Abstract
Conversion as a concept has played an important role in shaping the public face of Christianity and has frequently been recognised by both contemporaries and historians as a key demonstration and narrative of religiosity’s character. However, it is also an area where the religious have enshrined the importance of narrative and, in particular, the possibility of its variety. Religions of the book have consistently relied upon such narratives of conversion as fundamental methods of conveying and legitimising the importance of religious experience to audiences within their communion. However, such narratives have also had important messages to convey to those outside these communities of belief. These frequently crystallise and encapsulate the idea of change in the life and personality of the individual and the opportunities this further offers to the potential believer. Callum Brown has reminded us that such narratives were especially ubiquitous from the nineteenth century onwards.2 For both of these reasons conversion has also been an important influence on the construction of religious history. In its consideration of the lived experience of being religious, and the history of this, conversion has also had important things to say to aspects of the history of secularisation.
God doesn’t live in buildings Put up by the hand of men But He lives in the hearts of those Who have been born again1
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Notes
Poem by Paul McGowan from Lesley McGowan (1990) I Found Jesus ( Chichester: New Wine ), p. 40.
Callum Brown ( 2009 edition) The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800–2000 ( London: Routledge ), p. 69.
Rodger M. Payne (1998) The Self and the Sacred: Conversion and Autobiography in Early American Protestantism ( Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press).
Lewis Rambo (1993) Understanding Religious Conversion ( London: Yale University Press).
See, for example, Bob Altemeyer and Bruce Hunsberger (1997) Amazing Conversions: Why Some Turn to Faith and Others Abandon Religion ( Amherst: Prometheus Books ), pp. 231–3.
D. Bruce Hindmarsh (2005) The Evangelical Conversion Experience: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England ( Oxford: Oxford University Press ), pp. 16–17.
Patricia Caldwell (1983) The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press ), pp. 41, and 161–186. See this latter section for a comparison between the structure of puritan conversion narratives in England and New England. See also
Charles Taylor (2007) A Secular Age ( New York: Belknap ), p. 83, for a recognition that puritanism inculcated a confidence in salvation but alongside a deep conception of sin.
See Jean Delumeau (1990) Sin and Fear: The Emergence of Western Guilt Culture: 13th–18th Centuries [translated by Eric Nicholson] ( New York: St. Martin’s Press). Taylor also suggests this fear was a motivation instrumental in disenchantment. Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 88.
See Patrick Collinson (1967) The Elizabethan Puritan Movement ( Oxford: Clarendon Press).
See Ramie Targoff (2001) Common Prayer: The Language of Devotion in Early Modern England ( London: University of Chicago Press). Targoff argues that the nature of the English Reformation (and specific incidents and emphases within it) led to a devolution of piety to individuals. This was considered to have gone too far by some religious institutions. The end of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century can thus be classified as a period in which such institutions sought to ‘claw back’ some control over the possession of piety. See also Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 258.
Paul Oppenheimer (1997) An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Guilt ( London: Duckworth ), p. 64.
For material on Edwards see Payne, The Self and the Sacred, pp. 24–27, 50–51 and Stephen R. Yarbough and John C. Adams (1993) Delightful Conviction: Jonathan Edwards and the Rhetoric of Conversion ( Westport, CO: Greenwood Press). For evangelical conversion as Transatlantic idiom see Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Experience, pp. 60–77. Hindmarsh is an especially good guide to the range and diversity of conversion experiences, which cannot be discussed in the same level of detail here.
Jonathan Edwards (1972) A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in C. C. Goen, ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press). This story had a ripple effect across the Atlantic and was still a staple of conversion compendia compiled in the twentieth century, see its inclusion in
Robert Backhouse (1993) Invaded by Love: An Anthology of Christian Conversion Stories ( London: Marshall Pickering ), p. 38.
See also Thomas Scott (1808) The Force of Truth: An Authentick Narrative ( London: C and R Baldwin ), p. 3, for a mention of didactic literature capable of persuading children that their moral development and behaviour was under constant surveillance.
Rev. James Janeway (1821 edition) A Token for Children; Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives and Joyful Deaths, of Several Young Children. In two parts (London).
C. F. Andrews (1937) A Pilgrim’s Progress from Religion in Transition ( London: Allen and Unwin).
See Legh Richmond (1814) The Dairyman’s Daughter. Interestingly the Wikipedia entry (from where many in future will potential encounter the work), contains the following suggestive statement: ‘However, and partly because of this morbid theme, the book, while extremely popular for three-quarters of a century, is not well adapted to the tastes and the requirements of the 20th century and beyond.’
Harold Begbie (1923) Life Changers: Narratives of a Recent Movement in the Spirit of Personal Religion ( London: Mills and Boon ), pp. 17–20, 45–6, 89.
