannot talk of a conversion in the sense of a breach with one’s reli-
gion. One can envisage it from the perspective of a turning point under
the form of a calling. This one is like a conversion ad intra, because it leads
J.V. to change his life thoroughly, first by becoming a seminarian, then by
becoming a monk. When he gets out of the monastery, he expresses his
faith in the world, by serving in disabled persons associations, exercis-
ing charity—the “charisma of kindness” (Dericquebourg ). This, for
him, is another encounter with God, this time through afflicted people.
At the age of fifty, J.V. hears Graf Dürckheim talk on the radio. He
talks about it in terms of “encounter” and “second conversion.” He finds
in that author, whom some people classify as esoteric, a way of living his
faith in the world. He reads Dürckheim’s books, and from then on, he
will follow trainings that one would classify inside the New Age: yoga,
Creativism, prayer, Zen. He meets “Reliance,” a group that proposes dif-
ferent spiritual approaches, trainings of self-development as well as lec-
tures.3 He becomes a teacher in yoga. However, we cannot say that meet-
ing the thinking of Graf Dürckheim means being converted because
neither from an ideological nor from a practice perspective does he
leave Catholicism. Mezzo voce, he experiences a deeper meeting with the
divine, through the encounter of disabled persons. With yoga or Zen, he
“tames” a mystical experience he underwent in the monastery. Actually,
the experiences of serenity he undergoes sharply contrast with the dis-
ruption of the illumination he lived at the Grande Chartreuse. He com-
pletes an interpersonal experience among disabled persons, then among
the non-paralyzed. The final wisdom he reaches is an ideology of wel-
coming the other (charity) and the events of life that is in fact a Christian
one.
J.V. never left a Catholicism. This can be seen as a fundamental trend
in him. His belonging to the Church of Rome was strengthened by the
experience of a religious vocation, which we consider to be a conversion
ad intra. He continues to be a churchgoer. Meeting the thinking of Graf
Dürckheim brought sense, yet it did not replace his Catholicism. In the
same way, yoga and different propositions of meaning from the New Age
neither erased the Catholicism nor brought any new social behaviors. J.V
cannot be considered as being converted to the New Age.

3 Reliance is an association in Northern France that was a meeting point for people

interested in the doctrines and practices of the New Age.

 régis dericquebourg

Thierry B. . (Recorded at home and transliterated

July, ). The Gnostic path fueled by the New Age

At the age of fourteen, I began to wonder about my existence. I was

from a standard Catholic family. I attended the Catholic Church and, in
the s, I completely transgressed the ideas of the Catholic Church.
Strangely, it began by wondering about extraterrestrial life. I made two
years’ research, during which I grew interested in UFOs. It was the
passion of my teens. I must say that I wasn’t interested at all in the usual
occupations of the youth of my age. It’s obvious that I was interested in
spiritual questions, in existential questions, by the after-life. So I read a lot
about extraterrestrials, but it happens that this field opened on physics,
astronomy, then on Eastern movements and culture. It made me look on
the side of primitive cultures to see how they talked of UFOs. It opened
the world for me and made me leave Catholic culture. Afterwards, I met
a friend in high school who introduced me to yoga, and in the following
days, I discovered theosophy by Mrs. Blavatsky and Alice Bailey, in the
company of that friend who is still my friend today. Alice Bailey’s school
of thought is a bit more Western-like, easier for us to follow. It had the
advantage of answering my questions.
My spiritual path drove me to register to the “Arcanes” school at
. I followed the required twelve years’ correspondence degree course.
One studies Bailey and takes part in meetings. One is followed by a
secretary and becomes a secretary after – years, answering to new
members. In fact, I followed Arcanes during eighteen years.4 Afterwards,
I joined another trend, Free Masonry (Egyptian rite), without letting
down theosophy, which stays a major work that I am far from having
exhausted. My spiritual path drove me to set on foot different associations
that still exist, where I taught what I had learned. I opened my first
association in , in order to deliver the teachings of the Arcanes
School. I am specialized in consciousness, that is to say consciousness
raising, thus leading to the defense of the freedom of conscience. That’s
why I joined an association for the defense of the freedom of belief.
Consciousness is a keyword on my spiritual path. I discovered everything
is summed up in the word consciousness, and we can work and serve by

4 School of Arcanes was created by Alice Bayley (). The school prepares corre-

spondence-course lessons upon esotericism for home study and organizes meetings and
teaching sessions in its centers.
 becoming a new ager 

leading those who surround us, everything that’s alive—provided there

are thing that aren’t alive—to an ever higher level. It’s the aim of my life. I
stand up against those who want to stop that consciousness from rising.
Therefore, it’s the teaching of theosophy, too. This spiritual path is risky
too, because you are sure to be wrongly considered and seen through
a certain angle by the materialistic society, because you question many
things. In fact, it’s the path of gnosis, of course. When people ask how I
stand, I say I stand for gnosis. It’s what I claim.
R.D.: Has your search come to an end?
T.B.: I’ve just started upon the path. I could put it to a test. My luck was
that, back in , my association for teaching theosophy was taken for a
target, in the parliamentary inquiry on sects. As my aim was conscious-
ness and freedom of conscience, I began to fight for the freedom of con-
science, and it was a great chance, because the defense of freedom of con-
science allowed me to go toward other fields of consciousness, other ways
of understanding people, and to see that mine was relevant too. Today,
I am thus interested in theosophy and what is around. I am positively
sure it’s a major piece in spiritual teaching. Such a major piece that all
the major trends of thinking in gnosis, back in the nineteenth–twentieth
century refer to it. So today, I am far from being through. I even wish
to go farther. I wrote three books. The third one talks of consciousness
and consciousness-raising. I want to learn it, to spread it even more than
before. I am but young in this teaching.
R.D.: Were you transformed in depth in those groups you attended?
T.B.: It did transform me in depth. I was thoroughly transformed. No,
thoroughly is not the word, depth is. Outwardly, I just stay what I am.
I work in the teaching business. I live a standard material life. It didn’t
transform my material life, but it’s obvious that my quest isn’t down-
to-earth. It’s a spiritual one. The theosophical teaching didn’t bring me
away from rationality. I am a much more rational being than before. On
the inner level, I see life differently. The quest for material things isn’t
a priority. It’s there only for food and drink. But on the inside, I have a
totally different vision of life.
R.D.: Did that course change your relations to other people?
T.B.: To speak of my relations to the others, I can use the word transient. I
know that, when I address a human being, whoever he is, I know that he
is constantly evolving, that everything is therefore transient; so, what I
 régis dericquebourg

see is a stage of life. I know that all these being will evolve. I approach
a human being in a more global way, rather than seeing him, or her,
in his own self. It has allowed me to stand back a great deal. I also use
the knowledge that makes free by a sense of humor, because things don’t
last.
R.D.: Was your life transformed by the knowledge gained in spirituality
and by the experiences?
T.B.: On the intellectual level, yes, it’s true. On the social level, it’s true
too, because one doesn’t make friends with everyone. I gather that if I
hadn’t lived that spiritual quest, I wouldn’t be the same. I take delight in
life. I have total hope. I am quite confident that everything is constantly
evolving. I don’t live the same way as if I hadn’t have that spiritual quest.
Life wouldn’t be so joyous on the inside, because joy is there. I am certain
that life is endless. People frequently ask me how I can manage to keep
that joy in spite of all the onslaught. My life would be totally different
without that spirituality.
R.D.: Where do you stand as far as mainstream denominations are con-
cerned?
T.B.: The mainstream denominations are unsuccessful religious quests.
One day, someone perceives a part of the Whole and says it’s the truth.
His truth becomes Truth. I observe them as one of the means to lead
further to spiritual life. So, it’s a passage.
R.D.: Are you still a Catholic?
T.B.: I am interested in a religion in a purely cultural way, not in a spiritual
one. I know that I won’t find any answers to my questions in whichever
religion. My aim is not to have any dogma—and to serve other people.
R.D.: What about self-development?
T.B.: My spiritual quest wasn’t only bookish. I started an association
whose goal was to deliver a teaching and to give psychological training.
We did interpersonal psychology. As such, we studied Jung, Maslow. I
came onto different trends in psychotherapy to put them in parallel. I
practice Socrates’ maieutic with this experience in psychology. I use the
tools of awakening, of knowledge and consciousness-raising—with the
idea that knowledge makes you free. I practice therapy by listening.
R.D.: What about body psychotherapy?
 becoming a new ager 

T.B.: As far my body is concerned, I practiced yoga, martial arts, during

fifteen years, but that’s no therapy. I practiced meditation and T’ai chi. My
body isn’t forgotten. It’s for that reason that I don’t need any body therapy.
R.D.: Did experiences accumulate?
T.B.: I don’t know. I met people who left a thought system for another. My
course put me in contact with so many trends of thinking that I could test
the truth of theosophy. I haven’t found anything better. Experiences make
me grow richer. They are extra experiences. They can’t replace theosophy.
They don’t change anything. They enrich my primeval experience.
R.D.: Did you experience illumination?
T.B.: I underwent experiences of illumination, but they never “laid me
out.” What I experienced were expansion of consciousness, of perception,
out of body experiences, that you can’t explain to someone who did not
experience them. What I call illuminative experiences is a rather strong
sense of awareness that gave me a very deep feeling of well-being.
R.D.: Do you think you were converted?
T.B.: In fact, I didn’t think about it. When I stumbled upon the writings of
theosophy, in , at sixteen, I said to myself: there, I got it. Besides, the
first experience I had was at seventeen, when I finished reading the first
book by Bailey I ever read, and I read Djwal Khool. I fell on my knees.
I think it was a spiritual conversion. I sensed that I had found again—
and not found—my way. I had gone—seventeen years had gone by—and
I was consciously finding my way back. That’s what we call our ashram
[“Consciously Finding My Way Back”].
R.D.: Do you think you took up with a former life again?
T.B.: It’s obvious for me, and it was confirmed throughout the years.
Thirty-one years later, it’s still my conviction. It’s always there that I find
a relative certainty, because nothing is sure.

Commentary

The course of T.B. was marked by a conversion to theosophy. At the

age of sixteen, he discovers this Gnostic trend with the conviction that
it corresponds to what he was looking for, and he links that discovery
with a quest he began in a former life. He thus inscribes theosophy in
 régis dericquebourg

an imaginary genealogy that expresses the evidence of his encounter

with that spirituality. His first reading of Alice Bailey and Djwal Khool
produced a strong emotion in him: he said he fell on his knees—what
you rather do when you are converted to Catholicism. Is it because of his
religious socialization inside Catholicism that he behaved that way?
From then on, he starts to study theosophy with the school Arcanes. It
is a lasting commitment: eighteen years. That love at first sight brings him
to persevere in the quest for “knowledge,” the typical esoteric and Gnostic
way. Catholicism is abandoned. We can find here a reorientation of faith.
He still studies theosophy and confesses that he is not through with it.
Like many Gnostics, he joins a spiritualist Masonic obedience, probably
in order to get acquainted with symbolism, though he does not say so. His
encounter with Gnosis brings him to start associations that will spread
Gnosis and to share his quest for truth. It modifies his attitude toward
material goods: through a conversation outside of the interview, I know
that he did not take any academic degree or attend any high school that
would have allowed him to reach a higher position than the one he has
now. The way to Gnostic knowledge was undoubtedly enough for him.
His associations were later listed as dangerous sects in the parliamentary
inquiry led by Vivien, a representative in the French Parliament, with all
the disastrous consequences that this exposure could bring in his pro-
fessional and family life. This led him to launch a fight for the freedom
of conscience that he is still busy with today. His encounter with theos-
ophy was made manifest through a behavior noticeable on a social level.
It comes in addition to acknowledging an in-depth cognitive mutation
as well as a new vision of the world. He experienced illumination (out
of body experience, consciousness raising inside this frame, though we
can find these kinds of modified states of consciousness among people
who do not follow any spiritual path) that he imputes to moments in his
spiritual quest. We are in the presence of a conversion experience.
During his Gnostic quest, he journeys with the New Age. He goes
through self-development, different trainings in psychotherapy, in med-
itation, yoga lessons across fifteen years, T’ai chi and other martial arts
that he, like J.P, our first interviewee, puts on the same level as more spiri-
tual training. He sees that training as a supplement, an enrichment of his
theosophical education. (“I haven’t found anything better.”)
We cannot say that J.P is gleaning from one group to another in a
disorderly way. He follows a Gnostic path and explores other paths of the
New Age, in order to make this richer. He thus considers psychotherapy
or self-improvement training a way to have his mind see more clearly,
 becoming a new ager 

in order to reach a higher level in consciousness. Those are the same

processes as in Scientology, in which hearings and the purification of the
body in a sauna will cleanse the mind and body from engrams and toxins
in order to allow consciousness to reach higher levels of knowledge. If
need be, it could be said that T.B was converted to the New Age, if we
consider, like Massimo Introvigne (), that Alice Bailey belonged to
the New Age. However, his commitment to Gnosis and theosophy is
distinct from adopting the Gnostic trend of the New Age. It did not take
place within the New Age. It is lasting. He reoriented his life and relegated
his former religion to the level of a partial approach to “Truth.” He is at
one and the same time a convert to theosophy and a pilgrim of the New
Age. He was converted to Gnosis when he was young, but afterward he
was never converted to any of the New Age groups he saw. T.B found in
the latter some elements he finds useful for the Gnostic path he chose in
his youth and sees as final.

What Can we Draw from These Life Courses?

In neither of the three cases we presented do we find any conversion

to the New Age or to one of its entities, under the form of a “redirec-
tion of foundational trust.” When these people begin to participate in
them frequently, the conversion has already taken place. T.B chose the
Gnostic path after an “overwhelming” encounter with theosophy. J.V
undergoes a conversion inside Catholicism. J.P distances himself from
Catholicism after he searched for self-improvement, but there is no faith,
no commitment, no symbolic behavior drawn from any of the spiritual
groups he once frequented—which are themselves located on the same
level as sports practices that improve physical skill and concentration—
to replace what he himself calls his “blind and simple faith.” For these
people, the New Age’s sphere of influence is a gathering of propositions
of meaning and experiences through which they bring into motion the
resources they find useful to follow their path to salvation. They adhere
to them rather than are converted to them.
Referring to Berger and Luckmann’s thesis on the conservation of sub-
jective reality, we can give those paths an interpretation from the perspec-
tive of plausibility structures. All three of the interviewees insisted upon
the social links they had formed along these paths. The activities that take
place in that space (lectures, training, exhibitions, specialized bookstores,
courses) and the people they meet are the “significant others” that give a
 régis dericquebourg

plausibility structure to the attraction for activities offered to the public.

They contribute to validating a quest for truth and meaning that mixes
the body and the psyche with spirituality. The New Age offers this all, yet
one cannot be converted to it because it is a mere nebula. It cannot invite
conversion to itself. It can look like an alternative to institutions that are
in charge of dispensing salvation goods, but does not allow an alterna-
tion. A course in the New Age goes through participating in groups that
are only aggregates of people who, at a certain time, follow the same goal.
They are not structured communities.
Significant others give the quest for meaning and salvation its plausi-
bility structure, whereas belonging to multiple groups is exactly the con-
trary of being rooted in a community. Yoga courses or Zen meditation
do not aim at drawing people to Hinduism or Buddhism on a long-term
basis. To attend a one-week Tantra training course with a teacher one
will never meet again cannot bring one to be converted to Buddhism.
A conversion will take place within a structured Buddhist community
(Mathé, ). Shamanic trainings during the holidays in the South of
France are not going to bring any long-term commitment to Shamanism,
which would, in any case, have no meaning outside its ethnological con-
text (Rivière, : –). Druidic trainings have little chance to gain
followers to Celtic religion. Vibratory singing sessions are experiences
that can be used in other spiritual paths. Most of the time, people who
are in charge of training events or courses offer a fragmented knowledge
of a spiritual way, plus techniques. One can adhere temporarily or per-
manently to these teachings yet, no structure—including meeting round
the teachings of a spiritual master—can “make the convert”—i.e., bring,
from the empirical perspective, a modification of a person’s life behavior
and give the person the plausibility structures that will keep the person
in his or her new universe of meaning. Indeed, a New Ager who would
be comfortably “rooted” in a movement would not be a disciple of the
New Age any longer, since the New Age implies mobility. That person
would instead become a believer identified with a specific religious move-
ment.

Conclusion

The cases of the three New Agers reported here show that the New
Age did not bring a biographic disruption in spite of the emotions and
intellectual questioning these practices produced in them. It is rather a
 becoming a new ager 

social space in which they brought into motion resources they thought
useful to upbuild themselves, as well as reach salvation goods in a path
they had chosen. This path was never replaced by a commitment bringing
a change in social behaviors. Mobilizing resources could be furthered
in Gnostic networks, through the encounter with “other signifiers”—the
“Reliance” association, as well as so called “interesting” people, or people
who “became good friends.” Those became structures of plausibility
validating their quest. We could compare this phenomenon with what
takes place in Protestantism, the interdenominational trend, in which
any believer can taste for a while the specificities of every Protestant
movement—Evangelicalism for instance—where the person experiences
the intense emotional and spiritual healing prayer—while remaining
a registered member of his denomination of standard Protestantism.
The New Age perhaps is a place where one adheres successively or
simultaneously to ideas or practices put forward on a market in constant
evolution—in which some trends seem to be a craze, which gives the
impression that people join to keep riding the wave of fashion.

References

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Anthony, Dick and Massimo Introvigne. Le lavage de cerveau: mythe ou réalité?
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Berger Peter and Thomas Luckmann. . The Social Construction of Reality.
Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
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Nathan.
Bruns, Roger A. . Preacher, Billy Sunday and Big-Time Evangelism. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press.
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Delestre, Antoine. . Les religions des étudiants, Paris: L’Harmattan.
Dericquebourg, Régis. . Les Témoins de Jéhovah. Unpublished doctoral
thesis. University of Paris , Sorbonne.
———. . “Max Weber et les charismes spécifiques.” Archives de Sciences
Sociales des religions : –.
———. . “Playing With a Tradition or Belonging to Another Tradition?”
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london_deriquebourg.htm.
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d’un groupe religieux minoritaire dans le Nord de la France. Unpublished

doctoral thesis. Lille: Université Charles De Gaulle-Lille .
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protestants qu’on dit adventistes, edited by Fabrice Desplan and Régis Der-
icquebourg. Paris: L’Harmattan.
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Geoffroy, Martin. . “Le processus d’institutionnalisation du Nouvel age.”
Religiologiques : –.
Hervieu-Léger, Danièle. Le pèlerin et le converti: La religion en mouvement. Paris:
Flammarion.
Introvigne, Massimo. . Le Nouvel âge des origines à nos jours. Paris: Dervy.
Mathé, Thierry. . Le Bouddhisme des français: Le bouddhisme tibétain et la
Soka Gakkaï en France: Contribution à une sociologie de la conversion. Paris:
L’Harmattan.
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Editions Yves Michel.
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Weber, Max. . Economy and Society. Berkeley: University of California
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———. . The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Los Angeles:
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and Nicholson.
 chapter seven

ENCHANTMENT, IDENTITY,
COMMUNITY, AND CONVERSION: CATHOLICS,
AFRO-BRAZILIANS AND PROTESTANTS IN BRAZIL

Roberto Motta

For both theoretical and practical purposes, I accept Anthony Blasi’s

definition of conversion as “redirection of foundational trust.” I further
assume that religions, by their very nature, are agencies or “entities” that
provide “foundational trust.” But if so, why do people move from a given
religion to another religion, or from no religion to a religion, or from a
religion to no religion at all? The answer is that conversion means less
foundational trust as such than, as pointed out by Blasi, a redirection,
implying transition, transfer, passage. It is a before-and after-process, and
if change is not taken into account, there is no meaning in the study of
the subject.
In spite of these remarks, I will not deal in this chapter with the phe-
nomenon of conversion from a purely religious standpoint. This chapter
is intended to belong to the fields of the sociology and anthropology of
religion. Indeed, one of its basic hypotheses throughout is the existence of
causal relationships between conversion to a given religion and the social,
economic, political, and cultural circumstances of the life of devotees.
This methodological principle is akin to that adopted by Max Weber in
his chapter on “The Sociology of Religion” in Economy and Society (:
–). I am also not going to deal with the characteristics of conver-
sion from a general socio-anthropological perspective, but rather with
conversion as it occurs in Brazil, where it basically consists in the aban-
donment of allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church in favor of one of
the three following religious tendencies: () historical Protestantism, ()
Afro-Brazilian cults, () Pentecostalism.
 roberto motta

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Progress

The birth of Brazil as an independent country in  was in itself the

result of a kind of conversion.1 The ideological frame of mind behind
the creation of the new country was a result of the Liberalism associated
with the basic tendencies of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. In
strict terms, Brazil was born as a secular or lay country. It is true that
the  constitution maintained Roman Catholicism as the official
religion, while granting other cults, especially British and, later, North-
American Protestantism, full freedom of exercise and, at least in practice,
of proselytizing. Brazil did not repudiate Catholicism when the country
became independent, but since then, beginning with the political and
cultural elites and little by little percolating into the whole population,
a religious reference has not been conceived as part of the country’s
national or political identity, although the preeminence of Catholicism—
which continued to be the official religion until being disestablished by
the first constitution of the Republic, promulgated in —continued
to be acknowledged, even by non-Catholics, as a matter of historical
and social fact. But the secularized outlook that tended to prevail in
Brazil after Independence, indeed since the late colonial times under the
influence of French and Anglo-Saxon Enlightenment liberalism, entailed
a kind of disaffection for the Church. Catholicism came to be only
marginally required for the elites to “think” the country, the society and
their role within them.2
Since the existence of an independent political entity called Brazil,
what we might call Brazilianhood has been conceived as secular in char-
acter (but not as militantly antireligious), and thus compatible with other
forms of religion beside Catholicism.3 The first of those alternative reli-

1 Brazilian historiography holds that Brazil’s independence from Portugal was “pro-

claimed” on September ,  by Pedro, then a resident of Brazil, who was the son and
heir of João VI, King of Portugal. The Prince became Brazil’s first Emperor as Pedro I, but
this did not prevent him from also becoming King of Portugal for a brief period in .
According to many historians, Brazil’s independence was only consummated in ,
when Pedro I was pressured to abdicate Brazil’s crown in favor of his son, Pedro II, who
reigned until the Republic was proclaimed in , having always enjoyed the reputation
of an enlightened, benevolent, and not particularly Catholic, monarch.
2 Or, at that, to “think the world.” A full-fledged, if mainly implicit, Weltanschauung

was involved in the process (cf. Paim ).

3 As Peter Berger (: ) puts it, “the religious tradition, which previously could

be authoritatively imposed, now has to be marketed. It must be “sold” to a clientele that

is no longer constrained to buy. The pluralistic situation is, above all, a market situation.
 catholics, afro-brazilians and protestants in brazil 

gions was Protestantism, whose spread in the country began by .4

As conceived by some leading sectors of the national and indeed of inter-
national society, a glorious future awaited Brazil if its people converted
to Protestantism.5 From the very start, the missionaries, of mainly North
American (but also British) extraction, added to their religious kerygma a
proclamation of a more historical and sociological kind. To join a church
issuing from the Reformation would be equivalent to choosing the path
of social, cultural and economic modernization. For one of the central
problems of the Brazilian elites since practically the time of independence
had been the country’s at least relative backwardness, all the more so if
compared to North America. To this very day this has been the pressing,
though often only implicit, query of Brazilian thinkers and social scien-
tists: “Why are we not the United States?”6
Protestantism was viewed by many of its adepts, and also by many
who held no religious allegiance to it, as the foundational religion of the
United States and hence as the source of its progress. One of early Baptist
missionaries in Brazil, the Rev. Zachary Taylor (: –) is the
author of this magnificent, if somewhat crude, early formulation of the
Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism thesis:
“Are you a Protestant?” is the question raised by the Catholics. “Yes”
is the reply by the Protestant, who then tells the civilization, progress
and advancement of Protestant nations—England, Germany, Switzerland,
Holland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, France in part, the United States.
Whereas Italy, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Central and South America, all
dominated by priests, are rated as third class nations. I showed that quite
all the machinery, hardware, cloth, medicine, etc, are made in Protestant
countries. The priests ride in Protestant railroads, steam boats, send tele-

[. . .] At any rate a good deal of religious activity in this situation comes to be dominated
by the logic of market economics.”
4 For a standard history of Protestantism in Brazil, cf. Léonard . He is also the

author of a standard history of Protestantism in French (), with a special section

devoted to Brazil.
5 The theme of the glorious, indeed the “heavenly” future (celeste porvir), in these or

other terms, was a frequent one among missionaries and early converts. Celeste Porvir
is also the title of a standard reference book concerning the history of early Protestant
missions in Brazil (Mendonça ).
6 With the adoption of cultural relativism by a part of the intellectual elites, Brazil, the

negative form of this question, tended to become somewhat unfashionable—its positive

reverse being considered as more politically correct. Thus it is asked, in the terms of a
distinguished Brazilian anthropologist, “what makes Brazil to be Brazil?” (Matta ).
However formulated, this question looms very large in Brazilian social thought or in the
thought about Brazil, whether written by Brazilians or foreigners. (Cf. Motta  for a
short essay on the centrality of this question in Brazilian social science.)
 roberto motta

grams over Protestant wires, read their papers over Protestant spectacles,
and they walk over in Protestant shoes to see the nuns sewing on Protestant
machines.7
Early Protestantism in Brazil—that is, the kind of Protestantism associ-
ated with some of the “historical” churches of the English-speaking world
(Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians), which began doing missionary
work and gaining converts around —appealed to the progressivist
elites of the country.8 Using a vocabulary not as fashionable in the mid-
dle of the th century as it is nowadays, we can say that early Brazilian
Protestantism appealed to “those who hunger and thirst” after rational-
ity, wanting to fill the country with it. Rationality implies in this case
a form of thought that would discard the iconophilism associated with
traditional Roman Catholic worship to the benefit of a kind of thought
associated with the logos, the abstract Word entailing free access to the
Bible by an autonomous individual who rejects the mediation of a priest-
hood.9 Early Protestantism appealed thus to the social and cultural elites
of the country.10

7 The dating of Taylor’s memoirs is approximate. The memoirs are located in the
library of the Univesrity of California at Los Angeles. Cf. Mendonça  for a more
detailed study of the social thought of other missionaries and early converts in Brazil.
8 The equation between Protestantism and progress is found, in nearly ideal-typical

way, in the political activity and in the writings of the Brazilian “Apostle of Progress,”
Aureliano Tavares Bastos (–). He wanted Brazil to gain “a new soul.” In order to
undergo such a complete change, the country should learn from others the recipe for
progress which he, very much like Max Weber, recognized in the liberal spirit of the
Protestant Reformation, that led a small colony in New England to give rise to the “mighty,
rich, large, enlightened, free, intelligent, generous, courageous republic of the United
States of America.” For the United States had not suffered from “the stupid fanaticism
of the th century priests, having instead been settled by Quakers and members of
other independent sects.” According to Bastos, thanks to the Reformation the United
States had been impregnated with “morality, industriousness, intelligence, perseverance,
consciousness of human dignity and the sense of personal freedom, which are the
message of the Gospel and stand out as the basic features of the races of the North of
the Globe” (Vieira : ).
9 This is especially the case with such Catholicism as was practiced by the average

lay person in the colonial and newly independent countries of Latin America. The mere
possession of a Bible (all the more so if translated into the vernacular) was considered an
offense belonging to the jurisdiction of the Inquisition.
10 Those elites had their followings, their clientele, who often accompanied them in

their new faith. To this day the Presbyterian and Baptist churches (mainly, it is true, in
the more traditional region of the Nordeste) bear the stamp of prominent patriarchal
or quasi-patriarchal families, whose dependents joined them in their new religion (cf.
Perruci ).
 catholics, afro-brazilians and protestants in brazil 

By the turn of the th century Roman Catholicism had adopted

some of the attitudes and practices associated with Protestantism or, put
another way, with modernity. It did not yet change its dogmas, but they
were increasingly presented in a clearer and more systematic, logical way,
in a move away from the embedment of belief in images and ceremonies,
although the teaching of the catechism in verbal terms was never entirely
absent from Brazilian Catholicism.11 In point of fact, Catholicism, in
Brazil and elsewhere, has always consisted in a confederation of religious
styles, though with the prevalence of some of them in different historical
periods. Beside the worship of saints through vows, pilgrimages, feasts
and the like, plus that minimum of sacramental practice required by the
commandments of the Church, there gradually emerged in the country
more ethical forms of Catholicism, largely due to Italian and French
influence within Roman Catholicism as a whole.12 This was associated
with an increased participation of lay people in the Eucharist, both
through frequent communion and through an increased awareness of the
theological meaning of the Mass.13
It was the Church’s explicit strategy, by the turn of the th century,
to concentrate on maintaining or regaining its hold on the country’s
political and cultural elite. This was done through both the development
of more “rational” forms of devotion, and through the establishment of a
network of mainly secondary schools for both boys and girls all over the
country under the direction of religious congregations often of foreign
origin—also often in keen competition with the Protestant missions—
as well as schools (colégios or ginásios in Brazilian parlance) directed
by secular priests and even by lay persons of acknowledged piety. The

11 Victor Turner (: ) remarks that “iconophilic religions often develop com-

plex and elaborate systems of ritual; symbols tend to be visual and exegesis is bound up
with the ritual round. Iconoclastic religions are associated with reform and seek to purify
the ‘underlying meaning’ by erasing the signantia, the iconic symbols, which appear to
them to be ‘idols’ interposing themselves between individual believers and the truths
enunciated by religious founders.”
12 One might also say that these were more “logophilic” or even more “logical” forms

of Catholicism, giving the word the meaning it has in Paul’s letter to the Romans (: ),
in which Christians are advised to engage in “logikèn latreían,” translated as “obsequium
rationale” in the Latin Vulgate and as “reasonable service” in the King James version.
13 The first published translations of the missal into Brazilian Portuguese date from

approximately , largely as a consequence of similar trends in France and Germany.

The translation of the missal, for a long time forbidden or discouraged by the Holy See,
was logically just a short step away from the translation of the actual Mass into the
vernacular, which occurred after Vatican II.
 roberto motta

progress of the historical Protestant churches was checked, and around

 they had stopped growing in relative numbers.

Enchantment and Participation

Both the Roman Catholic and historical Protestant churches had made—
to use a phrase that became fashionable only later in church circles—a
“preferential option” for the elite, not so much under the assumption that
elite people’s souls were elite souls, but rather expecting that by gaining
or maintaining their religious hold on the upper classes they would gain
or keep the whole country. Such strategy appeared as all the more advis-
able as priests and missionaries were few in number. The pace of secular-
ization was certainly slower among the lower classes. But the members
of these classes possess neither the culture, the outlook, or the educa-
tional requirements that would qualify them as adequate candidates for
either the Catholic priesthood or the ministry of the historic Protestant
churches—i.e., for full-fledged participation as members of the Church at
all levels. Hence the importation of foreign priests (mainly but not only
members of so-called regular clergy) from the late decades of the th
century down to Vatican II and beyond. The native Brazilian clergy were
recruited in regions of old settlement (like the interior of the Northeast)
from a thin layer of “poor whites,” if educated enough to meet the require-
ments for an intensive study of Latin, which was indispensable until the
s in the education of priests.14
Catholic priests were also recruited—indeed still are to the present
day—from the German, Italian, and Polish communities who settled in
the Southernmost states of Brazil and soon were among the main carriers
of Roman Catholicism in Brazil—increasingly so, indeed, as among old-
stock Brazilians secularization and conversion to other religions grew
and did not stop growing in the second half of the th century. This is the
central problem in the sociological interpretation of Brazilian Catholi-
cism: who are the people who carry it—Max Weber’s Träger? The old aris-
tocracy of planters, Crown and Republic officers, and their descendents
forsook it. They thought they had found better things either in a certain
latitudinarianism or even in outright conversion to Protestantism. But

14 Textbooks in both philosophy and theology were written in Latin, although lectures

by the s were, as a general rule, delivered in the vernacular. Serbin () provides
a comprehensive history of Brazil’s clergy and seminaries.
 catholics, afro-brazilians and protestants in brazil 

the old subordinated classes, the descendents of African slaves and sub-
jugated Indians, déclassé whites, poor laborers, owners of small tracts of
land and their like, in both rural and urban Brazil, people of many shades
of racial and cultural mixture, did not feel responsible for the Church
either—all the more so as their sons were not admitted into seminaries for
no other reason than they did not meet the basic cultural requirements.
They were considered as strangers until able to meet these requirements,
that is, until becoming able to undergo the kind of cultural conversion
that would render them full participants in Catholicism with the ritual
and cultural characteristics that had become canonical by the turn of the
th century.
The conversionary failure of the Catholic Church in Brazil is primarily
and essentially due to this gap and the wondrous success, from the late
th century to the present, of Pentecostals and, in their own way, of
Afro-Brazilians, in whose institutions no similar gap exists. They belong,
as it has been said, to “religions of participation” (cf. Ribeiro ).
This may be understood in many ways and from several points of view
that tend rather to complement than exclude one another. On the plane
of ritual, it may refer to ordinary trance or trance-like states—that is,
to the immediate cognitive and emotional seizure of the “holy” or of
what is conceived as such. On the same plane it may also mean that
ritual is enacted by devotees and not simply watched or attended by
them.15 They are the actors, and it is the expression of their identity. It
may also mean that ritual, in down-to-earth fashion, meets the daily life
problems of devotees and tries to solve them. The search for healing is,
for instance, a frequent ingredient of rituals of participation. From the
examples that were just given it may also be concluded that, on the plane
of organization, there is no gap between the laity and the clergy—or at
least it means that access of the layperson to clerical office is not barred
by reasons of cultural distance, social status, race, and the like.
A given religion functions as the source of foundational trust to the
extent that it works as both the source and the expression of a basic

15 This entails a first magnitude problem to Catholicism with its fundamental distinc-

tion between priests and laymen. Several solutions have been proposed in the course of
history to the problems caused by this gap. The Council of Trent reiterated the distinc-
tion, with all the consequences it entails, in clear-cut opposition to the principles of the
Reformation. Theological trends of the th century (cf. Congar ) culminating in
Vatican II, have tended to attenuate (or to euphemize) the distinction by appealing to the
notion of the basic priesthood of believers, which would not as such exclude a “ministe-
rial” priesthood.
 roberto motta

identity. This identity can be approached from three main angles: It is a

sociological phenomenon. The devotee is, or becomes, the member of a
group, which he recognizes as his own and which recognizes him as a
believer among other believers. There is a psychological level. The devo-
tee gains a new personality or reaches a new understanding of his per-
sonality with its peculiarities in its Sitz-im-Leben, that is, in its concrete
circumstances of a social, political, economic and cultural character. And
thus identity merges into—if these neologisms may be used here—a kind
of egodicy, which is at the same time a sociodicy, culminating in a theod-
icy that explains evil and promises to replace it with good, in this life
(preferably), as well as in a world to come.
At this point there are two caveats that should be sounded. First, there
is no royal road that would allow us to discover which religion will
express the identity of a given group at a given time. This is a purely
contingent, historical issue. Second, and even more important, religion
is not just any expression of identity, but a sacred, enchanted expression
of identity. Not even Weber, when dealing with ideal-typical Calvinism,
in which he saw the “logical conclusion [of] that great historical process
in the development of religions, the elimination of magic from the world
[ . . . ] repudiat[ing] all magical means to salvation as superstition and sin”
(: ), understood Calvinism as a disenchanted religion, that is, as a
non-religion, at the level “of the ultimate values governing the action and
the consistently planned orientation of its detailed course to these values”
(: ). Indeed Calvinism, as understood by Weber, fits in the “value-
rational” (wertrational) type of social action, “determined by a conscious
belief in the value for its own sake of some ethical, aesthetic, religious, or
other form of behavior, independently of its prospects of success” (:
–).
One may thus conceive of a religion having supposedly reached full
disenchantment at the level of ritual and “sacrament.” On the other hand,
this religion would stop being religion and consequently stop gaining
converts if and when it shed its enchanted reference on the plane of
ultimate values. In the case of Calvinism and Calvinist-derived churches
this is represented by reference to a revelation attested by the Bible
and accepted in an act of faith—that is, in Blasi’s terminology, by an
act of “foundational trust.” Conversion cannot but be directioning or
redirectioning foundational trust toward an enchanted or supernatural
source of trust. Hence it is fully legitimate, indeed logically required, to
conclude that disenchantment—at least at the level of ultimate values—
leads to the decay of religion, and conversely, enchantment, if not directly
 catholics, afro-brazilians and protestants in brazil 

leading to conversion, is a necessary condition for conversion to take

place. This is the assumption that is demonstrated by the case of Brazil.
My hypothesis relating the conversion failure of Catholicism to its deficit
in participation as described above, especially vis-à-vis the subordinated
strata of Brazilian society, should now be completed by an additional
assumption: people, at the present Brazilian historical juncture, will join
only those religions that keep, reinforce and revitalize, the enchantment
they offer to their potential converts.

The Brazilian Revolution

Everything changed in Brazil during the second half of the th cen-
tury, and this change continues into the present. A basic feature of this
process was the demographic explosion, associated with the intensive
flow of migrants from the countryside to the cities, indeed to the largest
and most important ones, such as São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador de
Bahia, and Recife. These migrations have coincided with an equally accel-
erated process of economic modernization. These trends have resulted
not only in the rise of an urban working class, but also of a lumpen class,
in the sense of an amorphous group of dispossessed and uprooted indi-
viduals, set off by their inferior status from the economic and social class
with which they used to be identified, without having, at the same time,
succeeded in establishing new roots of a stable and formal character.
Between the working class and the lumpen class (which may as well, at
least for our purposes, be called the “informal sector”), there is no clear-
cut border. In Brazil, like in other emergent countries, transit is rapid and
easy between the two categories.
Whatever their precise economic and social status, the migrants have
willy-nilly lost contact with their former supporting structures, their
links with their former communities, the formal or informal associations,
the brotherhoods, shrines and feasts of their original setting.16 They have
been lost in transition, that is, they have fallen into a state of anomie
which, among other things, entails perplexity and loss of identity and
of that foundational trust which, in the last resort, is the foundation of
psychological and sociological being. As Ronald Glen Frase (: –
) writes:

16 Roger Bastide, drawing intentionally from Ribeiro (), dealt extensively with

these structures in his Les Religions Africaines au Brésil ().

 roberto motta

The real victims of this gigantic social dislocation were the rural migrants
stripped of the social institutions of extended family, patron-client and
face-to-face relationships which had provided them with a degree of secu-
rity and a framework of meaning in their traditional habitat. . . . The rural
migrants striving to survive in an urban milieu they did not understand
found themselves in a state social scientists describe as anomie. . . . This
inchoate urban population, bereft of traditional institutions which were
left behind when they made their journey into the city, were susceptible
to new ideologies which could make meaning of their existence and offer
hope for the future. . . . It appears useful to understand Pentecostalism and
various forms of Spiritism [that is, Afro-Brazilian Candomblé and similar
cults] as compensating mechanisms whereby the lower classes seek effec-
tive participation in society.17
A mighty struggle has taken place in Brazil. There has been a main loser,
the Roman Catholic Church; a secondary gainer (which also has been
a secondary loser), historical Protestantism; and two primary gainers,
Afro-Brazilian Candomblé and Pentecostalism. Historical Protestantism
has discussed earlier in this chapter. These other two religious tendencies
will now be briefly examined from the standpoint of participation, iden-
tity, and enchantment that have been recognized as basic in the process
of redirection of foundational trust.

