Conclusion

The concluding chapter provides summary observations of the book’s themes that highlight the complex, multifaceted dimension of conversion throughout twenty centuries of Christian history. These include the convert’s cognizance of divine presence; the crucial importance of historical context (political, religious, institutional, and socioeconomic factors); continuity and discontinuity (how much of the new displaces the old in conversion?); nominal, incomplete, and “true” conversions; personal testimonies and narratives (the autobiographical impulse attests to the converted life); the role of gender; identity and the self; agency (are converts actors or are they being acted upon?); the mechanisms behind and the motivations for conversion; the body as a site of conversion; the role of music; conversion as event and process; coercive practices; and forms of communication in the converting process.

Lower-Caste Conversions (1530–Present)

Beginning in the 1860s and 1870s, in separate regions of India, Protestants witnessed explosive growth through group conversions among the “depressed classes.” Forced to revise their understanding of conversion as an individual commitment made by one person at a time, Christians discovered that their future success lay in the conversion of the outcastes and tribal groups. By 1933, an estimated one-half of the Roman Catholics in India were descendants of mass-movement converts and at least 80 percent of the Protestant converts had also come via this route. This chapter considers group conversions or mass movements, primarily among nineteenth- and twentieth-century depressed classes and tribal peoples, who currently represent over 50 percent and 15 to 20 percent, respectively, of Christians in India. Groups discussed include the Shanars of Tirunelveli, the Chuhras of Punjab, and the Mizos of northeast India. The chapter concludes with an examination of recent conversion controversies.

Upper-Caste Conversions (1500–1900)

After tracing the early Christian presence in India and discussing the nature of the caste system, this chapter profiles individuals—well-known upper-caste nineteenth-century converts from Hinduism. As in China, the missionary presence in India was a necessary but not sufficient factor in Christianity’s spread. Missionaries initiated the first conversions, but within a generation or two, Indian Christians became the primary instruments for the spread of the gospel. Communication never flowed in one direction, from missionary to Indians. Increasingly, Indians converted on their own terms and adapted Christianity to meet their own particular concerns and to indigenize their faith by separating Christ from the trappings of Western, colonial Christianity. Converts discussed include Krishna Mohan Banerjea, Baba Padmanjee, Krishna Pillai, Narayan Vaman Tilak, Pandita Ramabai, and Brahmabandhab Upadhyay.

American Evangelicalism in Black and White (1750–Present)

This chapter begins with an examination of the evangelical movement among African Americans, including the testimonies of ex-slaves and the spiritual autobiographies of George White and Jarena Lee. It then considers the role of conversion in the Second Great Awakening. Although there was no overarching unity to this awakening, the revival profoundly shaped an emerging generic Protestant evangelicalism. However, not all were pleased with this age of revivalism. John Williamson Nevin and Horace Bushnell, two products of the revival, eventually became its most vociferous critics and questioned the notion of instantaneous conversions. In the industrial age, Walter Rauschenbusch articulated a view of conversion as social reconstruction, and in the twentieth century, Billy Graham appeared as the charismatic champion of “born-again” religion. The chapter concludes with a discussion of young evangelicals who questioned the individualistic emphasis of evangelical conversion and of others who left the evangelical fold and converted to Catholicism or Orthodoxy.

Catholics in Colonial America (1500–1700)

Conversionary efforts in the New World mirrored attitudes and practices in the Old. Christendom remained as much a project in the New as in the Old, and thus religious differences remained as problematic in the Americas as they did in Europe. Images of military conflict—combat, battle, and victory—language familiar on the Continent—infused the outlook of early modern Catholic missionaries, whereas Spanish and French missionaries in the New World often had the arm of the state to protect them and, all too often, to coerce the natives. This chapter selectively examines initial missionary efforts in a variety of locations—Spanish missionary outreach in the Caribbean, Peru, and Alta California and French missions in North America. The depth of Native American conversions was as varied as the methods used to produce them. On a superficial level, conversion meant a transfer of loyalty or allegiance, often without a full knowledge of what that transfer entailed. Or, with defeat, conversion might represent a conscious acknowledgment of the more powerful Christian God over weaker traditional deities.