Montague G. Barker (2000) Psychology, Religion and Mental Health ( Edinburgh: Rutherford House ), p. 4.
Edwin Diller Starbuck (1899) The Psychology of Religion (London). It is suggestive that some commentators simply assumed this area of research had been closed down by the triumph of the ‘more secular and scientific middle years of the twentieth century’. See
Natalie Isser and Lita Linzer Schwartz (1988) The History of Conversion and Contemporary Cults ( Peter Lang: New York ), pp. 16–17.
Many twentieth-century studies concurred with the idea of conversion as an adjunct to adolescence. See for example the figures in Frank Colquoun (1955) Harringay Story: The Official Record of the Billy Graham Greater London Crusade 1954 ( London: Hodder and Stoughton ), p. 233, which suggests over half of those presenting themselves as converts were under 19.
See Owen Brandon (1960) The Battle for the Soul: Aspects of Religious Conversion ( London: Hodder and Stoughton ), p. 27. Italicised emphasis in the original;
See Targoff, Common Prayer; >Mary Hampson Patterson (2007) Domesticating the Reformation: Protestant Best Sellers, Private Devotion, and the Revolution of English Piety ( Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press);
Leslie J. Lindenaur (2002) Piety and Power: Gender and Religious Culture in the American Colonies, 1630–1700 ( New York: Routledge ).
See Timothy Larsen (2011) The People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians ( Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Gavin Wakefield (2006) Conversion Today ( Cambridge: Grove Books ), pp. 3–4.
See Sante De Sanctis (1927, reprinted 1999) Religious Conversion; A Bio-Psychological Study (London: Routledge). Sante De Sanctis in the first third of the twentieth century noted that there was a decisive shift away from ‘the conversions described in the old books… attributed to marvels of all sorts, to exhortations and prophesies’ (p. 24). This is also evident in the stories in Wakefield, Conversion Today.
See Timothy Larsen (2006) Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth Century England ( Oxford: Oxford University Press). In this work Larsen argues that reconversion back to Christianity was as common, if not more common, than the previously orthodox vision of the supremacy of doubt in Victorian England. But also see
David S. Nash (2011) ‘Reassessing the “Crisis of Faith” in the Victorian Age: Eclecticism and the Spirit of Moral Inquiry’. Journal of Victorian Culture Spring 16, 1: 83–100, which focuses upon the importance of the narratives of seeking and of being spiritually omnivorous as an important manifestation of late nineteenth-century religious culture.
David S. Nash (1995) ‘“Look in her face and Lose thy dread of dying”. The Ideological Significance of Death to the Secular Community in Victorian England’. Journal of Religious History 19, 2 (December): 158–80.
See Susan Budd (1977) Varieties of Unbelief ( London: Heinemann Educational).
See H. C. Shackleton to Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner 30 September 1903 and 28 October 1903, Bishopsgate Library, Bradlaugh Papers,. See also David Nash (2002) ‘“The Credulity of the Public Seems Infinite”: Charles Bradlaugh, Public Biography and the Battle for Narrative Supremacy in Fin-De-Siècle England’. Journal of Victorian Culture 7, 2 (Autumn): 239–62.
See David Nash and Anne-Marie Kilday (2010) Cultures of Shame: Exploring Crime and Morality in Britian, 1600–1900 ( Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan ), Chapter 5.
Donald Soper (1937) ‘The Case of B.5.29’, in By the Grace of God: A Book of Religious Experience ( London: Hodder and Stroughton ), pp. 43–6.
Liza Davies (1994), ed., Inside Stories: Encounters with God in Prison ( Oxford: Bible Reading Fellowship ), p. 6.
For a collection of American examples on the Prison conversion story see Merlin Carothers, Valeri Barinov and Charles Colson (2001) Tales of Prison to Praise: Three Stories of Lives Transformed by God ( London: Hodder and Stoughton).
See Eddie Gibbs (1993) Winning them Back: Tackling the Problem of Nominal Christianity ( Tunbridge Wells: Monarch Publications ), p. 177.
Michael Apichella (1996) Prison Pentecost: Has Revival Come to Our Prisons? ( Eastbourne: Kingsway Publications ), pp. 86–7.
Judith Wigley (1992) Out of Bounds: The Story of Malcolm Worsley Prisoner to Probation Officer ( Guildford: Highland Books).
Virginia Lieson Brereton (1991) From Sin to Salvation: Stories of Women’s Conversions, 1800 to the Present ( Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press).
Nicky Gumbell recalls an individual saved from alcoholism by the power of religion instigated by a literal unsatisfactory encounter with his own reflection. See Nicky Gumbell ( 1993, 2007 edition) Alpha: Questions of Life ( Brompton: Alpha ), p. 47.