Candomblé

Candomblé is the continuation of traditional, icononophilic Catholicism

with the addition of a few specific ingredients of its own.18 It arose in
port cities of late colonial Brazil, where Africans, originally imported as
slaves, could establish their own associations—largely, at first, in the guise
of brotherhoods, supported and recognized by the Catholic Church. The
saints of Catholicism were fused, in an elaborate code of correspon-
dences, with deities of African origin, especially so with the orixás of
Yoruba derivation.19 A basic belief of Candomblé (partly inherited from

17 Frase builds on older foundations, laid by both foreign and Brazilian authors,

especially among them Camargo (; ), Durkheim (), Moura (), Willems
(), and Wilson ().
18 The word Candomblé is used here to designate the whole of the Afro-Bazilian

religions (Xangô, Mina, Batuque, Umbanda) and others, which, in spite of regional, ritual
and theological variations, share the basic beliefs of the dyadic contract with the saints
and of access to them through trance of possession. (cf. Motta .)
19 It appears, however, that the original carriers of Candomblé were free Africans

and their desdendents, petty traders, petty craftsmen, and the like, representing a kind
 catholics, afro-brazilians and protestants in brazil 

popular Catholicism) concerns the ability of individuals to make pacts

with the deities for their mutual benefit.20 The supernaturals, mainly
known as orixás or santos in Afro-Brazilian parlance, are worshipped
through sacrifice, dance and trance, and we are here very far from the
religions of “abstract man” such as they resulted, in the West, from the
Reformation, the development of capitalism, and other manifestations of
the tendency toward rationalization.21 In exchange, the saints give their
devotees help and protection, mainly in crises associated with health,
employment, love, and the like. This religion has not adopted a system of
abstract, impersonal ethics, but is rather oriented toward the felt needs,
the concrete and practical circumstances of the lives of devotees.
The basic characteristic of late th century Candomblé up to the
present has been its divestiture from its original ethnic affiliation. Mem-
bership in it is now being offered to an anonymous body of consumers
independent of the racial and ethnic sources from which they emerged.
This can also be considered the de-ethnization of ethnicity (Motta ).
The spread of Candomblé is not especially directed toward the African-
Brazilian sector of the population. It is offered instead to a public who,
to a great extent, are people of European descent living in the large cities
in the Southeast. Without severing its ties to the major priestly dynas-
ties who often claim descent from the royalty of Nigeria and Benin, Can-
domblé has turned itself into a kind of universalistic religion appealing,
without any discrimination of color or ethnic origins, to all Brazilians—
indeed to all people. This may be considered as entailing a process of iden-
titophagy: On the one hand, Africanness advances in Brazilian society to
the degree to which it separates itself from Blackness, while at the same
time the accelerated growth of the Afro-Brazilian cults, and the recogni-

of early lumpen in port cities such as Bahia, Recife, and Rio de Janeiro. Candomblé
and similar cults have by no means been rural manifestations but have taken place in
urban contexts. Candomblé starts to loom large on the Brazilian scene by the turn of
the th century. While, unlike Protestantism, it did not claim a rank comparable to
that of the Catholic Church, its emergence nevertheless points to the gap in identity (or
identification) between Catholicism and Brazilianhood that began to be felt by the same
time.
20 Concerning the notion of a bilateral (or “dyadic”) contract between saints and men,

which the Afro-Brazilians largely inherited from popular Catholicism (cf. Foster ,
which remains to this day as a classic study on this topic). Regarding Catholicism in
Brazil, cf. Azevedo , or in the context of the concept of a religious marketplace, cf.
Greenfield .
21 This expression derives form Marx (:): “For a society based upon the pro-

duction of commodities . . . the cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois
developments, Protestantism, Deism, etc, is the most fitting form of religion.”
 roberto motta

tion of Africanness as a source of personal identification and of commu-

nal life, is associated with no project for social and political change and
proposes no program to alter the standards or styles of living of the Black
in any concrete way.
Candomblé is fully and intensively a religion of participation. The holy
is the object of an immediate seizure through trance, sacrifice and feast,
which at the same time entail the intuition of an identity that leaves
behind differences whether rooted in the outside world or in the cult
group itself.22 Similarly, there is in Candomblé no sociologically signif-
icant separation or gap between clergy and laity. If priests and priestesses
as sacrificers and diviners require according to generalized belief a spe-
cial consecration, access to that priesthood—in contrast to Catholicism
and the historical Protestant churches—does not require years of study
in seminaries or universities. This entails a kind of institutional flexibil-
ity that has greatly helped the celerity with which the cult followed the
migrants who moved to the periphery of cities like Rio de Janeiro, São
Paulo, Recife, and others.23
Many of the conversion advantages of participation are shared by
both Candomblé and Pentecostalism. Yet, the former, refusing in actual
practice the notions of fall, sin and repression, would seem to agree with
some of the values of modernity and liberation.24 This is closely linked
with the Afro-Brazilian solution for the relief of guilt feeling, which is
the festive solution. This is the opposite of the repressive, normative or,
if we prefer, ethical solution of other religions, which transfer sacrifice
to the sphere of control over the behavior of the faithful. Candomblé,
so to speak, squares the circle. It encourages the relief of guilt by the
offering of sacrifice, and at the same time it permits the gratification of
the tendencies of the devotee’s libido. Sexual activity, and this in its whole

22 Pierre Verger (: ) sees the trance of Candomblé as “something more than a

conditioned reflex.” Indeed, it is according to him, a “manifestation resurrected from the

deepest recesses of the unconscious.”
23 In Recife the history of Candomblé (locally known as Xangô) is characterized by a

steady process of expansion from the old historical center, where the oldest shrines were
found, to more and more distant peripheries.
24 This was strongly emphasised, no doubt with a certain amount of poetic license,

among others, by George Lapassade and Marco-Aurélio Luz (: xix), who studied
the Candomblé of Rio de Janeiro. According to them, in the rites of that religion “Blacks
symbolically speak about all liberations: from slavery, to be sure, but they also speak about
the liberation of Blacks as Blacks; and they also mean the liberation of Eros, of mad love.
. . . We see there Dionysus, the Greek god of the slaves and of the women, fighting against
Apollo, the god of the Masters.”
 catholics, afro-brazilians and protestants in brazil 

gamut, is simply viewed as indifferent (adiaphorous, as Weber would

probably be prone to say) to the deities, save when it derives from their
specific tastes and preferences. These characteristics also probably help
to explain the attraction Candomblé exerts over potential adherents of
many ethnic backgrounds, within and without Brazil.
On the other hand, filhos-de-santo—an expression, with the literal
meaning of “children of the saint” or “children of sainthood” commonly
used in Brazil to designate devotees of Candomblé—lack a consistent
theodicy. They do not possess a general explanation of the world, of evil,
suffering, or retribution. They are oriented to the present without any
commitments to political or eschatological projects. The followers of the
Afro-Brazilian religions do not care to change the world. They do not
even care, as a matter of fact, to change their own persons. Participants
in these religions do not care to have a Lebensführung, a methodically
rationalized manner of life, such as these expressions are understood in
Max Weber’s historical sociology. And they do not care, either, about a life
that would begin with death. They can perfectly admit that these things
may exist, but they are not concerned with them. The core of Candomblé
is the bare contract that binds the man and saints and men with one
another in the exchange of goods and services through sacrifice, trance,
dance, and feast. This festive and enchanted character is its main strength,
but also its main weakness.

Pentecostalism

Man shall not live by liberation alone, but by every logically consistent
theological system, such as that which is represented in contemporary
Brazil by the Pentecostal churches, the fastest growing religious move-
ment in Brazil and in the rest of Latin America. To the masses marginal-
ized by anarchic economic and demographic change, Pentecostalism
offers the pride that originates from the experience of the Holy Spirit and
from the certitudo salutis, accompanied by an ethical project that gives
method, order and sense to daily life.
In marked contrast with both Candomblé and with popular Catholi-
cism (Vulgarkatholicismus in Weberian parlance), the specific core of
Pentecostalism consists of a kind of emotional sectarianism that leads to
the adoption of ascetic rules of personal behavior. This applies primar-
ily to the sphere of all spontaneous forms of enjoyment, not only with
regard to sexual activity (allowed only in marriage), but also to include
 roberto motta

alcohol and tobacco, which are strongly proscribed. Such prohibitions

gain, in point of fact, a status confessionis, not unlike the interdiction of
pork in Judaism. That is, they are perceived by members and outsiders as
characteristics that set apart the devotees from the rest of population.25
Thereby they enhance the propensity to save.26 This leads, at the same
time, to a gain in the conscienziosità which is also a hallmark, as Brazilian
popular perception has it, of the behavior of crentes or evangélicos.
Pentecostalism provides some form of rationalization for the every-
day life of believers. It also gives them a deeply ingrained sense of com-
munity. There are ministers and there are laymen, but there is no impor-
tant gap between the two categories—in contrast not only to Catholicism,
but to the historical Protestant churches as well. Pentecostalism, by pro-
viding full participation in the community, furnishes members above all
with a sense of identity that leads them to feel responsible for the church
as a whole. Brazilian Pentecostalism, since its beginning—once again in
stark contrast with Catholics and historical Protestants—has tended to be
independent and to rely on its own strength and strategies, being unen-
cumbered by institutions introduced, let alone controlled, by mission-
aries or influenced by significant flows of financial aid from abroad (cf.
Frase : ).
The characteristics associated with participation and identification,
a style of worship making use of even the barest of installations, the
training of ministers reduced to the learning by rote of a simple message,
a basic kerygma, as it is said in the vocabulary of New Testament studies,
have rendered Pentecostalism “the right religion for the right people”. The
churches of this tendency have greatly spread among the migrants who
settled in the periphery of the large cities, giving them a new community,
a new identity, and a new pride. This hypothesis had been formulated a
long time ago by many scholars, among them Camargo (, ),
Willems () and Frase (). It has been confirmed beyond all
reasonable doubt by empirical studies that stress the correlation between
migration and conversion to a Pentecostal church, while emphasizing at
the same time that the “available evidence shows that the periphery of the

25 A popular Brazilian song draws a neat contrast between o crente e o cachaceiro, “the

believer and the drunkard.”

26 This, however, need not and does not entail a special association of Pentecostals with

economic entrepreneurship. They certainly have at least some elements of the Protestant
ethic, although they are not necessarily the “carriers,” in Weberian terms, of “the spirit of
Capitalism.”
 catholics, afro-brazilians and protestants in brazil 

large urban centers can be considered as the areas of the keenest religious
competition” (Jacob et al. : ).27
The growth of Pentecostalism in Brazil (and elsewhere in Latin Amer-
ica) has occasioned the growth of a vast literature, which would deserve
a full study in its own right, implying a kind of Sociology of Sociology. As
an almost absolute rule, scholars have tended to take sides for reasons of
a general philosophy of history, being either strongly in favor or strongly
against the new churches. Among the former, largely influenced by The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism thesis can be listed Willems
(), Martin (), Freston (), Mariz (), and many others.
Among the latter, Lalive d’Épinay particularly stands out (; cf. Bas-
tian ; Corten ). Although his empirical references are Chilean
and Argentinean, he has influenced to a significant extent all subsequent
research in Brazil and in the rest of Latin America. Lalive at least implic-
itly follows the Marxist thesis of religion as alienation, and as he uses
it, the expression “haven to the masses” (all the more so in the Spanish
refugio de las masas) is strongly reminiscent of Marx’s “the opium of the
people.” Francisco Cartaxo Rolim (, ), who has played a leading
role in Brazilian research, has been even more explicitly, indeed dogmat-
ically, influenced by Marxism.

The Utopia of Liberation

Other reasons, beside a dogmatic bias of Marxist origin, explain the

frequent aversion of Brazilian social scientists toward Pentecostalism.
In point of fact, scholars in Brazil and elsewhere often tend to think of
themselves, in a Comtean way, as the clergy of the religion de l’humanité—
being entrusted by the laws of history with presiding over the transition
from the theological to the positive stage. Afro-Brazilian religions, in
spite of their conspicuous sacrificial character, seem to agree with one
view modernity by both their rejection of the notions of sin and guilt and

27 This belongs to the Durkheimian, rather than Weberian, core of the sociology of

religion and can also be found in Thomas O’Dea (:): “Social change, and especially
social disorganization, result in a loss of cultural consensus and group solidarity, and set
men upon a “quest for community”, that is, looking for new values to which they might
adhere and new groups to which they might belong. This implies that conversion—the
acceptance of a new religion—is itself closely related to needs and aspirations which
are highly affected by the social circumstances of the people involved, although social
conditions are not a simple and unique causal element in such cases.”
 roberto motta

by being, or by having been when they first originated in Brazil, religions

of the oppressed. They were thus adopted by many social scientists in
Brazil not so much in strictly religious terms—that is, in spite of some
outward tokens of participation social scientists have not been en masse
converted to them—but by the establishment of a kind of theoretical
protectorate over them. Therefore, thanks to the writings of sociologists
and anthropologists, Candomblé was invested with highly rationalized
theological reinterpretations. Congresses and conferences, attended by
both researchers and devotees, have functioned as “ecumenical councils”
in which faith is defined and proclaimed (cf. Motta , ). A holy
and scholarly alliance was therefore established in Brazil between the
Afro-Brazilian religions and the sociologists and anthropologists who
claim to define and represent the values of modernity—or perhaps,
rather, the metaphysics of modernity.
Indeed, mainline social scientists have not hesitated to take sides in
the religious medley. This is the case of Rolim, as it is of Mariano (whose
 essay is a standard reference in its field), and of many others. More
recently a collection of essays bearing on the topic, authored by some of
the luminaries of the social science of religion in Brazil,28 is presented
in the following way: “This book is a collective effort to analyze, from
various points of view, the impact caused by the growth of the Pentecostal
churches, with their speeches and practices of aggression and religious
intolerance toward the Afro-Brazilians and their violations of civil rights
by discrimination due to sexual preference” (Gonçalves da Silva :
).
By contrast, Pentecostals, who have shunned the control of foreign
missionaries, are by no means willing to adjust their beliefs and practices
to the model of modernity defined by the faculties of sociology and
anthropology. They do not “speak of all liberations” (Lapassade and
Luz : xix), but rather of many kinds of repression—or at least of a
strict regulation of the spontaneity of the body, with its affections and
passions, viewing as its “most urgent task the destruction of spontaneous,
impulsive enjoyment” (Weber :).
The postmodern age is not only in search of spontaneity, but also
of regulation and rationality. The conversionary appeal emanating from
the Dionysian spontaneity of the unconscious is not necessarily stronger

28 Vagner Gonçalves da Silva is the editor of the volume and one of its contributors,

besides Ari Pedro Oro, Alejandro Frigerio, Ricardo Mariano, Emerson Giumbelli, and
others.
 catholics, afro-brazilians and protestants in brazil 

than that which originates from the need of regulation, indeed of repres-
sion, associated with the superego, all the more so if regulation and
repression are associated with a consistent and enchanted theology.29
According to Rolim (: –):
[T]he recent magical and religious manifestations of Pentecostalism are a
sign among others of support for the capitalist system. What is in question
there is not the divine, even if it is called the power of God or the power
of the Spirit. What is in question is the profane power, the bourgeois
ideology. The reenchantment of the world, if we are allowed to call it so,
is nothing else but the absence of a critical consciousness open to the
contradictions of capitalist society. . . . [I]t must be said to those who are
afraid of experiments outside of the magical, religious, ahistorical ground,
that such experiments would encompass a view of society and a religious
consciousness open to the situation of the poor and thus able to give them
the means to recover their religious potential and to translate into the
concrete their thirst after liberation as subjects of their history.

This is exactly the program of the Liberation Theology whose conversion-

ary advantages and disadvantages we may now consider, before we draw
the final conclusions of this chapter. It has been said that in Brazil the
Catholic Church, by the adoption of the Theology of Liberation, chose
the poor, but the poor chose the ever growing churches and sects of Pen-
tecostal derivation. This is a paradox that haunts the sociology of reli-
gion in Brazil and elsewhere. I am here suggesting that the solution to
this paradox is found in the guiding thesis of Max Weber in his Religious
Rejections of the World and Their Directions (the Zwischenbetrachtung
[]). The conversion success of a given religious movement—hence
its social, political and economic consequences—is essentially linked to
its theodicy, indeed to its enchanted theodicy. This is equivalent to saying
that the inner-worldly success of a religious tendency depends on the per-
sistence of a properly religious “rejection of the world.” In other words,
the passage of religion to liberation politics—implying, as Rolim wishes,
a disenchanted “critical consciousness open to the contradictions of cap-
italist society”—if understood as the exit from religion as allegedly moti-
vated by religion itself, involves a contradiction, as it implies the elimi-
nation of the basic religious, enchanted motivation.
As a program for action outwardly based on a religious motivation, a

29 Consistent, that is, as theology, and not as social science or as science of any

kind. (Though consistent, the theology of Pentecostalism, like the theological training
of its ministers, is far simpler than those of the historical Protestant churches and of
Catholicism.)
 roberto motta

disenchanted Liberation Theology was, in the long run, doomed to fail

because it disregarded an indispensable requirement for its success, the
religious rejection of the world in order to bring about a new world.30 Max
Weber (:  [emphasis added]) says this in the following way:
[T]he concentration of human behavior on activities leading to salvation
may require participation within the world (or more precisely: within the
institutions of the world but in opposition to them) on the basis of the
religious individual’s piety and his qualifications as the elect instrument
of God. This is “inner-worldly asceticism” (innerweltliche Askese). In this
case the world is presented to the religious virtuoso as his responsibility.
He may have the obligation to transform the world in accordance with his
ascetic ideals . . .

This is precisely what is absent from Liberation Theology: a properly

religious rejection of the world and of society. Therefore, that theology
is torn by an insurmountable contradiction. It has fully endorsed the
oxymoron that consists in the claim that there is a religion which, qua
religion, leads to an exit from, hence the end of, religion. It is, on the
other hand, quite clear that there may be no full-fledged religious disen-
chantment as long as religion remains the value that motivates, as their
final cause the “ethical, aesthetic, religious, or other form of behavior,
independently of its prospects of success” (Weber : ).31 Gutierrez
(: –)—followed by Rolim and many others—claims that “with
the Theology of Liberation we have reached a political interpretation of
the Gospel, a new way to make theology. It is theology as a critical reflec-
tion on historical praxis. Thus it is a liberating theology, the theology
of the liberating transformation of the history of mankind.” Supernatu-
ral, enchanted, other-worldly salvation is thus replaced by inner-worldly,

30 Yet, nothing prevents it from possessing, or having possessed, a certain effectiveness

during a limited period, either because it represented a kind of “interim ethics,” meant to
assure a smooth transition from religion into a basically secularized politics or because it
resulted from a tactical alliance with a given aim, say, an electoral victory—and this very
likely done in full awareness by at least some of its proponents. This is made possible pre-
cisely because of its syncretic character, its religious and political components being sim-
ply juxtaposed in a kind of cognitive penumbra. Liberation Theology also represents the
quest for a new source of legitimation—valid at least for the interim, a reasonable interval
before complete secularization, during which the vested interests resulting from previous
commitments can be decently safeguarded—for the very existence of the Church, which
will now devote itself to performing high quality services of a political and “historical”
kind.
31 This need not mean, however, that an exit from religion, or from a given religion,

cannot be caused by the inconsistency of a given religious system or even that religious
systems are per se inconsistent.
 catholics, afro-brazilians and protestants in brazil 

historically immanent, political liberation. No other Heilsgut is promised

by the new theology beside political liberation resulting from the end of
oppression and brought about by class struggle. This may be viewed as a
détournement de religion, allowed by the cognitive penumbra of ideolog-
ical syncretism, leaping from a strictly religious dimension to an essen-
tially secular or secularized, disenchanted ideology.
An extensive literature, of both theoretical and descriptive character,
is today available, concerning Liberation Theology in Brazil, the rest of
Latin America, and even the world at large, whose listing, classification,
review and evaluation could constitute the subject of many papers and
books. This is not the aim of this section. Besides pointing to some basic
internal contradictions of a theological and logical kind in the basic
theoretical tenets of the movement, I want to give but a few examples of
how things have occurred in practice. To my knowledge no descriptive
study is as vivid and poignant a portrayal of how things really happened
as Jadir de Morais Pessoa’s, A Igreja da Denúncia e o Silêncio do Fiel (The
Church of Denunciation and the Silence of the Faithful).
Pessoa wants to study, as he says, “the exchange of traditional religious
rites and services for popular actions of liberation, especially of rural
workers” (: ). His scene is the diocese of Goiás, in central Brazil,
where, he adds,
beginning with the diocesan assembly of , the terms Igreja do Evan-
gelho [Gospel Church] and Caminhada [literally “path,” but certainly sug-
gestive of Peru’s sendero luminoso, “shining path”] were to define the
new social and religious identity of all Catholic individuals who adhered
prophetically to the process of change that was taking place in the diocese.
These changes comprised above all the rupture with traditional religious
habits centering around the “consumption” of sacraments and the coura-
geous denunciation of the situations of injustice, especially of the exploita-
tion of the rural workers by the landowners. (: )

As simple and as attractive as this is, things take a decided turn to the
more complex, when we read that “the uses were dogmatically changed.
Whoever attributed to religion the task of explaining or giving a meaning
to personal or family situations that have no sense at all (illness, death,
failures, disasters) had now to restrict it exclusively to the decodification
of social relations and politics of oppression” (: ).
A nearly totalitarian order was imposed on the diocese:
The whole network of religious services [ . . . ] was declared to be unnec-
essary and even harmful, since it was oriented toward the consumption
of sacraments rather than to evangelization. Movements such as Cursillo,
 roberto motta

Charismatic Renewal, lay associations like the Apostolate of Prayer, the

Catholic League, the Marian Congregation, and the Third Order should
make room for the only acceptable form of practicing religion and belong-
ing to the Church. But the policy of uniformity was not successful. . . .
The sociological urgency of this situation derives from the failure to rec-
ognize that religion and politics are two different religious dimensions. . . .
My empirical data point to the sheer and naked superposition of the two
spheres. The religious sphere was deprived of its language and identity,
which were transferred to the speech and objects that were hitherto specific
to the political sphere. The end result of this process was the politicization
of the religious and the sacralization of the political. (: , )
This rapid religious change, or rather, this quick exit from religion sup-
posedly caused by theological motivations, led to some tragic, at times
tragicomic, consequences, of which Pessoa gives some examples, of
which this is one: “Several persons of the same family were killed in a
car crash at Nova Glória. As they were practicing Catholics, the priest
was called to celebrate their funeral mass. He not only refused to go, but
in addition, ridiculed the demand of the bereaved.” Pessoa then adds,
with a somewhat naïve eloquence—augmented by references to Peter
Berger, Victor Turner and Claude Lévi-Strauss—that “death, after all, is a
basic anthropological reality, which is ritualized in every society” (:
). Likewise, while conceding that “the violence of the landowners
against the workers was extremely serious, being the source of the prob-
lems that really mattered and toward which all lights were directed,” he
also observes that “problems of a personal kind, like marital difficulties,
alcoholism, clashes between neighbors, emotional and sexual problems
among the young, child rearing issues, and so on did not get the same
attention, since, from a political standpoint, they had little to do with
people’s development of consciousness” (: ).
There is thus an erosion of religiousness that does not spare even
the most militant. Pessoa tersely reports that a priest, who was “one of
the leaders of the [liberationally militant] pastoral work [of the diocese]
moved to São Paulo, where he took a Master’s degree in Social Anthro-
pology and later became a pai-de-santo [Candomblé priest] in Curitiba,
where he died.” There is also the less portentous case of the sister whose
activity was very important in the beginning of the Caminhada. She quit
religious life and married the former president of the syndicate, who was
also one of the main lay agents of the Gospel Church. They are still the
leaders of the congregation of the small valley where they now live. They
cultivate a small garden and seldom visit other places (: ).
 catholics, afro-brazilians and protestants in brazil 

Whether or not he formulates it so, the main conclusion that can be

drawn from Pessoa’s ethnography, concerns the self-defeating charac-
ter of Liberation Theology which, as its leaders would have it, should
mean the passage from religion into politics as motivated by religion
itself.

The Decline of Catholicism

In spite of the many papers that have been devoted to Liberation Theol-
ogy in Brazil, there has not yet been a sociological, historical, or even
theological full-fledged evaluation of Liberation Theology in Brazil. It
is not clear what, in terms of costs and benefits, it has represented to
the Catholic Church. One of the indicators of those costs and benefits
could be presumed to consist in the demographic evolution of Brazil-
ian Catholicism. According to Brazilian census data, which has included
religious affiliation in virtually every decennial compilation, there were
,, Catholics in  and ,, in . There were, in
absolute numbers, ,, more Catholics in the latter year than in
the former.32 Yet, respective to the total population of the country, the
percentage of Catholics fell from   in  to   in . In Rio de
Janeiro which, in spite of its having lost the rank of capital to Brasília, is
still a trend-setting city for the whole country, Catholics were no more
than   in .
Meanwhile, the combined membership of the Pentecostal churches
and sects leaped from ,, in  (when, for the first time the
census treated them as a separate category) to ,, in —that
is, from .  to .  of the whole population.33 Pentecostals have
been growing to the tune of one million new adherents each year. A
single church, Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, experienced indeed
astonishing growth, passing from mere , members in  to over
,, in —and it keeps increasing.
Pentecostals have obviously been filling a religious void. On the other
hand, it can be safely stated that the Liberation Theology has not been

32 Brazil underwent very rapid demographic growth in the second half of the th

century. Thus, from around ,, in , the total population had incrased to
around ,, in .
33 Protestants in general (that is, Pentecostals and affiliates of so-called “historical

churches”) were .  of the whole population in .

 roberto motta

filling a void. And it does not seem qualified to do so due to its lack of
a consistent theodicy, oriented not only to the coming of a new Heaven,
indeed of a new Earth, but also to the personal, subjective, ordinary needs
of people, taking into account disease, aging, addictions, love, rivalries,
employment, financial difficulties, and all the many dismal failures of
everyday life. “Catholic radicalism,” to use the vocabulary of Emanuel
de Kadt’s () pioneering study, could hardly fail to reflect structural
changes in Brazilian society. It does indeed reflect, to mention but one
aspect of the change, the demographic explosion that took place both in
urban and rural areas of Brazil, originating the huge masses of migrants,
the “marginal population” (cf. Pereira ) that became a prime object
of the interest of radical theologians and who joined so massively the
shrines of Candomblé and the temples of the Pentecostals. At the same
time the clergy have tried to assure themselves, should the end of religion
be at hand, a decent interim by cooperating with the social and political
forces which, during the second half of the th century, could be seen,
at least in Latin America, as the “possessors of History.” In the time of
Gutierrez’s writing of his classic book, there were reasons for his like to
hope that the Cuban model of revolution would sooner or later dominate
the whole continent. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of real
socialism in Eastern Europe among other factors entailed the indefinite
postponement of that dream.

Final Remarks

This is a provincial paper whose conclusions are not meant to apply to

other countries than Brazil nor to world areas other than Latin America.
It might be argued that Brazil, due the peculiarities of its ethnic, cultural,
and social history, follows a course that could not possibly be the same
as that of the mainline Western countries. This was the thesis of one
of the earliest scientific observers of the Brazilian scenery, who in the
early years of the th century, wrote about the “illusion of catechesis”
to which missionaries and other clergy would fall prey to in Brazil or
concerning Brazil: “Here . . . as in other places where missions—whether
Catholic, Protestant or Muslim—to convert the people can be found . . .
the opposite has occurred: Catholicism has been adapted to rudimentary
animism, which gives a material, physical and objective representation to
all mysteries and abstractions associated with monotheism” (Rodrigues
: ). Thus the massive adhesion to terreiro and temple—that is, to
 catholics, afro-brazilians and protestants in brazil 

Afro-Brazilian cult groups and Pentecostal congregations—reflects the

ethnic history of the country. We must indeed be careful in generalizing
the Brazilian example to other lands. Yet, the central hypothesis of this
chapter is that religious conversion implies everywhere the refusal of
the “iron cage” of rationalization, secularism and disenchantment such
as they came to prevail in the Western world. Converts are basically
attracted to those religions which have kept an “enchanted” outlook,
that is, to those religions that appeal to something beyond empirical
reference, to a “wholly other,” indeed to the very “Holy” (cf. Otto ).
This appeal to something beyond an empirical referent appears to me to
be very much the same thing as Blasi’s “foundational trust,” which in turn
implies a basic act of faith.34
Brazil has some undeniable ethnic and historical peculiarities. Yet,
what happens here is, in its way, part and parcel of a much wider tendency
that has parellels in the culturally and politically dominant countries of
the Western world and probably in other areas. We should note that
while the Roman Catholic Church kept its basic enchanted outlook,
which in its specific case entailed a staunch opposition to some aspects
of modernity—including its distrust, at least before the more moderate
stand adopted by Pius XII, for the scientific and rationalized (hence
disenchanted) study of the of the Bible and tradition, which led to the so-
called “crisis of Modernism”—it attracted important numbers of converts
in France (especially intellectuals in the first half of the th century [cf.
Gugelot ]) and in English-speaking countries, until the very eve of
the Second Vatican Council. This event was a watershed, as it meant,
among other things, a kind of cognitive capitulation to disenchanted
modernity, leading to an immediate fall in the number of converts and,
indeed, of adherents.
Liberation Theology has been an effort to give a new meaning to the
disenchanted Church. But such disenchantment has been, at least in
Brazil, a major factor of the very high rate of conversions to enchanted
and fundamentalist Pentecostal churches and sects, and it also helps to
explain the expansion of the Afro-Brazilian cults. The case of Liberation
Theology allows us to draw a further conclusion: There is not, there
cannot be, religion without an enchanted core. And this enchantment

34 The core of enchantment, as it understood in this chapter, consists therefore in the

act of faith, which may be associated, according to the case, with elaborate systems of
mythology and of magical practice. But even without mythological systems and/or the
magic practices, religion remains enchanted by the appeal to the supernatural referent.
 roberto motta

is exactly that which leads religion to be considered, in Marxist terms, as

“the opium” and “the illusory happiness of the people,” rendering vain
or at least very difficult all attempts to change religion into a critical
reflection bearing on a purely immanent historical or political praxis.
Likewise, it can also be concluded that, barring some felicitous play on
words that attributes different meanings to what is only apparently the
same term, a religion that qua religion leads to the exit from religion can
hardly exist.

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 chapter eight

CONVERT, REVERT, PERVERT

Enzo Pace

If a conversion is seen as a battle taking place along the boundaries of

systems of religious belief, then it can be studied not only as a process
involving individuals in their relationships with those who succeed in
convincing them to “change sides” in terms of their faith, but also as
an indicator of a conflict going on inside and outside a given system of
belief. This conflict is about the endurance of the symbolic boundaries
that a system is strongly interested not only in marking, but also and
above all in defending in order, on the one hand, to state the superiority
and authenticity of the truth that it claims to possess over that of other
religions, and on the other to ensure that the symbols of the verum that
it defends cannot circulate freely beyond its borders. These symbols are
consequently no longer the distinctive elements of a bonding capital. They
become signs of a willingness to cooperate with other religions or spiri-
tual traditions, drawbridges let down between different symbolic capitals,
and the foundation blocks of a bridging capital (Putnam ). In a way, a
far more complex and differentiated socio-religious environment seems
to develop along the boundaries laid down and protected by a system of
belief, where individuals can perceive that there are other ways of believing
that differ from the religions they were assigned at birth (Rambo ).
If, on the other hand, we analyze conversion starting from a systems
theory of religious belief (Luhmann , ), then the relevant issue
from the sociological standpoint is not only to reconstruct the processes
inducing a person to change faith (the subjective dimension) and trust
(the social dimension, i.e. the social networks and conditions facilitating
the change), but also to analyze the relationship between the system of
belief and the environment, between what—for the sake of brevity—we
might call an established religion (with its doctrines, its temples, its body
of specialists, its devotions adopted by the various social classes, and
its rituals) and what is, by definition, the surplus sense that individuals
always tend to attribute to their actions when they think they are acting
religiously. In fact, there is a discrepancy between the sense created
 enzo pace

by organized systems of belief and the sense spontaneously attributed

by individuals on the strength of their specific (individual and social)
biographical features, and this discrepancy is one of the areas worth
exploring in a comparative sociological study of systems of religious
belief (Pace ). In the relationship between system and environment,
conversions to another religion can be interpreted as a given system of
belief proving unable to dominate the surplus sense produced in the
environment. People who change religion are basically individuals who
no longer feel entirely at home with the set of beliefs and rites of their
previously given or chosen religion.
Various salvation goods (Stolz ) may circulate in a person’s social
environment, relating to different systems of belief, so they cannot be
represented as exclusive goods over which the systems are able to wield
absolute control. As a result, the less the different systems of belief suc-
ceed in defending at least the boundaries delimiting their own salvation
goods, which they can use to support their claim to be different and
(in many cases) superior to the others, the less the individuals will see
these boundaries of difference as impassable in the socio-religious set-
ting. Moreover, if individuals tend to share certain socio-religious prac-
tices (funerals, weddings, births, festive practices during the main festi-
vals on the various religious calendars), then the divergence—between
the sense established by a system of belief on the one hand and the con-
sent it is given in social practices on the other—will tend to increase, a
fact that emerges from numerous case studies on societies historically
characterized by religious pluralism (for instance, sub-Saharan Africa,
Brazil, Japan and India). Conversion is therefore basically a battle that
takes place along the symbolic boundaries between systems of belief that
happen to coexist in the same social environment. If a person converts, it
is as if one of the systems had lost the battle to keep the person convinced
and convincingly within its own boundaries.
In systems of belief that function on the basis of the law of quantitative
growth (the more we are, the merrier—in that the numbers of our faithful
are proof in itself that we are on the right and true path), a few conver-
sions pose no great threat. They are not taken as seriously as real mass
transfers of people to other religions or systems of belief. Take the case,
for instance, of the large numbers of Brazilian, Mexican and Guatemalan
people who switched from the Catholic religion to various Evangelical,
Pentecostal or charismatic churches. In all these cases, it was more a case
of a massive than of a mass conversion, since there was no longer a prince
or king wielding his power to oblige his tribe or people to embrace a given
 convert, revert, pervert 

faith. This is a molecular movement that allows individuals to join a new

church, leaving behind the one with which they were familiar, if for no
other reason than because it was the church into which they were born
(the Catholic church, that is). In many cases, there is not even any need
for the persuasive effect of a television channel or TV preacher behind
their decision to change their faith.
For an individual, this decision can be experienced not so much as a
breakaway from his previous beliefs, which identified him with a given
salvation institution or socially-organized world of sense, but rather as a
new spiritual voyage leading him beyond boundaries that he no longer
considers impassable to explore a territory that seems new, but not too
far removed from the universe of beliefs that he is formally abandoning.
A conversion is therefore interpreted as a threat to a system of belief that
sees it as weakening its ability to claim once and for all (as all religions do
when they are convinced that they bear a universal message) that theirs
are the real salvation goods for the whole of humanity.
It is worth adding that a conversion process may involve not only pass-
ing from one religion to another, but also departing from a religion to
become a non-believer in all its various cultural forms, from convinced
atheism to agnosticism, from generic deism to spiritual research without
churches or dogmas (Davie, Heelas and Woodhead ; Flanagan and
Jupp, ; Giordan ; Heelas and Woodhead, ). In this sense, a
conversion still subtracts power from a system of belief. It transfers infor-
mation to the energies of the spiritual sphere and, in a sense, distributes
it in the environment. This loss is all the greater the more the system has
become historically structured into a complex organization functioning
on the principle of obedience to an acknowledged authority. The more
the authority is founded on the organizational axiom that Auctoritas facit
veritatem (Schmitt ), the more severely it will suffer the loss—not so
much of the large number of faithful, but rather of its control over its
symbolic boundaries. In a sense, a person who has converted wields the
power of the loss: he loses the faith, as it were, to acquire another.
Applying the debt-credit concept that Nietzsche identifies in his On
the Genealogy of Morality () as the original social relationship in
the evolutionary process that leads a human being to go beyond the
level of primitive instinct, it is as if a person who has converted has
contracted a new moral commitment to his chosen new system of belief,
while the system from which he departs is in his debt, being guilty of
not having known how to keep him within its boundaries. It is hardly
surprising (and common enough knowledge for there to be no need to
 enzo pace

stop here to discuss the issue thoroughly) that many religions have always
treated those who embrace another faith as traitors, renegades, heretics,
apostates, and so on. Apostasy, in particular, has been considered a
punishable crime (and still is by some schools of Muslim law), even
warranting the death penalty, since it is configured and still seen not only
as offending God (a sin), but also as a gross deviation from the established
social and political order (a crime). In other words, it is like a breach of
contract, and the party at fault must face the consequences. A person who
converts contracts a new debt, a new obligation to the system of belief that
he has chosen more or less of his own free will. The degree to which his
action is voluntary depends on the historical and social circumstances
in which the conversion takes place and can be determined from the set
of constraints on the conversion process itself. It is one thing to speak
of compulsory conversions, quite another when an individual has had
freedom of choice: between two opposite poles—no freedom on the one
hand and total arbitrary freedom on the other. (There are also various
intermediate situations to which we shall return later.)
There is therefore a sort of irony for the systems of belief: the more
they claim to be faithful custodians of an absolute truth and entrust the
responsibility for defending it to an established authority, the supreme
head of a religious organization, the more conversions are seen as a snub
of this authority (rather than of the truth, which can continue to circulate
freely, albeit in fragments, in the socio-religious environment), because
conversions point to a weakness in the image the authority wants to
portray of itself as the illuminated and ultimate holder of the truth.
While on this issue, it is worth noting what happens in the now
boundless world of Protestant branches and denominations, where new
churches and new sects have continued to flourish ever since the Ref-
ormation, confirming the structural weakness of the organizing princi-
ple that has progressively taken shape behind Protestantism (Willaime
), unlike other Christian churches, and the Catholic church in par-
ticular. Since this organizing principle is founded on the idea that every
human being illuminated by the faith, as laid down in the Bible, poten-
tially has the church within him, conversion becomes more of a men-
tal attitude than of individuals choosing to become associated with one
church rather than another, abandoning the church of their birth to join
a new sect, and so on.
This is why it is important to make the point that not all conversions are
equal. There is clearly a huge difference between the conversion of Paul
of Tarsus and the compulsory conversions of Hebrews and Muslims after
 convert, revert, pervert 

 in Spain, or the mass conversions imposed by the Sublime Porte

in the Balkans, or more recently first by the German and then by the
Belgian settlers in Burundi and parts of Ruanda. What is less obvious is
that Paul steps over a line as Jesus of Nazareth had already done, a line
marking the boundary between Hebrew tradition and the new religion
taking shape around the figure of Jesus. But while Paul struggles at the
border that now separates the two religions, in search of his identity as a
new believer (a Christian), in the case of compulsory conversions there
is a new, dominant religion that uses the converts (or potential converts)
to reposition the impassable boundary that separates and distinguishes
them from the defeated religions. This operation sometimes fails in the
historically longer term because layers of the vanquished system of belief
continue to survive and resist, returning to the surface as soon as the
conqueror’s power declines, and coming back with all the original vigor
of a belief that was thought to be extinct.
Paraphrasing from Max Weber’s theory of action, we can thus sketch a
conversion typology that will help clarify what happens in various socio-
religious settings in the contemporary world with respect to conversion
processes. The traits of the ideal-types are summarized in the following
diagram:

Figure .. Ideal-types of Conversion

. Rational-instrumental:
Conversion is the result of a more or less
refined calculation.
I become converted because it suits my
purposes, without allowing myself to
become very involved on an emotional
plane or in terms of my lifestyle.
. Rational-value-oriented:
Conversion is the outcome of a convinced
adhesion to a system of belief and its
values.
I become converted because I think the
new faith offers a better set of values than
others.

. Traditional-conformist:
The conversion is due to the conversion
policy that a dominant system of belief
adopts in relation to those who originally
did not adhere to it.
I become converted to conform to the
rules of social interplay that the religion
of the majority helps to reinforce, since it
is seen as a pillar of the established social
order.
. Charismatic-subjective:
The conversion derives from an affective
and emotional interaction between a
spiritual leader and a disciple, who allows
himself to be guided along the paths of
the spirit.
I become converted because I have found
a life that leads to an interior illumination
and the discovery of a truth that the
religion of my birth (or lack of religion)
was unable to make me understand.
 enzo pace

The four ideal-types can be viewed on an active/passive dimension

as well. The first and the third, each in its own way, are passive forms
of conversion, imposed by conversion policies (that may be coercive
or founded on moral and social suasion) and chosen for the sake of
convenience. This is probably the case, for instance, when men convert
in order to marry a Muslim woman and make the marriage comply with
the rules of Islamic religious law (shari#a), when they recite the formula
to profess their faith (shahada) before an acknowledged representative of
a mosque in the presence of two witnesses (Allievi ; Taylor ).
The second and fourth types of conversion, on the other hand, imply
an active mobilization on the part of an individual who, guided by a
spiritual master or after a slow process of conviction maturing in his
head and heart, embraces a different faith from the one given at birth,
or rediscovers the meaning of his given faith, becoming a born again
believer. In both cases, this is a believer in motion (Hervieu-Léger ),
who does not feel indebted to the religious institutions of his birth and
who moves with a relative degree of freedom in a deregulated market of
salvation goods. The four types of conversion can also be interpreted as
different levels of intensity in the individual’s choice, which is virtually nil
in the third type, limited in the first, but high and very high, respectively,
in the second and fourth.
In addition to these comments on the typology of conversions, we
need to consider a final conceptual classification. Conversion is a process
that concerns not only or even mainly an individual’s conscience, but
also the relationship between a system of belief (or systems, if there
are several competing with one another in the same society) and the
environment. In other words, if the conversion is a battle taking place
along the boundaries of a system of belief, then every conversion will
theoretically be considered by the system of belief being abandoned as a
perversion on the part of the individual concerned, this term being used
here with three distinct and complementary meanings:
a. It is as if people leaving a given religion were altering, corrupting
and violating the natural order established by a god or cosmic
supreme principle reflected in and radiating from the system of
belief they have left behind.
b. The converted are consequently a negative sign inasmuch as con-
cerns a religion’s capacity to present itself on the market of salvation
goods as the authoritative interpreter of the true faith.
c. It is therefore as if the converted had become contaminated, their
 convert, revert, pervert 

authenticity and integrity damaged by their decision to embrace

another faith (or to abandon any form of belief), as if they had fallen
from a state of grace into a state of impurity.
Conversion and perversion thus implicate an attempt at reversion, to
reconquer these lost souls, confirming my idea of conversion as a hands-
on combat along the symbolic boundaries between systems of belief. The
battle certainly involves individuals in flesh and blood on the one hand,
and what Foucault (, ) called governmentality (or the pastoral
power of religions) on the other. Conversion can be seen as a subjective
way of believing, but it is always configured in relation to an organized
system of belief. In a way, it takes shape in an individual’s biography as a
result of a self-engineering process, a rebuilding and redesigning of the
sense that an individual attributes to his life and the world in which
he lives, as Blasi has noted earlier in this volume. This is what emerges
first when life stories are collected from people who talk about how they
became converted and what it meant to them. They describe their new
state of conscience in two ways: as a change and as an illumination; a
change in the sense of another state of conscience, and an illumination
in the classic sense this term has always had in religious science, as a
discovery that the pieces (of the meaning of existence) all fit back in place
and finally produce a picture that is clear and distinct in its contours.
In this context, the light alludes to the fact that, from the cognitive
standpoint, the truth finally appears at the end of a period of searching,
dispelling the shadows of doubt.
So, I see conversion as a process that is not linear—starting from one
point and arriving at another—but more complex, that implies abandon-
ing one religion in order to join another (often confirming this passage
with a change of name), the latter reacting with the new believers’ accred-
itation while the former attempts to reconquer them, and the strategies
the latter adopts to resist such a restoration. In the light of these consider-
ations, I aim to focus on a portion of this process: the rituals of reconquest
and purification developed and implemented to try to win back people
who have abandoned the religion of their birth or original environment.
Getting people to revert is not just a matter of welcoming back people
who had moved away from the faith of their fathers (maybe celebrating
the prodigal son’s return home with the sacrifice of a fatted calf); it is
more an act of reconquest expressed in rituals of purification leading to
the reversion of an individual who had previously been considered an
impure degenerate (pervert), traitor and liar, according to a sequence of
 enzo pace

stigma that are usually applied by those remaining faithful to a system

of belief to those abandoning it, often transforming their interior experi-
ence into a public affair.
I shall particularly examine two reversion rituals to demonstrate that
it is useful to study the conversion process as an indicator of the con-
flict existing between a system of belief and a socio-religious reference
environment: rituals developed by neo-Hindu movements and those
invented by the ultra-orthodox Hebrew movement called Habad.
Examining these two cases does not entitle us to generalize, but merely
helps us to formulate a working hypothesis that, in a comparative study
of the rituals developed in other socio-religious settings, might falsify the
claim that: conversion is not only a matter of individual choice, but the
outcome of a conversion policy, a battle taking place at the boundaries
between systems of religious belief, or between these and modern forms
of believing without belonging; said policy is expressed as a form of commu-
nication implemented by groups of believers who specialize in obtaining
reversions, inventing rituals and procedures (and thus communicating
in a novel way) to reconquer those lost to the faith, convincing them—
not only through reasoning, but also through emotional involvement in
a liturgical or ritual activity—that by converting they have fallen from
grace, and only by reverting can they return to a state of grace, thereby
being restored to the state of purity as creatures in tune with the principle
behind the natural order of things (Stromberg ).