Catholic East and Pentecostal West (1800–Present)

The first part of this chapter examines Catholic missions among the Maasai, with particular attention given to the perennial issues raised by Vincent Donovan in his book Christianity Rediscovered. After a cursory examination of the role of missionary education as a vehicle of conversion, the discussion returns to the Maasai and, in particular, to the attraction of the Christian message to women. The second part of the chapter revisits West Africa with a brief glimpse of the Aladura movement in Yorubaland (Nigeria) before taking up Nigeria’s Pentecostal explosion in the mid-1970s. Expressed in multitudinous forms and organizations, the emergence of Spirit-centered movements took place within a local context of socioeconomic and political upheaval and a larger global context of exposure to modernizing influences, particularly those emanating from North American Pentecostalism. In addition to attracting young adults, women find that Pentecostalism is a boon to stable marriages and family life.

The Church of the East and the First Catholic Missions (635–1840)

This chapter opens with a broad survey of Christianity’s initial appearance in West Asia and the several papal-sponsored sending missions of a handful of friars that followed. It then moves to a more extended treatment of the first organized and subsidized effort by the Church to penetrate China with the gospel—the first Jesuit mission of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Particular attention is given to the conversionary efforts of Matteo Ricci, the conversion of Xu Guangqi, and European missionary attempts to convert rural people and villagers. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the homegrown variety of Christianity that survived during the period when Christianity was officially outlawed in China as a heterodox and “perverse sect.”

The Rise of Evangelicalism (1675–1750)

This chapter considers expressions and views of conversion in two major evangelical movements in two locales—Pietism in Germany and Methodism in England. Pietism, whose spirituality informed nearly all aspects of British and American evangelicalism, emerged in the seventeenth century as one of the most important Protestant renewal movements after the Reformation. Pietists stressed that assent to formal doctrine fell far short of true Christianity. Critical of “nominal” religion and dissatisfied with the way that Lutheran pastors preached and carried out their pastoral duties, Pietists located true religion in the heart. Their language of “rebirth,” “regeneration,” and the “new man” stressed the experiential, emotional, even mystical side of the faith. In England, the conversions of John and Charles Wesley were indebted to the influence of Pietist Moravians. John’s itinerating preaching, and organizing skills and Charles’s hymn-writing would profoundly shape England’s Evangelical Revival.

European Catholicism (1500–1700)

The long Catholic Reformation, which lasted from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, is one of the most active, intense, and expansive in the history of Christian conversion. This chapter begins with an examination of the conversions of two profoundly influential Catholics from the Iberian Peninsula (Ignatius of Loyola and Teresa of Ávila) and then considers efforts by the religious orders to re-Catholicize Europe. With the Jesuits leading the way, the Church evangelized the masses, drawing them into a personal relationship with God by encouraging the very things Protestants condemned: cults of intercession, pilgrimages, concern with purgatory, feast days, adoration of Christ in the Eucharist, and devotion to the saints. The chapter then moves to a discussion of conversion in the context of religiously mixed communities (Catholics and Protestants) in the Low Countries and France and ends with a discussion of Pierre Bayle’s defense of free conscience as the basis of true conversion.

Protestants and Continental Reformers (1517–1600)

By the early sixteenth century, the call to conversion had moved in other and more radical directions, resulting initially in renewed personal spiritual commitment at odds with the Catholic Church and then moving to outright schism and a change of institutional commitment. Reformers such as Martin Luther and John Calvin experienced new and profound reorientations through their focus on the Bible and its teaching of salvation by faith alone, by grace alone, and through Christ alone. Anabaptists such as Menno Simons embraced these basic teachings but also placed emphasis on conversion (the “new birth”) as a life of discipleship. The reformers’ success in transmitting a thoroughgoing change of heart and mind to the populace, however, had mixed results. Political resistance, spiritual indifference, theological polemics, Catholic intransigence, and the persistence of ancient magic lore and occult practices ensured that the wholesale reformation of Europe, even in Protestant-controlled areas, would never become a reality.