For an example of the recast recovery narrative intended to avoid religious idioms and the centrality of a ‘higher power’ see James Christopher (1988) How to Stay Sober: Recovery without Religion ( Amherst: Prometheus Books).
See Jack Trimpey (1996) Rational Recovery: The New Cure for Substance Addiction ( New York: Pocket Books).
Ibid., p. 104. However, see also Anne Townsend (1990) Faith without Pretending ( London: Hodder and Stoughton ) for a narrative in which a woman, after a number of traumatic experiences within the religious world, rejects the fact that most authority within this world comes from men. She finds her salvation through training for the priesthood.
Donald Capps (1990) ‘Sin, Narcissism, and the Changing Face of Conversion’. Journal of Religion and Health 29, 3 (Fall): 233–47, p. 233.
Modernisations of Bunyan’s, Pilgrims Progress included comic strip versions in which the characters of Christian, Faithful and Hope ‘are frequently shown bare-chested and give the appearance of being on high-protein diets and preoccupied with body building’. Barry E. Horner (2003) Pilgrim’s Progress, Themes and Issues ( Darlington: Evangelical Press ), p. 356.
Albert I. Gordon (1967) The Nature of Conversion: A Study of Forty-Five Men and Women who Changed their Religion ( Boston: Beacon Press ), p. 33. Interestingly this study also contained investigation of the phenomenon of conversion to enable marriage with a member of a specific religious group. It also analysed the growth and development of conversion schemes and catechisms to enable this to happen. Taken together these indicate a 1960s view that appeared to accept, at face value, the self-regarding and instrumental reasons for religious conversion.
This is likely to be echoed by many of the implications of Callum Brown’s demographic explanations. These see significant changes around the function, purpose and viability of the conventional family as an episode in the creation of a more autonomous individual prepared to debate with established notions of a moral order. Callum Brown (2012) Religion and the Demographic Revolution: Women and Secularisation in Canada, Ireland, UK and USA since the 1960s ( Woodbridge: Boydell Press ), p. 9.
Rosemary Haughton (1967) The Transformation of Man: A Study of Conversion and Community ( London: Geoffrey Chapman )
Daniel Callahan Preface p. 4. See also Paul Heelas (1996) The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization of Modernity ( Oxford: Blackwell). This work is explicit about New Age spirituality being rooted in a search for a better version of the self; either through purging the impact of negative experiences or through the realisation and self-conscious assumption of a new identity. Callum Brown also later describes this (in the formation of a modern secular version) as the destruction of an ‘older, restraining and hegemonic brand of self’ replaced by a ‘newer (or liberated a formerly deviant or repressed) brand of self’. Brown, Religion and the Demographic Revolution, p. 258.
Slimming World (2000) Food Optimising the Satisfying Way to Lose Weight and Feel Great with over 120 Delicious Recipes ( London: Ebury).
Adele Parker (2006) Slimming Secrets of the Rich and Famous ( London: John Blake).
James H. S. Steven (2002) Worship in the Spirit: Charismatic Worship in the Church of England (Carlisle: Paternoster Press), pp. 14–36.
See David Nash (1999) Blasphemy in Modern Britain 1789 to the Present (Aldershot: Ashgate), Chapters 3, 4 and 5.
Ali Köse (1996) Conversion to Islam: A Study of Native British Converts ( London: Kegan Paul ), p. 191. This critique also had a counterpart in charismatic distaste for a ‘rationalistic’ and ‘mechanical’ Christianity especially during the Wimber ‘Signs and Wonders’ ministry of the late 1980s. See Steven, Worship in the Spirit, p. 27.
Les Isaac (2009) Street Pastors ( Colorado Springs: David C. Cook ), pp. 16–17.
It is worth contrasting this with some pre-1939 thinkers on the issue of conversion, who saw it as a redoubling or deepening of existing faith. In his 1937 book Harold Beales described faith as ‘essential for conversion’ and cites relevant biblical texts, which he presumed his readers were familiar with or at least had access to. This is followed by programmes that tacitly assume religious membership as a prerequisite for this type of conversion. See W. Harold Beales (1937) Children of God: Chapters on Conversion and its Consequences (London: Epworth Press), pp. 20–1, 33–4.
Lynn Bridgers (2005) Contemporary Varieties of Religious Experience: James’ Classic Study in Light of Resilience, Temperament and Trauma ( Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield).
See also W. R. Forrester (1956) Conversion ( Edinburgh: St Andrews Press ), p. 21, for a critique of James and his tendency to ‘pathologise’ conversion.
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Nash, D. (2013). Saved and Transfigured Selves — Salvation, Old and New. In: Christian Ideals in British Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137349057_3
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