Politics of Paradise in the Reversion

Movements of the Hindu World

The first case study that I propose to examine concerns the phenomenon
of conversions in modern-day Indian society. For some years now, there
has been both political and religious controversy over the increasing
number of conversions from Hinduism to other religions—particularly
to Islam, Christianity, and the Bahá"i faith. It is hard to say how many
people change religion in a year because such information is often pro-
vided by the leaders of movements undertaking intensive conversion
campaigns. It is relatively easy, instead, to document the controversies
that have arisen in India since  between movements of different
religious and political tendencies, the bone of contention being places
of worship or conversions from one religion to another. The choice of
this date is merely a convention and refers to a march organized by Shri
 convert, revert, pervert 

Advani (born in Pakistan in ), the leader of the BJP (Bharatiya Janata
Party, the center-right nationalist party that governed India from  to
), from the Hindu temple of Somnath in the state of Gujarat to the
Babri Mosque, which dated back to the time of the moguls (built in ),
in the city of Ayodhya, in the state of Uttar Pradesh. This was not the only
place of Muslim prayer in the city of Ayodhya or in the surrounding state
of "Uttar Pradesh, which has approximately  million Muslim residents
amidst a total population of more than  million people, but its sym-
bolic significance was particularly manipulable by neo-Hinduists.
This march between the two cities took the form of a pilgrimage based
on a very popular Hindu ritual called the rath yatra (yatra meaning pil-
grimage, while rath means cart), a religious festival particularly famous
in the state of Orissa, when millions of people embark on a spiritual walk
in summer, accompanying large allegorical carts on which the principal
Hindu divinities are enthroned. The march became one of the first politi-
cal and religious actions launched by the new nationalist party. As leader
of the BJP, Advani was to say: “If Muslims are entitled to an Islamic atmo-
sphere in Mecca, and if Christians are entitled to a Christian atmosphere
in the Vatican, why is it wrong for the Hindus to expect a Hindu atmo-
sphere in Ayodhya?” (in Brass : ).
The message was clear, and the important point to note is that the
leader of the neo-Hinduist party, with the aid of the movements and
groups for Hindu religious reawakening, invented a repertoire for trig-
gering a collective action along two planes, one religious and the other
political. The traditional rituals were reinvented and become a set of
collective gestures expressing a political tension, a visible statement of
Hindu identity that was seen as being threatened by Muslims, Jainists,
Christians or the followers of Bahá"i, as the case may be. At the time of the
first march in , for instance, there were numerous incidents with the
police along the way, especially when the kar sevaks (militants who took
part in the march or joined in along the way) claimed to each be carrying
a brick that was to serve in the reconstruction of the Rama temple, after
the mosque in Ayodhya had been destroyed. The police succeeded then
in preventing an assault on the mosque, though some people lost their
lives in the fight, and they immediately became the martyrs of Ayodhya.
The organizers of the march had dotted the whole route with a number
of rituals well known to the Hindu population, such as blowing shankhs
(conch shells) in the streets, ghanta gharial (ringing prayer bells and
beating on alloyed metal plates), raising saffron flags in the day-time
and organizing mashals (processions bearing flaming torches) at night
 enzo pace

(Brass : ). This complex repertoire of rituals was designed to

mobilize the people politically, making them step over the threshold
that normally divides the day-to-day from the extraordinary, the profane
from the sacred, tolerant cohabitation from violent opposition against
other people, classified as enemies. Such actions can take on various
masks in the contingent situation in India (Jeffrelot , a, b,
), but what we are interested in understanding is not so much
why, but rather how all this happens, what forms of communication the
religious liturgical code succeeds in promoting and producing. In fact,
this is a liturgical action conducted outside the temple and progressively
taking the shape of a political event and expressing a logic that differs
from the strictly religious. It tends to become what we might define
as a collective action to purify the land, that prompts the passage from
the symbolic violence of the new liturgical action to the real violence
of an attack on the people or places of worship of another religion.
In this light, the case of Ayodhya is emblematic and possibly the best-
known of neo-Hindu events, but it was by no means an isolated event.
It was a public event that can be seen as fitting into a chain of disputes,
revolts, protest marches, and controversies about conversions that have
repeatedly stained the most recent history of the Indian democracy, from
at least  until the present day.
According to Hindu tradition, the hill where the Babri Mosque was
built was once occupied by a temple dedicated to Rama, King of Ayod-
hya and seventh incarnation of the god Vishnu, or rather the place where
Rama (Ramachandra in full) was apparently born  years before our
era. Nobody had claimed the site for the Hindus for centuries (Bacchetta
, Elst , Bhatt , Smith ). The mosque’s destruction in
 symbolically marks a divide in contemporary Indian society, the
transformation of some of the movements of Hindu cultural and reli-
gious reawakening, which had sprung up as of the second half of the
th century, into political-religious movements that identified them-
selves with the ideology of hindutva, a neologism that translates as the
pure Hindu identity. This neologism was coined by Vinayak Damodar
Savarkar () and has met with a fair degree of success among the rad-
ical political neo-Hinduist movements of our times. Finally, to complete
the picture of the historical references, we need to mention that Hin-
duism has been through a period of religious reawakening that has had
various sources (Pace and Guolo ), the most important of which
(for its past and present influence on contemporary political and reli-
gious movements) is the reformation project developed by Dayananda
 convert, revert, pervert 

Saraswati, who founded the Noble Society (Arya Samaj) in . This
project was designed as a genuine hermeneutic effort to renew Hinduism
and make it suitable for meeting the challenges of the modern world
imposed by British colonial rule. There are interesting analogies here with
the reawakening movement that developed around the same time in the
American Protestant and the Sunnite Muslim environments—i.e. in very
different parts of the world and in profoundly different settings, in the
sense that Arya Samaj also proposed to redefine the fundamentals of the
real Hindu faith. In order of importance, these are:
Faith in a single, supreme God, the source of all knowledge, an intelligent
and merciful, right and universal presence, the only entity worthy of being
venerated.
The Veda (or scriptures) are the only source of truth and understanding,
the infallible, unchangeable, holy word to which all Arya must conform.
All human actions must comply with the cosmic law of the Dharma, and
must consequently be inspired by principles of love, justice and rectitude;
All this is achieved by promoting the well-being of all and being committed
to promoting understanding and defeating ignorance.
As we can see, Dayananda’s thinking tends to redraw the universe of
Hindu beliefs in monotheistic terms, bringing the foundations of the
faith down to a simplified system of belief that we can picture as follows:

Figure .. The Arya Samaj System of Belief

 enzo pace

Arya Samaj thus stands at the crossroads between two powerful move-
ments in Indian society at the end of the th century: on the one hand,
there is the need to be free of the British colonial yoke; on the other, the
hope of a cultural and spiritual redemption achieved by returning to the
purified and revisited religious roots of Hinduism, from which to embark
on a path of reawakening (Singh ). One of Dayananda’s closest col-
laborators within the Arya Samaj reinterpreted the ancient shuddhi ritual
to adapt it to what we might define as a reversion policy. In fact, it literally
means purification, but also reversion (or reverting after converting). Its
origins can probably be traced back to the times when India was domi-
nated by the Mogul empire, and many Hindus converted to Islam. With
the decline of Muslim rule, the shuddhi was subsequently perfected to
facilitate the return of these converts to their original religion, taking
on a form that the Arya Samaj leaders and militants revived to restore
these converts to Hinduism. The ceremony is straightforward: it involves
washing your feet and drinking a little water from the holy river Ganges
(Gangajal). Such a re-baptism in water symbolically cleanses the person
who had been contaminated by another religion. In the language of the
Arya Samaj, this means bringing “home” those who were lost, returning
them to the fold. So, reversion presupposes not only a previous conver-
sion, but also the idea that said conversion to another faith has tainted
the individual with an infamous sin, making him a pervert, a traitor to
the faith of his forbears.
The context in which the revisited shuddhi ritual takes place today is
characterized by recurrent socio-religious disputes, more acute in some
areas and less so in others, but generally arising in all the states where
Hindu extremists are particularly active in accusing people who have
converted to Islam or Christianity of being responsible for the Hindu
people’s loss of traditional values and identity, supporting the political
rhetoric of movements like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a
national voluntary organization founded in  by a physician origi-
nally from Nagpur, or the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP or World Hindu
Council), a branch of the RSS created in . The shuddhi is part of a
repertoire of collective activities that functionally rally political consent
in favor of the BJP, the political party that has succeeded in becoming the
essence of, and an image for the above-mentioned movements.
The repertoire includes actions with variable degrees of violence, both
symbolic and physical: from insistent efforts to persuade people who
have converted to re-convert to their original religion, to assaults on
places of worship (as in a case of the mosque in Ayodhya), to acts of
 convert, revert, pervert 

vandalism against religious schools. In September , for instance,

a group of Hindu extremists stoned the Catholic school annexed to
the Loreto convent in Lucknow, capital of Uttar Pradesh, where they
claimed that Hindu girls were being forcibly converted to Catholicism
in violation of the laws of the state (one of the few states in India
with a rule prohibiting all forms of conversion). In August  violent
riots organized by the Vishva Hindu Parishad militants burned down
a Catholic orphanage in the State of Orissa, after the murder of their
leaders, Swami Saraswati. There is also a political battle to extend the
law that forbids any slaughtering of cows (animals Hindus traditionally
consider as sacred), which is currently permitted for non-Hindus, and
finally an action to convert back the so-called tribal communities or
Dalits (“outcastes”) who frequently, and hardly surprisingly, embrace
another religion that preaches equality in the face of God and salvation
as an individual opportunity (Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Bahá"i).
On this point it is important to note how the controversies over con-
versions draw strength not only from tension between different systems
of religious belief, but also from recurrent political and social issues con-
cerning the position of the Dalits (literally, the oppressed) and the abo-
rigines (Adivasi in Sanskrit): the former account for around  million
people, the latter another  million, and both continue to be relegated
to the margins of the social scale, despite the abolition of the caste sys-
tem and laws to promote affirmative action in favor of these outcasts and
the many ethnic minorities dotted all over India, but mainly in the states
of Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan. Ever since the th century,
when Catholic and Protestant missionaries began to arrive, and up to
the present day, there have been massive conversions to Christianity and
increasingly, these days, to Buddhism as well. In the city of Nagpur, in
central India, for instance, a ceremony was held in September  to
celebrate the conversion of approximately , people to Buddhism.
This movement was begun by a brilliant lawyer, Bhrimao Ramji Ambed-
kar, who became a Buddhist in  and encouraged other people to fol-
low him. Among all the people who did so, a by no means secondary
argument in favor of their conversion to a religion different from Hin-
duism was the specific wish to leave the caste system behind because they
felt socially discriminated or because, as members of an ethnic minority,
their fundamental minimum rights were not adequately safeguarded.
In all these cases, moreover, the fact that the people being converted
were outside the caste system, and therefore maximally impure by defini-
tion according to the socio-religious stratification imposed by the Brah-
 enzo pace

min at the very origins of the varna—the caste, in Portuguese (Dumont,

)—makes us see why the radical neo-Hindu movements have put
the overcoming of the caste system on their political agenda and why the
rites of reversion are accompanied by the promise of a better social sta-
tus. It has to be said, however, that the caste system is so deeply rooted
in the mentality and in the folds of society that it is even reproduced in
the other, non-Hindu religions. The symbolism of the reversion rituals
is much the same in the case of aborigines who converted to Christian-
ity: they are invited to take back the name they abandoned when they
were baptized, they are given new clothes, and they have a ritual purify-
ing bath.
Water is definitely a symbol that circulates readily, as it were, between
different systems of belief because it carries the idea of pure/impure
(Douglas ). It is also a much contended symbol, making this liquid
element also become a symbol of the remarkable permeability of the
boundaries separating different systems of belief demonstrated by the
conversion-reversion processes seen increasingly often in contemporary
Indian society. According to the Indian newspapers, one day a ceremony
is held in a given place to celebrate hundreds of Hindus converting to
Buddhism and next day, maybe hundreds of miles away, a like number of
Dalits who had previously become Christians have reportedly returned
to Hinduism, and so it goes.
It is worth emphasizing that, on the margin of all these happenings,
there is a public debate underway on the conversion phenomenon, which
goes to show that the major exponents of the different systems of religious
belief in Indian society are striving to understand and justify what is
going on. There are frequent interviews with leaders and militants, as well
as stories of conversion and reversion. Just a few excerpts are given in the
table that follows, giving some idea of the public representation (in the
sense of social dramaturgy used by Goffman []) of the conversion-
reversion processes, as if to weave the web of a great meta-story of Indian
cultural and religious identity. In other words, the topic of conversion
has become a matter of collective reflection on the destiny of democracy,
of the pluralism and secularism of the state, and ultimately on Indian
national identity (Sen , ; Taylor : –).

Figure .. The Public Debate on Conversion-Reversion
A Hindu woman who
converted to Islam
(Associated Press,
//)
Dalits who reverted to
Hinduism
(Asia News, //)
Hindus vs. Christians
(Asia News, //)
Hindus vs. Catholics
(Indian Express, //)
convert, revert, pervert 
The environment in which I grew up was extremist Hindu
where Muslims were severely hated. I embraced Islam
after my marriage but I disliked worship of idols since my
adolescence . . . . There is a ritual in our family that when a
girl is married, she washes feet of her husband and drinks
that water. But I refused to do so on the very first day due
to which I was severely admonished . . . I started visiting a
nearby Islamic centre. I heard their conversation and knew
that Muslims did not worship idols. They were seeking
blessings from some other person.
A thousand Dalit Christians reverted to Hinduism today,
the th anniversary of the birth of Bhimrao Ambedkar,
the messiah of the Dalits, in the town of Tirunelveli
(Tamil Nadu). Arjun Sampath, president of the Hindu
Makkal Katchia (MMK), a local political party, announced
that “We’ll purify all those who return to Hinduism by
sprinkling Ganga theertha (Ganges water) and Sethu
theertha (Sethu water) . . . The members who return to the
Hindu fold will take an oath and sign affidavits. Later, we’ll
get the conversion certificates from Arya Samaj to get their
names changed in the Gazette.”
The conversion controversy has kicked up a storm as
unwelcome as the Orissa cyclone. On October , ,
the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest US Protestant
group issued a prayer booklet for its , church
members to “pray for Hindus lost in darkness” during the
Hindu festival of Diwali. Its International Mission Board
said in a press release that the  days of prayer would be
“aimed at dispelling the darkness that holds more than
 million Hindus in spiritual bondage.” In India, a BJP
spokesman said: “First, India is more religious than any
other country in the world. Morally, it is more Christian
than any other Christian country. Secondly, is it not an
insult to India to tell Hindus that they are all sinners and
that only Jesus can save them?”
Assam Satra Mahasabha, the apex body of Vaishnavite
Satras (monasteries) in the state, has accused Christian
missionaries of launching a massive conversion campaign
in the river island of Majuli. The Catholic Church has
denied that it has been carrying out conversions in Majuli
or elsewhere in Assam. “We have established a school and
healthcare services in Majuli. But there is no intention on
our part to convert anyone under any circumstances,” an
official of the church said.
 enzo pace

Conversion of tribal Radhakrishnan, a Paniya tribal from the Devala area of

people Gudalur, while on a visit to Germany, told a group of
(The Hindu, //) German Church pastors: “When the missionaries in our
area, take the children to their school, they change their
names, convert them to Christianity, teach them to forget
our gods and our people. They have no regard for our
culture. Our children are alienated forever.”
Conversion to Buddhism Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, has
(BBC News, //) welcomed the proposed mass conversion of tens of
thousands of lower-caste Hindus, known as Dalits. The
Dalai Lama said the move would give them more equality
in society. Speaking in Calcutta on his return from a trip
to Taiwan, the Dalai Lama said converting to Buddhism
should not cause resentment among other religions or
castes, as Buddhism and Hinduism were, as he put it, like
twins.
Conversion to Udit Raj, a Dalit leader, told the BBC that around ,
Buddhism people converted to Christianity and Buddhism . . ..
(BBC News, Joseph D’Souza, the president of the Dalit Freedom
//) Network and a Christian convert, described the
conversions as a “celebratory occasion” and “I think it’s
important to understand that this is a cry for human
dignity, it’s a cry for human worth.”
Reverting to Hinduism Ramlal Kanol, who is blind, said four men came to his
(Compass Direct, house on February , first offering him money to go
//) with them, then threatening to imprison and fine him if
he didn’t. I was forced to participate in the Hindu rituals,
and I could not resist the force in the temple because of
the massive crowd surrounding us,” he said. “The crowd
was gathered together to make a show that all of them are
converted Christians re-converting to Hinduism,” said
pastor Bhadur Singh, who along with  members of his
church was lured to the temple by a local politician.
Reverting to Hinduism “We will intensify our programme to bring back people
(Global Council of Indian who had been lured into Christianity and Islam,” said
Christian Journal, a VHP leader. “The Fathers and missionaries lured us
//) with amenities. But we were duped. We realized this and
decided to come back to Hinduism,” said Pulin, Hakim
Tudu and Babulal Murmu.
Hindu vs Pastor A Pastor and members of a Pentecostal Church in
(All India Christian Kattakkada in Kerala were attacked by Hindu radicals
Council Journal, //) while they were attending the prayer service in the
morning on  July .
 convert, revert, pervert 

The table gives just a very brief idea of the conversion controversy that,
for many years now, has not only made the news, but has also and above
all become a social indicator of the religious and political conflicts taking
place in more or less violent and aggressive forms in various Indian states.
It is not easy to distinguish clearly between the different dimensions of
these conflicts, where religion ends and politics or economics begins, and
vice versa. There was certainly an increase in the number of such conflicts
between  and , a decade in which Indian society underwent
profound economic changes that altered the social stratification founded
on the survival of the caste system. The most evident sign of these changes
is the growth of the Dalit movement, which is striving to overcome the
cultural and socio-economic obstacles that currently prevent .  of
the Indian population from fully accessing the rights of citizenship. There
is often a very close link between their expectations of social justice and
economic reinstatement on the one hand, and a propensity to abandon
the mainly-Hindu religion of their birth and opt for other religions on
the other (Fernandes , Oddie ).
This case study on conversions in the Indian subcontinent is an inter-
esting test for analyzing the conversion phenomenon as a battle taking
place along the symbolic boundaries between systems of belief in a soci-
ety that has historically been pluralist from the religious standpoint. The
battle follows a precise narrative scheme: conversion is seen by a sys-
tem of belief as a perversion, so action to obtain a reversion becomes
a communication and action strategy (a socio-religious action strategy)
implemented by one system against another. The action is imagined as
the reconquest of a lost soul and celebrated with rites of purification. To
defend its boundaries, each system tends to describe its competitors as
the expression of falsity, impurity, the reign of darkness, as opposed to
its own, the one and only true and pure faith, the resplendent reign of
light (i.e., truth). The conversion-reversion processes thus act like pilot
lights, showing how difficult it is for the systems of belief to preside
over their territories and their sacred boundaries, since it has become
so easy for these boundaries to be overcome, as if they had become
porous and communicative, despite attempts made by each opposing sys-
tem to demonstrate that they, and only they, are bearers of the truth. By
dint of shouting at each other that their converts are perverts or that
they have renounced the light of the true faith, the representatives of
the various Indian religious denominations seem to be admitting that
their respective systems of belief are no longer able to control the pro-
duction of sense, since an individual’s freedom to choose the religion
 enzo pace

that suits his spiritual needs and his expectations of social justice have
evidently increased in their socio-religious setting. So the case of India
is telling us that a process is underway that is eroding “the principle of
religious revenue”: a system of belief that represents itself as the hori-
zon of sense, and that was taken for granted as part of the daily life
of an entire population, is being put to the test by these conversions,
which give us a measure (in the case discussed here) of a liquid reli-
giousness, to borrow a category dear to Bauman (), which precisely
translates the idea of a permeability of the system’s symbolic bound-
aries.

Becoming Pure Again in the

Habad Ultra-Orthodox Hebrew Movement

The second case study concerns Habad. The name is an acronym derived
from the first letters of the Hebrew words hochmah (wisdom), binah
(understanding), and da"at (knowledge). The movement began in a small
town in Belarus called Lubavitch, around the figure of the first rebbe, or
charismatic leader, Schneur Zalman, from Liadi (–). The move-
ment forms part of a larger network of Hasidic (hasidim, or ‘the pious’, in
Hebrew) communities (or courts), composed of a number of families.
Originally, these families traced their common descent from a charis-
matic leader who transmitted his extraordinary powers “through the
blood.” The leader of a Hasidic court is considered a mediator between
the “celestial court” and the “earthly” one. Thanks to his exceptional pow-
ers of sanctity, the leader is able to put the human community in commu-
nication with the world of the divine. At the same time, he has often been
seen as a spiritual master and healer, the community’s political leader and
the bearer of a special gift, the ability to perform miracles (mofsin) and
to ward off misfortune. Because of this concentration of extraordinary
powers, the Hasidic communities chose to call their leaders rebbe, rather
than use the traditional term of rabbi (Abramovitch and Galvin ,
Mintz , Ravitzky ).
The last Rebbe of the Habad movement was Menachem Mendel
Schneerson. His views form part of the Jewish Messianic school of
thought, which sees redemption as a public event that will occur in his-
tory and arise within the community of the pious who await the Messiah.
The community, therefore, is a sort of living laboratory from which the
face of the Messiah will emerge. The Messiah in question is Ben David, of
 convert, revert, pervert 

whom Schneerson often spoke as an eschatological but, at the same time,

real figure in whom all the new ideas of the Last Times will appear. This
concept not only helps strengthen the authority of the charismatic leader,
easily identifiable by his holiness and exemplary nature, with the Messiah
to come; it also represents a strong cohesive factor for the group, exalting
the special virtues of which he is the embodiment, the vanguard of the
central event in the messianic belief. This explains the particularly impor-
tant effects on organizational performances, both as regards the mission-
ary zeal guiding the movement’s collective action and the authority struc-
ture of the relationship between master and followers. If one is convinced
that the Messiah is “among us,” then the intense activity of proselytism,
which is not traditionally widespread in Judaism, can be justified. Fur-
thermore, if this conviction is continually enhanced by the process of
beatification or sanctification “on earth” of the figure of the charismatic
leader, conducted by the community and seconded by the leader, mes-
sianism becomes a symbolic resource with a strong organizational value
(Brodowicz , Ehrlich , Feldman ).
When Schneerson was appointed in  as the legitimate successor
to Yosef Yitzhak Schneerson, the sixth Rebbe, he said in his inaugural
speech that, “this generation will announce the Age of the Messiah, bring-
ing to an end the teshuvah, the penitence which pre-announces the com-
ing of the Messiah” (see the organization’s official Website www.chabad
.org). The decision he made on the occasion of the Six-Day War in 
to send spiritual assistants from the movement to the soldiers at the front
was based on a precise eschatological conviction. By so doing, in the
eyes of many ultra-orthodox Jews abroad, he rehabilitated the theolog-
ical legitimacy of the State of Israel, which many movements had pre-
viously considered an unholy, artificial creation. The argument he used
to persuade his followers was that, by winning the war, the holy bor-
ders of the Promised Land (Eretz Yisrael) would be fully restored and
that such an event would confirm the imminent arrival of the Messiah.
The wait for the Messiah was therefore linked to a series of practical, not
imaginary events (Gutwirth , Greilsammer ). From then on,
the Rebbe urged the movement to engage in an intensive campaign of
re-Judaization in the Brooklyn neighborhoods. He launched what came
to be known as mitzvah tanks, or “tanks of the commandments,” con-
sisting of groups of proselytizing missionaries in minibuses working the
streets of the metropolis. On his death in , the process of mourn-
ing among his followers proved long and complex for two main rea-
sons: in the first place, many believed (and still believe) that he was
 enzo pace

the Messiah—hence the problem of explaining his disappearance from

earth; second, there was the difficulty of finding a suitable successor (Pace
).
The Habad communities are utopian in character; they believe in the
practice of equality and fraternity, in contrast with a social and politi-
cal structure that they perceive as impious and unjust. The ideological
device—the firm belief in the imminent coming of the Messiah—does
not make them withdraw from the world. On the contrary, it mobilizes
human, material and organizational resources to transcend reality and
prefigure those times, when the world will no longer be as alien as it seems
today to the vanguard of the pure faith. This is how the followers of Habad
see themselves, unlike their religious brethren who, in their view, have
become secularized (Pace , Pace and Guolo ).
In , Yosef Yitzhak Schneerson, then head of the Habad commu-
nity, decided to create a small, self-sufficient village in Israel called Kfar
Habad, which grew from , inhabitants in  to approximately
, in . This prompted a considerable shift of opinion: the State of
Israel and Zionism had previously been considered unholy, but after the
 Yom Kippur War, Menachem said that Israel had the full (divine)
right to annex the occupied territories, according to the principle of
pikuach nefesh (Guolo ), which literally means “respect for life,” but
in the present context, it is the rabbinical expression of the essential duty
to save the life of a Jew when it is under threat, even if it means breaking
Judaic law.
The fact that the Habad movement came to believe that the seventh
Rebbe was the Messiah kept tension in the community high. It also
charged up the wait for imminent change in the social order, particu-
larly in Israel, the last frontier of the manifestation of the Messiah and, at
the same time, the wait for the building of the celestial Jerusalem. From
 onward, the messianic tension within the movement became more
pronounced and was expressed in ever more zealous forms. At the begin-
ning of , Habad launched a campaign in major American newspa-
pers to announce the coming of the Messiah. Meanwhile, they organized
the mass distribution of leaflets and stickers bearing the slogan, “We want
Messiah now, we don’t want to wait.” On June , , the New York Times
carried a Lubavitch advertisement that ran, “The mass return of Jews to
the land of Israel from the former Soviet Union and the defeat of Iraq after
the first Gulf War are unequivocal signs of the coming of the Messiah.” In
this climate, the followers of Habad consolidated their conviction that the
seventh Rebbe was actually the long-awaited Messiah. Schneerson never
 convert, revert, pervert 

really proclaimed himself as such, but he also did little to counter this
belief. In April , a group of Lubavitch rabbis made an authoritative
statement in which they identified the messianic traits of Rebbe Schneer-
son (Ravitzky : ), provoking criticism from within the movement
itself from other, more cautious rabbis who had misgivings about identi-
fying the figure of the Messiah with the head of the movement. Ten years
after the Rebbe’s death, the messianic belief is still very much alive. Its
missionary zeal provides ample proof of this: the movement has grown
by   in ten years and can boast approximately , missionaries in
 countries around the world.
Habad Messianism thus represents a sort of symbolic capital that has
accumulated thanks to the charismatic force of a leader who, in his
lifetime, became a cultural resource for the organization that has helped
make the Habad movement active and competitive in the contemporary
Jewish religious market. It is against this backdrop of a reawakening of the
observance of the precepts of the Torah and the refound Jewish identity
that we can understand the conversion policy fine-tuned by the Habad
movement. This is inspired by the conviction that the Messiah will arrive
when the last Jew returns to complying with all the divine precepts. This
means that militants of the movement consider Jews who have chosen to
live their religion of birth in a more secular manner as a hindrance, an
intolerable cause of delay in the Messiah’s return, the signs of which are
now unequivocal, according to Lubavitch’s followers (signs such as the
opportunity to re-establish the holy boundaries of the Promised Land in
Israel after the victorious Six-Day War of ).
Habad’s proselytism consequently focuses primarily on all those Jews
who no longer practice their religion or who have a purely cultural
relationship with the religion of their birth. A passerby might be asked,
“Excuse me, are you Jewish?” If they answer yes, they are invited to
climb into a camper van with a view to restoring them to the right
path. Jews who have become assimilated and secularized are the main
target in the battle conducted by these militants in their tanks. Such
military language is not used by accident and is not ours, but typical
of the missionary rhetoric of the Habad: their camper vans are spiritual
combat vehicles that can be converted into a mini synagogue every time
someone agrees to revert—wearing as a sign of purification the teffilin
(the phylactery, which indicate the refound link with the divinity and
with the community of the pure and the holy sons of Israel).
Jews who have become assimilated with the world are consequently
seen as people who have allowed themselves to be contaminated by the
 enzo pace

spirit of modernity. They have become impure. They no longer wear the
clothes of their forebears. They do not pray according to the ritual rules,
and they fail to follow the kashrut (strict diet), to respect the Sabbath, and
so on. The mitzvah tank, according to Schneerson, was a standard van; its
back door was rolled up, showing a cargo of one large wooden table, two
wooden benches, and a dozen young men with beards and black hats. A
poster taped to the sides of the moving van said “Teffilin on board” and
“Mitzvot On The Spot For People On The Go.” They are modern means,
or rather machines, where a cleansing ritual is celebrated for those who
have lost the true faith. From this point of view, they are like traveling
clinics, where zealous soul-doctors seek to convince all those who seem
Jewish to them, or have admitted to being Jewish, to “return home,” to
emerge from the perverse condition that failure to comply with the Holy
Commandments evokes in their eyes.
This time the battle is not conducted along boundaries separating
different systems of belief, but within one and the same system that has
experienced a process of wide diversification in the course of its historical
evolution, and especially in modern times, along an axis with people who
no longer believe, or whose way of life has become entirely secularized,
at one end and those who wish to observe all the precepts to the letter
at the other, with a variety of types of behavior and attitudes in between,
depending on the variable scale of intensity of their belief, their sense of
belonging, and their religious practices.

Conclusion

What we set out to demonstrate is that conversion can be studied from a

sociological standpoint, seeking not only to explain why a person decides
to change status as a believer, switching from one religion to another
or moving away from under its influence, but also to understand how
this takes place by monitoring the relationship between system of belief
and socio-religious environment. That is why we chose to observe the
conversion and reversion rituals that have developed in two particular
case studies, i.e., in the radical Hindu and Hebrew movements. This
analysis has shown that conversion and reversion are two terms that point
to a third—perversion—in a sort of semantic triangle that is effective
in metaphorically showing that conversion is a sociological object that
we can use to study the conflicts and tensions developing along the
symbolic boundaries between different systems of belief. This is basically
 convert, revert, pervert 

an empirically interesting way to measure the heuristic validity of systems

theory applied to the field of religion. From the point of view of a
system of religious belief, the conversion process is seen as a loss of sense
to the surrounding environment in general, and to another system in
particular. This loss is dominated by stigmatizing people who convert
and by transforming the loss into a renewed symbolic investment to
distinguish the system on offer as being capable of reconquering what
was lost. In this sense, it is not a matter of single individuals, but rather
of the total quantity of conversions that can be exhibited like trophies
after a good hunting session, breaking down the perversity that had cast
doubts over the staying power of the symbolic boundaries protecting a
system of religious belief.

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 chapter nine

CONVERSION AS A NEW LIFESTYLE:

AN EXPLORATORY STUDY OF SOKA GAKKAI IN ITALY

Luigi Berzano and Eliana Martoglio

Sociological interest in the phenomenon of religious conversion remains

quite high, above all in modern societies characterized by marked plu-
ralism. The phenomenon refers, on the one hand, to conversions to new
religious movements that have recently fragmented the religious land-
scape, on the other hand to the high religious mobility characteristic of
these societies and the consequent identification of believers in one or
another established religion with elements of new religions.
Today, forms of conversion involving less radical and final choices are
increasingly more frequent; due to the character of religious nomadism
and circularity they can be defined as conversion as a new lifestyle. They
do not any longer affect the religious identity of an individual—one’s pri-
mary ethnic belonging—but they reflect the identifications an individ-
ual may make with specific practices, beliefs or moral norms of another
religion, different from the one with which one historically identifies. In
this latter case, conversions regard the lifestyles of a person—the indi-
vidual, while not renouncing an original religion, adopts a lifestyle typ-
ical of another religion, sometimes even repeating this pattern for more
than one religion. The most frequent form of conversion—in particu-
lar regarding those religious movements that do not exclude multiple
belonging—is indeed the adoption of a lifestyle typical of a religion to
which one does not belong, different from one’s primary identity.
This chapter does not, therefore, analyze conversions as they have
been conceived in the historic period of the centrality of monotheistic
religions—the Christian, Hebrew, or Muslim religions. In that historic
phase, conversions involved the individual in radical choices and repre-
sented a turning point in the biography of a person. They regarded the
individual identity and prescribed the renunciation and cancellation of
the entire “cultural and symbolic capital” around which the person orga-
nized a previous religious biography.
From this point of view, Buddhism is a particularly representative case.
 luigi berzano and eliana martoglio

In the Italian context of the last twenty years, Buddhism has been one of
the fastest growing religious traditions. In this religious environment, it
appears that forms of religious identification not foreseeing the abandon-
ment of one’s primary religious identity have been increasingly spread-
ing. Therefore, “Catholics in Buddhism,” referring specifically to Soka
Gakkai, will be considered here as an exemplary case of conversion as a
new lifestyle. We will thus analyze, in actual cases, the practices through
which this type of conversion and consequent identification develop, and
the cognitive strategies utilized to place this identification inside a differ-
ent religious identity.1
This first section examines the notion of a post-secular society—a soci-
ety in which secularization has encouraged new religious and culturally
significant phenomena to manifest themselves because of their connec-
tions with the secularized world and religions. The second section rein-
troduces the classic four-cell typology of conversion: vertical conversion,
processual conversion, interactionist and horizontal conversion, coer-
cive conversion. In the third section, an additional type of conversion
is hypothesized: conversion as a new lifestyle. Finally, we report data col-
lected through field work conducted in the city of Torino (Turin) in 
by way of interviews and accounts of people converted to Soka Gakkai.2

Conversions in Post-Secular Society

The current condition of the contemporary Areopagus, which with its

pluralism and syncretism characterizes even religious systems, favors
new interest and interpretative hypotheses concerning the phenomenon
of religious conversions. This phenomenon differentiates itself more and
more because of the reasons that produce it, the social forms it takes on,
its duration, and the biographical involvement of converts. Today’s Are-
opagus is fostered by three major factors: the enfeeblement of religions
ascribed at birth, the failing conviction that there is one true religion, and
the current post-secular phase.

1 The text of the chapter as a whole is by Luigi Berzano, except for the detailed research

report, which is by Eliana Martoglio.

2 As of July , Soka Gakkai in Torino had , members: , women and ,

men. In Italy there are , members. Comparable data for the North American context
can be found in Coleman () and Geekie ().
 conversion as a new lifestyle 

The enfeeblement of religions received at birth and of ascribed cultural

and religious factors is transforming religions more and more into social
systems that are open, horizontal, and have movable boundaries. For
example, in Bosnia or Northern Ireland, where religion still represents
belonging to an ethnic group, this means that religion has taken on
characteristics and forms of national identity. In the past in Italy it would
have been considered strange or maybe deviant for a Catholic to convert
to Buddhism or Islam. Today, such a conversion no longer causes great
surprise. Belonging to an ethnic group and having a certain cultural and
historical background is even less necessarily identified with a traditional
religion.
Notwithstanding this, the declaration of being a Catholic as though
by inertia still holds its ground in Italy today, even though the faith-
ful are giving up specific beliefs and practices. It would appear that the
individual comes up against major problems and difficulties when aban-
doning an ascribed religious identity-belonging as opposed to abandon-
ing beliefs or religious practices. In addition, the principle of inertia of
belonging is also confirmed by the fact that a social identity tends to dis-
appear only when it is substituted by an other. In the present Italian con-
text an individual who declares that she belongs to a religion other than
Catholicism comes up against major cognitive dissonance compared to a
person who incorporates in different ways beliefs and practices of other
religions. Furthermore, it should be borne in mind that the inertia of reli-
gious belonging also depends on the specific nature of religious goods,
which are made up of knowledge, experience and emotions, and can
be considered a form of human capital. Since any religious change ren-
ders previous human capital largely null, an individual is very reluctant
to change religious affiliation. The current context of great freedom of
belief, experience and religious practices, in addition to ethical-moral
convictions, could be a prelude even to a change in belonging. This fact
is increasingly worrying historical churches, beginning with the Catholic
Church, which is the major religion in Italy.
In the case of immigrants in Italy, the prediction was only partly
true that after a phase of indifference toward religion, they would have
converted to their own ethnic religion of origin. Religious assimilation to
one’s own ethnic religion did not prove to be inevitable. This emphasis,
placed on the magnitude of the change rather than what is chosen, even
in religious activity, is such that the profile of the contemporary homo
religiosus is itself shown increasingly in the figure of the seeker, that is, one
who builds a religious identity with successive elements and choices. In
 luigi berzano and eliana martoglio

some cases it means practicing the religion to which one already belongs
more actively; in other cases the final result of the search is a more or less
exclusive following of a new religion.
The second factor that contributes to the phenomenon of new con-
versions is the enfeeblement of the conviction that one’s own religion
is the sole “true religion.” In a pluralistic society it is difficult to main-
tain the conviction that there is just one true religion and that all the
others are wrong. The dogmatic principle of Catholic theology—extra
ecclesiam nulla salus—is substituted by that of thousands of ways of sal-
vation to be followed through individual choices. The globalization of
science and technology has brought down the barriers of time and space
that separated individuals and have produced the condition, which Peter
Berger has defined as “urbanization of conscience” in our modern world:
all individuals are bombarded by multiplicities of communications and
information (see Berger, Berger and Kellner : ). In the future, the
Internet will intensify this horizontal dimension of society and religions,
thus creating a global and immediate culture that will enfeeble all tra-
ditional ties of faith and reciprocity. For religions the fall of their verti-
cal and hierarchical structure will mean a fall—in the area of reflected
thought—of a sole metaphysical thought in favor of processes of abstrac-
tion that will be led by the sciences and technologies.
In Italy, an indicator of the growing enfeeblement of the Catholic
faith as the sole point of reference for its followers is represented by
what has been described as: strong identity and enfeebled identification
by some research (Berzano, Genova and Pace ; Berzano and Zoc-
catelli ). Religious identity is the religious definition individuals give
of themselves so that they can speak of we/us as opposed to I/me. About
  of Italians still declare themselves to have a Catholic identity. To
date, therefore, the Catholic identity has held fast as if by the “law of
inertia,” almost as if the imprinting of primary socialization still has a
significant effect. On the other hand, among Italian Catholics strong
identification (upholding beliefs, practices and Catholic morals) occurs
among less than  . Identification means the influence of an indi-
vidual’s self-recognition in the developed collective Catholic entity on
choices, actions, and interests. Strong identification for most Catholics
means more and more a waiver of one’s own independence or “a luxury”
to which one cannot aspire. The context of growing religious supply can-
not but stimulate more attempts to experiment with successive and serial
identifications; it is in such contexts that processes of socialization start
up, leading to other religious universes. This datum, moreover, is partly
 conversion as a new lifestyle 

encouraged by the fact that many groups and religious movements do not
require an effective conversion, but often simply require a lifestyle that
does not exclude multiple religious belonging. Therefore, today, religious
contexts prevail, and the Italian one is no exception, in which religious
identities do not always consequently correspond to religious identifica-
tions. Identity and identification do not reproduce each other ascriptively
in the same way.
The analysis of today’s conversions cannot underestimate these two
aspects of differentiation between identity and identification. The for-
mer differentiation refers to the rise of religious pluralism and the mul-
tiplication of religious groups and associations available on the religious
market; the latter concerns the differentiation of practices, interests, and
styles of religious activity that the individual chooses among various reli-
gious organizations. On the basis of this double differentiation, it can
be said that the opportunities to develop new forms of identity and
identification have never been as many as they are in current societies.
The current religious condition therefore allows the individual to alter-
nate between developing identities and identifications in two directions:
either by broadening affinities and differences based on personal moti-
vations or, instead, by regressing toward elementary and fundamentalist
identities and identifications.
The third factor that triggers new sociological interest in the study
of conversion is the current age, which defines itself as post-secular.
Post-secular not in the sense that secularization processes are no longer
present, but in the sense, instead, that—paraphrasing Weber—due to a
linking of circumstances, they have led in the very field of disenchant-
ment and secularization to the manifestation of significant cultural phe-
nomena due to the connections between the secularized world and reli-
gions. The effects of secularization have not emptied religion of its reli-
gious experience, its history and its knowledge; they have simply trans-
formed links with the diversity of the secular world. In historical religions
the post-secular condition is that which is characterized by all the effects
of secularization, but also by the new spiritual resources and links that
living secularism generates.
This is the current picture of religious interests and of spiritual moods
together with their links with the post-secular age: a reassessment of
experiences of the sacred, the rebirth of multiple forms of religion, a
demand for spirituality and ethical needs addressed to religious expe-
rience but not always automatically derivable from rationality, new spir-
itual bents for religious knowledge, and an ever-increasing differentia-
 luigi berzano and eliana martoglio

tion of spiritual forms. We are talking of religious interests and spiritual

attitudes connected to the social and cultural conditions of our age, of
the post-secular effects that are no longer those of the age when secu-
larism commenced. Post-secular religion—i.e., embodying acting, inten-
tionality, and the need to recompose identity—manifests itself in two
main directions. () A fundamental anthropological condition, which
Weber (: ) defined as the “feeling of unimaginable inner loneliness
of the solitary individual” connected to the great historical-religious pro-
cess of the disenchantment of the world—beginning with ancient Jewish
prophecy that, together with Greek scientific thought, rejected all magi-
cal means in the search for salvation as being superstition and impiety. ()
A multiplicity of situations involving morals and ethics (genetic manipu-
lation, sexuality, disease, environment, ethnic differences, etc.), social life
(predominance of the individual and egoistic ego), politics (the separa-
tion between morals and politics), and the economy (autonomy of mate-
rial, consumer interests).
Significantly, it is actually in the post-secular condition that we see
an increase in the forms of non-exclusive, non-definitive, and never-
final conversions, almost as if individuals felt the constant need to re-
invest symbolically in new forms of spirituality. In fact, secularism has
de-institutionalized many parts of traditional religious systems and has
increased freedom and individual choice. This phenomenon of religious
nomadism, i.e., of circular and temporary conversions, recalls radical
theories such as that of Marcel Gauchet concerning religious presence
even after the disappearance of religions. According to this French polit-
ical scientist, the world shows its alterity when the gods abandon it (:
–). It is in such a context that a profound imaginativeness of what
is real, which in the past was the anthropological support of religions,
starts to work of its own accord, independently of the ancient beliefs that
once directed it.

Conversion: Theories and Types

In Western society religious conversions have been considered sudden

and radical changes in the biography of an individual. They used to hap-
pen because of the perceived intervention of a force and of a presence
from on high. The convert was asked to adhere wholly to the new reli-
gion and likewise renounce the former religion (i.e., through apostasy
and disaffiliation). Thus, they were vertical, exclusive conversions that
 conversion as a new lifestyle 

brought about a radical change in the biography of the convert. William

James (: –) spoke of them as births into a new life, similar
to the adolescent’s development. Along with renouncing the former reli-
gious affiliation, the convert had to be removed from previous systems of
social relations and lifestyles. These conversions meant a radical turning
point, often sudden and marked by forces, voices, and mysterious pres-
ences. Often, converts experienced prolonged and acute periods of ten-
sion and biographical failures in their affective, working, educational or
cultural life before conversion. Following conversion, the convert could
speak of one period “before” and of a distinct one “after.” “Before” was
a non-authentic and insignificant phase, while “after” was the time of
enlightenment and perfection of life.
The ideal type of traditional conversion is that of Saint Paul, as de-
scribed in the Acts of the Apostles (: –). While the apostle Saul was
on the way to Damascus to persecute Christians a light from heaven
suddenly shone about him then threw him from horseback, blinded him,
and spoke. The voice told him to go to Damascus where, three days later,
Paul was healed and baptized by a pious Christian. Hence from that day
Saul became Paul, a tireless preacher of the gospel. In his conversion
we see almost a Weberian ideal type: a sudden and individual event, a
dramatic choice, total affective involvement, a definite turning point in
the biography. In these terms, conversion has usually been considered
an extraordinary and rare event. The rituals that go with the conversion
are real rites of passage to a new life. The convert is easily identifiable
because of the clear transformations of belief, value, coherence, attitude,
and action.
Today, the sociology of conversions is much richer in models and
empirical data. In addition to the factors already described, recent socio-
logical theories concerning interaction and rational choice have enriched
such interpretative models. There are four types of conversion: vertical,
processual, interactionist/horizontal, and forced. This chapter will add a
fifth type: conversion as a lifestyle.

Vertical Conversion
According to Gerardus Van der Leeuw (: –), vertical conver-
sion is a type of conversion in all religions, where there is a second ego that
rises beside the first ego; everything is transformed and a new life com-
mences. The fundamental experience is the same for all converts: new
potential enters life and the convert feels completely different. Life has a
 luigi berzano and eliana martoglio

new foundation and starts again. At the beginning of this type of con-
version there is a sort of ecstasy or theophany that totally consumes the
convert. Historically these conversions have accompanied great move-
ments or “awakenings.”
Converts recount this type of conversion as a narrative of a transfor-
mation from an initial to a final state, mediated by a turning point that
represents the crucial event around which the whole story is built. The
convert reinterprets past events and characters on the basis of the ideol-
ogy of the new group and of its value system. In recounting the experi-
ence, the convert provides two interpretations: a negative one concerning
the past and a positive one concerning the present. The past before con-
version is described as something that had to be overcome. The convert
finds the positive premises in the actual negative ones of the past, and
this is where the conversion begins. By highlighting this discontinuity
with the past, even the identity of the convert represents a rebirth that
solves all problems.
In converts’ accounts of their turning point there is always a move from
a reference-language function to a constitutive one. In the former, the
convert recalls meanings, values and beliefs (the doctrinal system) shared
by the group to which conversion was made. However, in this phase
there is a repertoire of semi-propositional elements that are not clearly
defined.3 The constitutive function of language occurs when the subject
acknowledges the new doctrinal system and takes possession of it. Insofar
as the convert internalizes the newly shared beliefs and values, the group
is enriched with the production of progressive narratives concerning the
change.

Processual Conversion
Processual conversion is a gradual religious transformation both of the
religious identity of an individual and of one’s everyday identification
with the new religion. The gradualness of such a process is character-
ized in the subsequent phases through which the convert acquires the
knowledge, motivation, attitudes, and practices needed to live with the
new religious and relational world to which she or he aspires to belong.

3 According to Sperber (), an individual’s semi-propositional beliefs are charac-

terized by an undetermined content and are not supported by empirical data. This does
not mean they are irrational: they are assumed rationally if there are rational grounds to
trust the source of the beliefs.
 conversion as a new lifestyle 

Processual conversion is thus a temporal and sequential process in the

biography of an individual, through which one moves from identification
with one sociocultural religious system of beliefs, practices, and attitudes
to a subsequent identification with a new sociocultural religious system.
Despite the character of gradual spiritual transformation, the indi-
vidual involved in it detects an identity change that is considered and
described as having a “before” and “after” in one’s own biography, at
times stressing the sudden character of such change more than what was
actually experienced. Processual conversions follow some characteris-
tic stages that may correspond to particular ideal-typical sequences. The
phases are as follows: crisis (a phase of uncertainty in existential, social
and cognitive references), research and trial (attempts to find a solution
to the problems caused by the situation of crisis), meeting (contacting
the religious group with which to become affiliated), stability (a period
to acquire beliefs and become familiar with the members of the group),
maturity (taking on official roles that will lead the neophyte to active
involvement in favor of the group).4
The converts speak about their pathways to faith by building a narra-
tive that is above all a story of “change.” These stories presuppose a change
and transition in the subject’s biography from an initial state (before) to
a final state, mediated by a turning point that represents the crucial event
around which the whole narrative is built. The accounts of conversions fit
into a progressive narrative genre because the change leads to a current
state that the convert considers better than the starting point: the suc-
cession of events in time also represents an improvement in values. On
the level of discourse, the accounts of conversion may be described as
narratives where the protagonist, subsequently to the encounter with the
new religious affiliation group, undergoes changes in attitude and world
view. By changing the narrative viewpoint that tends to coincide with the
group’s, the convert uses expressive vocabulary that is legitimized by that
group (Pannofino ).

Interactionist and Horizontal Conversion

Much research has identified a basis of conversion processes in relations
with friends and acquaintances. This is a type of conversion in which
conversions occur through horizontal means and on the basis of rela-

4 Some authors (e.g., Dawson :–) refer to this biographical process as the

transition from the condition of passive to active convert.

 luigi berzano and eliana martoglio

tions and interactions with individuals and groups with whom one lives.
Conversions occur from social events and social networks that are built
on the basis of proximity and working and living together. In particu-
lar in post-secular societies where the two pillars of traditional religious
identity (ascribed religion and the only true religion) have become fee-
ble, religions, too, are constituted more and more as horizontal social sys-
tems.
Lofland and Stark () propose a seven-stage model, Wilson and
Dobbelaere () a four-stage one, and Mara Einstein () a “rela-
tionship marketing” one, all of which include features unique to the cases
and interactionist features. Lofland and Stark’s model is based on inter-
views with a group of converted “Moonies,” one of the early communities
of the growing movement of Reverend Moon’s Unification Church in the
United States. This model is constituted by seven factors that slowly lead
the individual to become, first a convert in words and then a total convert.
These converts begin as followers who profess a faith and are accepted
by members of the core group as sincere, but do not have an active role
in the movement. Total converts show their involvement through words
and actions. According to the Lofland/Stark conversion model, a person
must () experience enduring and acutely-felt tensions, () within a reli-
gious problem-solving perspective, () which results in self-designation
as a religious seeker, and the prospective convert must () encounter the
movement or cult at a turning point in life, () wherein an affective bond
is formed with one or more converts, () where extra-cult attachments
are absent or neutralized, and () where the convert is exposed to inten-
sive interaction to become an active and dependable adherent. Each of
the seven steps is required, but only the sum of them leads to a true—
that is, total—conversion.
Wilson and Dobbelaere’s model, which includes four phases already
described by Remy and Hiernaux (), is significant because it inter-
prets the Soka Gakkai-like conversion process in Great Britain not as a
search for religious meaning but as a solution to the problems of one’s
daily life. Only after conversion does the convert with perseverance in the
new religion move on from daily problems to search and conquer bud-
dhity, that is, “inner light,” which is defined as a condition of profound
and total happiness. The most important object of the cult, the gohonzon,
is bestowed to the convert only in this phase. As for the factors that trig-
ger conversion, Wilson and Dobbelaere (: ) report the importance
of social networks and affective bonds:   came to know the move-
ment thanks to social interaction. Of these, the majority ( ) were
 conversion as a new lifestyle 

through “pre-existing extra-movement ties”—that is, through friends

( ), partners or family members ( ), or acquaintances, work and
student colleagues ( ).
Mara Einstein’s model applies the relationship marketing diagram to
religious conversion. In the last few decades, the conversion process
has been applied to consumer products. Einstein does the opposite,
applying consumer dynamics to those of religious conversions. So there
are similarities with brand communities and new religious movements,
the processes of brand fidelity (cult branding) with those which make one
identify with a new religion, the “brandfests” with religious celebrations
and rituals, the moral responsibility of consumers to the same brand
(keep the faith) with the missionary spirit of a convert to a new religion.
Einstein describes five steps in the conversion process: () informal pre-
affiliation, () formal affiliation, () conversion, () confession, and ()
active involvement with the group, spiritual awareness. Converts become
aware of their own spiritual need only in the final phase of spiritual
awareness. At this stage the new member can say “I am converted.” Strong
identity and strong identification bond them definitively to the group.
“Wholly absorbed in the beliefs, rituals and myths of the institution and
regularly taking part in services and other activities, the new follower
is so emotionally involved in his new religious convictions to want to
communicate them to others, thus becoming a missionary or evangelist
of that systems of beliefs” (Einstein : ).

Forced Conversion
According to the model of mental manipulation (“brainwashing”) con-
version would occur in the case of individuals affected by serious psycho-
logical problems, or where groups would attract followers into confined
communities and exert pressure, threats, or even physical abuse against
them. The literature concerning coercive conversions goes beyond the
purely phenomenological interest of this chapter, to deal with the reasons
and mechanisms of conversion above all, and possible physical abuse
to the subjects involved. An exemplary example of coercive conversion
might be that of suicide terrorists. However Iannaccone and Introvi-
gne () conducted research on the membership of new movements
and religious groups involved in terrorist actions or suicides. On the
basis of the data of this research, they concluded that it is not the well-
known brainwashing factor (nor even poverty or social exclusion) that
explains forced conversions, but instead a set of personal relations. Con-
 luigi berzano and eliana martoglio

version processes in such groups largely occur based on social interac-

tion between the convert and members of the group. Proselytism itself is
a process that involves reiterated social interactions, and converts fully
and voluntarily take part in their own conversion.

Conversion as a New Lifestyle

Our research sets out from the hypothesis that in the post-secular age,
due to the effect of the dimensions of nomadism, experimentation, and
circularity, conversions are always more characterized by the social form
we define as lifestyle. A lifestyle is a set of practices to which the individ-
ual attributes a unitary sense, which is a distinctive model shared within a
collective group or subculture, without having its generative element either
in a pre-existing cognitive-value framework or in a predetermined socio-
structural condition. This definition goes beyond that given by sociologi-
cal tradition, according to which lifestyles are always related to a standing
(economic level, social position, status, reputation) or a cognitive value
system such as religion. Our interest in this definition is to see whether an
individual can build a horizontal lifestyle through interaction with other
individuals and groups, hence may consider it as a life plan in which one
can place one’s own individuality, interests, sensitivity. Let us examine the
four factors of this definition:
. Practice means regular social activities carried out by a person or
group of persons in their daily lives; although these activities do not
derive constantly from an explicitly reflective process, they depend
on an individual choice, and in the eyes of the individual who is
acting, they are charged with a particular meaning (Ansart :
). Practice may concern religion, work, culture, and politics. A
lifestyle is a set of practices that pertains to various fields. Catholics
who have contacts with members of Soka Gakkai may acquire
“manners,” roles, symbols of Soka Gakkai that are akin to other
of their own practices but without converting wholly to the new
religion.
. The individual attributes a unitary sense to a set of practices. The
sense is not referred solely to the expressive content transmitted
by each practice, but it refers to the interpretation that the same
individual attributes to all the practices that make up the lifestyle.
The fact of attributing a unitary sense to a lifestyle does not mean
connecting it back to prior values or opinions outside it; rather, one
 conversion as a new lifestyle 

relates to it not as an aggregate of distinct factors but as an organic

cultural form. With such a unitary sense, the multiple practices
considered as a whole can be read through the same interpretative
model, within which each one may acquire the full meaning. For
instance, a pacifist, ecologist, vegetarian Buddhist considers such a
lifestyle unitary even though the practices that form it have different
origins and unlike areas of application.
. The unitary sense attributed by the individual to such practices
taken together becomes a distinctive model shared by a group, sub-
culture, or spirituality. Even though each individual develops a per-
sonal lifestyle and finds in it a unitary sense, we can speak of a
“lifestyle” only where it is possible to find shared practices and a
unitary meaning defined by a collective group.5 A spirituality could
be considered a lifestyle that brings together individuals who share
common practices, even though they come from different cognitive
universes (religions).
. A lifestyle does not have its generative factor either in a pre-existing
cognitive-value framework (e.g., a religion) or in a predetermined
sociostructural condition. Therefore, on the one hand, we cannot
consider lifestyles as precipitates on the level of practices of a frame-
work of values and knowledge, that is to say, a framework of notions
concerning being and having to be. On the other hand, we cannot
consider lifestyles as cultural expressions of an individual’s stand-
ing. Standing can most certainly influence the development of a
lifestyle, above all in the form of a framework of possibilities and
opportunities, but it cannot represent the generative factor. This
therefore means that overall the sense of lifestyle, as with its base,
cannot be sought outside of it, but emerges instead as essentially
endogenous.
How does a conversion form as a new lifestyle? Both a generative and
a constitutive process must be considered. In the generative process the
development of a conversion as a new lifestyle, on the one hand, is based
on the personal sensitivity of an individual and on the attribution of
personal meaning to a framework of spontaneously chosen practices;
on the other, it develops in relation to cultural models that characterize

5 Thus Reimer (:) says that “the analysis of lifestyles therefore should show

similarities and differences between groups of individuals rather than similarities and
differences between individuals.”
 luigi berzano and eliana martoglio

other lifestyles that are identified as significant (due to proximity or sep-

aration) and possibly a cultural model identified as mainstream. In the
constitutive process, a conversion as a lifestyle takes shape on the one
hand as a form of a condensation of a framework of personal sensitiv-
ity in a set of reciprocally connected practices and on the other hand as
a form of communication of such a sensitivity through such practices.
Therefore, a conversion as a lifestyle appears as a sociocultural configu-
ration that is always at the same time “for oneself ” and “for others,” and
thus simultaneously as connected to the individual as to the social con-
text, and therefore characterized by both.
The definition given and its application to the phenomenon of conver-
sion derives from the recognition that in contemporary societies the rela-
tions between standing and lifestyle, and between religion and lifestyle,
are loosening. A number of groups without a fixed status, in which the
individual makes a personal lifestyle an immediate life plan in which to
place one’s own individuality in appearance, partying, attire, and physical
bearing, is growing—and this includes religious groups. Even as regards
religious activities, the individual, rather than adopt a lifestyle that is
totally dependent on the cognitive value system of a religion, builds it
through tentative individual and experimental choices.

The Research Plan

We chose to conduct a field study with the Soka Gakkai in Torino, given
the particularly hybrid nature of this Buddhist movement. It is in fact
secular and completely integrated with advanced modern society. It is
missionary in using one sole text of Buddha’s teachings, the Lotus Sutra. It
proposes a gradual conversion to its followers. It has a strong community
spirit. The aim of the research was to establish: () whether the method of
conversion is interactionist, horizontal, and/or the result of a process—
i.e., how much interpersonal relations count and whether the conversion
is sudden or the result of a process; () to what extent the converts
sought a new spiritual experience to solve their daily problems rather
than exclusive and irreversible adherence to a religion; () to what extent
they wished to try practices, i.e., a new lifestyle, rather than follow an
organized set of beliefs and moral obligations.
Our considerations and the tables reported are based on  interviews
and  life histories of the followers of the Soka Gakkai in Torino, inter-
viewed in  and . There were  women and  men, aged 
 conversion as a new lifestyle 

to .6 The  interviews were based on about  questions concern-

ing the presence in the interviewee of the attitude of a seeker, how the
person became acquainted with the practice, the conversion process, the
reasons for joining Soka Gakkai and the reasons for staying, the religion
with which the interviewee identified to ascertain possible dual belong-
ing, the activities and the degree of inclusion in the organization; besides
these, we examined various elements that distinguished followers in their
activity, choices or other factors. Nine other converts related their life sto-
ries focusing on their experience of and in Soka Gakkai with little input
on the part of the interviewer. The topics raised were again: how they
came to know Soka Gakkai, the reasons for joining and the presence or
absence of a crisis at the moment of conversion, whether the attitude of a
seeker was present, the start of the practice and its inclusion in everyday
life, participation in the group, the meaning attributed to the Gohonzon.
The level of education of our sample is very high with respect to
Turins population: the great majority have at least a high school diploma,
almost one third have a university degree. This is similar to Wilson and
Dobbelaere’s finding in the UK that Soka Gakkai converts tend to be
more educated than the general population. In our sample many are
clerks and workers or professionals and shopkeepers. The large number
of retirees/housewives is to be attributed to the fact that many of the
women interviewed are over .

Ways of Conversion

“I would like to know how you came to know Soka Gakkai. When and
how did you join? What was your course?” As Table  shows, almost
all the interviewees replied that they had learned about Soka Gakkai
mainly through friends, then relatives or acquaintances. Among acquain-
tances, there are, for instance, co-workers, neighbors, and a teacher.
There is a difference as far as the person who does shakubuku, (intro-
duces one to Soka Gakkai Buddhism): women were mostly introduced
by friends, while for men, it was with the same frequency for a friend as
a relative/partner. Neo-converts related during interviews how they got
involved through a person they trusted.

6 The extracts quoted are from both the interviews and life histories, without dis-

crimination between the two data sources. The nine life stories were collected by Nicola
Pannofino ().
 luigi berzano and eliana martoglio

A friend had joined the organization about two years before. She often
spoke to me about Buddhism. Out of interest I asked if I could attend a
meeting. It was in October , and I have never stopped attending since.
(S)
A good friend told me, someone who is very dear to me and still is. She
spoke to me in a difficult moment of my life; I was going through a hard
time on all counts and she spoke to me about Buddhism because she had
learned about it from her sister, who is also a close friend of mine . . . . I
have known her since I was . . . six years old, and so we grew up together.
We were in elementary and middle school, and so I trusted her. (S)

At times more than one family member is involved, often a sister, brother,
mother, daughter or partner convert because they see the change in their
loved one; or either the neo-convert manages to convince someone to try
the practice with insistence.
My sister started to practice after one year, and she told me it was because
she had seen the change in me and that made me happy. (S)
My daughter introduced me to SG, she would say: “I’m going to the
Buddhist meeting,” and I thought it was those chanting Hare Krishna
whom I had seen once in Florence. I thought “My daughter has gone
crazy!” And then I saw her at home chanting this mantra. Then she said:
“Why don’t you come to the meeting?” and I went because I have always
had great trust in my children and so I thought if she was asking me . . . I
went a little—so to speak—taken by the hand, led, right? (S)
My girlfriend [ . . .] when she saw I was practicing she came along as well.
Now she practices every day. (S)
My girlfriend told me about this practice. We have been engaged for over
six years. She started telling me about the practice when we got engaged. At
the start this thing sort of—I won’t say bothered me—but I said to myself:
“It’s her business, these things have nothing to do with me.” In fact, the
more she tried to talk me into it, the more it bothered me. I’d say: “Forget
it!” (S)

Sometimes the conversion process is started together. Two sisters were

introduced by a friend or a mother and daughter by the daughter’s
teacher.
My daughter was in high school. She was going through a rough time, we
had moved house . . .. [I]t had upset her, to tell the truth she was quite
depressed. And one day . . . her teacher spoke to her about Buddhism. She
was still under age at the time, and so [the teacher] said that if she wanted
to attend meetings she needed to speak with us parents and we had to
authorize it. So she told me about this, and we decided to go and see the
teacher at her home to talk about it, generally. She explained to us what this
 conversion as a new lifestyle 

Buddhism was like, how it worked, the fundamental things. And then we
decided to take part in the first meeting, which was at her house, with her
father’s consent of course . . .. Following the first meeting I started to take
an interest in it, too, and then we went some of the way together. We used
to attend the fortnightly meetings, and at home we tried to pray together,
helping each other, that is to say when one, say, didn’t [feel like it] then
the other would encourage her a little [ . . . ] Anyway it was a novelty for us
both. (S)
Only in one case out of thirty-five interviewees did the encounter with
Soka Gakkai not occur through social networks but was triggered by
happenstance:
It was pretty strange because I went to a fortune-teller. I was curious
because it was a very difficult time in my life, I couldn’t find answers to
questions I had put to myself, and I met this person in a shop. I went
to see her. This person read my cards. She told me some very general
things, and then she said: “If you really want to change your life, recite this
sentence” and she wrote it for me on a piece of paper, she actually wrote
the pronunciation. (S)
We must notice the difference here with Wilson and Dobbelaere’s
research conducted in the early s in Great Britain concerning the
go-between of conversion. In that research,   of the people learned
about Soka Gakkai through such things as the media, an exhibition, a
concert, or letters, while another   by chance encounters (:).
In our case almost everyone started practicing upon the advice of people
well known to them; there is only one case of a chance meeting, and even
it involved an interpersonal interaction. There are also significant differ-
ences concerning the person who does shakubuku (a friend, relative or
acquaintance), if the years of practice are taken into account. In Table 
it can be seen that neo-converts (from  months to five years of prac-
tice) learned about Soka Gakkai mainly through relatives or co-workers;
for those who have between six and ten years practice, the go-between
is with the same frequency a friend or a relative/partner; for those who
have more than ten years of practice, the go-between was more often a
friend. These data may shed some light on how the social network that
leads to conversion changes in time.
 luigi berzano and eliana martoglio

Table .. Who Attracted New Members?

W (n = ) M (n = ) Total (n = )
Friend   
Relative/partner   
Acquaintance   (co-workers) 
Casual acquaintance   

The interviewees claimed that they attended a meeting or they started

practicing spurred on by the person who had done shakubuku. The
practice was initially sporadic but then became daily; in one case it was
erratic for about ten years. Once the decision was taken to follow this
course, only a few stopped reciting the daimoku because of work or
“laziness” in practicing, but soon resumed. People practice, particularly
at the start, after having set an objective.
The whole set-up really got to me. After all, I had been a Waldensian. The
Waldensian liturgy is very austere, isn’t it? The candles, the incense, these
people with a sort of rosary beads, kneeling in front of a parchment made
me think they were all mad. Because they also said: “If you recite Nam-
myōhō-renge-kyō you’ll be happy.” I said to myself: “Help, they’re all crazy.”
But then . . . I would hear wonderful stories, and this intrigued me and
made me approach SG. Then I started practicing because the fact that there
were people who spoke of such profound and beautiful experiences—
people who had really serious problems and managed to solve them and
come to terms with them thanks to the practice—stirred my interest, after
all we all have problems . . . So I started reciting and set myself a target as
they had told me. . . . It worked, so here I am. (S)
When asked if they practiced some religion before conversion or had
been brought up in a religion, two-thirds of the interviewees said they
had been brought up Catholic or at least had been baptized (see Table
.). Half the interviewees considered themselves practicing Catholics
when they were introduced to Buddhism; the others had already given
up their faith many years earlier. The rest of the interviewees of Christian
heritage had a Waldensian background. Two were brought up Soka
Gakkai because their parents were followers, while the remainder had
not received any religious training. Therefore, not only are those who do
not have a religion with which to identify attracted to the practice, but
even those who declare they did have a specific identification.
 conversion as a new lifestyle 

Table .. Interviewees’ Religious Backgrounds

Religious background W (n = ) M (n = ) Total (n = )
Practicing Catholic   
Catholic, then agnostic   
Practicing Waldensian or   
Waldensian background
nd generation Soka Gakkai   
No religious background   

A little less than one-third of the interviewees appear to have had a

conflicted conversion—due to their belonging to either the Catholic or
Waldensian churches, or because of family opposition, or due to prob-
lems related to their personality or life. Catholics speak of a sense of guilt
(as they do in Wilson and Dobbelaere’s research). As far as other reli-
gious backgrounds are concerned, only the practicing Waldensian had
trouble with conversion. The majority of the interviewees did not, since
their belonging to Catholicism or Protestantism was very superficial or
they had separated themselves previously.
I always thought I was at fault, I was brought up with this Catholic sense of
guilt . . . I had a terrible accident . . . and I immediately thought it was God
punishing me because I wanted to try a different religion, and this was the
punishment. (S)
I was a Waldensian . . . I said my prayers regularly every night. At fifteen,
sixteen, seventeen years of age I went to church to read. I was a believer,
that is, I thought there was something that could help me. So in the early
months, after my conversion to Buddhism, I was a little troubled. I would
say: “Is it right? Isn’t it right?” But then the doubt disappeared quickly.
(S)
Initially, some of the people were ashamed to speak of their practice to
family, friends, or co-workers; although they did not meet any particu-
larly hostile reactions. But the practice may trigger serious opposition on
the part of family members.
The first time I recited at home it was six in the morning, and to be sure
my wife wouldn’t see me I went . . . into the former stable, which is now a
storeroom, and that’s where I recited, I was almost ashamed. (S)
I had lots of trouble, above all connected with my family, who were
absolutely against it. I live with my mother and sister . . . . My mother
took it really badly, very badly, as if I had betrayed her. With respect
to our family, which had been practicing in the Christian tradition, she
saw my conversion like a real betrayal. Slowly I got her to understand it
was good for my life. I wasn’t harming anybody. It wasn’t going to cause
 luigi berzano and eliana martoglio

problems. She is slowly getting used to it. She’s still not happy when I say:
“It’s Thursday, I’m going to the meeting . . ..” She’s not happy, but there’s no
longer that distressing anger. It was real rage at the start. (S)
Our study hypothesized that joining Soka Gakkai was the result of a pro-
cess rather than immediate conversion, which in fact proved to be the
most frequent course. Usually our interviewees acquired practices that
gradually became part of their daily lives. Theoretical study was under-
taken only later through workshops or courses in Italy and abroad. How-
ever, occasionally there was strong identification concerning Buddhist
philosophy or belief from the very start.
My conversion started because I was finally getting the answers I hadn’t
found previously. . . . [I]t was like . . . putting on some comfortable shoes
that fit perfectly, that’s what Buddhism was like for me . . . I keep on saying
it’s like you had a question in life to answer, you feel like you are in the
wrong place, at a certain stage someone arrives who says. “This is the
answer” and it’s just perfect, there’s no other answer. That’s what I feel. (S)
The Buddhist principles seemed to belong to me, I felt them deep down,
at last ideas and language which suit my way of life. That was the trigger.
(S)
This philosophy is . . . like a made-to-measure dress. In fact when I
approached this Buddhism, I read a book entitled “Buddhist philosophy”,
I thought that if I had had such clear ideas I could have written it myself, I
mean it was exactly my way of interpreting life. (S)
Just over half of the interviewees appear to have had a period of seeking
before they met up with Soka Gakkai Buddhism. For example, either
they had shown interest in white magic and astrology or had undertaken
spiritual or religious readings, or they had practiced yoga, reiki and
martial arts (judo, kungfu), or Japan and the Far East appealed to them.
Others had followed a psychological track.
I have always believed . . . er . . . believed in the universe, the planets, the
influence of the planets on man. So I looked into it a little, therefore white
magic and cards, yes, card reading and stones . . . I didn’t just read my
horoscope in magazines, I actually studied zodiac signs, planet matching,
that sort of thing . . . I love Japan, manga already appealed to me . . . My
boyfriend was studying Japanese, that is we were really getting into this
thing on Japan . . . Initially I went because I was curious, because they took
their shoes off and did these Japanese things. (S)
I have always been a seeker, and I got into white magic; I did solstice and
equinox rites . . . I did some research on Buddhism which I had learned
about through reading Hermann Hesse, who is one of my favorite writers.
(S)
 conversion as a new lifestyle 

I have always been attracted by these oriental things, philosophies of life,

relaxation techniques. (S)
I spent a week in a Theravada Buddhist monastery in Rieti and now
I should go, because it appeals to me, to do martial arts in a Shaolin
monastery in Vicenza one weekend. Before I started high school, I was into
esoteric doctrines—magic and the like, reading tarot cards, esotericism
and crystal gazing. (S)
I must say I have always been attracted by oriental religions. As a child I
did yoga on my own, I did judo for a number of years. I also did a bit of
Kungfu . . . I dare say in some other life—we believe in previous lives—I
probably lived in some eastern country because when I see oriental things
they always appeal to me. (S)
Two thirds of the interviewees claim they became acquainted with SG
Buddhism when they were going through a crisis: due to a serious illness,
an accident, sentimental or financial problems, or even an existential
crisis or depression. Others were introduced by a friend, relative or an
acquaintance because they were curious.
I was breaking up—actually I was in the middle of a very painful separa-
tion. I was really broken when it ended . . . I was hurting. It hurt to face
life . . . A friend who had known me for years, who saw I was so low, one
day said to me: “Anna, I don’t know what else to say, you are so depressed!
Look, they have spoken very highly of a—these people who practice Bud-
dhism and recite this,” and she wrote this phrase on a piece of paper, “Nam-
myōhō-renge-kyō.” Once I was asked to their home to recite. They feel
well. I have seen people whom I knew before they practiced, and they have
changed so much for the better they’re unrecognizable. “Try it.” I didn’t
know what else to do. My husband had left; I had a teenage daughter who
felt as betrayed as I did. On top of how I was feeling I had to look after her.
It was like being in jail. I didn’t know how to get out. (S)
Let’s say it was a very difficult time. At the time I practically never left
the house. I was a teenager, full of fears, lots of family problems . . . My
parents had separated. My father was drinking heavily, a difficult family
scene. There was no money, so I couldn’t go to school . . . I was eighteen,
and I was going through a bad time. I was afraid of the dark, it terrified me.
The dark. It might have been winter: at six o’clock in the afternoon it was
already dark. I was afraid of being on my own. It was a real phobia. That’s
what pushed me. (S)
Except for one case, all the interviewees have practiced for three or more
years and to the question, “What is your religion?” they all answered Soka
Gakkai Buddhists, no one claimed a dual religious belonging. However,
the accounts usually reveal a period of approaching which lasts months
or even a few years. The only interviewee who after four months practice
 luigi berzano and eliana martoglio

claimed he was a Buddhist, revealed he had been in Buddhist circles

before he was introduced to Soka Gakkai: I had already tried other
types of Buddhism, above all for personal study, and other religions. The
ideology and the techniques appealed to me very much . . . and I decided
to continue attending” the Soka Gakkai meetings. (S)
Some of the survey questions were posed to gauge if there had been
any changes in lifestyle after conversion: changes concerning general
commodity consumption in the field of clothing, cultural activities, or
entertainment or political opinions. The replies reveal few changes from
the outside. Obviously, people read more because they are seeking more
knowledge of Buddhist thought. One interviewee explained that she
gained more self-esteem and so took more pride in herself and there-
fore started to dress better. Another went on to say that time manage-
ment changed. Practically all the interviewees claimed that something
happened to distinguish them from other people: be it values, a mental
attitude, or special qualities. For instance, they claim they share “a great
ideal for peace” or “we look happier,” or it is “the desire to be happy, to
improve one’s life and the environment, courage, selflessness, compas-
sion, generosity, the ability to listen.” They all say that a major change
happened in their lives, above all from the psychological point of view.
I don’t like wasting time anymore. I mean, before I wasted lots of time
doing nothing . . . while now, I take time off to relax, but I realize that time
is very important and it is important that I use it well. Practicing has taught
me that each instant of life is valuable, and so if we waste time it is like
denying the value of that instant. (S)
I am much calmer and balanced now. Once I was more instinctive. I
reacted impulsively, at times I was aggressive . . . whereas now [there is]
this balance, this appreciating life, and appreciating the life of others, too,
learning about the beauty in other people. (S)
Psychologically I feel much better. I feel that things, problems, and diffi-
culties don’t scare me anymore. I am confident that I can overcome them
or at least face them. I feel there are people around me whom I can count
on or whom I can call and they’re there. I feel protected to a certain extent
by the group, and I feel I still have drive to do things . . . I don’t take things
for granted and feel I’m done, I still feel I want to accomplish things. (S)
 conversion as a new lifestyle 

Toward a New Form of Conversion

At the root of the three hypotheses on which this survey was grounded,
we were interested in examining a new type of conversion that includes
horizontal and processual transformation, together with greater atten-
tion to practices rather than values, which constitutes a new type of con-
version: conversion as a lifestyle.
As far as the hypothesis regarding horizontality and processual trans-
formation, the data revealed that all the interviewees followed an inter-
actionist and horizontal procedure. Practically all the interviewees were
introduced to Soka Gakkai by friends, relatives, or acquaintances. There
is just one case of a totally chance meeting (a fortune-teller). There-
fore the message is transmitted by social networks; the message deserves
credit because it comes from a well-known person who is trusted. Most
of the conversion procedures can be described as a process. The intervie-
wees were usually encouraged to attend a meeting by a person of their
social circle, or they received simple instructions from them on how to
recite the daimoku. They started practicing immediately or after some
time. The initially erratic practice became daily thereafter. A pattern of
conversion can be traced in clearly distinguishable stages:
. Crisis or search: The reason to join is due to a difficult moment in
life or because curiosity is aroused. In the latter case, the person was
already into religious or spiritual-esoteric seeking.
. Meeting and practicing the daimoku: Following a trusted person’s
instructions one starts practicing or attends a meeting. There may
be discontinuity in this phase; practicing may start and stop. Defec-
tion is highest at this stage.
. Stabilization: Practice becomes a daily routine, and one mixes with
the practicing group. Usually material benefits can be seen in one’s
life.
. Maturity: The practice has become binding; there is total religious
identification. There are psychological and spiritual benefits. Ex-
pressive vocabulary that makes the group legitimate is seen in the
interviews. Often converts join the hierarchy and may criticize the
organization or the people in charge.
The second hypothesis was aimed at understanding to what extent the
neo-converts sought a new spiritual experience to solve their everyday
problems, rather than wanting to belong exclusively and irreversibly to
a religion. The interviews revealed that most people started practicing
 luigi berzano and eliana martoglio

because they were in a state of crisis, almost as if it were the last resort.
This means trying a practice that seems to offer therapeutic benefits, not
identifying with a religion. Others, who were not affected by a crisis,
seemed to be more or less consciously seeking a spiritual path, certainly
not a religion with its rules and its clergy.
As for the hypothesized conversion as a lifestyle, it can be said that,
particularly in this type of Buddhism, the individual is often involved in
practice and participation in a group well before assimilating the philo-
sophical and value system. Reasons for conversion often rest on the indi-
vidual’s personal sensitivity and the personal meaning that is attributed to
the framework of practices. This can clearly been seen in the reasons the
interviewees give when they say they consider themselves Soka Gakkai
Buddhists. They claim they approached Buddhism because it is a philos-
ophy that does not contemplate a superior being and relies significantly
on individual responsibility. It helps to understand the mechanisms of life
and supplies answers to great issues. It is not constituted by a set of rules.
There is no organized structure with clergy. The community of follow-
ers helps and supports those in need, in the practice and in the harmo-
nizing of objectives. To support this last hypothesis there are numerous
instances in the interviews and life stories:
I needed to find a spiritual dimension that suited me. (S)
I can’t stand dogmas, even less so obligations . . . Buddhism is freedom . . .
That’s what really appealed to me at the beginning. (S)
I was fascinated by this religion above all because it did not impose any
type of rules, there were no obligations of any sort. (S)
There is no church, and the church as a body is quite castrating and
restrictive. (S)
Buddhism tells me that in the very moment I decide to be happy, I am
already happy . . . It means that from that moment on I will make every
effort and I will be . . . I will become happy . . . It tells me every day is
New Year’s Day so I can decide to change my life every day. I can set new
objectives . . . and I don’t have to look back and say: “I missed the boat”
. . . . Understanding how our life works: why we repeat the same actions or
why the same things always happen to us . . . It’s these things that intrigue
me, and it still does because it is a never-ending study of life and of how to
live better. (S)
Among the Buddhists I immediately found a much better climate than
that which was around me at the time. Above all normal people, very
serene, at least when we met. The atmosphere was warm. This was a great
encouragement. (S)
 conversion as a new lifestyle 

The Soka Gakkai is a great family, I mean if anyone is in need we help each
other, we support each other. (S)
Friendship is one of the fundamental things that ties me to Soka Gakkai:
friendship and mutual support among followers, which is basic to life; it
should be for everyone. (S)

Conclusions

Conversion has been defined as a new lifestyle, the conversion of an

individual who at first adopts certain practices of a new religion, rather
than its cognitive value system. One adopts a new lifestyle (practices,
symbols, preferences for people and places) that helps to solve everyday
problems, and are usually generated by interaction with close individuals
and friends, more than through the cognitive value system of the new
religion. Friends recruit friends, relatives recruit relatives, and neighbors
recruit neighbors. In statu nascendi conversion is not simply the cognitive
adoption of a set of beliefs, but it is based on a system of social relations.
The observation that conversions occur primarily through social net-
works and pre-existing interpersonal ties does not exclude the fact that
even other non-rational factors may have an effect, such as aesthetic,
affective, and the supra-rational. The latter, therefore, are not always
present, above all in the nascent state of conversion.
As far as our first hypothesis, it can be said that nearly all the intervie-
wees’ conversions stemmed from interpersonal relations and the search
for a community. From the first meeting when reciting the daimoku of
the Lotus Sutra, the neo-convert feels part of a new community that rep-
resents the new growing frame of his or her biography. The community
listens to his or her story and shoulders the individual’s problems. Shar-
ing significant practices makes ties firmer and increases mutual esteem.
Virtual ties become real, weak ones become stronger, and strong ties gen-
erate others.
Finally, I took my best friend (at the time) up on his invitation. I went to
the last meeting of the year. I started practicing immediately. (S)
I was introduced to Soka Gakkai at the age of  by my parents who had
been practicing for a few years. Up to  I attended the odd meeting but
I didn’t feel any need to practice. However, at a certain point I came up
against a real problem and I couldn’t find a solution, I turned to Buddhist
prayer. (S)
I was introduced to Buddhism because my current husband—who wasn’t
at the time, he was just a person I liked—practiced . . . . This was really
 luigi berzano and eliana martoglio

important to him and so I said: let’s go and see where he goes, largely
because there were people who phoned him . . . (S)
As far as our second hypothesis, it was revealed that the majority of the
neo converts were looking for a new spiritual experience to solve the
problems of daily life more than belonging exclusively and irreversibly
to a religion. Joining Soka Gakkai is therefore a voluntary act. The orga-
nization does not pressure new arrivals to feel converted at once, but
encourages them to take one step at a time. But between one reading
of the daimoku of the Lotus Sutra and another, relations consolidate that
involve the new followers in the system of beliefs and friendships with
the members of Soka Gakkai. The organization’s objective is to spur the
desire in the new arrivals to belong, knowing that authentic religious con-
version is based on personal needs, even if external factors may foster it.
Our data confirm Thierry Mathé (), who concludes his research
on Tibetan Buddhism and Soka Gakkai in France by observing that con-
versions in these two movements represent a need for regeneration more
than for re-conversion; they consist in breaking a lifestyle on the existen-
tial level (hence a new lifestyle) rather than on the level of the meaning
of life, since the issue of truth is considered insignificant. These are con-
versions that respond more to the need to adjust to one’s own personal
situation rather than to the system of beliefs of an institutionalized reli-
gion.
I wanted answers concerning my mother’s illness . . . “Why couldn’t I have
a normal life like any other -year-old?”—and so, Buddhism gave me the
answers to all this. Catholicism had not. At the time I read the Mormon law,
the Koran, the Holy Scriptures. I was looking everywhere. I didn’t think of
Buddhism because it probably wasn’t the right time. (S)
I was looking for answers, and I found one for each of my questions: What
is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of death? Is life worth living?
How do you live? What is my life worth? Why do bad things happen? . . .
(S)
It was a really bad period; I did nothing but cry about my situation . . .
family . . . (S)
I wanted to change my life; I was sick and tired of the life I was leading,
because I had made lots of attempts, of all types, but there was no way out
of this situation. (S)
As far as the third hypothesis, it can be said that nearly all the inter-
viewees wanted to try new practices through conversion, that is a new
lifestyle, more than adopting an organic set of beliefs and moral obliga-
tions. Conversion as a new lifestyle, which concerns the majority of our
 conversion as a new lifestyle 

interviewees, does not require individuals to adopt the value system of a

new religion whole cloth, but just the parts that they choose. For these
reasons it is a weak, experimental conversion and not definitive.7
The individual involved in a conversion as a new lifestyle does not
give up the reasons that induced the conversion. One seeks the balm
of a solution and of enlightenment, but one is not prepared to give up
the freedom of questioning. One continues to fluctuate between joining
and keeping a distance, between the cult of the problem and the choice
of a solution. That is why the conversion is never fully resolved. Only
at a later date and for some individuals will conversion reach definite
religious outcomes and a condition of profound and complete happiness.
Buddhism means responsibility. You are responsible for what happens in
your life . . . It is your mission to be happy, to build your life, your identity,
your ego . . . You decide everything you want, you put the causes and
receive the effects in your life. (S)
Buddhism teaches me wisdom; Buddhism doesn’t say: “This is right and
that is wrong” . . . There aren’t those sorts of rules, to be honest there aren’t
any rules, in general. (S)
Conversion as a new lifestyle therefore represents the typical form of reli-
gious being in post-secular society, because on the one hand it solves
the paradigmatic uncertainty of historical religions insofar as it supplies
all individuals with cultural and symbolic reference frames and encour-
ages individuals’ active research of new systems of belief and forms of
association. The onus falls on the individual who is free to behave and
believe, faced with his or her own individual responsibility. Significantly
one interviewee stated, “Religion is like a dress, it’s like a dress for me,
that is, it must fit you well, it must make you feel good, and it must give
you the answers which make you serene.” (S)

7 According to some authors, this type of conversion, which has been growing since

, is homogeneous to the consumer culture, in which sharing the same brand knits
social ties among the consumers themselves and links them as in a community. This
is confirmed by brand communities, brandfests, and the power of cult branding in
general, in which the three elements that constitute every community are to be found:
shared awareness, rituals and traditions, and a sense of moral responsibility. Roof says
(:), “The generation of baby boomers, which was greatly influenced by the
consumer culture, has grown up considering religion like a commodity and trading it
practically like any other product.”
 luigi berzano and eliana martoglio

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Model: A Critical Assessment.” Social Problems : –.
Sperber, Dan. . Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach. Oxford: Black-
well.
Van der Leeuw, Gerardus. . Fenomenologia della religione. Torino: Bor-
inghieri.
Weber, Max. . The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Los Angeles:
Roxbury.
Wilson, Bryan and Karel Dobbelaere. . A Time to Chant: The Soka Gakkai
Buddhists in Britain. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
 chapter ten

CONVERSION AS OPPOSITION

Giuseppe Giordan

While illustrating religion as “communication power” in one of his most

recent books, Enzo Pace (: ) asserts that “in the world of reli-
gions nothing is created and nothing is destroyed, but all (or almost all) is
preserved.” In other words, interpreting religion as interlaced languages
related one to the other and interdependent, we may see how within
the same religious tradition issues and symbols of the past re-emerge in
the contemporary epoch and are recontextualized in frames of mean-
ing that are rather different from the past yet capable of being meaning-
ful to contemporary persons. Such interlacing of languages may be seen
not only in the diachronic dynamics from the past to the present, but
also in the more and more complex relations characterizing the “global-
ized religions” of the postmodern world. It is a situation that might be
described as a slow yet constant process of hybridization and contami-
nation between different religious traditions, where the borders between
one and another are much less insurmountable than we are commonly
used to believe.
Pace writes (: ):
[A]s far as religions are concerned, the law of accumulation counts: they
can be represented as great belief systems made up of various layers, some
of them deeper than others, some believed to be more authentic than
others, according to a hierarchic scale that is defined each time by those
who have the authority or by those who control the circulation of beliefs
within the system.
From this perspective, it is difficult to speak of “pure” religions: all of
them bring within themselves the traces and the encrustations of their
evolution through the centuries, a route often marked by competition
and wars. As paradoxical as it may seem, the more a religion is animated
by the will to conquer and to expand, the more exposed it is to the “risk”
of being contaminated from other symbolic universes. If on one side this
process develops through the “long story” of the tracing historic epochs,
under another perspective it can be detected even in the “short story”
 giuseppe giordan

of the existence of an individual—especially when the question of the

borders between one religion and the other and the truth of the beliefs
are evaluated in the context of conversion.
The choice of converting expresses in some way the act of taking sides
on the part of the subject or of the group as regards the complexity of
beliefs, of the rites and the moral norms: this position of taking sides is
the result of a comparison or a confrontation that, in the final analysis,
means to express a judgment of truth. Such judgment touches the truth of
beliefs, but also the plausibility of prescribed behaviors or of prohibitions,
as well as the aesthetic sense and the mysterious dimension of liturgical
rites. All these dimensions composing the religious field, when they
are sifted by the converted person, are re-composed according to a
criterion of coherence which, from the sociological point of view, might
be often interpreted as a syncretistic process. In this sense syncretism
is not simply the re-composition of a picture that tries to put together
elements of different provenance, but the true construction of a “code
of complexity” capable of putting the converted believer in touch with
the social and cultural environment in which he lives.1 In this chapter
we analyze a peculiar case of conversion, a conversion that in the s
involved practically the whole village of Montaner, a center of about ,
inhabitants located about one hundred kilometers north of Venice.
Montaner is still today a unique case in Italy where, in the village
square, there are two churches fifty meters apart from each other: to the
North there is a Catholic church and to the South an Orthodox one. If
in many other national contexts this co-presence, even architecturally, is
normal, forty years ago it was totally new in the Italian landscape, and
in certain aspects it was quite unimaginable. Even stopping for a quick
glance at the landscape, we notice the church towers that characterize the
skyline in the towns as well as in the country in Italy (Sanga ); his-
torically speaking, also some synagogues have been present, and recently
even some mosques, but in the sixties what happened in Montaner was
all new.

1 More than a superimposition of beliefs, syncretism is a working principle of reli-

gions themselves: “Religious syncretism is not a particular kind of religion, but the struc-
tural characteristic peculiar to the systems of religious belief: ‘syncretism’ is the word for
what we conventionally label ‘complexity.’ Systems with a religious basis are complex by
definition, hence to survive they must learn to differentiate from the environment; they
must learn to reduce the complexity they find in the environment, partially transferring
it inside themselves” (Pace : ).
 conversion as opposition 

The reasons for the “mass conversion” from Catholicism to Ortho-

doxy that took place then are multifarious. First, it is placed in a par-
ticular context, the Italian context in which Catholicism is the major-
ity religion administering the dynamics of the religious field in a “quasi-
monopolistic” way.2 How is it possible that in the heartland of the Cath-
olic faith a whole group of people would decide to change their religion?
But there’s more: why the choice in favor of Orthodoxy? And why a “mass
conversion,” typical of the Middle Ages and certainly not of the end of the
s? What is the role of the “new religion” in its function of founding
the collective identity? And, most especially, what had stopped working
in the “old religion,” the religion of their ancestors? Or, considering the
matter from another perspective, what needs of the people were met by
the choice of converting?
Analyzing the different languages that people use to justify their con-
version to Orthodoxy, we have found a complex interlacing of communi-
cation codes referring to some aspects of the social and cultural context
of the s in Italy. As often happens when oral sources are gathered,
“the expressive modes which at first seem to belong only to the linguistic
code of a single person, on the contrary are part of a wider collective pat-
rimony” (Ciciliot : ), almost as if it were a collective identity capable
of providing the single individuals with the resources to tell about their
own experience.
Interviewing  people it has been possible to reconstruct the reasons
of their conversion by bringing them back to some contexts in which the
protest phenomena of those years were more intensely concentrated.3 In
particular, we have focused first of all on the language of politics, partic-
ularly present in the juxtaposition between the right- and the left-wing
parties; second, it is possible to identify the language typical of the ecclesi-
astical reform of the years immediately after the Second Vatican Council;
finally, the interviewees have recurrently manifested expressions typical
of the anarchical and antiauthoritarian cultural movements linked to the
youth culture of . Among the evidences of the younger ones, that

2 In order to examine closely the role of the Catholic religion inside Italian society see

Cipriani (), Diotallevi (, ), Garelli (, , ), Garelli, Guizzardi
and Pace (), and Nesti ().
3 This research is based on  in-depth interviews of about one hour each, carried on

during the months of June and July  in Montaner. Among the interviewees,  are
witnesses of the facts as they happened at the moment of the conversion to Orthodoxy;
therefore they are from age  upward. The remainder are youth or young adults born in
the s.
 giuseppe giordan

is to say among those we might define the “second generation” of the

members of the Orthodox Church of Montaner, a rather different lan-
guage is present, a way of expressing themselves that can be referred to
the debate that in the sociology of religion has been labeled with the con-
cept of “spirituality.” In all these cases it has been possible to see how both
in the personal experience of the converted individual, as well as of the
group sharing their choice of conversion, “nothing is created and noth-
ing is destroyed” because the beliefs, traditions and ways of thinking of
the past are adapted to the new situation.

Once Upon a Time There was “Father Jail”

All the Montaner events occurred between December  and Novem-
ber .4 On December , , Monsignor Giuseppe Faè, the old
parish priest who had guided the Montaner community for forty years
died. The figure of Msgr. Faè was characterized by a strong personal
charisma and an authoritative temper, determined and resolute, that con-
tributed to creating his role not only as a spiritual, but also a social and
cultural guide for this somewhat isolated and poor village in the Venetian
mountains. Msgr. Faè not only did everything in his power to offer spir-
itual and moral assistance to the population, but also to provide for the
material needs of his community from a nursery school, to an orphanage,
to a small hall for public meetings (successively destined to become a the-
atre and a cinema). In addition to this, he also was very important guid-
ing the anti-fascist forces of the area who were getting organized covertly
against the German troops during the civil war that burst in Italy after
September , , when Mussolini’s regime collapsed. In March ,
Msgr. Faè was arrested for his anti-fascist activity and, after the end of the
war in , just for his having been put in jail, he started calling himself
“Father Jail.” When he returned to Montaner, he engaged himself further
in improving the living conditions of the population of this little village:
he worked to obtain the telephone line, electric light, running water into

4 No volume yet exists fully reconstructing the facts of the Montaner event as devel-

oped from the beginning until today. Nevertheless there are some degree theses con-
taining information of an historical and anthropological character (Ciciliot ). Some
sociological thesises have also provided interpretive criteria: in particular Nardi (),
Resenterra (), and Chies (). Berzano and Cassinasco () provide a sociolog-
ical study of Orthodoxy in Italy.
 conversion as opposition 

their houses, a daily bus service to the nearby center of Vittorio Veneto,
the opening of a post office, and the construction of a new school build-
ing.
During his parish activity he was supported by younger priests, and
in the last three years of his life, being by that time old and ill, he was
assisted one named Father Antonio Botteon. At the time of his death,
the Monsignor was highly esteemed, even revered as a saint, by the
population. The interviewees who have met him tell odd anecdotes about
his often bizarre behavior and about his presumed miraculous powers.
After Msgr. Faè’s death, a trial of strength started between the Bishop,
who had already chosen a successor, and the population of Montaner,
who saw in Fr. Botteon the right parish priest for the purpose of ensuring
continuity with the work of the deceased Monsignor. According to the
code of Canon Law, however, the appointment of a parish priests is not
the congregation’s concern, but rather it is the exclusive competence
of the Bishop. In Montaner a committee was formed who asked the
Bishop for an audience in order to obtain Fr. Botteon’s appointment as
their parish priest.5 The answer was negative, and this not only because
the appointment of a parish priest is the Bishop’s concern and not the
community’s, but also because Fr. Botteon was considered to be too
young for such role.
Just after the visit of the Montaner committee, the Bishop appointed
another priest as the new parish priest, to take office in Montaner on
January , . During the night between the th and st of January
some men from Montaner built a wall in front of the doors of the
church and of the rectory. Before the church a notice was posted in
which “the people of Montaner” proclaimed Fr. Botteon as their parish
priest, and justified this choice as the fruit of democratic consultation.
The afternoon of the st the new parish priest appointed by the Bishop
arrived in Montaner with his own things, but the population in the
square prevented him from carrying out his move—although the police
were also there to guarantee public order. In this way the “war” between
the people of Montaner and the Bishop started, a war in which the
protagonists were the women, since the men either emigrated or worked
all day at considerable distance from the village. In the first days of
February, another delegation went to visit the Bishop bringing a request

5 In those years the bishop of the Vittorio Veneto diocese was Monsignor Albino

Luciani, who became Pope in  taking the name of John Paul I. (His pontificate lasted
only  days, and he is now remebered by history as “the smiling Pope”.)
 giuseppe giordan

signed by  families out of a total of  asking him to accept the
appointment of Fr. Betteon as their parish priest, but the answer once
again was negative.

The “Cats” and the “Mice”

During the first protest actions, the village seemed to be more or less
close-knit, but as the conflict escalated, many people drew back from
the protest, and the group of those who believed it was unfair to object
to authority became more and more numerous. So Montaner split into
two factions, between whom a true conflict broke out, based on such
deep hatred that it is still present today. The two factions took the names
of “mice” and “cats”: the former were those who remained faithful to
the bishop’s decision and the Catholic church, and were so-called in
reference to the expression “sacristy mice” in order to describe peo-
ple devoutly linked to the ecclesiastic institution; while the latter were
those who successively became members of the Orthodox Church. All
the people interviewed are keen to remember that this image had the
function of intending to remind everyone that “cats, sooner or later, eat
mice.”
The case, as it is not difficult to imagine, ended up in some national
newspapers, and the quarrel in this way became known outside the local
context. In the first months of  representatives of other religious
confessions arrived in Montaner, in particular Protestants and members
of the Orthodox Church, even though the possibility of a conversion
from Catholicism to another religious confession was not taken into
serious consideration in the first months of the fight. Feeble attempts of
reconciliation followed, but strong stands were taken the part of both
the cats and the ecclesiastic institutionalists. The split turned so bitter
that it could not be healed. In the following months the cats, who had
gone to visit the bishop many times and even to visit the Pope in Rome
without obtaining anything, organized some meetings to decide how
to continue their protest, and during such meetings the possibility of
shifting to another religious tradition “as a protest” was considered.
Angela’s response, in connection with this subject, is particularly
enlightening: “I must admit that we didn’t have very clear ideas. On the
contrary, there was much confusion about what we wanted to do. Nev-
ertheless it seemed to us that changing religion might be a good way to
express our disagreement and our anger toward the Catholic hierarchy.”
 conversion as opposition 

To the interviewer who observes that Orthodoxy actually isn’t another

religion compared to Catholicism, but simply another Christian confes-
sion, Angela retorts that in the beginning they didn’t pay much attention
to these subtleties and these details: what they wanted to do was to make
those who had demonstrated indifference to the legitimate requests of the
Montaner population pay the consequences. The theological, moral or
ritual aspect of believing then was totally unrelated to the considerations
of the inhabitants of Montaner who were “converting” to the Orthodox
religion.
No matter how things went, in the evening of December , ,
in the square just in front of the Catholic church, the first Mass of the
Orthodox rite was celebrated. A few weeks before the protest committee
had gone to the bishop for the last time presenting an either-or to him:
either Fr. Botteon was appointed parish priest, as the great majority of
the Montaner population had democratically decided, or all of them
would “convert” to Orthodoxy. As a result of the negative outcome of the
meeting, the facts followed the words: the vague and in many respects
indefinite possibility of conversion thus became real (Ciciliot ). The
Orthodox priest came from a community of the Russian rite located in
the neighborhood of Turin and formally settled in Montaner beginning
in June . The liturgies were celebrated first in a garage and then
in a private house, but during the summer a church was built that was
solemnly consecrated on September , . The building of this place of
Orthodox worship fifty meters from the Catholic church finally marked
the division between the Orthodox “converted ones” and those who
remained faithful to Catholicism.
But the dispute did not end there. The division between “cats” and
“mice” were felt inside families themselves, with many parents remaining
Catholic and children becoming Orthodox. On November , , All
Souls’ Day, the Catholic and the Orthodox processions met in the village
cemetery: a clash, even physical, between the two factions followed, and
for this reason the police were called. The worst was over because the
Catholic parish priest decided to leave the field and continue prayers
in the church. Living together, between Catholics and members of the
Orthodox church, has been always difficult since these beginnings. It was
almost a condition of “living together armed,” with the police forces often
garrisoning the village square.
In the interviewees’ reports there are two terms that recur frequently,
even if they are immediately corrected and more precisely defined, al-
most as if the interviewees wanted to hide from themselves before hid-
 giuseppe giordan

ing from the interviewer that things in the beginning were exactly like
this. Paola’s and Antonio’s answers are enlightening with regard to this
subject.
Paola, who at the time of these events was twenty years old, says:
I remember those months as a period of great enthusiasm as regards the
new experience that was going to start . . . Montaner had never appeared
in the newspapers, but at that time everybody spoke of us. To tell the truth,
however, it was a period of suffering, because in the village, and also among
our own friends, there was an atmosphere of hatred . . . . Well, maybe to
call it hatred is too much . . . Let’s say the interpersonal relations were not
good. We didn’t greet each other any longer. We didn’t go shopping any
longer to the shop where the keeper belonged to the other religion . . . . A
bad atmosphere indeed, with suspicion, calumny, hatred . . . Yes, I told you
that the word hatred was perhaps too much, but I do believe that, at certain
moments, it was a matter of hatred. Just think that I didn’t speak any more
to my uncle, who remained Catholic, not even during his long disease that
led to his death.

When interviewed about the meaning that the choice of converting to

Orthodoxy has had for him, Antonio, admits that:
Speaking of “conversion” is probably exaggerated, meaning that to us to
become Orthodox didn’t actually mean, at least in the beginning, to change
our religion, but simply to be able to pray to the God to whom we had
always prayed without having to obey the Catholic bishop any more . . . .
Little by little we have realized that being Catholic or being members
of the Orthodox Church is not exactly the same thing, but, you know,
at the beginning everything was so confused: to us it was sufficient not
to have to go to the Catholic church any more. The Orthodox liturgies
were more or less the same as the Catholic ones, even if they were longer
. . . however the Orthodox priest did not oblige us to stay in the church
during the whole function. Even from the point of view of the things we
are required to believe I don’t see great differences, or maybe I don’t see
the differences because I have never really explored the Orthodox religion
deeply . . . But, you see, when we speak of religion in general there is always
some confusion about the things to believe and about the things that we
are allowed to do and those we are not allowed to do.

Antonio speaks of confusion in a straight manner, admitting that, at

least in the beginning, nobody really knew what it meant to become
members of the Orthodox church. Other interviewees with a higher level
of education use the term “confusion” with more “reserve,” almost being
ashamed of describing their shifting to Orthodoxy in this way. It is a fact
that the experience of those years is interpreted by the witnesses who
lived it in terms of “hatred,” first against the Catholic bishop and then
 conversion as opposition 

against those who did not convert to Orthodoxy, and of “confusion” for
what is involved in the entrance into the new religious confession.6
From the interviews as a whole the impression is that what it meant to
decide to become a member of the Orthodox Church wasn’t very clear.
Perhaps Francesco, who at the time of the consecration of the Orthodox
Church was nine years old, is right when he asserts, somewhat between
irony and regret, that those “who became a member of the Orthodox
Church converted ‘by chance’.”
But the accounts we collected from the interviewees tell us not only
what was actually the initial situation (“hatred” and “confusion”), but they
also report reflections that have been stored forty years in the memory
of this disunited little community, with respect to both their personal
memory as well as the collective memory. It is not difficult to imagine
that, with the passing of time, those people have wondered whether it
was possible to change their religion “only” out of resentment toward the
hierarchy of the religion in which they were born and brought up.
In other words, even if things seem to have happened exactly in this
way, when the subjects were interviewed about this event, the language
they use becomes more complex, more intricate than the simple narra-
tion of a conflict. As noted above, and consistent with the observations of
Pace with which this chapter opened, in the conversion accounts of the
people from Montaner we find a contamination of languages where the
borders between culture, politics, religion and common sense fade away
until they become difficult to reconstruct. However, in the narration of
the single subject who uses all these symbolic universes of meaning in
order to rebuild his own experience, we may notice the predominance of
either element, according to what one intends to justify or to legitimate
by means of such narration.

6 The experience of the Montaner Orthodox Church had a rather troubled beginning

even because of the unclear position of the first Orthodox priest who guided it. He was an
Italian man, who, it seems, had initially been an Evangelical minister and who declared he
successively converted to Orthodoxy. We know that he signed with the title “Italian Exarc
of the Episcopal Catholic Apostolic Orthodox Church,” even if nobody has ever known
to what Church he actually belonged. He was a kind of “wandering priest,” and when he
arrived at Montaner he declared he was a member of the Russian Orthodox Church. For
many years the liturgical functions of the new Church were more similar to the Catholic
functions than to the Orthodox ones, and this too perhaps contributed to making the
converted people feel that the change had been more formal than substantial.
 giuseppe giordan

The Language of Political Struggle

Contrary to what facts seem to say, according to the evidence of some

of the interviewees, the choice of becoming members of the Orthodox
Church was not hurried or casual, but the fruit of an attentive evaluation:
to the inhabitants of Montaner, the Orthodox religion recalled the idea of
Russia straightaway and, together with Russia, the world of Communism.
This meant a great deal to a village that during World War II had known
the struggle against Fascists and Nazis and that had distinguished itself
in this struggle, making almost an identity trait of it. If nothing else,
it granted immediate sympathy to Orthodoxy. The Communism of the
inhabitants of Montaner considered Russia in a mythical way, as if it
were a land where the ideals of freedom and justice had been actually
implemented in everyday life. It is a pre-political approach that identifies
itself not with Marxism or with some economic theory, but with the will
to overcome misery, to fight against power and poverty.
Luciano, the oldest of the interviewees, born a little before the burst of
World War II, provides a good synthesis of this attitude:
The Orthodox religion has developed in a land of poverty and abuse, of
violence and oppression, and just this faith has given to the Russian people
the strength to redeem themselves from the powerful . . . . Orthodoxy is not
a religion for the rich and the right-minded people, but for people who are
acquainted with labor and suffering . . . for people who want to conquer
their own dignity . . .. Jesus has chosen the poor and the last ones, the
marginalized and the oppressed ones, and we are poor and last, oppressed
and marginalized even from religion that often justifies the powerful and
the oppressors.

As it is easily seen, the controversy against the “right-minded Catholics”

is always present, but the most relevant aspect is the totally arbitrary
reconstruction of the events of Orthodoxy in Russia, a reconstruction
that little has to do with the actual historical events, but that is, however,
capable of legitimating the choice of the conversion to Orthodoxy.
Beyond this reference to Communism and to Russia, there is also
another aspect, still of a political nature, that might seem to be push-
ing toward the “conversion”: the antagonism between the little village of
Montaner and the bigger center of Sarmede on which it depended. Such
antagonism and such will of autonomy was justified even for the differ-
ent political choices: the Communist party obtained most of the votes in
Montaner, while in Sarmede the majority party was Christian Democ-
racy, which was seen by the Montaner population as a Fascist party.
 conversion as opposition 

The wish to become a free and independent municipality compared to

Sarmede would have found an element of further autonomy in the choice
to convert to Orthodoxy. This is a motivation that, after all, has worked,
and still works, in various areas of the world: using religion in an identity
perspective as an element of cohesion within a group and, at the same
time as an element of differentiation from the outside world. The rivalry
of parochial type between the little municipality of Montaner and the
main center of Sarmede has left traces even in the conversion accounts
of the people we have interviewed: “Obviously,” Lucia states pointedly
when pressed by the interviewer,
we haven’t converted to Orthodoxy to distinguish ourselves from those of
Sarmede, but we can say that our conversion has helped us to understand
better what it meant to become aware of our own diversity and our own
autonomy . . . I mean that we haven’t converted to differentiate from
the Catholics and from those who had voted for the party of Christian
Democracy . . . . Nevertheless the fact that the majority of the population
of Montaner have become members of the Orthodox religion has helped
us to feel more united and close-knit against the power that wanted to keep
us marginalized.
In Montaner, then, they have not converted in order to be different, but
being “religiously” different has helped the population to confirm and to
claim their right, their political choice and their aspiration to autonomy
with more strength. It is difficult to say how much importance such
aspiration to autonomy has influenced the choice of “changing religion,”
but all the same it is without doubt that such an element has played its
role.7

The Language of Ecclesiastical Reform

Besides the language of the political struggle, and specifically that of

the confrontation between Communists (members of the Orthodox reli-
gion) and Christian Democrats (Catholics), the language of the Church’s
reform emerges in the accounts of the interviewees, even if with minor
frequency. The presence of such “specific terminology” is inserted in the

7 Such claim of autonomy appears to be well enmeshed in the history of Montaner. As

a matter of fact, Fr. Faè had long debated with the Bishop of Vittorio Veneto the request
of elevating the little parish church to the level of a “cathedral.” Still in line with the
autonomist will of the inhabitants of Montaner as regards the municipality of Sarmede,
there is also a will to change the name of the municipality into “Montaner of Italy.”
 giuseppe giordan

historical situation in which the Catholic Church has lived in the years
following Vatican Council II (–). The Council had aroused
inside the Catholic communities many expectations of a profound re-
form of the Church, especially on the ecumenical side.
Many Italian Bishops, however, turned out to be unprepared to face
such efforts of “updating” and “renewal,” and they limited themselves
to retouching some aspects of the traditional positions that, after all,
had worked in the past. Thus, inside Italian Catholicism two opposite
interpretative lines of the Council developed: the “traditionalists,” who
were very critical about some aspects of novelty of the Council, and the
“dissenting protagonists,” who considered the Council a starting point for
the radical renewal of the Church (Ciciliot ).
This general frame of great ecclesial change is reconstructed in the
words of some of our interviewees in order to adapt it to the situation
of Montaner, putting together the ideas that in those years animated
the theological debates and the more limited exigencies of the local
community of Montaner. It is an interesting effort to connect the “little
history” of the village to the “great history” of the Church, as if they
wished to legitimate their choice of converting on the basis of the unkept
promises of renovation from the Catholic Church. Mario’s story clearly
expresses such connection between the local situation and the theological
debate of those years:
The Council expressed themselves in favor of the “Church of the poor,” and
the concept of “God’s people” was very important. These are perspectives
that asked that everybody do their best to change the inequities of the
society in which we lived . . .. The official Church didn’t actually seem to
want to change. The Vatican was not inclined to sell their riches to give
them to the poor, and even less inclined were they to lose their power
of control over people or to acknowledge the dignity of “God’s people.”
Through my conversion to Orthodoxy, I wanted to say “Enough!” to the
power of the Catholic hierarchy, and I wanted to take sides with the poor
and the marginalized ones.

The language of ecclesiastical reform and the language of social and

political reform are interlaced to the point of superimposing the political
and the religious themes. An experience that is mentioned by some of our
interviewees is that of the “base communities”: they are experiences that
were originally born in Latin America, later diffused in Europe, where
informal groups of believers gathered to live a Christian faith radically
inspired by the Gospel and by the Council’s guidelines. These groups of
believers operated just inside or even outside the parish churches, hence
 conversion as opposition 

they eluded the direct control of the ecclesiastical authorities, and they
were most of all engaged in the need for social and ecclesiastical reforms.
The legitimation for their work of protest and reform was guaranteed
by a direct relation with the Bible: from personal and public reading of
the Holy Scriptures the “basic communities” found the inspiration and
strength to challenge the existing order and to try to change it by recon-
structing a kind of primitive Christianity. The Montaner community took
inspiration from this model, and still does, in some people’s opinion,
even if we cannot understand very clearly, talking with the interviewees,
why they chose the Orthodox tradition and not the Protestant tradition.
When it was pointed out that the personal reading of the Bible is more
consistent with Protestantism than with Orthodoxy, Serena answered to
us that “the Bible has always existed, hence it is valid for the Catholics
as well as for the members of the Orthodox Church and for the Protes-
tants as well . . . . Only there are people who implement it better than
others!”—an answer that clarifies the controversy with the Catholics, but
that doesn’t explain, from the strictly religious point of view, the reason
for conversion to Orthodoxy.
Serena is also very keen to let us know that Montaner had fully
received the ecumenical aspirations of the Council, according to which
all the Christian churches would link together again after the centuries of
division and reciprocal excommunication; however when it was pointed
out to her that “to convert” from Catholicism to Orthodoxy is not exactly
what the Council says about the theme of ecumenism, Serena, a little
out of patience, said that “if all the Christian ‘religions’ are equal, I don’t
understand the reason why people are so scandalized if one decides to
shift from one to the other.” Obviously, an interview situation is not one
to teach the difference between “confessions” and “religions.” Besides, the
simplification of the Council made by Serena doesn’t take into account
the fact that the Council’s ecumenism acknowledges equal dignity to all
confessions, but doesn’t say that they are all equal.
The language used by Serena and Mario, as well as before by Angela,
doesn’t enter upon theological subjects, but seems to derive information
freely from the Council’s vocabulary of ecclesiastical reform, sometimes
even distorting its meaning, in order to justify some choices—including
the “conversion” choice, which otherwise would be more delicate to
justify. Between the lines of this language, as well as, after all, between
the lines of the language of politics, it is not hard to detect reference to
the “hatred” and “confusion” mentioned at the beginning of this chapter.
These are elaborations deriving from rather different cultural universes
 giuseppe giordan

interpreting what happened in a more complex and “acceptable” way,

both for those who have lived such events and for the audience that today
listen to them.

The Language of the Anarchical and Anti-authoritarian Culture

When we carefully analyze the interviews of the  people who lived

through the conversion to Orthodoxy at the end of the s, it clearly
emerges that there is a common ground in which each one then plants
his or her own more or less original interpretation: it is the culture of
the Sixties, with its anarchical aspirations, its wish to assert one’s own
subjectivity, sometimes even with revolutionary spurs. For the first time
ever, people who never before had the chance of making their voice
heard can take the floor. Certainly such an atmosphere is the background,
not only historical but also symbolic and semantic, of the Montaner
experience. It is not an exaggeration to think that the imagery of the
contestations in those years, that came from the United States and from
France and afterwards from the university towns in Italy, primed some
emulation dynamics even in Montaner, where television was starting to
spread into individual homes just toward the end of the decade.
The focus of this whole event, culturally speaking, is to be found in
the freedom of being able to self-determine, and to ascertain how it
is possible to challenge even religious authority, “coming off well.” The
experiences of self-management and autonomy previously underlined
find, in the cultural climate of that period, the necessary oxygen to grow
and to gain strength.
Patrizio, a man already over his sixties, with long hair gathered up into
a bun behind his back, explicitly outlines the coordinates of his “con-
version” as the assertion of his freedom of choice concerning religious
power, which according to him, was largely responsible for the marginal-
ized and poor situation of Montaner:
I believe that the choice of converting offered me the possibility to have my
right acknowledged against the strong powers which wanted to deny it to
me: We had democratically chosen our parish priest, and the Bishop said
“No.” . . . Well then we might as well change our religion, trying to find one
that would be more respectful of our freedom. To me it didn’t make much
difference to what religion to convert, the important point being to put an
end to Catholicism! . . . In our own small scale we too have succeeded in
doing a little revolution, in having a clear conscience and affirming our
freedom without any fear and reverence toward anyone.
 conversion as opposition 

In some interviews anti-authoritarianism is confused with anti-

clericalism, to the point that one wondered whether those who wanted
to convert to Orthodoxy were indeed looking for another religion. The
Orthodox clergy, however, were seen in a different way from the Catholic
clergy, since the priests were married, and this made them close to real
people and more distant from the ecclesiastic authority.8 The Orthodox
religion, from this point of view, appeared to be a more modern religion,
since not only did it not demand priestly celibacy, but it acknowledged
the role a woman could play helping her priest-husband with his func-
tions. Little matters that this was possible only in the mental representa-
tion that the “converted people” of Montaner had made for themselves:
it was nevertheless enough to recognize in Orthodoxy a religion that was
sufficiently “keeping up pace with modern times.”
With the passing of years, this situation of doctrinal “confusion” and
of personal “hatred” left space for deep and extended secularization
processes, to the point that a great part of the population distanced
themselves from both Catholicism and Orthodoxy. The more or less
harsh fight between the two factions de-legitimated the role of the priests
as well as the beliefs of the believers—so much so that we might say
that an anarchical and anti-authoritarian culture has prevailed over the
Catholics as well as over the members of the Orthodox Church.

The Language of Spirituality

There is a last group of interviewees who do not feel at ease with the lan-
guages about which we have just spoken: it is the youngest ones, those
who have not “converted” to Orthodoxy, because they were born into
families that had become Orthodox a few years before their birth. The
seven young and young-adult people who have been interviewed repre-
sent the quasi-totality of the choir who presently accompany Mass with
their chants on Sundays. The choir gathers practically all the young and
young-adult people who consistantly participate in the Sunday Mass.
The language they use to express their being members of the Orthodox
Church is remarkably distant from that of their parents. It isn’t a matter
of completely different languages: both actually understand the linguis-
tic and expressive languages used by the others. However the youngest

8 Orthodox bishops are regarded? to be celebate. Thus in Orthodoxy, the juxtaposi-

tion is not between priest and people, but between bishop and priest-and-people.
 giuseppe giordan

ones are well aware of the reasons that have led their community to
become Orthodox, and they are rather critical in regard to those rea-
sons.
First, they do not hide from themselves the fact that in the beginning
there was much “confusion,” or that the true reason for the conversion,
according to what practically all the interviewees of this group have told
us, was the wounded pride of this little community who would not resign
themselves to having to obey a bishop who authoritatively denied what
seemed to them to be a right.
Accounts the effects of the “hatred” for the more adult ones have not
completely disappeared, even if by now they are memories that weaken
more and more with the passing of time. “When I was a child,” says Marco
who was born at the beginning of the s,
I remember that we, the members of the Orthodox Church, were a small
closed group, we stayed on our own, and our parents did not let us go
to play football with the Catholic kids. When we grew up, this division
definitely weakened, even if none of us still today can claim to have real
friends in the other group . . .. This situation, analyzed with today’s eyes,
seems to me to be simply hilarious, a paradoxical situation that enlightens
how religion may be dangerous and create conflicts, rather than make the
world more human.
Having been invited to go deeper into this question about religion, Marco
explains what Orthodoxy is to him: not a religion with dogmas, moral
rules to follow, a hierarchy to obey, but a kind of spirituality inducing
reciprocal love, brotherly help, inviting one to cultivate within oneself a
sense of mystery leading to God. What Marco said tells us not so much
what Orthodoxy is in itself, which is also dogmas, moral rules and hier-
archy, but what he believes the Orthodox religion is. And this personal
route has also led him to expose the possible violent implications that
religions carry within themselves, implications that in Montaner have
actually shown their negative effects in the past.
Elisabetta’s evidence, partially following what stated by Marco, goes
further into “Orthodox spirituality” as she means it:
What I like most in the Orthodox religion is the silence during the Sunday
liturgy: it is a kind of silence that makes me feel well with myself, that
makes me discover God in my heart of hearts, that enlightens me as to the
choices to make during the noisy everyday life . . . When I participate in the
Catholic liturgy, maybe for some funeral or friends’ wedding, I feel uneasy
because on those occasions it’s all running, never stopping, answering
prayers automatically . . .. Catholicism seems to educate people to obey
rules. Orthodoxy has helped me to become freer, to be more myself.
 conversion as opposition 

The issues highlighted by the last two interviewees are expressed with
a vocabulary that remarkably differentiates their discourse compared
to what we previously described. Not only do the words change; the
grammar and the syntax also change. Although the comparison with
Catholicism persists, it is no longer this that legitimates the choice of
being and remaining members of the Orthodox Church. Now there are
the “personal” reasons referring to a social and cultural context that has
radically changed in comparison with the context at the end of the s’
era.
If we wish to bring back to sociological categories what the youngest
members of the Orthodox Church say about their religious experience,
the connection with the debate about the relation between religion and
spirituality is immediately evident.9 The core of the matter lies on the
foundation of believing, moving from obedience to the ecclesiastic au-
thority, external to the subject, to the liberty of choice of the subjec-
tive self: not only the relation between religious institution and personal
experience is polarized, but the latter is superior to the former. We may
speak of a “democratization of the sacred,” in which the subject is capable
of deciding autonomously, and is legitimated to do so even socially, about
the various aspects of his existence, including the “religious” aspect. More
than the certainties offered by the traditional churches, nowadays the
believer seems to be inclined to run the risks of research and exploration,
where there are no more neat differences and borders and where iden-
tities are constructed more by inclusion than by exclusion (Wuthnow
).
The language spirituality speaks of personal well-being, of self-fulfill-
ment, of attention to the feelings and to the meaning of life: according to
the words used by Elisabetta, “spirituality is something that helps you in
the journey of life, and not a series of prohibitions that don’t allow you
to appreciate it thoroughly.” While in the other three languages we have
identified the hybridization phenomenon that takes place among social,
political, religious factors and personal experience that fuse together to
the point of becoming an identity matrix, this last language is one that
brings attention back to the innerness of the subject. In this perspective
conversion happens not so much from one religion to the other, but
rather from a modality of believing given by tradition to a modality of
believing more knowingly and autonomously chosen and experimented.

9 On “religion” and “spirituality,” cf. Roof (, ), Wuthnow (, ),

Giordan (, ), Heelas and Woodhead (), and Flanagan and Jupp ().
 giuseppe giordan

Conclusion

The Montaner case represents a “mass conversion”—a rare phenomenon

in the context of the contemporary western world. It is a peculiar conver-
sion that is the fruit of a controversy engaged with a bishop that has had
as its outcome the shifting of the population from Catholicism to Ortho-
doxy without knowing precisely what this might mean. Only with the
passing of the years have the inhabitants of Montaner made that choice
their own in a conscious way: an itinerary of appropriation that, as we
have seen, has overlapped quite different languages and cultural uni-
verses, sometimes theoretically incompatible, but anyhow always apt to
be recomposed with a certain meaning in the narrations of the people we
have interviewed.
There are many other aspects that ought to be studied: mixed mar-
riages between members of the Orthodox Church and Catholics, the
religious education of the children within the mixed couples, the phe-
nomenon of re-conversion from Orthodoxy to Catholicism. However,
these are aspects that are common to other conversions as well: the pecu-
liarity of Montaner resides exactly in what has been told in this chapter.
How can we understand what has happened in Montaner? That this
little schism happened in an exclusively Catholic context doesn’t seem
to be explicable literally in theological or religious terms, but rather
through analyzing languages of a political and cultural kind, without
forgetting the wounded pride of this fragile and, just for this reason,
strongly defended village identity. To be sure, the ecclesiastical language
and successively the religious language have overlapped to the political
language, up to the “spiritual” perspective of the young members of the
Orthodox Church.
The Orthodox Church members of Montaner today are few, even if
on Sundays the Orthodox church is full, since it gathers many immi-
grants coming from the Ukraine, Romania, Russia and other countries
of Eastern Europe. Besides, in Montaner, the first Orthodox monastery
for women in Italy has been present since , composed of three
nuns. History has evidently run its course, and the initial “conversion
by chance” has produced (as a side effect? as an unforeseen effect?) the
consolidation of Orthodoxy in Northeast Italy.
 conversion as opposition 

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 giuseppe giordan

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 chapter eleven

MAKING THE CONVERT: CONVERSIONS

IN THE LDS COMMUNITY TODAY

Sophie-Hélène Trigeaud

Although the significance of the growth of the Church of Jesus Christ of

Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) may be debated among social scientists,
the fact of its growth is without doubt. Each year since the s, the
number of converts baptized in the LDS Church has, on average, tripled
the number of children born into it. In  for instance, nearly  
of the people who became Mormons were converts; their volume far
surpassed that of the children born from LDS parents and then baptized.
Hence, the annual increase of LDS members must be due more to the
conversion of new members than to any Mormon “baby booming.”

Table .. Ratio of LDS Children of

Record vs. Converts Baptized, –1
Year Increase in Converts Ratio
Children of Record Baptized Converts/Children
 , , .
 , , .
 , , . min
 , , . min
 , , .
 , , .
 , , .
 , , . max
 , , .
 , , .
 , , .
Average , , .

1 The LDS Church annually publishes Statistical Reports for the General Conferences.

The statistics concern the LDS records as of  December for the prior year. Cf., “Sta-
tistical Report” (. , , , , , , , , ); “Annual
General Conferences,” Ensign. Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
 sophie-hélène trigeaud

In addition, there is a question of logic: in many places where the LDS

Church is implanted now (in other words, nearly everywhere but Illinois,
Missouri, and Utah), it is neither an historical nor a traditional church.
Therefore, logic wants that most of its members are converts if they are
not children or grandchildren of converts. If we set apart the question
of the retention of converts in this church, these statistical and logical
approaches let us understand that Mormonism has experienced dramatic
growth due to this continual entrance of converts (cf. Stark : ).
But this fact may not be reduced to an understanding of conversion to
Mormonism as simple mechanism through which converts simply flow
into the church. Indeed, it is a complex interaction system of processes,
combining the community that makes the convert and the convert who
becomes committed to the community.
The case of a religious movement, now more than a century and a half
old, maintaining its growth (or at least its continuity) through the conver-
sion of people, constitutes an indisputable object for a sociological case
study of religion in the contemporary world. This is the point of depar-
ture that I suggest in this chapter, to focus on the phenomenon of the
conversion to Mormonism today, and to investigate LDS practices and
representations for accurate causes, purposes, and effects of the process.

Background and Research Method

The literature on Mormonism is simply huge. Two reviews of it (Stark

, Mauss ) show as much. It is extensive in the social science
field, appearing largely in the second half of the twentieth century, as
a “Mormon subculture.” The issue of conversion in such a context has
itself motivated many studies. Of course, different points of departure in
these inquiries implicate a variety of research foci. For instance, among
contemporary European scholars, Bernadette Rigal-Cellard () and
Mette Ramstad () have asked why some people convert to Mor-
monism in specific local areas in France and Polynesia. Among Amer-
ican Mormon scholars, Armand L. Mauss has analyzed the issue from a
more global sociological perspective. In his book The Angel and the Bee-
hive (), he intended to demonstrate that two apparently contradic-
tory patterns may coexist in Mormonism, and these patterns combine in
a complex lineage system of “chosen” and “peculiar” people—both the
permanence of the Utah Pioneers’ sons and the arrival of “Gentiles,” who
were invited to convert.
 conversions in the lds community today 

Surveying this literature provides one type of answer to the present

question about the reasons for and effects of the conversion process in
contemporary Mormonism. Nevertheless, a multidimensional approach
to the phenomenon may introduce new insights in several ways: First,
multidimensional means combining different methods: the statistical
question, presented in the introduction, may suggest a very quantita-
tive study; nevertheless, even though I have used statistics and quan-
titative sociological methods, my epistemological orientation is mainly
qualitative because of a philosophical and anthropological educational
background. Second, this combination means adopting a transnational
viewpoint—focused on Mormonism as a whole in the Western contem-
porary world, without undervaluing deep ethnological surveys in par-
ticular places—as I did, for instance, in France and Utah. Third, it means
not reducing the observation solely to an object, but turning our atten-
tion to a complex system such as conversion, and to all of its processes in
interaction. Fourth, although I have chosen an exogenous approach inas-
much as I am not a Mormon, the endogenous point of view must not be
radically rejected. Far outside the sociological field, many LDS publica-
tions are continually issued about conversion. These are of a very specific
nature—being basically proselytism skills’ manuals—but they certainly
constitute fine materials for ethnographic investigation.
This chapter is an outcome of previous work: seven years of French
masters and doctoral degree research (Trigeaud , , ) whose
pursuit has been divided into several parts:
. Field work consisting of direct observation in LDS activities: in LDS
parochial and missionary fields, in the LDS educational system,
and in LDS family life. This took place mainly in France (areas of
Paris and nearby Paris, and the South-West of France), in Utah
(in Salt Lake City and the area of Provo, especially with a survey
at Brigham Young University [BYU, the principal university of the
LDS Church]),2 and more informally in Copenhagen.
. E-mail questionnaires including two that asked about the LDS mem-
ber’s individual route of life, which have been similarly conducted,
for comparison, in the francophone zone of Europe (Questionnaire
JA-francophone: France, Belgium and Switzerland, with a sample of
 respondents) and among BYU students in Utah (Questionnaire
BYU : with a sample of  respondents); and a third, asking about

2 The survey received BYU IRB approval in .

 sophie-hélène trigeaud

the religious reading habits of BYU students (Questionnaire BYU :

with a sample of  respondents). The intention of these question-
naires was to assay the results of the direct observation to verify
whether or not they were representative.
In-depth personal interviews—in general, regular talk with peo-
ple in the field (or informal interviews) have been prioritized. But
some more formal interviews, about special topics or with special
interlocutors were conducted as well. The informal interviews were
generally not structured with prepared questions, nor recorded,
but were transcribed as clinical verbatim reports—except for rare
opportunities, when taking notes was possible. The formal ones, by
contrast, were both prepared and recorded (with MP recording).
The purpose of these interviews was to have a more accurate idea
of the endogenous discourse and to go deeper in the knowledge of
the individual life-course of the convert;
A survey of LDS resources among books, articles, newspapers, mag-
azines and any other publications, conferences, Internet sites,
movies, announcements in the media, and so on. This last but not
least part of the survey is intended to consider any data in the gen-
eral LDS context.
To define a methodology, however, not only means describing the dif-
ferent strategies pursued. It also signifies providing more information
about the application of the methods to the object. Here indeed, the
research may inquire about Mormonism as a whole. Nevertheless it def-
initely aims to permit the focus on centers of attention as parts of this
whole—assuming their indivisibility with this context. This is the reason
why these data on conversion to Mormonism are mostly extracted from
more general survey work. With respect to the connection of the phe-
nomenon to a more general context, this method revealed the necessity
for dealing with two inseparable issues: the issue of the conversion as an
LDS community’s action on the convert and the issue of the conversion
as an action of the convert him(her)self. It is the equal interest in both
these facets of our object that required an ethnographic observation of
conversion as it occurs in the field, combined with an in-depth socio-
anthropological analysis of the context of the observed facts.
 conversions in the lds community today 

Conversion to Mormonism: A Case Study

in France among Young Adults Today

Although the goal of this project is a study at the level of the global
system, it is necessary to begin with a specific case study of conversion
to Mormonism today, one that can offer concrete grounding for our
analysis. France indeed is a country where the LDS Church is neither
a traditional nor an indigenous church. Although it is true that the first
LDS missionary arrived in France in —which is to say only nineteen
years after the establishment of the LDS Church by Joseph Smith at
Fayette, New York—implanting the church in France was difficult. The
Mormon mission had to be transferred or closed four times.3 Very few
converts where baptized. There were less than  French Mormons in
the s. As shown in the Table ., it was only after World War II,
and especially in the s, that the LDS Church experienced significant
growth in France.4 As of , there were , members in France
distributed across  congregations.

Table .. French LDS Members  to 5

Year Number of French Members
of the LDS Church
 
 
– 
 ,
 ,
 ,
 ,
 ,
 ,
 ,

This historical background allows us assume that in France today, most

of the French LSD members are converts, children, or grandchildren
of converts; and that the area has been and still is a place of intense

3 Transfer: Jersey Island, –. Closure: –, –, –.

4 About the history of the LDS Church in France, see Seguy ; Rigal-Cellard ;
Euvrard ; www.newsroom.lds.org .
5 www.newsroom.lds.org/ldsnewsroom/eng/contact-us/france Oct. ;

www.newsroom.lds.org ; Wilson ; “Histoire de l’Église en France,”

www.eglisedejesuschrist.fr/main.php?p= Aug. .
 sophie-hélène trigeaud

LDS missionary activities: both of these conditions making it a relevant

location for this research.
While the total amount of French LDS members is not enormous, I
decided nevertheless to select a sample of young adults to study their
conversion for two reasons: first, because I noticed along my field work
that most of the converts had been converted while they were young
adults and, second, because francophone sociologists have not generally
supposed that this age bracket was very active in religion (see, e.g.,
Lambert and Michelat ; Lambert ; Galland )—at least
not until more recent research on the issue (Galland and Roudet ;
Lambert ). Thus, from a French point of view this section expected
to study the conversion to Mormonism among young adults in France
today as a marginal phenomenon.
Following the methodological protocol outlined above, this part of
my research consisted of field work involving of three years of direct
observation in LDS activities for Young Adults, primarily at the Institute
of Religion in Paris. The Institute of Religion is a place for  to  year
old LDS members (“Young Adults”), where they take classes in religion
and have spiritual as well as social activities. In the year –,
, students were enrolled in such programs worldwide, including
, in the United States and , in France (Church Educational
System: Annual Information Update ). In those years, the Institute
of Paris claimed  students. These statistics give an idea of the young
population among the active Mormons (whereas all the Young Adults are
supposed to be affiliated with this structure).6 I mainly used verbatims
in this context, writing notes afterward. Occasionally, I took precise
notes during the classes, for information about specific topics or about
“testimonies” of conversions shared between the Young Adults and their
“instructors” (the name given in LDS educational system to those who
teach).
The second part of this study consisted of an e-mail questionnaire
combining open and closed questions.7 The initial strategy for this sur-
vey was to locate volunteer subjects, but it was eventually published on
the Website of the francophone LDS Young Adults members (thus, the

6 According to the French LDS directeur de la communication in a  letter, the

“young adults” population comprised between . and .  of the total LDS French
population in December . But this number represented people registered in the LDS
record and was not an actual count of the activity or non-activity of these members.
7 Questionnaire JA-francophone: the complete data and analyses of this questionnaire

are available in Trigeaud .

 conversions in the lds community today 

questionnaire was no longer restricted solely to answers from those living

in France, but open to francophones in other European settings, primar-
ily Swiss and Belgian). The volunteers took the survey on-line and sent
their answers to a special e-mail address I opened for this purpose. The
questions solicited information about the socio-demographic character-
istics of the volunteers and about their religious biography (to have the
most complete context of their conversion) and included direct questions
about their possible conversion.8
The questionnaire was not limited to converts but also included peo-
ple born in the LDS Church, because one purpose was to compare differ-
ent kinds of conversions—i.e., from the exterior as well as from the inte-
rior of the community. Among the  people in the sample,  declared
themselves to be converts: four were converts from the interior, that is to
say “even being born in the Church,” and fifteen were converts from the
exterior.9 Another purpose was to compare between converts and those
born in the Church the different possible patterns of the Mormon’s typical
proof of faith and conversion—the “testimony.” The respondents did not
need to be active Mormons, but could also be inactive or former mem-
bers. (Even though the object of the study was conversion into the Mor-
mon faith, I did not want to exclude the process from conversion to un-
conversion, from faithful to lapsed, for the possible insights it could pro-
vide.) Thus, the sample included four non-active and former Mormons.
This sample of  respondents is small-scale in comparison to the
sample of , respondents on the French part of the European Value
Survey of  (Bréchon ). Nevertheless, the total amount of LDS
French “Young Adults” being itself small in scale implies by principle of
proportion a small-scale sample. Moreover, some seminal contemporary
studies have also drawn their data on small samples of LDS subjects
(e.g., Smith and Denton : –). Hence, even though this sample
is not formally representative, it is significant at least in the sense that
the young LDS members who attend the Institute’s classes or who are
linked to this Website (which requires a password for entry) are, by
definition, representative of the most actively practicing LDS Young
Adults, inasmuch as the education provided by the Institute is a not only

8 For instance in the Questionnaire JA-francophone: “Were you born in the Church

or converted?” “If converted, how long have you been converted, and what was your
religious affiliation before?” “What was the reason for your baptism or conversion?”
9 The distinction between “exterior” and “interior” makes reference to outside and

inside the LDS community. It is the fifteen exterior converts who are represented in
Table ..
 sophie-hélène trigeaud

part of LDS education, but is additional to the education and religious

activities of the Sunday meetings.
The third part consisted of in-depth personal interviews with a se-
lected sample of fourteen Young Adult converts. They had to tell more
about themselves and to explain their experiences with LDS Church—
how they had their first LDS contact or met an LDS member for the first
time, how they were converted, what their current activities in the LDS
Church were, and details about their testimony. Ten of these interviews
were recorded. I took notes during the other four. Additional informal
interviews were conducted without recording with other converts, with
their family and friends, with missionaries, bishops and instructors.
The fourth part of the survey was the reading, as explained previously,
of all the LDS resources I could find on conversion or proselytism among
books, publications, movies, Internet, and so on. This survey was not pri-
marily focused on the study of conversion but on a more general study of
Mormonism, through the three issues of conversion, education, and com-
munity as three axes of a complex system of religious continuity. From
this general survey, I have extracted materials concerning the conversion
aspect, and I have added some less directly connected materials that per-
mit deeper interpretation of the context of conversion.
Considering these data as a whole, what can we say about conversion
to Mormonism in France among Young Adults today?
The first immediate results of the survey let us draw outlines of who
the converts from the exterior are. These data as a whole are displayed in
Table .. On average, they were a little more than  years old when
they converted. In decreasing order, they were comprised primarily of
atheists, non-practicing Catholics, and “believers without belonging.”10
A minority of them were practicing Catholics, “Protestants” and “Evan-
gelicals” (i.e., subjects used one term or the other to describe themselves),
Buddhists, or Jehovah’s Witnesses. With respect to their education, the
answers showed that approximately one-fourth had completed a high
school program or a professional training curriculum. A third had one
to three years of college or comparable studies after high school. One-
fourth had completed four years of university education, and about ten
percent had complete more than five years at university. About their cur-
rent activity in the LDS Church or, more precisely, their membership sta-
tus, ninety percent were currently active members, one was inactive, and

10 On “believing without belonging,” see Davie : –.

 conversions in the lds community today 

two were not members any more. Eighty-three percent were worshiping
weekly in their parish meetings, and thirty-one percent had been mis-
sionaries.

Table .. Profile of Converts from the Exterior

Questionnaire In-depth Total sample: 
JA-francophone: interviews:  converts
 converts converts
Gender M–F  M –  F  M –  F
Average age at baptism . . .
Religious affiliation before their A A A
conversion (or when have been  NPC  NPC  NPC
converted in case of several  BWB  BWB  BWB
changes): A, Atheist; NPC,  PP  PC  PC
Non-practicing Catholic; BWB,  B not very E  PP & E
Believing without belonging; practicing  JW  JW
PP, Practicing Protestant;  B not very
E, Evangelical Church; PC, practicing
Practicing Catholic; B, Buddhist;
JW, Jehovah’s Witness
Education (in French system,  bac level or  bac  bac or p.t.e.
“bac” [baccalauréat] being the professional  bac +   bac +  & 
passage from high school to training  bac +   bac + 
college) education  more than bac  bac + 
 bac +  &  +  more than bac
 bac +  +
 bac + 
 more than bac
+
LDS membership status:  AM  AM  MA
AM, Active Member; I, Inactive  NM  IM  MI
Member; NM No longer a  NM  NM
member
Weekly worship in parish   
meeting
Did a mission   

In comparison with the data collected by Rigal-Cellard (), there are

less people in this sample who converted from Catholicism (at least active
or practicing Catholicism) than people who converted from atheism
or from a believing-without-belonging background (the non-practicing
Christians being themselves, as non-belonging, logically included in this
category). Nevertheless, the situation of young people who declared that
they converted while they were believing, but came from a family where
 sophie-hélène trigeaud

they received neither religious culture nor religious tradition, is typical

of what had been previously observed by Danièle Hervieu-Léger (:
)11 and by the scholars in the  European Value Survey (Roudet
: –). However, this result should not obscure another, more
unexpected, one: among the converts in this sample, some, and especially
some males, had been formerly highly involved in religious worship—
such as cases of men who had been trained in Catholic seminary or
who had wanted to become a Catholic priest when they were a child.12
Hence one can argue for the necessity of paying more precise attention to
the specific religious background characteristics of converts as possible
factors in the conversion process.
The second type of results from this survey consist of information
about the nature and the principle of the conversion of these young adults.
In particular, it lets us understand how they were converted.
On the one hand, from the convert’s side, we may assume that the way
to enter into contact with the LDS Church, and eventually to accept bap-
tism, differs according to the place. In this particular case, conversion to
Mormonism in France is indubitably different from conversion to Mor-
monism in a typical Mormon locale like, for an extreme example, Utah,
where Mormonism is present everywhere with a strong community cul-
ture. It is evident that in a French context, converts to Mormonism have
very little chance of having been previously acquainted with anything of
this specific religious culture before their conversion (and even of hav-
ing, for a larger and larger part of them, been acquainted with any other
religious culture either).13
In her book on the conversion phenomenon, Hervieu-Léger (:
– et passim) makes a distinction between three Convert Figures:
the first is one who changes his or her religion for another one; the sec-
ond is one who was not religious before the conversion and joins a reli-
gion for the first time; the third is one who reconverts to his or her own

11 “Conversions of those who have no religion increase in societies where . . . religious

and family transmission has largely become precarious” [my translation].

12 One of the primarily reasons they explained about their change was the fact that

Mormonism would let them be both a priest and married. Such kind of change, in
Catholic as in other Christian contexts, appears moreover in different LDS sources. (cf.
From Clergy to Convert, an LDS book which is a collection of conversion-to-Mormonism
stories related by former clergymen and women of various denominations [Gibson
]).
13 I am currently engaged in research that compares the origins of young converts

today with those who converted as young adults twenty or thirty years ago in order to
explore these differences.
 conversions in the lds community today 

religion, hence “returns to tradition.” Considering the previous religious

affiliation declared by fourteen of the young adults in our questionnaire
and interviews, we could be inclined to think that basically half of the 
in this sample fall into the first category of converts—those who change
their religion for another one. But, if we look at their answers more care-
fully, and in particular, if we take as a whole the young who were Atheist,
believing without belonging, or not practicing, then we could reverse the
interpretation and realize that nineteen of these youth, (two-thirds) actu-
ally belong to the second category—those who were not religious before.
We may now consider a final issue that emerges from the survey as well.
In addition to the fifteen converts who compose the sample of our ques-
tionnaire that would receive the appellation “converts from the exterior,”
four young adults answered affirmatively to both of the questions “Were
you born into the Church?” and “Were you converted?” These answers
could a priori signify that some of the converts fall into the third cat-
egory of those who returned to their own tradition. But deeper study
of their cases shows the inaccuracy of such a hypothesis. After reading
the life-courses developed through the other parts of the questionnaire,
and after in-depth interviews, it clearly appears a posteriori that “convert
while being born in the Church” does not mean a return after leaving,
but a process to get, by themselves and in the continuity of their educa-
tion, what was not given solely as a heritage.14 Hence they would be better
called converts from the interior.
As an example, this idea of a process of self-experience in addition
to tradition and heritage,15 was present in the answer of a young adult
who explained, in the francophone questionnaire, why he decided to
convert—and how he gained his “testimony” to do that—while he had
been baptized at eight-and-a-half years of age:
[About baptism and conversion] At first, because it was a tradition, and I
rejoiced a lot about that. The true conversion was because I wanted to know
if I was wasting my time at Church or not, hence I did my own search.

14 For instance such items as: “What age were you baptized?” “Were you baptized as a

convert (not previously participating in LDS Church activities)?” “Have you ever been
involved in other religion practices previous to your participation in the LDS faith?”
“Why have you chosen the LDS religion? Or what was your conversion experience?” “LDS
membership status of your family?” “Are there members of your extended family who are
also LDS members?” “When was the first member of your family baptized?”
15 Because of its diachronic dimension, tradition is different from “social capital” and

“interpersonal attachment” as put forward by Stark (: –).

 sophie-hélène trigeaud

[About testimony] It was not a quick thing, but it came through time and
experiences. I had nevertheless to search. My faith had to be tested. [Male,
, active member]

If this situation was significantly present on the francophone side of

our survey, it is important to observe, in comparison with the results
of our Questionnaire BYU-, that it was the most representative on the
American side, concerning the BYU-students of Utah who are living in
a place where Mormonism became the main religious tradition:
Yes, even being born a member still takes conversion. [Female, , active
member, baptized at age ]
Yes. I was converted in the sense that I came to know, love and want to
participate actively in my religion because I wanted to, not because I was
born into it. [Female, , active member, baptized at age ]
Yes, I was born in the church but also converted in the sense that I have
gained a personal testimony of the gospel. [Female, , active member,
baptized at age ]
Yes, everyone needs to find their own testimony whether they were born
into the church or not. [Female, , active member, baptized at age ]
No. Not in the sense that I’ve been taught the gospel all my life and was
not found or taught by missionaries. I’m converted in the sense of having
a testimony. [Female, , active member, baptized at age ]
Yes, meaning the personal conversion everyone needs, but grew up in the
church. [Male, , active member, baptized at age ]
Yes. I was not a “convert” in that I joined the church later in my life, but
there is a certain point when every member of the church must gain their
own testimony that it is true. It is only in that way, that I have gained that
testimony, that I consider myself a convert. [Female, , active member,
baptized at age ]

Far from any Mormon specificity, this emphasis on the personal expe-
rience of religion, if it is here opposed to family heritage, could be
solely interpreted as a common fact of the religious modernity, that
many authors have already highlighted. For example, Roland Campiche
stresses the importance of a “new religious revolution” in the way that
in modernity, children were influenced by their parents’ example on the
condition that they “experienced this themselves” (: ). In her
book on The Pilgrim and the Convert as well, Hervieu-Léger pointed out
this individual experience as the basis of conversion in the individual-
izing context of religious modernity: “In a society where religion has
become a matter of privacy and optional choice, conversion enters, above
 conversions in the lds community today 

all, on a individual choice dimension, in which the believing subject’s

autonomy expresses itself ” (:  [my translation]).
Contrary to this general context of modernity, however, the fact
emerging from these surveys is that, in contemporary Mormonism, indi-
vidual experience does not seem to be the antithesis of the influence of
the tradition (as above: “because it was a tradition, and I rejoiced a lot
about that”). So the question arises whether conversion from the interior
is a matter of individual choice for the subject or of following tradition.
Some responses to the questionnaire indicate that even if it is an “individ-
ual matter,” making the choice itself may be imposed as a necessity in the
young person’s life course: as some young Mormons have explained it, “at
one point or another . . . members . . . must decide” or “had to decide”:
Yes. Not everyone who goes to church necessarily has to be converted to do
so. But, regardless of family members who may or may not be members of
the church, at one point or another, members of this church must decide
if they really believe all this stuff or not. When you decide that you do,
that becomes the springboard for your own conversion. [Female, , active
member, baptized at age ]
Hmm . . . I had to decide if I would stay or not in this Church. [Female,
, active member, baptized at age ]
My parents did not give me a choice. [Female, , member in “formal
probation,”16 baptized at age ]
This pattern of “choice making” as a more or less automatic process
indicates the non-contradictory way in which traditional heritage and
individual conversion may converge in Mormonism. Their symbiotic
arrangement appears statistically too, if we consider again the answers
of the BYU students about the reason why they explained that they were
baptized and converts:  percent of them mentioned both traditional
heritage and individual experience. In addition, while  percent claimed
a personal decision, a majority of  percent acknowledged that they
wanted to ensure the continuity of a tradition to which they felt that they
belonged.

16 A “temporary state of discipline” after a transgression of LDS standards (cf. Ballard

: ).
 sophie-hélène trigeaud

Table .. Why Young Adults Choose

Mormonism (BYU Questionnaire)
Why have you chosen the LDS religion?
Or what was your conversion experience?
(open question)
Following the tradition. . 
(e.g. “Because I was born in it.” “Because of my family, my parents, /
[etc.]”)
Accepting the tradition, but after a personal experience. . 
(e.g. “I was born in it and at first it was not a choice, but I eventually /
decided, after that I prayed, read, study, [etc.]”)
Personal reasons or choice. . 
(e.g. “Because I love this Church.” “I feel good here.” “Because I had /
a personal revelation [etc.]”)
No answer . 
/

Moreover, in answer to another question—“What feelings do you have on

how your family/relatives have educated/given/influenced you in your
spiritual and religious life?”—the young Mormons more directly ac-
knowledged that they feel they are a part of a traditional lineage. On the
francophone side of our survey, all the young adults who declared that
they grew up in the LDS Church replied by a clear recognition of their
family heritage. On the BYU-students side,  percent also confirmed
explicitly such an influence.17 But these students were not only explicit
about this perception. The terms that they used in their responses show
how evident tribute to lineage and tradition heritage seemed to be to
them.
I really enjoy having relatives that are members of the Church. I feel that I
have examples to look towards in my life that share my beliefs and younger
cousins that I need to be an example for. I appreciate my parents’ consistent
spiritual guidance. I feel that they have given me a strong foundation of
good principles to live by through the church and innumerable blessings
that have come by my membership in the LDS Church via my parents’
influence. [Female, , active member, baptized at age ]
My family and relatives have all given an example of what I want or don’t
want in my life. But living and encouraging me to live the standards of the
church I have seen the blessings and happiness that come into their lives

17 Among the remaining responses, three persons left the question blank, while two

expressed reservations but not denial.

 conversions in the lds community today 

and that have come into mine as I have lived the gospel. They have helped
to expand my knowledge about the Plan our Heavenly Father has for us.
They haven’t forced me to do anything but have given me agency to choose
for myself. By doing this I know that this is what I want in my life. [Female,
, active member, baptized at age ]
I have members of my family who crossed the Plains. I’m so thankful
that they were willing to give up the comforts of life so that they could
be with the church. I’m most thankful to my parents who have dedicated
their lives to living the gospel and to teach all  children to be faithful.
They never coerced us into the church, it was there and we all in our
time developed our own testimonies; I very much feel the influence of my
pioneer ancestors who made the decision to give their all to the gospel.
[Female, , active member, baptized at age ]
These data reflect that the young adult LDS members who declared
that they were “born in the church” generally claim having been both
autonomous searchers and conscious heirs in their conversion from the
interior process. Their perception is that they “had to chose” though this
choice was in a tradition, because they belong to a lineage represented
not only by their closest relatives (“my parents,” “my relatives”), but also
by their ancestry (“my pioneer ancestors”), and even by their whole
community (“the church”).
Should we hence adopt Margaret Mead’s determinist stance toward the
“child’s dependence upon tradition”? According to her, in the mechanism
of the transmission, it is a quasi-physical law that no child can escape
the tradition of the adults who are around him: “The forces of imitation
are so much more potent than any adult technique for exploiting them;
the child’s receptivity to its surroundings is so much more important
than any methods of stimulation, that as long as every adult with whom
he comes in contact is saturated with the tradition, he cannot escape a
similar saturation” (: ). In such a mechanism, Mead primarily
advanced not the psychologists’ idea of “identification,” which they sup-
pose leads to the formation of personality, but a “process by which the
growing individual is inducted into his cultural inheritance” (: ,
cf. ). The Mormon narratives that we just considered could allow us
to agree with Mead. Nevertheless Mead’s stance may not be completely
appropriate to the Mormon field: on the one hand, a significant amount of
people “born into the Church” grow to become inactive or non-Mormon;
on the other hand, some converts declare that they grew up in totally
non-Mormon surroundings.
It is difficult to know for sure how many people being “born” Mormon
eventually quit the LDS Church, but we can obtain a few examples of
 sophie-hélène trigeaud

this possibility through young adults, reared in Mormon families, who

explained that they had siblings who quit the LDS Church or became
inactive. In the BYU  Questionnaire, the respondents were asking about
the LDS status of their close relatives and family, and among  “born
into the Church” subjects,  (or  percent) acknowledged that they
had more or less disaffiliated sibling(s).18 Nevertheless, Mead herself
mentions such possible evolution in traditions “striving to maintain”
themselves:
Religious bodies with outlooks as profoundly different as Roman Catholi-
cism and Christian Science claim large numbers of adherents always ready
to induct their own and other people’s children into the special tradi-
tions of their particular group. The four children of common parents may
take such divergent courses that at the age of fifty their premises may be
mutually unintelligible and antagonistic. [ . . .] Within the general tradition
there are numerous groups striving for precedence, striving to maintain
or extend their proportionate allegiances in the next generation.
(: –)
Hervieu-Léger’s sociological argument, however, helps to elucidate such
a dualism, which is likely to combine imitation and individual choice
(even tending to disaffiliation): Typically in the contemporary world,
continuous transmission of the heritage remains the first requirement
for a religious institution’s continuity, while tradition is growing to be a
chosen option rather than a transmitted life-style for the individual.
Transmitting in a continuous and regular way, the whole heritage [ . . . ]
that is involved in the realization of its own aim is, for an institution, a
first requirement that is the condition of its continuity in time . . . . “[I]n
a modernity where social as well as religious identities are less and less
given—that is to say, transmitted as is from one generation to another—
the fact of religious believing does not correspond anymore,” according to
the Protestant theologian Pierre Gisel (: ), to the fact that people
“know that they are engendered.” It is much more linked to a choice that
implies that people want to be engendered into a tradition (or expressly
wish their children to be).
(Hervieu-Léger : , , my translation)

18 Questions: “LDS membership status of your family? Mother [Non-member—

Investigator—Non-active Member—Active Member—Other (clarify: . . .); year of {LDS}

baptism?]. Father [N-m – I – N-a-m – A-m – O (clarify: . . . ); year of the baptism?]. Broth-
ers [N-m – I – N-a-m – A-m – O (clarify: . . . ); year of the baptism?]. Sisters [N-m – I – N-
a-m – A-m – O (clarify: . . .); year of the baptism?].” “Are there members of your extended
family who are also LDS members? [Yes—No (clarify: Who? Membership status? Year of
baptism?)”.
 conversions in the lds community today 

Hence Mormon society, rallying both contemporary individualism and

traditional transmission—through lineage—of the heritage, would be in
line with modernity. But while conversion is, for individuals belonging
to the lineage system, the main place of this manner of individuation,
tradition appears to be a substrate rather than an agent of LDS commu-
nity growth. Consequently, the agents of this growth should be sought
in other facets of the conversion than solely in the fact that LDS young
adults may be primarily involved in an imitation of the tradition pro-
cess.
So it is also necessity to consider, on the other hand, the phenomenon
of conversion to Mormonism on the LDS community side, which could
a priori appear as a standardized process: indeed, the LDS Church has
the same missionary program in its different areas all over the world.
Wherever the place of the conversion, it is the same missionary lesson
program, the same pre-baptism LDS bishop’s interview with the convert,
the same rite of baptism by immersion, and in theory at least, the same
integration into the local congregation with worship, involvement in
activities, and social welcoming.19

Conversion in the LDS Community Today: Making the “Member”

Analyzing the conversion to Mormonism process aims indeed at under-

standing the final goal of the community: making an individual a “mem-
ber,” according to its values and cultural standards as well as its religious
representations. Considering that LDS give people the name “member”
once they are baptized into the LDS Church, we could think that baptism
is the major agent of the transformation from who is considered as a non-
member (or an “investigator”) to a member.20 But this logical deduction
would not take into account the importance, in such a passage, of the
community’s efforts to “make” the member, through its intense prosely-
tizing and social welcoming of the newcomers. From the “full time mis-
sionaries,” to the “ward missionaries,” to the ordinary “members,” it is

19 This program is standardized through institutional means and educational sup-

ports—for example, the Missionary Training Centers, such manuals as the Missionary
Handbook () or Preach My Gospel: A Guide to Missionary Service (), and
www.mission.net. The worldwide Mormon mission network has been the object of many
studies (cf. Davies ; Durfee ; Introvigne ; Penley ; Ramstad ;
Rigal-Cellard ; Stark ; Stark and Bainbridge ; Trigeaud ).
20 “Investigator” is the name given to an LDS catechumen.
 sophie-hélène trigeaud

the whole LDS community that partakes in “mission”—hence the desig-

nation of the “Mormon network” as the primary agent of the passage (cf.
Stark : –, –; Stark : –; Trigeaud , ).
There were, for example, , LDS full-time missionaries in 
( Statistical Report). These are primarily young adults ( years old
as a minimum for females,  to  years old for males) who spend from
 months (females) to two years (males) of their life in mission. Such a
mission implies a ritual that “sets apart” the missionaries and introduces
them into a liminal life with strict religious standards and such full-
time activities as proselytizing, teaching, or humanitarian service. The
primary responsibilities of the full-time missionaries who proselytize are
to “find,” “contact,” and “teach” the “non-members” or “investigators”
until they are baptized. All LDS young males are supposed to “go on
a mission.” This is not presented by Mormons as an “obligation” but as
a religious “duty.” Other LDS full-time missions concern couples who
agree to leave their regular work or retirement lives and go on a mission,
usually to assume some form of leadership responsibility (see Missionary
Handbook ; Preach My Gospel ; Ramstad ; Trigeaud ,
). The ward missionary has primary responsibility for continuing the
work of the full-time missionaries in the local unit of the LDS Church
after the baptism of new converts.
Every LDS member may also be considered as involved in the “mis-
sion,” however, since every member is encouraged to find people to con-
vert. For example, the Young Women Personal Progress (: ) manual
for LDS young women advises, “Invite friends of other faiths to Church
activities; Reach out to new converts and those who are less active.”
Within the ward there are on-going activities of “visiting teachers” and
“home teachers,” and all Mormon parents are supposed to prepare their
children through informal means to go on a mission (cf. Christensen and
Christensen ), while specific education is assumed by Missionary
Training Centers.
But focusing on this first obvious source for the reproduction of Mor-
mon faith and life would also mask the effectiveness of two less visible
agents. To discern them, it is necessary to take cognizance of the dis-
tinction, consistently drawn by Mormons, between “active members” and
“non-active members”: to be included in the former category, a member
has not only to be baptized, but also to commit to community life. Com-
mitment typically arises during the conversion process (cf. Wimberley
, ), and it especially takes on a special dimension through the
application by the community members of an LDS missionary skill called
 conversions in the lds community today 

the “commitment pattern.”21 But commitment is not only the result of a

unilateral action of the community on the convert: it also requires a more
complex interaction between these two parts. It implies such actions from
the converts in obeying such community standards as tithing and honor-
ing the LDS code of the “Word of Wisdom” (including abstinence from
alcohol, tobacco and caffeine), and being involved in the community’s
activities.22
Among the numerous ways in which an “active member” may so
participate, two specially involve a commitment that requires both the
convert’s and the community’s action. The first of these is “testimony
bearing”—where members ritually “bear testimony.” This occurs pre-
eminently during the “testimony meeting” that occurs the first Sunday
of each month in LDS wards, at the time of the “sacrament meeting.”23
According to Douglas Davies, this performance is the “essence of Mor-
monism,” and it constitutes a “major gesture in Mormon behavior” whose
principle obeys a “law of Witnesses” (:–). Here Mormons
give proof of their own conversions while building community cohe-
sion grounded on a complex interaction between personal experience
and collective memory through a rhetorical “self-corroborative chain”
(Ravenshear : ; on this process, cf. Trigeaud )
The second of these intersecting modes of commitment is the organic
integration of the member (in the Durkheimian sense), through the
“request or assignment” for those in the community to “fulfill” a calling:
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is organized to benefit all
who participate, and all are expected to assist in its labors. [ . . .] The Church
is administered according to the principles of individual involvement,
service, and self-government. There is no paid ministry in local wards
of stakes, and the work of the Church is carried out through volunteer
service by the members, who are called by the priesthood leaders to
contribute in various capacities. [ . . . ] One purpose of Church callings

21 This pattern typically appears in the Missionary Handbook (:–): “Proselyt-

ing. Proven methods. To proselyte effectively, use the commitment pattern as you focus
on the following key actions: FINDING [ . . . ] TEACHING [ . . . ] BAPTIZING AND FEL-
LOWSHIPPING [ . . . ] . . . Use commitment pattern principles to motivate and inspire
members and leaders to fulfil their missionary responsibilities” (: –, –).
Although these efforts have been well known by Mormons as the “commitment pattern,”
recently the LDS Church has been likely to present the concept without the direct use of
the term “pattern.” In its new missionary program indeed, LDS members are encouraged
rather to “help people make and keep commitment” (Preach My Gospel : –).
22 About the significance of these practices in the LDS community, cf. Davies ;

Heaton, Bahr and Jacobson ; Stark :; Trigeaud , .
23 On the “ritual function of testimony bearing,” see Mauss : .
 sophie-hélène trigeaud

is to benefit individual members by letting them do the work of the

Church. [ . . . ] Through service, members learn their responsibility and
their capacity, enlarge their understanding and increase their commitment
to the gospel.24
Coming full circle, the convert is being made a piece of the community
even as he is participating in the collective making of this community.
Commitment in this sense is certainly not specific to Mormons. Robert
Bellah and his colleagues (: ), for example, report a contempo-
rary occurrence of such phenomena for instance, in a Presbyterian con-
text:
Nan Pfautz, raised in a strict Baptist church, is now an active member
of a Presbyterian congregation near San Jose. Her church membership
gives her a sense of community involvement, of engagement with issues
at once social and moral. She speaks of her “commitment” to the church,
so that being a member means willing to give time, money, and care to the
community it embodies and to its wider purposes. [ . . . ] She says, “I believe
I have a commitment to God which is beyond church. I felt my relationship
with God was O.K. when I wasn’t with the church.”25
In reference to Bellah’s earlier work, we can also recognize here the
influence of the “collective emphasis” peculiar to the “early New England
political thought.”26
As for the manner in which the LDS convert has to become a “mem-
ber” through both individual conversion and imitation of the tradition,
he is also made a “member” through both individual and collective com-
mitments. To elucidate, last but not least, the key of such a mechanism
that tends to destine individualism toward collective action, we can look
to Bellah’s analysis (: –, ) of the “dialectic of conversion and
covenant” in Protestant and Republican American culture:
There was, then, a strongly social, communal, or collective emphasis in
early New England political thought. That collective emphasis, that under-
standing of man as fundamentally social, was derived from the classical
conception of the polis as responsible for the education and the virtue of
its citizens, from the Old Testament notion of the Covenant between God
and a people held collectively responsible for its actions, and from the New

24 Cf. Monson : ; Pitcher :–. On the “commitment” hence implied,

see Shepherd and Shepherd, : –. Again we see an influence from Protes-
tantism (e.g., Weber, : –; cf. Davies : –).
25 On the Protestant background of the Mormons “demanding commitment from

each believer,” see Davies : . On the economic dimension of this commitment in
the LDS context, see Davies : , ; Bousquet ; Trigeaud .
26 On the influence of this thought on Mormon culture, see Trigeaud .
 conversions in the lds community today 

Testament notion of a community based on charity or love and expressed

in brotherly affection and fellow membership in one common body. This
collective emphasis did not mean a denigration of the individual because
the Calvinist synthesis of the older traditions maintained a strong sense of
the dignity and responsibility of the individual and especially stressed vol-
untaristic individual action. But Calvinist “individualism” only made sense
within the collective context. [ . . . ] This dual emphasis on the individual
and on society can be traced in the dialectic of conversion and covenant
that was continuously worked over in the colonial Protestant Churches and
came to provide a series of feelings, images, and concepts that would help
shape the meaning of the new republic [ . . . ] Both the Constitution and
the Civil War amendments are thoroughly secular documents, but they
embody the moral commitment of a covenant people to order its life by
the highest standards of which it is capable.

Far from a “peculiarity,” it eventually seems that when Mormonism

makes a claim for the indivisibility of conversion, covenant, and commit-
ment among its members—and so for the whole community—it shares
common ground with a typical American heritage.27

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 chapter twelve

A COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY PERSPECTIVE ON

RELIGIOUS CONVERSION AS TOLD IN THE GOSPELS

Stefano Federici, Pierluigi Caddeo,

and Francesco Valerio Tommasi

In this chapter we intend to approach religious conversion from the

perspective of cognitive and social psychology, describing those mecha-
nisms and mental processes at the basis of a socially and culturally com-
plex behavior such as that of religious conversion. As a model of con-
version we will mainly refer to some pericopes and sayings drawn from
the Gospels. Such a choice, besides being suggested by the methodical
necessity of limiting the investigative field to the controllable space of an
essay, takes into account the fact that the term “conversion,” as it is under-
stood in the ordinary language of English speakers and of European lan-
guages in general, derives its semantic characterization first of all from
these sources. The chosen textual reference has, therefore, a paradigmatic
relevance from a historical-cultural point of view.

Preliminary Considerations

Our research into the mental structures causing human behavior begins
from the (cognitivist) conviction that the output (the behavior) is richer
than the input (the stimulus)—that is to say, than the circumstances
that originated it. This conviction is based on the “thesis of the poverty
of the stimulus” (Fodor ; Plotkin ): what the mind represents
of the world is not a simple secular representation of reality but its
reconstruction, containing more information than that in the material
offered by the stimuli. This is certainly evident in perceptive, mnemonic
and linguistic outputs. Deaf children in a school where signs and gestures
are forbidden develop a systemic language governed by rules, as Senghas
and Coppola (: ) report:
 s. federici, p. caddeo, and f.v. tommasi

It has long been postulated that language is not purely learned, but arises
from an interaction between environmental exposure and innate abilities.
The innate component becomes more evident in rare situations in which
the environment is markedly impoverished. The present study investigated
the language production of a generation of deaf Nicaraguans who had not
been exposed to a developed language. We examined the changing use of
early linguistic structures (specifically, spatial modulations) in a sign lan-
guage that has emerged since the Nicaraguan group first came together. In
under two decades, sequential cohorts of learners systematized the gram-
mar of this new sign language. We examined whether the systematicity
being added to the language stems from children or adults; our results indi-
cate that such changes originate in children aged  and younger. Thus,
sequential cohorts of interacting young children collectively possess the
capacity not only to learn, but also to create, language.
(cf. Harris, ; Schaller, ; Pinker, )
The very phenomenon of enrichment of the stimulus, due to the men-
tal elaboration of the lived experience, is what happens in the process of
religious conversion: some historical facts become, for the believer, “dis-
closure” events, enriching a meaning that is not immediately referable to
the facts themselves (Schillebeeckx, , ). The conversion route
described in the Gospel, leading the believer to professing the Jesus of
history as the Christ of faith, is described as a process characterized by
the awarding of a new and further meaning to the observable facts: “Then
their eyes were opened and they recognized him [ . . . ]. They asked each
other, ‘Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on
the road and opened the Scriptures to us?’ ” (Luke : –).1
The conversion route, meant as a product of the mental elaboration of
information and facts, is therefore outlined as a process that—being read,
for example, through the field theory of Kurt Lewin ()—assigns to
the totality of the coexisting factors a higher value than the sum of the
single elements. This approach of a holistic kind, typical of the Gestalt
school, in which the structure of the psychological field acquires a new
form and defines a new and manifest meaning (insight), in some way
gives reason to a conversion process that is a manifestation and awareness
of a new meaning of reality.
In this respect, reference to a German legend reported by Koffka (:
) in Principles of Gestalt Psychology can be helpful:

1 All scriptural citations are from the Holy Bible: New International Version. London:

International Bible Society, .

 a cognitive psychology perspective 

On a winter evening amidst a driving snowstorm a man on horseback

arrived at an inn, happy to have reached shelter after hours of riding over
the wind-swept plain on which the blanket of snow had covered all paths
and landmarks. The landlord who came to the door viewed the stranger
with surprise and asked him whence he came. The man pointed in the
direction straight away from the inn, whereupon the landlord, in a tone of
awe and wonder, said: ‘Do you know that you have ridden across the Lake
of Constance?’ At which the rider dropped stone dead at his feet.

In what environment, Koffka asks, did the behavior of the stranger take
place? The question, Koffka insists, will have to say that there is a second
meaning to the word “environment,” according to which “our horseman
did not ride across the lake at all, but across an ordinary snow-swept
plain. His behavior was a riding-over-a-plain, but not a riding-over-a-
lake.” This legend suggests to us, first, that the mental representation of
reality (the iced bare patch) does not always coincide with its physical
characteristics (the Lake of Constance); second, that the awareness of
one or the other world is not simply discovered in consequence of a
direct and immediate experience of the environment, but is the result
of sharing meanings in a social context that transmits them; finally, that
the meaning we attribute to reality has a crucial importance for human
existence: it either vivifies or kills, bears to the world or withdraws us
from it. Therefore, that new and manifest meaning, that insight that
releases the spring of the conversion process, does not emerge out of a
solipsistic re-elaboration of mental processes, but is an additive factor
that, as it is narrated in the German legend, is the result of a meeting, the
product of a social interaction that determines its shared meaning.
We find this additive principle again narrated even in one among the
most famous evangelical pericopes, this time drawn from John’s Gospel
that, in the image of a miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes,
offers to us the conversion route that the disciples first and the crowd
after must cover in order to disclose to that sense capable of satisfying a
people’s hunger:
When Jesus looked up and saw a great crowd coming toward him, he said
to Philip, “Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?” He asked
this only to test him, for he already had in mind what he was going to do.
Philip answered him, “Eight months’ wages would not buy enough bread
for each one to have a bite!” Another of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s
brother, spoke up, “Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two
small fish, but how far will they go among so many?” Jesus said, “Have
the people sit down.” There was plenty of grass in that place, and the men
sat down, about five thousand of them. Jesus then took the loaves, gave
 s. federici, p. caddeo, and f.v. tommasi

thanks, and distributed to those who were seated as much as they wanted.
He did the same with the fish. When they had all had enough to eat, he
said to his disciples, “Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be
wasted.” So they gathered them and filled twelve baskets with the pieces
of the five barley loaves left over by those who had eaten. After the people
saw the miraculous sign that Jesus did, they began to say, “Surely this is the
Prophet who is to come into the world”. (: –)
To Philip there is only one way to answer Jesus’ provocative question
about how to obtain that indispensable good for human subsistence
(bread): using money. But in this world there is no remedy to poverty:
no money, no food. Andrew’s intervention redefines the problem and
allows us to get to a new interpretive modality through which it is pos-
sible to overturn the indigent condition of the crowd into a miraculous
superabundance. Here the evangelical teaching through the sign of the
multiplication of loaves and fishes is clear: a society based on the value
of money will not satisfy hungry people, but a society founded on the
sharing of goods will be able to transform the little owned by each of us,
if shared, into superabundance for everyone. The loaves’ multiplication
expresses in a narrative and symbolic style that principle according to
which the whole is more than the sum of its parts: love, manifest through
the solid sharing of one’s goods, transforms what to our eyes appears to
be insufficient into superabundance for everyone, provided it is shared.
The goal we set ourselves here is not that of demonstrating the exis-
tence of a mental module of God, capable of grasping the sense of the
divine in the prosaic facts around us, but that of analyzing some of the
mental functions underlying conversion—meant exactly according to the
model inferred from the Gospel—if it is considered from a psychologi-
cal perspective—functions that certainly do not exhaust the reasons for
a conversion, but that form the conditions without which such model
of conversion would not be “humanly” imaginable. We wish to search
for some of those cognitive structures that have been at the basis of the
cultural development that has produced that richness of religious sym-
bols and signs through which such an idea of conversion is received and
negotiated.
Following such analysis, we may even make the hypothesis of a com-
munity of universally recognizable elements that form that “universal
grammar” of the “religious man,” without which an experience such as
that of the World Day of Prayer in Assisi in —where for the first
time in history hundreds of representatives of the different religions
of the world assembled in a prayer meeting sharing a deep religious
 a cognitive psychology perspective 

experience, lived in the multiplicity and community of the different

faiths—the words of Pope John Paul II when he addressed the Heads and
Representatives of the Christian Churches and Ecclesial Communities
and of the World Religions would be untranslatable and incomprehensi-
ble: “If there are many and important differences among us, there is also
a common ground [ . . . ]. Yes, there is the dimension of prayer, which in
the very real diversity of religions tries to express communication with a
Power above all our human forces” (: ).
“Belief in the supernatural and religion” belongs to that list of human
universals that encompass those characteristics of culture, society, lan-
guage, behavior and psyche pointed out by ethnographers in diverse soci-
eties that are a sign of the mental modules upon which are founded
those complex and innate characteristics of the human mind: “Among the
many examples are such disparate phenomena as tools, myths and leg-
ends, sex roles, social groups, aggression, gestures, grammar, phonemes,
emotions, and psychological defense mechanisms. Broadly defined uni-
versals often contain more specific universals, as in the case of kinship
statuses, which are universally included among social statuses” (Brown
: ; cf. Brown ). Tooby and Cosmides (: ) observe sim-
ilarly that while
[t]here is certainly cultural and individual variability in the exact forms
of adult mental organization that emerge through development, . . . these
are all expressions of what might be called a single human metaculture. All
humans tend to impose on the world a common encompassing conceptual
organization, made possible by universal mechanisms operating on the
recurrent features of human life. This is a central reality of human life and
is necessary to explain how humans can communicate with each other,
learn the culture they are born into, understand the meaning of others’
acts, imitate each other, adopt the cultural practices of others, and operate
in a coordinated way with others in the social world they inhabit.

Just as the fact that it is possible to make use of any language to con-
vey any message makes us believe that all languages are made of the
same material (Chomsky ; Pinker , ), similarly the exis-
tence of religious universals, making a religious experience translatable
and sharable, encourages us accept the existence of universal and innate
mental mechanisms which, even in the variety of the social and cultural
experiences, make certain specific religious behaviors universally intelli-
gible and sharable.
The comparison between the Gospels and the analysis of cognitive
psychology conveys at least two great conversion models that we wish to
 s. federici, p. caddeo, and f.v. tommasi

outline here and that, according to the latest observations, we may believe
have universal validity. The possible universality of these two models
then makes them conceivable as compatible models. However, we cannot
exclude their inconceivability, in an alternative sense, if some reciprocal
traits are radicalized.

Causality

A first interpretation model of the conversion process as narrated by

the Gospels is that according to which there would be a mechanism
that involves, as its first step, the acknowledgment of a supreme being
at the origin of all that exists. Creator, motionless motor, first cause,
demiurge—it has the function of justifying the beginning of every form of
life, orienting its existence, and guaranteeing an ultramundane purpose.
What surprises us in the study of human cognition is that this capability
of picking a causality link is based on an innate system of a knowledge-
specific domain leading each human being toward the knowledge of
reality since infancy. Hume was certainly right in assuming that our belief
in the existence of cause-effect relations was a product of psychological
processes and a psychological compulsion to have such convictions—
even if some evidences seem to make us reasonably believe that he was
wrong in believing that such relations did not belong to the deep causal
laws of nature (Plotkin ).
Some psychologists of development have formulated an experimental
procedure focusing on the length of a baby’s visual fixation when it is
attracted by various images projected on a screen. Not being able to
resort to verbal statements with new-born babies, these researchers have
used a procedure that has exploited the curiosity and attention of the
baby concerning some events, when the latter manifest infringements
of physical laws: the more expected the images presented in a film,
that is respectful of physical laws, the more manifest is the habituation
effect pushing the baby to turn its eyes elsewhere, getting distracted;
by contrast, the more unexpected are the presented images, infringing
physical laws, the longer the baby keeps fixing on the unexpected event
with curiosity. The age of the subjects was between three and six months,
when children do not possess speech. They start stalking and grasping
objects, but cannot walk, however they are able to infer information
about the movement of objects. Alan Leslie (: ) observes, “These
findings . . . inform us about a specialized learning mechanism adapted
 a cognitive psychology perspective 

to create conceptual knowledge of the physical world, and to do so at

an early period in development when general knowledge and general
problem-solving abilities are quite minimal” (cf. Baillargeon ; Spelke
; Spelke and van de Walle ).
Certainly one of the most fascinating experiments that has been car-
ried out with infants, again with the method of the length of visual fix-
ation, is one relating to the effect of the movement of an object caused
by another object in motion. The babies tend to get distracted when they
are shown that an object a in motion hitting another object b causes its
movement; but they are attracted by the infringement of this law, that is
to say when they are shown that object b starts moving even when object
a stops just before hitting object b. However, when inanimate objects are
substituted with human figures, the babies are no longer surprised seeing
that object b starts moving even if the human figure has not hit the object,
not considering this an infringement of the law. The babies, it may be con-
cluded, since they only a few months old, know that the cause-effect rela-
tions that govern human beings are governed by different laws from the
physical ones (Plotkin ; Gazzaniga ). Infants do not, however,
develop an innate and specific knowledge of all the entities they perceive.
They do not seem to have a systematic knowledge of shadows and plants
and probably they do not distinguish in their reasoning the actions of
human beings from those of other animals (Carey ; Premack ;
Spelke ; Spelke, Phillips and Woodward ).
The existence of these cognitive structures that appear innate to us may
give us reasons for the question why the belief in a supreme being is found
in all cultures.2 Each human being is well prepared in advance to believe
in the possibility that an animated being may be the cause of the existence
of all things: in this sense we are born as believers already—at the most
we run the risk of dying as atheists. The conversion process, then, does
not so much open the mind to the possibility of accepting a metaphysical
causality as reinforce it.

2 The causal attribution process is functional to the necessity of understanding,

explaining and predisposing one’s behavior in connection with the context in which one
operates. Leaving out of consideration the type of identification process of the casuality
of the events and of the human behaviors, whether they are based on specific causal
schemes (Kelley ), turned to identifying the major causes or reasons for the events
(Buss ) or mainly guided by data and theories (Alloy and Tabachnik ), it is
chiefly a spontaneous process contributing to supplying reality with sense. Thus, finding
causality becomes not only the first agent of the organization of events, but a codification
system of reality that defines it and makes it accessible by virtue of its unique meaning—
omnicomprehensive and participatory at the same time.
 s. federici, p. caddeo, and f.v. tommasi

Conversion at the most voices the human capability of picking causal-

ity, not only physical causality of real events, but also offering names,
rituals, symbols and contents. We are not surprised then that Jesus of
the Gospels indicated in children the models of true conversion: “I tell
you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will
never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles him-
self like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew
: –). In this saying we may catch two messages describing the vision
that Jesus has of conversion: on one side, to become as children is a chal-
lenge to leave every claim of power and supremacy over others, but rather
becoming the slaves of and dependent on others (Schüssler Fiorenza,
), while on the other side, the acknowledgment of the fact that the
child has the competence to express an act of faith, because he is capable
of understanding.
The fact that the human being may grasp in full the content of the
evangelical message not as the outcome of a conversion process involv-
ing the adhesion to a formal and structured whole of theological doc-
trines is a conviction that the Jesus of the Gospels manifests more than
once, such as when he states: “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and
earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned,
and revealed them to little children” (Luke : ). As Plotkin () has
well explained, in the world of evolutionist biology cause-effect relations
are both the source of the selective pressures, powerful and pervading,
to which all living organisms must fit, and the end or the aim of the
psychological sensitivity to those relations that have evolved in animals
and that can move in the world and operate in it. And just this psycho-
logical sensitivity is at the basis of the mental representations that have
then been passed on and duplicated in cultural entities—memos, that in
turn have had their own evolutionary routes generating various cultural
products which, however, share some common metacultural elements,
that are universally recognisable: “Like fish unaware of the existence of
water, interpretativists swim from culture interpreting through universal
human metaculture. Metaculture informs their every thought, but they
have not yet noticed its existence” (Tooby and Cosmides : ).
Since the time that the human being has resorted to the belief in a
supernatural being in order to overcome the anguish of death, to recover
a link with his perished relatives and strengthen the clan’s bonds, the
mind has already been oriented to supplying an answer to him, a vision
of the world from which it is difficult to let God escape. Newberg, d’Aquili
and Rause (: –) write:
 a cognitive psychology perspective 

The neurobiological roots of spiritual transcendence show that Absolute

Unitary Being is a plausible, even probable possibility. Of all the surprises
our theory has to offer—that myths are driven by biological compulsion,
that rituals are intuitively shaped to trigger unitary states, that mystics
are, after all, not necessarily crazy, and that all religions are branches
of the same spiritual tree—the fact that this ultimate unitary state can
be rationally supported intrigues us the most. The realness of Absolute
Unitary Being is not conclusive proof a higher God exists, but it makes
a strong case that there is more to human existence than sheer material
existence. Our minds are drawn by the intuition of this deeper reality, this
utter sense of oneness, where suffering vanishes and all desires are at peace.
As long as our brains are arranged the way they are, as long as our minds are
capable of sensing this deeper reality, spirituality will continue to shape the
human experience, and God, however we define that majestic, mysterious
concept, will not go away.
It hence becomes a categorical shift to move from a view that would
characterize as a “counter-intuitive thought” that would characterize
belief in a “super-natural being” to the supernatural figure to which those
powers of the animated being are ascribed, which each infant already
knows very well, of being able to move in the distance, beyond contact,
beyond sight.3
In Matthew’s narration of Jesus’ meeting at Capernaum with the Ro-
man centurion (: –), the two interlocutors, different and hostile in
culture, education and religion, agree over a common element, a reli-
gious universal, linked to social causality. And although they derive from
very different religious experiences, the two protagonists of the story
find themselves as witnesses of an authentic process of religious con-
version: the generalization of social causality and the attribution of this
law to a human figure with supernatural powers. Thus the centurion
speaks to Jesus: “For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers
under me. I tell this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and that one, ‘Come,’ and
he comes. I say to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.” What is more
obvious and understandable than this phenomenon? Yet this arouses
Jesus’s admiration to point him out as an example of great faith, as

3 Pyysiainen, Lindeman and Honkela (: , cf. Pyysianinen ) provide

“evidence for the hypothesis that persons consider counterintuitive representations more
likely to be religious than other kinds of beliefs. In three studies the subjects were asked
to rate the probable religiousness of various kinds of imaginary beliefs. The results show
that counterintuitive representations in general, and counterintuitive representations
involving a conscious agent in particular, are considered much more likely to be religious.
Counterintuitiveness thus seems to be an important element in a folk-understanding of
religion.”
 s. federici, p. caddeo, and f.v. tommasi

a model to imitate in order to be saved. Jesus does not ask this man
to follow him and embrace the new faith—as a matter of fact he dis-
misses him saying: “Go! It will be done just as you believed it would.”—
because he has recognized in him that generative religious grammar
typical of every authentic experience of faith, on which every religion
leans and that all faiths share. Jesus and the centurion have spoken
to each other and have understood each other because they have suc-
ceeded in communicating about those human universals that are at the
basis of each authentic conversion, having become like children again.
The acknowledgment of a causal (supernatural) power of Jesus pro-
vokes admiration, independently from the fact that this same power
in the centurion’s faith will be attributed to a pantheon of animate fig-
ures.

The Theory of the Mind

If our rational ability to grasp the cause-effect connection in animate

and inanimate objects helps us to understand which mental process
can guide the mental representation of an individual converting to the
causative force of a supernatural being, religious conversion—at least
in its description emerging from the Gospel stories to which we are
referring—is much richer and articulate than a simple animist faith in
supernatural forces. The conversion process indeed does not reduce itself
to the acknowledgment of a causal agent of supernatural phenomena. In
the evangelic viewpoint, it is basically a sequel expressing itself in the wish
for living with Jesus and as he does, adopting his aims and cooperating
with his mission.
In the story by Mark (: –) of the recovery of a sick woman subject
to bleeding, one example among various possible choices, many are those
who “touch” Jesus, to get thaumaturgical benefits from him, but only one
bleeding woman is able to get into deep communication with him and is
cured. This communion is the result of a sympathetic exchange, in which
the intentions of the believer and Jesus’ intentions are reciprocally shared.
Jesus is not a passive agent of life force, but an interlocutor who becomes
a trustworthy companion in the believer’s life path. Luke the evangelist
summarizes all this at the end of his Gospel describing an archetype-like
conversion route in the episode of the Emmaus disciples (Luke : –
). The disciples, at first blinded by their dejection, do not recognize
Jesus who becomes their traveling companion. However, as soon as they
 a cognitive psychology perspective 

feel comforted by the presence of that traveler, they recognize Christ in

him and say: “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with
us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?” The (re)conversion of
these disciples is characterized by re-established syntony: the words of
that traveler are reliable, they speak to the heart, they have understood
each other.
These aspects of religious conversion, as they have emerged from the
Gospel stories, have recourse to some competencies of humankind that
characterize it as such and that are at the basis of the social competencies,
of the verbal and nonverbal communicative skills through which we are
able to understand the communicative intentions of others, to recognize
their emotional states and their causes. This richness of human social
competencies, which is part of that psychological equipment of the com-
mon sense we implement each time we enter into relations with other
people in order to understand their intentions and foresee their behavior,
is ascribed by cognitive psychologists to another specialized represen-
tation system, already present in children who are a little over one year
old, and that finds its cognitive maturity around the age of four, indepen-
dently of the received education and of the culture to which they belong.
It’s the ability that allows us to represent the mental states of other peo-
ple: the emotions other people feel, their wishes, opinions and intentions,
their ways of reasoning, whether they simulate or cheat. This cognitive
ability enables us to use such information to interpret what the others
say, making their behavior meaningful and anticipating what they will
do afterwards. In order to do so, first of all the child must have acquired
a certain level of awareness of his own mental states as distinct from those
of the others, and that can be originated inside the person from wishes,
expectations, beliefs, or as the answer to external events.
Various ways have been worked out to verify whether a child can read
the mind. According to one of them the child is submitted to situations
involving false beliefs, such as: if the child knows that the money is in the
old Chinese vase, but he also knows that the thief thinks it is in the desk
drawer, if the child is asked: “Where does the thief look for the money?”
he should answer that the thief will look for it in the wrong place, that is
to say in the drawer (Dennett ). A child of about age four is already
capable of passing a test like this (Wimmer and Perner ).
Equally important for the interpretation and anticipation of other
people’s behavior is the ability to understand the moods, emotions, and
wishes felt by the others. From infancy, the human being shows his
nature of social being by expressing himself in an interest in the sensorial
 s. federici, p. caddeo, and f.v. tommasi

experiences provided by other human beings and in interacting and

sharing meanings and intentions. A child can understand other peo-
ple’s wishes even before their opinions, and already by the age of two,
he possesses the clearly frustrating awareness that he may have wishes
that do not correspond to those of his parents (Wellman ). Infants
are capable of distinguishing facial expressions indicating happiness, sad-
ness, anger and fear, and already by three years of age they can distin-
guish how situations can influence emotions. Finally, children by the end
of their first year can understand make-believe, knowing very well how
to distinguish it from reality: they can play feigning mummy or talking
on the phone holding a banana, without confusing either their own or
the others’ identities and roles, or the actual use of the objects (Howlin,
Baron-Cohen and Hadwin ).
How can a child be able to recognize other people’s frames of mind
without seeing, listening or hearing them? This capacity of paying atten-
tion to the properties of the frames of mind is probably based on a
specialized representations system, innate and species-specific (we do
not have clear evidence that other animals possess similar abilities); an
“intentionality detector,” as Baron-Cohen () calls it, that allows us
to detect other people’s minds and understand that most human actions,
including our own, derive from the way we represent the world of the
mind (Dennett ; Plotkin ). The idea that we are born pre-
disposed to the development of such competencies and that ontogenic
development is determined by the phylogenetic characteristics of each
human being, involves the fact that mental states are universally recog-
nized, independently from cultural, linguistic and social differences. As
a matter of fact this innate capacity of understanding the social environ-
ment urges the child toward understanding the others, which defines and
codifies itself in social interaction through a bi-directional involvement
in the communicative process between the child, capable of recognizing
the feelings and intentions of the others, and the other people (Harris
; Dunn ).4 We may have different opinions about what provokes

4 Our ability to understand the basic aspects of society, of expressing love and

attitudes and of being able to distinguish between different actors and social categories is
apparent from childhood. For example, various studies have demonstrated that, starting
from age five, children show specific attitudes and preferences toward particular ethnic
groups (Barrett and Short ). The conception a child has of the social categories
and the ethnic outgroup, initially based on perceptive aspects, would be subsequently
redefined and mitigated when the awareness of the reciprocity of social relations increases
(Aboud ). From these studies, then, “the evidence of the very high sensitivity of
 a cognitive psychology perspective 

certain moods in each of us and about how we react to certain stimuli,

but the frames of mind are the same, whether or not they are perfectly
named in our language with specific words (Ekman and Davidson ;
Lazarus ; Pinker ).
According to Gospel stories, conversion unceasingly resorts to this
social human ability. Religious conversion is not evangelically referable to
an intellectual practice and is not measured by the intelligence quotient,
but rather by the capacity of making God’s intentions our own: “Not
everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven,
but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew
: ). Only mastering a theory of the mind enables us to conform to
another one’s will as such, because it makes us aware of our intentions as
distinct from the others’ intentions and, therefore, as potentially sharable.
Again we understand why Jesus commends that these truths are hidden
to sage and intelligent men and are revealed to the little ones instead;
while the theological content of a religion may be an esoteric mystery
comprehensible only by the elect, conversion as agreement and sharing
intentions in favor of a supreme good is available to anyone who listens
and implements Jesus’ words (Matthew : ). It is on this community
of intentions and not on blood links that the relations of the new human
community are based: “ ‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ he asked.
Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, ‘Here are
my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and
sister and mother’ ” (Mark : –).
The fact that in Gospel stories conversion implies a social competence
has as a consequence that the believer’s faith is not measured on doctrinal
and magisterial knowledge, but on the empathic ability of recognizing
other people’s needs.5 Conversion is then mainly a solidarity process.

young children to the more primitive aspects of the value system of their societies”
(Tajfel : ) would emerge. Therefore, this human capability of recognizing and
distinguishing the differences and social belongings, and of being able to understand
and share the complex system of norms and reference values through social interaction,
provides us with the explicative background of the conversion process in the sharing of
meaning outlined so far.
5 Empathy, which is usually considered an element preceding the implementation

of behaviors aimed at helping other people (Hoffman ), is made explicit through
emotional activation associated with a cognitive process in which one assumes the other’s
perspective. To be able to assume the other’s needs implies perceiving similarity between
people expressed in a system of rules and shared social norms. The theoretical reflection
about empathy as preceeding prosocial and altruistic behavior, then, concerns the fact
that the individual assumes a definition of himself as an unselfish person embodying
 s. federici, p. caddeo, and f.v. tommasi

This meaning of conversion—that is to say not as in deference to doc-

trinal truths, but as the capability of accepting and satisfying the others’
needs—characterizes the same behavior of Jesus in the Gospel, a behavior
that causes a scandal in those who have made their agreement to doctri-
nal and ritual norms the aim of authentic conversion. Simon the Pharisee
is shocked by Jesus’ acceptance of a sinful woman (Luke : –), and
those Pharisees gathered in the Synagogue of Capernaum take counsel
against Jesus when he makes a deliberate transgression of the sabbath
rest by curing a man with a shriveled hand (Mark : –). Jesus’ disre-
spectful and infringing behavior has a justification in his construction of
the meaning of religious conversion as an act of human solidarity, an act
of charity.
If we radicalize the consequences of such an observation, even faith
in a universal world cause—that is the first conversion model we have
described—can be joined to this type of doctrinal belief. It is actually
a type of faith based mainly on experiences of a theoretical-individual
kind, namely on the capacity of activating a subjective knowledge leading
to an objective and sure grasp of a phenomenon. In other words, a
faith modeled according to a scheme in which the relation between the
self and the world develops without opaque or uncertain areas. Starting
with modern critics (from Hume to Kant), of the idea that reality is
available to the subject with total transparency, the phenomenological
Husserlian stream has worked long on the subject-object scheme in
general, up to putting its validity in a critical position (Husserl –
): the results are, among others, criticism of the ideas that man’s
fundamental dimension is of a cognitive type (Heidegger ); that God
must be thought in terms of “being” (Heidegger ; Marion );
and a repeated comparison with the experience of empathy, which in fact
does not allow reduction of the intersubjective relation to a subject-object
model (Stein ; Husserl ). Each subject forms itself in a mature
and responsible way thanks to the call of language and responsibility
from others:

and sharing social values of respect and mutual help. Therefore, the self perception as
an altruistic individual is emphasized through a social sharing process implying the
acknowledgment of one’s altruistic dimension even from the others: “who are told that
they are the kind of people who like to help whenever they can may infer that prosocial
behaviors across a variety of situations are expected of them” (Grusec and Redler :
). The capability of identifying oneself with the other and of assuaging his suffering in
this way become participative modalities in virtue of one’s belonging to a sharing social
system considering the neighbor as oneself (see Batson ; Batson et al. ).
 a cognitive psychology perspective 

In interlocution there is symmetry of roles: each “I” is reciprocal with a

“you.” But such symmetry presupposes that the subjectivity of the inter-
locutors is already established; originally [ . . . ] the constitution of the sub-
ject (objective genitive) takes place through the (asymmetrical) allocution
from another already constituted subject: addressing an infant as a “you,”
the I, which “originally” is the other, makes possible the development of
the subjectivity of the “person” to whom (alter) ego turns. Only this being
made object of allocution makes the subject possible, that is to say thought
as self-reference, as I, as cogito. (Olivetti : )
An important trend in contemporary philosophy of religion, pursuing
such questioning of reflective and transcendental thought, is on account
of this turning toward conceiving the religious experience first of all in
ethical-practical and interpersonal terms. In this sense, the responsibility
toward the other subject and religious conversion form two phenomena
that are not immediately distinguishable, because “God” is not describ-
able in terms of a conscience datum, a phenomenon, or an object, but
is revealed only beyond the categories that structure the knowledge of
the world in terms of relation between subject and object, and there-
fore one “comes to the idea” only in the “epiphany” of the other’s face
(Levinas ). Religion understood in this way follows the semantic
line of re-ligare, rather than re-legere: it is an appeal to duty, that at least
in its essential and fundamental elements does not include theoretical-
cognitive aspects (Olivetti ).
As some evolutionist psychologists argue, the birth of culture would
not be imaginable if the human species had not developed as advanced
cognitive mechanisms as those of the theory of the mind. Culture, meant
as knowledge shared by the members of a certain society, implies psy-
chological mechanisms that make the human being capable of commu-
nicating with others and of creating agreement. And it’s only when agree-
ment is reached on the information and the actions, that is to say on
concrete things, that it is possible to think about beginning to agree on
the conceptual and the arbitrary (Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby ;
Plotkin ). This process, marking human phylogenetic and cultural
evolution, also characterizes the development process of religious con-
version according to the New Testament narrations. In them religious
conversion is never reduced only to a solitary mystic experience of inte-
riority and immediacy of the divine (Fischer ; Moioli )—which
could have never led to the Christian religion as a cultural product—
but to the negotiation of meanings emerging from the community of
the experiences. Participation and agreement, then, on shared meanings
 s. federici, p. caddeo, and f.v. tommasi

reveal themselves in obedience to a content of faith, the kerygma. This

first cultural product generates cohesion, expressing itself in community
life. From here, inside a social group, the creation of the incorporeal
products of the construction—rites, dogmatic truths, hierarchical roles,
etc.—may begin.6
It is again the account of the Emmaus disciples that dramatizes all
these psychological processes in a narration. The Emmaus disciples,
once they have understood the meaning of that meeting with Christ in
semblance of a traveler and once they have understood the meaning of
the conversations they had with him on their way, do not remain in
Emmaus, where they had lived that mystic experience, but they return to
Jerusalem where the first community dwells. In the narration Luke pays
great attention to describing the dynamics of this meeting: before the
Emmaus disciples tell the others about what happened, the community
announce to them: “It is true! The Lord has risen and has appeared to
Simon” (Luke : ). It is in the community that the meaning of the
religious experience is negotiated, the community is the mediator of
the meanings of the conversion process. The Emmaus disciples cannot
announce they have met the One Who Rose from the Dead if they have
not previously received from the believers’ community those meanings
that will confirm their experience as a path of authentic conversion,
which they may share and in which they may participate.

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 chapter thirteen

CONVERSION AND MISSION:

MISSIONARY INSERTION AND THE SOCIAL
CONDITIONS OF CHRISTIANIZATION

Paul-André Turcotte

One way to understand conversion is as a change of religious adherence

that becomes a gain for a religion that proceeds from a different socio-
cultural environment from that of the person who converts. The central
figure of such a change is the missionary. Conversion thus defined is not
just a religious reaffiliation, that is to say, a change of adhesion that ben-
efits, this time, another cultural, doctrinal and moral formation which,
however, comes from the same socio-cultural environment in the midst
of the same religious family—as for example the passage of the individual
or the group from a reformed church to an evangelical church (Schwindt
: ). An interconnected or preceding meaning is that of a spiritual
awakening within the same religious confession that seeks to revitalize it
in its totality. If the revitalization touches the whole of its religious orga-
nizations in a common social space, the individuals and the groups posi-
tion themselves in a degree of vitality that is either turned toward tra-
dition or unprecedented innovation. These possibilities do not exhaust
the meanings and the practices of conversion that can overlap or cross
over.
The intentions of the presentation that follows in this chapter are not
to discuss these conceptions in order to derive ideal-typical traits from
a sociological point of view (e.g., Knoblauch ; Attias ). Rather,
a theoretical analysis will be applied to the socio-religious actor who is
the missionary, to his perception of the other and to the conditions of his
insertion, with an impact on the strategies that are put in place to foster
conversion. The conceptual framework will have Max Weber’s or Ernst
Troeltsch’s insights as a theoretical background. The cases of figures are
taken from archival research into the history of Catholic missions with
respect to the influence of religious representations on human behavior.
With respect to social conditions, attention will be given not only to
cultural factors but also to the political and economic ones.
 paul-andré turcotte

Missionary Insertions with Respect

to the Conditions of Conversion

The history of Christian missions goes back to the very origins of the
faith, whether through the writings of missionaries or in the form of
external relations. The perspectives and descriptions have adopted some
formulations that are accorded to the currents that go through the evo-
lution of the method and historical narrative. The relations are incor-
porated, in that case, in the discovery accounts. The objective pursued
seeks to evince, directly or indirectly, conditions of missionary insertion
and its action in the evangelization of non-Christian or de-Christianized
lands. Since the first centuries of Christianity some people were sent to
proclaim the message of the gospel in those frontiers at the limits of the
Roman Empire. Following this, the missionaries addressed themselves to
the peoples considered barbarians on the great European continent and
from there to other continents (Décobert ).
Missionary action accounts have elicited renewed interest within
Catholic and Protestant missions that have functioned since the six-
teenth century. With the discovery of the American continent, Chris-
tian Europe had to deal with a new world—which became “The New
World”—characterized especially by religious syncretism along with the
merging of races and cultures. The questioning and innovations that
resulted from unprecedented situations had few immediate effects on
the structures, the symbols and the practices of the Churches or groups
from metropolitan Europe. The relevant institutions, strong through
their acquired experience, were able to readjust some strategies of im-
plantation and expansion, of conversion and the organization of new
Christians, without having to modify significantly their ways of doing
things or the vision of things in their home country. As a result of trans-
actions between organized religion, cultural or economic and political
conditions, though not without resistance, Christianity in the Americas
ended up becoming singularized while at the same time admitting the
same base in belief and the same divisions in ministries and functions in
structures that were relatively similar or identical. Tensions traversed the
exchanges between the different places of implantation and regulation.
This was the case within the great state churches and, to some degree,
in the minority groups, including the Catholic religious orders (so Prud-
homme : –; Bosch ).
The expansion of Catholic or Protestant detachments took on greater
importance with the facilitation of movement through the moderniza-
 missionary insertion and christianization 

tion of the means of communication and the progress of medicine. At the

same time, the human sciences, principally on the Protestant side, ren-
dered the missionary perspective stronger, which had consequences for
the comprehension of the other and the strategies for his comprehension.
Missionary accounts that used the ethnographic means of expression dis-
played the anthropological conception which is at the basis of insertion
and the action of conversion. These missionary accounts were used in
the research of fledgling social science, including both Emile Durkheim
and Max Weber. While Durkheim () dedicated himself to tracing
the elementary forms of religious life based on the accounts of primi-
tive customs with a view to seeking some permanent historical elements,
Weber () systematically sought historical comparison between the
great religions to understand up to what point they participated in the
emergence and the deployment of modernity, understood in the sense
of the rationalization of human, material or symbolic production. The
reception of the missionary accounts continued to extend beyond the
frontiers of the religious sphere to interest other domains beyond those
of organized religion. It was that way from the beginnings of the Catholic
missions to the Americas. The missions and their accounts on the one
hand inspired intransigent responses, religious closure and a pride of cul-
tural superiority, but they also extended the horizons of knowledge and
in that way opened minds to a renewed comprehension of “the human”
in its diversity.
In the Catholic context, the evangelization corresponding to the colo-
nization of the Asiatic or American territories, and afterwards of Africa,
did not cease to elicit lively discussions before and after the creation, in
, of Propaganda Fide, which provided rules and regulations with
respect to missionary activity. These rules are contained in the instruc-
tions to apostolic vicars going to Tonkin and Conchinchina. They con-
sisted in establishing criteria for the relations between colonization and
mission, relations among objects of sometimes violent conflicts, contra-
dictions and compromises of missionaries with the colonists, and of the
traumas of subjected populations. The main directive was the following:
the missionary must maintain himself aloof from the affairs of state and,
generally, from politics. Four principles founded the distinction between
political action and mission: the independence of the latter from states
and, in this respect, the existence of close relations with Rome; the pri-
ority of the formation of an indigenous clergy that would be capable of
replacing missionaries if they were to be expelled; the creation of a regu-
lar hierarchy (lower clergy, priests, and an episcopate); and an agreement
 paul-andré turcotte

with the papacy to establish a complete Church, the obligation for the
missions to tend to self-sufficiency, including economic self-sufficiency.
With respect to evangelization, the missionaries were to avoid transport-
ing their European culture with themselves, consequently they were to
be careful with changing the rites, customs and practices of the peoples
if they were not against religion and morality (Prudhomme : –,
; Union missionnaire du Clergé ).
These instructions produce a great variety of sometimes opposing
positions in different moments and places throughout history. The re-
fusal to recognize the difference of cultural alterity meets compromise
understood as an agreement that integrates contrary, even antagonistic,
elements thanks to mediations that permit reciprocity while respecting
the alterity of the elements. It is a transaction where the reciprocity is
without fusion and the distinction is without rupture. In the best of cases,
each of the parties finds its place, beyond the reciprocal concessions, in
the negotiations in which power relations intervene, as well as the third
party regulations, directive principles, shared values and so on. These
relations can be exacerbated in case of the refusal to compromise, to
accept shared criteria that are at the juncture of socially recognized rules
and particularities that derive from the singularity of a point to be gauged
and articulated (Turcotte ).
Whatever the modality of his insertion may be, the missionary is that
migrant, that foreigner who testifies to a total personal experience and, at
the same time, acts as a delegate of an institution, which results from its
organization, its beliefs, rites and discipline of life. Hailing from another
land he is faced with the challenge of making a collectivity, which con-
stitutes an organic whole that comes from another social environment,
believe with a view to an adhesion that supposes a change of life that is
optatively whole, both on the part of individuals and of the collectivity.
Structural or formal movements are in question, and these contribute to
changing the mentality and the behavior of the individuals who make up
a society. The process of transformation of interpersonal relations (people
and groups) and social structures is dialectical. In addition, the message
and the activity of conversion are modified to the extent that individual
and collective alterations take place. Strategies and mediations compete
in a process of change that is globally tendentious (Russell : –
). Such an aim is ramified in a configuration of objectives with the
complexification of the modes of action and the tentacular and sectorial
reading of reality.
In doing this, it is highly likely that an interpenetration of the reli-
 missionary insertion and christianization 

gious compound which originates from elsewhere and the culture of

the people to which it is addressed attains a heightened degree over
time. Even if this becomes the case, the ordinariness of life finds con-
sistency in a religious reference mixed with references that derive from
ancestral tradition. At the same time, the capacity for interpellation of
change into the original message will have dissipated. This capacity is
from now on confined to groups of religious virtuosity that rattle the
torpor of belief and at the same time revivify the collective conscious-
ness. We cannot expect to obtain durable effects on the conduct and
the structures of the organic whole that envelop the life-world. Some
awakenings are possible that position and call for the improvement of
the social order according to Christian principles. Their crystallization is
translated by a normalization which is imposed on consciences to var-
ious degrees. The social actors know how to reinterpret the rules of life
that stem from normalization as well as how to elude them, to function in
their own interests. Some inversions can appear and be deployed to the
point of deconstructing a society completely (Séguy ; Ouédraogo
).
Christian missions, especially after the eighteenth century, have sought
to implement, often entering into open conflict with colonists, a Chris-
tian social order, which is to say, one that conforms to the evangelical
message as it is interpreted by the original institutions. In a broad sense
and at least since the sixteenth century, the Christian message, in its gen-
eral practices and beyond its diverse historical forms, has opted for a
positive vision of history, working for the advancement of the humaniza-
tion of peoples, has supported action on the propagation of its religious
message and not on economic or political objectives. In the interaction
of instances that pursue specific objectives, however, equivocations are
not lacking with respect to the missionary societies and the public colo-
nial powers, and between these and the traditional leaders (Prudhomme
: –; Comby ).
While sharing points of similar discipline and of theological reflection
concerning the relations of diverse instances and populations, Protes-
tants and Catholics both knew drifts and compromise. The deviations
came in several instances from the relative, and not directly intentional,
confusion of the evangelical message with political or economic action.
The sliding, from one to the other, is observable, it would seem, in the
case of the formation of elites, with a view to implanting a society which
is integrally Christian (Merle ). The comprehension of this question
commands the knowledge of the Church as a type of Christian group,
 paul-andré turcotte

comparable to other historical types, while at the same time it hearkens

back to different practices and the separation of powers.
Throughout its history missionary Catholicism has strictly linked the
annunciation of a message, revealed through events, letters and attempts
at reflection held on Biblical texts, to the construction of social and reli-
gious works. The conversion of hearts goes hand in hand with the trans-
formation of society (Union missionaire du clergé ). The Protestant
missions abound in the same sense, through the articulation of preach-
ing and of action in society, while insisting on the individual’s access
to the Biblical text and, if the individual is not to have access to it, the
character of an authority which is deemed to be certain. On the one
hand and the other, the propagation of faith and the action of civiliza-
tion are inseparable. This being the case, the Protestant missions should
themselves have to have been more flexible and innovative than Catholic
ones, because of these factors: their missionaries came from contexts
which have been linked to modernization and openness to the world,
the respect for religious liberty in the British colonies, the de-centered
organization of autonomous Churches, and the importance accorded to
religious revival and to social critique with respect to the reading of the
Bible to confront concrete situations (Prudhomme : –; Bosch
; Merle ). At the turn of the twentieth century, the leaders of
the Social Gospel movement had no fear to take recourse to the social
sciences to analyze, for example, economic servitude in the context of
mass industrialization and urbanization and to derive the traits of a the-
ology which stressed a humanization of action, in accordance with the
gospel and the Christian tradition which derives from them (cf. Walter
Rauschenbusch ; Turcotte ).
A critical reflection based on the socioeconomic or economical-polit-
ical aspects of colonization and its dehumanizing consequences has been
largely lacking in Catholic thought, geared as it is to social questions and
based on political or theological-philosophical principles. With respect
to enculturation it is difficult to articulate the cultural aspects with re-
spect to those linked to economic or political practices, without for-
getting the conditions of autonomization of the local churches that are
in accordance with the Christian tradition of an evangelical perspective
(Ndi-Okala ). Some notable exceptions to that dominant movement
are the roles often played by members of religious orders or Christians
who are socially involved in the name of an intense and reflective faith.
It is necessary to acknowledge the innovations in the field and the reflex-
ive production in the social sciences that continues to receive a mit-
 missionary insertion and christianization 

igated institutional reception if they are not, in fact, wholly rejected.

These defensive reactions do not, fortunately, represent the totality of the
Catholic intellectual production on missions.

The Missionary as Migrant and Foreigner: The View of the Other

The sociocultural status of the foreigner constitutes the necessary con-

dition of the missionary as a migrant. In this respect we are essentially
indebted to the work of Alfred Schütz (). The foreigner is essentially
one who moves toward another place to settle for a time that can be more
or less long. In this way he is distinguished from the wanderer whose
mobility does not allow for any form of attachment. He also displays a
capacity for mobility within the new context because of the fact that he
remains an outsider. Correlatively, he can easily come into contact with
the different elements of his social environment, and he does not depend
on any of them through blood ties or his profession, let alone through
belonging to a common place of origin. Clearly the foreigner presents
himself—on the inside and the outside, in the external and face-to-face—
and the result of this is the perspicacity of his point of view, based as it
is on objectivity and critical distance. The point of view of the other evi-
dences both the incoherence and the logic of what “goes without saying”
for the natives, in the name of references that are unknown to them. At
the same time, it is through the investment in the socialization modalities
of the context into which the foreigner is accepted that the foreigner also
discovers himself to be a harbinger of alterity, which then leads him to be
profoundly aware of the roots of his own identity and of difference. Even
if inserted in his place of adoption and detached from his origins to the
point of being considered as such by his compatriots, he is not consid-
ered as one who shares the same heritage as the rest of the countrymen.
He could even be suspected of a lack of loyalty. Is he not able to represent
the inconceivable or be a spy? Living in an ambivalent social condition,
the foreigner can place himself in a better position between the past of
the roots of his identity and a future to construct thanks to his position
as a mediator of unsuspected compositions.
Testimonies of missionaries as foreigners are increasingly rare. Partic-
ularly illuminating is the account of the Canadian Jesuit Nil Guillemette,
in the Philippines after having been in the Ivory Coast for three years. He
holds that “one never completely gets used to being a foreigner in a coun-
try which one considers as one’s own” (: ). The incapacity to learn
 paul-andré turcotte

the language of the place as well as one’s own is often cited as one of the
principal problems, even if that language is learned well. Proverbs, popu-
lar expressions, piercing formulations and other things continue to elude
even the speaker who is familiar with the language. It is also necessary to
learn another system of social conventions and, worse, the complexity of
the rules of day-to-day life which are based on a cultural sensibility and
which will never be fully appropriated. If the missionary is white, he is
assimilated into the race that claims industrial and technical superiority,
which has a heavy colonial, religious and cultural past, even if Canada
never had any colonies as such. The Catholic institution, as the religion
of the white man, has the ambiguous prestige of western power and tech-
nology. The native demands intellectual knowledge from the missionary
with a view to social and economic development and for a Christian syn-
thesis that is capable of expressing the native cultural context. In order to
attain this, it is fundamental to remain a non-native, different through
one’s previous formation and education (: ). In addition, the mis-
sionary changes with contact with the people who have become “his” to
the point of relativizing his own cultural world. Upon returning to his
country of origin, on vacation or definitively, he also feels himself to be
even more a foreigner than in missionary activity. He will share his con-
dition of being foreign with those who have lived or live the same expe-
rience, as was the case—exceptional, naturally—of profound friendships
with the natives.
The second testimony is of an altogether different order. A Canadian
Viatorian, René Pageau tells of his experience in Haiti where he was supe-
rior of missions from  to . He does so in poetic terms, which
occurs rarely in Catholic missions. The tragic reality of Haitian existence,
however crude, is described in literary form, in the search for human-
ization. Generally the idea is that of an inner perception, of one who is
not entirely involved. This position is not comfortable, but it allows for
audacity, denunciations which would be otherwise unreceivable, politi-
cally speaking. With respect to struggles for power in the midst of Haitian
institutions, in both the Church and the State, the missionary poet does
not hesitate to say the unspeakable:
My country is a poem but there is misery and hunger/there is fear and
betrayal/the class struggle/at fraternal war/those close to power/silently
frequent/the presidency/while priests/in the episcopal poultry yard/talk
and probe kidneys and hearts/to get to know who among them/will be the
next bishop/or the next cardinal/of the first black republic/independent
for two centuries/the victory of slaves decided/to take their destiny into
 missionary insertion and christianization 

their hands/[ . . . ] it is the reign of the princes of power/where each person

has the great dream/of serving the interest of the people/after serving their
own. (: –)
The dynamic evoked in literary terms is not specific to Haiti, it is the
situation of economies of scarcity and of socioeconomic servility. When
in Cameroon I often heard in Yaoundé the popular maxim that states:
“The goat grazes where it is tied.”
These modalities of insertion or writing of the missionary are not
reserved to the person who comes from afar. Those from the same place
can also create the conditions of a distancing, which can remain fictitious
to a certain point, but it reveals itself nonetheless. This is the case notably
when an individual or group, associative or institutional, takes the chance
of revealing that which apparently goes without saying, beyond contra-
dictions or malice, having perhaps to shake certitudes, situating oneself
from what is commonly received, of the politically and socially correct, as
an enclave with relation to the environment. If the measure includes the
scrutiny of social relations, it is akin to that of the sociologist, as Schütz
points out in his essay on the foreigner. Native peoples, in the etymolog-
ical sense of the word, are able to attain a critical distance that foreigners
cannot, culturally speaking, because the ideological perceptions darken
reflection or they determine it, especially with respect to religion. Since
Rauschenbusch, the social sciences have refined their tools to undertake
a critical reflection, from questioning to analysis, illustrating the capacity
of naming, and thus mastering decision-making with a view to change.
The instrumental contribution—theory and method—has not ceased to
shake up certitudes. The temptation remains high to resort to the simple
use of techniques, of pastoral practice centered on itself. This option does
not suffice to provoke change, to manage relations between continuities
and discontinuities. It must pursue a work on itself, on its representa-
tions and its functioning. Is this challenge not that of the foreigner who
is stable to the point of assimilating to his context, but who nonethe-
less continues to be considered as being foreign? In this sense the Jesuit
Guillemette does not display the perspicacity of the point of view of the
foreigner, which is demonstrated by the passenger Pageau, whose point
of view remains external. Some studies evince the critical capacity of the
missionary, such as that of Carlos Collantes Diez () in his work on
the African city based on his ministry in Yaoundé.
 paul-andré turcotte

The Point of View of the Other and Religious Conversion

A case that is contextually more complex is that of the French Viatorians

who immigrated to Lower Canada, in present Québec in the middle of
the nineteenth century. At the time of that immigration, the Clerics of St.
Viator in the France of their creation constituted a religious order that,
far from its origins, remained relatively unformalized beyond the Roman
approbation. They began in the s at Vourles, near Lyons, thanks to
the initiative of Louis Querbes, who died in . Approved by Rome on
May , , from  to , they had only a sketch of a rule. The
institutions approved by Rome comprised some articles of Christian life
with specifications on religious vows (poverty, chastity and obedience).
On April , , three French Viatorians, Etienne Champagneur, Louis
Chrétien and Augustin Fayard set out, from New York, for Lower Canada.
Champagneur was the Superior of the Canadian community, and he
claimed that due to a lack of rules he was virtually forced to rule through
his own authority, supported in that respect by the bishop of Montréal,
Ignace Bourget (Dussault : ). In the same sense, Champagneur
had Father Léautaud as a novice master, who maintained the function
after Querbes’s concessions with a view to Roman approbation. The
Canadian Viatorians deepened Léautaud’s spirituality, which hearkened
directly back to the imagination of the creation of the order, before its
formal institutionalization (Lévesque ).
When the Viatorians arrived in Canada they found a land that was
already Christianized, known as territories that had belonged to the first
French empire. Their mission was no less missionary on account of the
novelty of their project of insertion, and their contact with the Cana-
dian scene presented a world which destabilized their cultural reorienta-
tions of life in society. Champagneur and his companions had the expe-
rience of being foreigners in a world that was not lacking in familiar
aspects. They were confronted with the point of view of the other and
at the same time agents of such a point of view, through the differences
in the ways of seeing and doing things. During the early days a familiar-
ization was forged in spite of the distinction, but not without problems
(Hébert : ). The point of view of the missionary as a foreigner
returned to the newly arrived, from their arrival until their implanta-
tion in a Viatorian community which was directed by Canadians, which
occurred in . Two other French Viatorians were united in  to
the Viatorians who just arrived from France, François-Thérèse Lahaye
and Antoine Thibaudier, both having been missionaries in Saint Louis
 missionary insertion and christianization 

in Missouri since . They had undertaken their studies in theology

before being ordained priests and exercising their ministries in teaching
or in the parish.
Landing in New York on May , , the Viatorians who had come
from France recognized the highly commercial and Protestant character
of the society. The shock that they experienced was of such magnitude
that, as Champagneur said, “it is impossible to express the sentiments
which the Europeans felt upon arriving in the New World” (Hémond
: ). From New York to Montréal by boat it was the great expansions
of land that impressed them: great forests, rivers and lakes, the beauty of
the landscapes and the immensity of the territory (Héber : –).
To sum up, everything was different from France, beginning with the
immense cold of Winter and the excessive heat of Summer. The rigorous
climate forced some newly arrived people to return to France, but a
similarity was also evinced: agricultural production is “about the same
as in the north of France” (Hémond : ).
The sphere of the Viatorians encompasses the region of greater Mon-
tréal along a territory of around a hundred kilometers. Some dreamed
of the immensity of the continent, dwelling on discovering the farthest
points. The foundation of Bourbonnais in Illinois in  allowed for the
knowledge of the center of America, where some Canadians had recently
immigrated or where there were some families from Louisiana. The Via-
torians also had a mission on the territory where, in the s, combat
between the British army and the patriots seeking autonomy through “a
responsible government” for Canada—a bourgeoisie which understood
itself to be the mistress of the destiny of the country, in agreement with
part of the clergy and the cultural elites, of aristocratic origin or other.
The defeat of the patriots in – had as a result the hanging of
the leaders of the rebellion, of whom some returned to the country, espe-
cially after the law of compensation to the victims of the rebellion was
voted by the parliament of Montréal, which provoked the Fire of  by
some conservative Anglophones.
Among the consequences was the fact that the Canadian higher clergy
saw its prestige diminish after its links to English power and the lack
of social reception of its orders and exommunications. With a view to
reaffirming the Canadian Francophone cultural identity and consolidat-
ing its institutions in order to reappropriate the government and indus-
trial development, it was important to combine the diverse forces, among
them, that of the Catholic Church. The Church could not count uncondi-
tionally on a clergy that was largely disavowed by the people and had to
 paul-andré turcotte

appeal to other agents, among them, French religious orders. Through

the mobilization of a growing bourgeoisie, the Sulpicians and bishop
Ignace Bourget attempted to recruit them to the point that the number of
priests was insufficient to assure ministries. In  the Catholic Church
of Lower Canada had  priests for a half-million faithful, among whom
, were in the diocese of Montréal, which had the responsibility
for  parishes or missions over an immense territory that extended
to New England and Illinois, Vancouver and Oregon, in addition to the
Outaouais and Hudson’s Bay. The Viatorians were also faced with the
competition of the Francophone Swiss pastors and with the influence of
the “apostate” priest Charles Chiniqui, which they countered on accept-
ing the parish of Bourbonnais, and the quarrel, after , of the episco-
pate with the Institut Canadien which, founded in , supported con-
ferences, reading libraries and the initiation of public speaking as well as
other cultural manifestations (Hébert : ; Perin , ).
In addition, Protestantism was no longer in the s the religion of
the conqueror and rejected as such. One of the leaders of the rebellion of
– against English domination, Dr. Côté, was ordained a Protes-
tant pastor in  followed by the conversion of Catholic priests who
entered the ranks of the Protestant clergy. Conversions reached the sur-
rounding towns. Bibles in French were distributed and the “evangelical”
newspaper Le Semeur Canadien was launched in . These Protes-
tants, note the Viatorian letter-writers, observe Sunday as faithfully as
Catholics and they do not harass them. On account of various structural
reasons, the relations of the Viatorians with the Protestants were frequent
and even encouraged. In their schools such as at Joliette or Berthier, the
English teachers were often Anglo-Protestants. The usefulness of English
was such that teachers had to be native speakers (Hébert : –,
, , –).
The massively Catholic nature of the Canadian Francophone popula-
tion did not lead the observers of the time to a sanctimonious position.
For example, Montréal is called “a most Christian town . . . the churches
are magnificent and especially filled with people. The priests dress in their
habits” (Hébert : ), which was tolerated only in Catholic Québec,
the only state of the sort in North America that gloried in it. Montréal
was also characterized as a corrupt city, especially on account of drunk-
enness and anticlericalism. At the same time the occasions for religious
to lose their faith were greater than in France (Hébert : ). Gen-
erally, according to Champagneur, “this new continent . . . is a land of
indifference at debauchery, of inconstancy and of a liberty incompatible
 missionary insertion and christianization 

with the true religious spirit.” The benefactor Barthélemy Joliette him-
self “did not frequent the sacraments” (Hébert : ). With regard
to religion, one responsibility was remarked by the French Viatorians:
cooperate with the clergy and other religious orders to stop the loss of
Catholics to Protestantism, and work to revitalize an old religiosity, to
give new credibility to the institutional Church in the eyes of the faith-
ful.

The Political-Economic Relations of the Act of Conversion

The French Viatorians were thrown into a society in which Catholic

evangelization, launched in the seventeenth century, had worked accord-
ing to Roman criteria. These foreigners had to adapt themselves to uses
and customs that, of European origin for the most part, were culturally
adapted to the American continent. They also had to deal with a society
that was typical of a British colony, where a non-Catholic organization
and mentality predominated, principally Anglican, which meant that
the respect for religious liberty was on a non-French basis. This liberty
declined in the diversity and autonomy of the diverse Christian churches,
some with respect to others in their decentralized organization in insti-
tutionalized communities, even for Catholics. Since  the manage-
ment and possession of churches—parishes in addition to the salaries
of priests and vicars—depended on the council of the people elected by
the faithful. Anglicans, Protestants and Catholics competed, while bor-
rowing resources of a diverse nature and integrating useful elements that
worked well and allowed for spiritual revival. These churches were ruled
by the same regulations of the state and the same social structure of reli-
gion, often through the Anglican church. For them, the conversion of
hearts or religious renewal along with social criticism and the construc-
tion of social and religious works went hand in hand, all with a view
to installing a social order which conformed to the evangelical message
interpreted by the ecclesiastical institution.
In the socioreligious context very different from that of France, the
Viatorians were among the first male religious orders to be established on
Québec soil under English rule, from  to . The others comprised
the Brothers of the Christian Schools who arrived on November , ;
the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, on December , ; the Jesuits, on
May , ; and the Congregation of the Holy Cross, on May , ,
along with the Viatorians (Dussault : –). This was linked to the
 paul-andré turcotte

Catholicism of New France, where male and female religious orders had
played a role of great importance. The ceding of this France in the New
World to England had, among its consequences, that of the interdiction
of male religious orders, Jesuits and the Récollets, and of recruiting for
them, along with the confiscation of their goods, like the College of the
Jesuits of Ville Marie, which was to become McGill University after a
long legal process; the chapel of the Récollets of Québec, which was
transformed into a Presbyterian church, and that of Trois-Rivières, with
the convent which was given to the Anglicans. The Sulpicians avoided the
confiscation, insisting on their status as a society of priests, along with
the Foreign Missions of the Seminary of Québec, founded by Monsignor
Laval in . The derogation, however fragile it was, and an object of
revision during almost the whole century, had permitted financial aid to
be given to works undertaken by female communities, being untouched
by the measures against male communities, and the creation of works
at the behest of the male orders, such as the creation of the College
of Montréal in , in substitution for the College of the Jesuits, by
the Canadian Sulpician Curatteau de la Blaiserie (Turcotte : –
).
Positivistic historians continue to reckon with the reasons and the fac-
tors for the arrival of the male French religious orders after . Some
functional religious reasons are advanced: their episcopal instrumen-
talization with an end to control by religious orders, the extension of
Catholic works thanks to cheap labor, and the recovery of establishments
taken over by the conquering English. Financial reasoning seems to be
the least grounded for the period which interests us: the average salary
was equivalent to that of non-clergy in the positions they occupied in
society, salaries which were, in fact, higher than those in France at the
time (Dussault : –). Nonetheless the economic difficulties were
important in the process of the implantation of new communities. The
various salaries in the recognized civil projects proved to be insufficient
to cover the cost of the intellectual and spiritual formation of the new
recruits and to compensate those involved in pastoral and philanthropic
activities who were badly paid. A common policy took hold: produce the
maximum and consume the minimum. It was necessary to establish a
price: that of sacrificing one or two generations of men, which was done,
not without variations according to the communities, taking into account
the deaths of young men in their twenties and thirties that took place
among the religious as evinced by the tombstones in cemeteries of the
communities (Dussault : –).
 missionary insertion and christianization 

One reason for the implantation of religious communities derives

from letters by Viatorians and other documents and is the question of
the drying up of secular Christianity in the cultural resistance to the
Anglo-Protestant occupier and the necessity of a redefinition of this resis-
tance through a project of sociopolitical reconquest, which was eco-
nomic and cultural—in the line of the continental spirit, a reactivation
of the mystical energy of New France, without breaking from the Greco-
Latin source with a European reference. To the degree that the Catholic
Church intended to play a decisive role in this project, it was necessary
to diversify these human resources and to make them increase, to end
the monopoly of the parish clergy, especially since its social credibil-
ity was on the wane, most especially among the up-and-coming social
classes, and even among members of the clergy who protested against
other clergy, who were aristocratic and disconnected with the problems
of the population. In any case, we are far from the humanistic spirit of
the Renaissance, of intellectual and spiritual competence, of the cultural
openness of missionaries—traits that had characterized the evangeliza-
tion of New France. At the same time, the connivance of members of
the Catholic Church with Anglophone domination had provoked oppo-
sition which was crystallized in indifference with respect to the Catholic
institution, in the places of worship and ritual practices that were once
considered due the respect of things sacred. Even more had taken place
in the territory of New France and also in Haiti and the French Antilles,
by European clergy, be it with respect to social behavior deemed immoral
or with respect to uncertain competence and to the authoritarian, if not
contemptuous, attitude which severely judged the actions of their hosts
and sought to impose rules of life on them that were unadapted and con-
sidered excessive.
In spite of a prejudiced social credibility, the contribution of the reli-
gious orders rather than the secular clergy was desired by the emerging
social classes, especially in such a multireligious and culturally diverse
space as the area of Montréal. There the powerful Sulpicians confronted
an episcopate that was still badly established and expecting the French
religious orders to consolidate its institutional position both socially and
religiously. At the same time, aligning itself with an entrepreneurial bour-
geoisie that was a rivalry to the one that was associated with the clergy
linked to the past was a renewing clergy, among whom was the bishop of
Montréal, Bourget, who, beyond his ambivalence, counted on the mobil-
ity of the new arrivals, the diverse investment of those forces, and their
spiritual influence transmitted by a style of life that sought to exemplify
 paul-andré turcotte

the gospel in the living out of daily life. This was evinced in the will
to affirm publicly a revivified Canadian culture that was in continuity
with the Catholic heritage, while at the same time respecting the existing
cultural and religious diversity. To reach such objectives, Msgr. Bourget
invited ten female religious orders, the greater part of whom were at first
associated with educational or charitable work. All of them worked for
the religious and sociocultural objectives, with effects that were political
as well as economic. Multiple transactions were put in place that tran-
scended confessional or linguistic limits and even the limits of the state.
In this totality, in affinity with its aspirations and vision of things, an
industrial and commercial bourgeoisie found the legitimate symbolism
of its advancement along with other people who came from a Catholic
context and were open to change and a portion of the Anglo-Protestant
bourgeoisie.
The Francophone Catholic public space became increasingly socially
identifiable upon the adoption of an architectural style which was almost
uniformly classical and installed itself even in Anglo-Protestant bas-
tions—for example, the construction of the archdiocesan cathedral of
Montréal, in the heart of the financial center, built according to the
plans of the Viatorian Michaud, or afterwards, the University of Mon-
tréal on Mont Royal in the middle of an Anglophone quarter. The dec-
oration of churches generally followed the Roman style of grand fres-
coes and paintings with dramatic scenes or those close to day-to-day life,
done by Canadian or European painters. To render religion accessible
to the whole of the faithful supposed a liturgical theatre that inspired
an openness to the marvelous, to emotions, and to the reaction of the
senses and not only the spirit. The revitalization of popular culture, pre-
viously highly politicized and weakened by the latest English repres-
sion, benefited as well, but not exclusively, from the revitalization of a
Tridentine Catholicism, which was characterized by doctrinal rectitude,
a religiosity which appealed to the heart, the Christ-centered conver-
sion of the person, and the cult of saints in the framework of the insti-
tutional hierarchy. Counter to the great North American confessions
which proposed religious practice within the confines of sacred spaces,
Bourget supported religious processions, even in the heart of commer-
cial neighborhoods or ones which were populated by non-Catholics, as
a public expression of the faith of French Canadians. In greater Mon-
tréal and the newer surrounding towns, the Catholic church created a
French-speaking institutional space, offering services whose competence
escaped the control of the Anglo-Protestant majority in Canada, the
 missionary insertion and christianization 

autonomy of French Canada and, as a correlation, the guarantee that its

culture had become incapable of dissociation from the liberty of action
and transaction of the Roman Catholic church (Perin: : –,
).

Colonization and Christianization: Relations and Conflicts

In an altogether different context, that of the high plains of Western

Cameroon, from the First World War to the s, the Dehonian reli-
gious order was openly opposed to the French colonial administration
whose economic policies let to the subjection of the population which
was being evangelized. It was not a case of re-Christianization based on
a new context and a cultural and political-economic reconquest but one
of being able to establish a link between evangelization and the human-
ization of social relations in the context of economic production and its
relations of dependence to the negative aspects of the conditions of life.
The dynamics of the relations between the politicoeconomic realm and
the mission of evangelization is shown to be one of the most complex,
and during a long period essentially was centered around salaried work
and its instances of regulation relating to the quinquina plantations in
the traditional lands of the Bamileke.
The issues of regulation were between the traditional leaders, the colo-
nial administration, and the Order of Priests of the Sacred Heart of Jesus,
commonly called the Dehonians. Even if they arrived on the same boat,
the missionary, the colonizer and the administrator cannot be confused.
Thus the Dehonians were able, through a way of action which was firm
yet not without contradictions, to translate concretely the social teach-
ings of the Catholic church in a different context than that of its elabo-
ration, of its references to the situation. In the land of the Bamileke, the
Fo were submitted to forced labor, even if it was remunerated, formu-
lating demands that were deemed unacceptable by the French colonial
powers and, upon not receiving their perceived right, the oppressed took
recourse to violence. Their masters, the colonizers, practiced an accumu-
lation of capital which did not take into consideration the moderation of
profit, nor the salary that was necessary for the socio-economic repro-
duction of the forces of labor. In order to serve a market of workers whose
remuneration was under the cost of living, the Dehonians in particular
demanded a just salary in order to be able to form families and human-
ize work conditions. It was from their response to the exploitation of
 paul-andré turcotte

quinquina that the religious contributed, in a relative way, to the emer-

gence of new socioeconomic relations through the transactions among
these parties.
The intention of impregnating existing social structures with Christian
values through an exemplary practice supposed a detachment from the
commissioner of the Republic, which was accompanied by a firm critique
of colonial measures. Two kinds of schemes face each other: one seeks the
humanization of the conditions of life and socioeconomic production
with an explicit reference to Catholic social teaching; the other seeks the
interests of profit and political, even cultural, domination.
These two antagonistic positions came into play in daily life and the
struggles that pit the dominant and the dominated. It is in relation to
these two elements that the resistance and the transactions in the defi-
nitions of social relations display themselves, be it through maintaining
or modifying conditions according to the parties involved. The teaching
of the Church ends up having an impact on the behavior and the struc-
tures through the canals of mediations that intertwine with the evangel-
ical mission of the Dehonians who have to deal with reticence on the
part of the Catholic hierarchy. A constellation of interactions, with its
advances and contradictions, has continued to grow around the emanci-
pation movement, linked to the expansion of the gospel (Léon XIII ;
Ledure ; Tsopmbeng : –, –, –, –).
The Cameroonian situation of the previous century is similar to the
consecutive positions and discussions that followed the subjection of the
indigenous peoples of Spanish America in the sixteenth century. It is
known that the domination of the invaders was rejected by the Domini-
can Las Casas, who dreamt about a Christian republic without servitude
and for whom evangelization means the completion and perfection of
Natural Law, meaning it be respected absolutely as it was before the intro-
duction of sin in the relations among individuals. He appealed to the
papacy to have it insist that human relations correspond to the exigencies
of the gospel and to the Natural Law of humanity, but he forgot that the
papacy no longer could rule over European kings and princes, some of
whom had even broken with Rome (Bataillon and Saint-Lu )
Vitoria, another Dominican, elaborated a theological argument that
was more complex in a certain way. Among other points he held that
the indigenous people could seem rough yet they were not, nevertheless,
devoid of reason. If they are culturally inferior, they are not so from
the point of view of nature; the cultural gap finds its solution in the
adoption of Christianity, which renders men equal in capacity. In fact, all
 missionary insertion and christianization 

men are free through Natural Law, hence colonization should be tem-
porary and should prepare for emancipation. This argument does not
consider the economic aspects of colonization (Martin ). Sepulveda
justifies the conquest and subjection of indigenous peoples due to the
rights of men over positive rights. What does this mean? Evangelization
and colonization constitute necessary conditions for the access to civ-
ilization and to salvation of those savage people, who practice human
sacrifices, cannibalism, and idolatry. Colonization, the “necessary evil”
we would say today, is necessary to put an end to barbarity (Merle
; Union missionaire du clergé ; Prudhomme : –, –
).
These three positions, typical in more than one way, will be reprised
in similar ways, if not given way to opposing arguments on the topic
of slavery and the consequences of European colonization. From this
point of view the humanizing action of the Dehonians inscribes itself
in a long debate and a history of Catholic missions, which were not
globalized in univocal terms, especially with respect to the legitimation
of relations of the missions with colonial policies, traversed as they
are by cooperation and opposition, by transaction and distinction. The
reference to Natural or humanitarian Law, in terms of equality or human
liberty, that is to say the human’s fundamental and universal dignity
on account of absolute Natural Law, and at the same time through the
affirmation of the primacy of the religious message over economic and
political objectives, constitute the symbolic weapons of missionary action
for the advancement in the humanization of social relations, especially
when the conditions of subservience affect Christianized populations or
those who are being converted.

Conclusion: The Figure of the Missionary

and the Action of Conversion

The missionary, a member of a religious order, appears as a migrant,

a foreigner in this way and as an external witness to innovations. At
the same time, he is interpellated, and he tries to refashion culture in
the manner of the Catholic institution. The conjugation of both figures
of missionary action demands a realignment of the reason for and the
finality of conversion along its process. This demand is necessary all the
more knowing that the enterprise of proclaiming a religion that issued
forth from another environment must be rendered credible with a view
 paul-andré turcotte

to a change in life that will meet with some reticence and obstacles.
Some selective arrangements with respect to ways of perceiving and
living, among them some with respect to power and the economy can
correspond to this resistance. In the best of cases, the tension releases a
process which produces a transaction that is the fruit of negotiations and
of points of agreement among actors as well as the recognition, explicit
or implicit, of difference. The compromise in question supposes a human
cost, notably of a spiritual nature, for the missionary (Turcotte and Remy
: –). To discharge exclusively upon the witness or the institution
can psychologically solve the problem of identity through the closure
of positions at the risk of ignoring or endorsing contradictions and
hardening conflicting positions to the point of rupture. The possibility is
high that things will be otherwise when the missionary is able to combine
the two aspects of the mission. In any case the figure of the missionary
is a complex one, more so since he is situated at the crossroads between
the witness and the institution, the intensity of belief and its extension, of
compromise and intransigence, of the continuity and the discontinuity in
the recomposition of the things of life with reference to the foundational
message and the tradition of another religion.

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 CONTRIBUTORS

Luigi Berzano is Professor of the Sociology of Cultural Processes at the

Political Science Faculty of the University of Turin. He is member of the
Scientific Council of the Religion Section of the Italian Sociology Asso-
ciation. His research interests include social movements, sociology of
leisure and lifestyles, religious transformations between innovation and
fundamentalism. His publications include: New Age ( [Religiosità del
Nuovo Areopago ()]) and Damanhur: Popolo e comunità ().
Anthony J. Blasi, Professor of Sociology at Tennessee State University,
earned the Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Notre Dame. He has
authored many works in sociological theory and the sociology of religion.
His most recent project was a translation of Georg Simmel’s  classic
Soziologie (), with Anton K. Jacobs and Mathew Kanjirathinkal. He
is a former president of the Association for the Sociology and current
editor of the Review of Religious Research. His current research focuses
on the history of American sociology of religion.
Pierluigi Caddeo is lecturer for the modules of Environmental Psychol-
ogy at the University of Cagliari and of Social Psychology at the Univer-
sity of Perugia. He received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology () at
the University of Rome “La Sapienza.” He is member of the International
Association for People-Environment Studies and the Italian Association
of Psychology. His research interests focus on the fields of Social, Envi-
ronmental, and Economic Psychology and include the topics of attitudes
and behaviors toward green consumerism, economic conduct, social and
local identity and environmental sustainability.
Roberto Cipriani is Professor of Sociology and Chairman of the De-
partment of Sciences of Education at the University of Rome . He has
served as editor-in-chief of International Sociology. He has been president
of the International Sociological Association Research Committee for
the Sociology of Religion and member of the Executive Committee of
the International Association of French Speaking Sociologists, and of
the International Institute of Sociology, as well as president of the Italian
Sociological Association and a Directeur d’Études at Maison des Sciences
de l’Homme in Paris. His publications include: Sociology of Religion: An
 contributors

Historical Introduction () and The Sociology of Legitimation (,

Current Sociology : ).
Régis Dericquebourg is affiliated with the faculty of the University
Charles De Gaulle-Lille and a permanent member of the Group for
the Study of Religions and Secularity (laïcité) at the Center for National
Scientific Studies in Paris. He wrote a doctoral thesis on the Jehovah’s
Witnesses and has continued research on this movement. In , he
began studies on healing churches publishing such books as Healing Reli-
gions (), The Antoinists (), The Christian Scientists (), and
To Believe and to Heal (), completing an habilitation in this area in
. He also has research interests in religious discrimination and the
prophetic personality.
Stefano Federici, psychologist and theologian, is currently Associate
Professor of General Psychology and lecturer in Psychology of Disabil-
ity, at the University of Perugia, Faculty of Education, and visiting pro-
fessor of Psychotechnologies at the University of Rome “La Sapienza.” He
has authored more than  international and national publications in the
research areas of cognitive psychology, disability, and religion. Recently,
along with Giuseppe Giordan and Lluis Oviedo, he has carried out inter-
national research on the beliefs and opinions of United States, Spanish,
Portuguese, and Italian Catholics concerning several controversial issues
in Roman Catholicism.
Kieran Flanagan is a Reader in Sociology at the University of Bristol,
England. His latest book is Sociology in Theology: Reflexivity and Belief
(). With Peter C. Jupp, he has edited: A Sociology of Spirituality
(). He is a former Chair of the British Sociological Association
Sociology of Religion Study. Recently he completed essays on the implicit
theology of Zygmunt Bauman and the prospects of a leap of faith from
sociology into theology. Currently he is writing a book: Sociology at
Prayer: Utterances in the Wilderness.
Giuseppe Giordan, Ph.D. in Social Sciences (), Pontifical University
of St. Thomas Aquinas (Rome), is Lecturer in Sociology at the Univer-
sity of Padua. He is Secretary of the Italian Sociological Association Sec-
tion on the Sociology of Religion, and Book Review Editor of Religioni e
Società. His main works include Valori e cambiamento sociale: definizioni
operative e modello esplicativo [Values and Social Change: Working Def-
initions and Explanatory Models], Dall’uno al molteplice. Dispositivi di
legittimazione nell’epoca del pluralismo [From One to Many: Systems of
 contributors 

Legitimation in the Age of Pluralism], Identity and Pluralism: The Values

of Postmodern Time, and the edited volumes, Tra religione e spiritualità: Il
rapporto con il sacro nell’epoca del pluralismo [Between Religion and Spiri-
tuality: The Relationship with the Sacred in the Age of Pluralism] and Voca-
tion and Social Context, volume  in the Religion and the Social Order
series. His current interests are the interaction between religion and spir-
ituality, and the relationship between youth and religion.
Cornelis N. de Groot (Kees) is a Lecturer in Practical Theology at the
Faculty of Catholic Theology of Tilburg University and has served as
President for the Association for the Sociology of Religion in the Nether-
lands (–). Kees received master’s degrees in sociology from the
University of Amsterdam and in theology from Tilburg University, and
wrote a doctoral dissertation on psychotherapy and religion at Leiden
University. He has published on church, religion and liquid modernity
in several international journals, and recently co-authored a Dutch text-
book in congregational studies.
Eliana Martoglio holds a Master of Science in Social Anthropology from
Delhi University and is now training as a psychotherapist, collaborating
with the chair of Sociology of Cultural Processes at the Political Science
Faculty of the University of Turin. She conducts research on new religious
movements in Turin. Her publications include: Indemoniati: Indagine
sulla possessione diabolica e l’esorcismo ().
Patrick Michel is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique and President of the Political Science and Soci-
ology of Organizations Section of the Comité National de la Recherche
Scientifique of France. In addition to his primary interest in Central
Europe, his research focuses on the theoretical aspects of the relation
between politics and religion. His published works include: Religion(s)
et identité(s) en Europe: L’Épreuve du pluriel, co-edited with Antonela
Capelle-Pogacean and Enzo Pace () and Politique et religion—La
grande mutation ().
Roberto Motta has a Ph.D. in Anthropology from New York’s Columbia
University. He has done fieldwork on the Afro-Brazilian religions and
also has a keen interest in social change and social thought. He has
published in several languages and has worked in teaching and research
in Brazil and abroad. He is at present a researcher of the Conselho
Nacional de Pesquisas in Brazilia and of the Groupe de Sociologie des
Religions et de la Laïcité in Paris.
 contributors

Enzo Pace, Professor of Sociology and Sociology of Religion at the

Faculty of Political Sciences of the University of Padua, is the Direc-
tor of Department of Sociology and of the Interdepartmental Center
on Intercultural Studies of the University of Padua. He is also Past-
President of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion (ISSR)
and a Directeur d’Études at the L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences
Sociales in Paris. His recent books include Religion(s) et identité(s) en
Europe: L’Épreuve du pluriel, co-edited with Antonela Capelle-Pogacean
and Patrick Michel, and Raccontare Dio: La religione come comunicazione
(both ).
William H. Swatos, Jr., has served as Executive Officer of the Association
for the Sociology of Religion since , prior to which he served for six
years as editor of Sociology of Religion, the ASR’s official journal. He is also
executive officer of the Religious Research Association, adjunct professor
of sociology at Augustana College (Illinois), and senior fellow of the
Center for Religious Inquiry Across the Disciplines at Baylor University,
serving as managing editor of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research
on Religion. A doctoral alumnus of the University of Kentucky, Bill is
author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of over twenty books including the
Encyclopedia of Religion and Society (). His current research centers
on pilgrimage religiosity, secularization and resacralization, reflected in
his most recent book, On the Road to Being There: Pilgrimage and Tourism
in Late Modernity, also published in the Religion and the Social Order
series (). With Kevin Christiano and Peter Kivisto he has written
the text Sociology of Religion: Contemporary Developments ( [nd
edition]).
Francesco Valerio Tommasi is a post-doctoral scholar in Philosophy of
Religion at the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” and is Wissenschaft-
licher Mitarbeiter at the Thomas-Institut of the University of Cologne.
He is Editorial Assistant of Archivio di filosofia. His recent publica-
tions include Philosophia transcendentalis. La questione antepredicativa
e l’analogia tra la Scolastica e Kant () and, with Andreas Speer, the
critical edition of Edith Stein, Des hl. Thomas von Aquino: Untersuchun-
gen über die Wahrheit—Quaestiones disputatae de veritate ().
Sophie-Hélène Trigeaud is Assistant Professor sociology at the École des
Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She completed her doctoral
dissertation, Conversion, Education, Community: A Social-Anthropolo-
gical Study of the Mormon (Latter-day Saints’) Practices and Beliefs Today
 contributors 

from a Transnational Viewpoint, at the ÉHÉSS in June . In addition

to her research on Mormons, she has worked more recently with William
H. Swatos, Jr. and André Sleiman on Marian pilgrimage religiosity in
France.
Paul-André Turcotte is Professor of Social Science at the Institut Catho-
lique de Paris. His books include L’éclatement d’un monde: Les Clercs
de Saint-Vieateru et la revolution tranquille (), L’enseignement sec-
ondaire public des Frères educateurs, –: Utopia et modernité
(), Intransigeance ou compromise: Sociologie et histoire du catholi-
cisme actuel (), and co-editorship, with Anthony Blasi and Jean
Duhaime, of Handbook of Early Christianity: Social Science Approaches
().
 Religion and the Social Order
Edited by
William H. Swatos, Jr.

ISSN 1610–5210

The series Religion and the Social Order was initiated by the Association for the Sociology
of Religion in , under the General Editorship of David G. Bromley. In  an
agreement between Brill and the ASR renewed the series.

. State, Market, and Religions in Chinese Societies. .

Edited by Fenggang Yang and Joseph B. Tamney
ISBN 978 90 04 14597 9
. On the Road to Being There: Studies in Pilgrimage and Tourism in Late Modernity.
.
Edited by William H. Swatos, Jr.
ISBN 978 90 04 15183 3
. American Sociology of Religion: Histories. .
Edited by Anthony J. Blasi
ISBN 978 90 04 16115 3
. Vocation and Social Context. .
Edited by Giuseppe Giordan
ISBN 978 90 04 16194 8
. North American Buddhists in Social Context. .
Edited by Paul David Numrich
ISBN 978 90 04 16826 8
. Religion and Diversity in Canada. .
Edited by Lori G. Beaman and Peter Beyer
ISBN 978 90 04 17015 5
. Conversion in the Age of Pluralism. .
Edited by Giuseppe Giordan
ISBN 978 90 04 17803 8