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Toward an Integrative Theory of Religious Conversion: A Review Essay of The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion by Lewis R. Rambo and Charles F. Farhadian (2014)

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Abstract

This paper, a review essay of The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion (2014), first summarizes some of its social scientific chapters and then attempts to begin building an integrative theory of religious conversion. This theory is based upon a critical realist perspective and draws on Paloutzian’s multi-level interdisciplinary paradigm of conversion research, recent developments in the cultural sociology of religion, and the language of conversion, and it could be extended to integrate additional levels. The paper ends with a brief discussion of human flourishing and the possible role of conversion in it.

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Notes

  1. The first part of this review essay is similar to, though not identical with, a book review previously written for Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review (Jindra, I.W.: Book review of The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion. Sociology of Religion, forthcoming).

  2. For a concise and recent summary article on Bhaskar’s work, see Gorksi (2013). For a more extensive but similar description of critical realism to the one given here, see Jindra (2014).

  3. A good definition of emergence can be found in (Smith 2010, pp. 25–26): “Emergence refers to the process of constituting a new entity with its own particular characteristics through the interactive combination of other, different entities that are necessary to create the new entity but that do not contain the characteristics present in the new entity.”

  4. See also Paloutzian and Park (2013, p. 75) on this point. In 2013, at the Annual Meeting for the Society of the Scientific Study of Religion in Boston, I presented a paper on the limitations of the “multilevel interdisciplinary paradigm” of religious conversion. The later sections of this article are based on that presentation.

  5. Paloutzian has long advocated viewing conversion as a change in one’s “system of meaning.” This becomes apparent both in his chapter on the psychology of religion in the Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion and throughout the Handbook of the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality (Paloutzian and Park 2013).

  6. Some of the works cited here specifically focus on spiritual experiences (e.g., experiences of the occult and paranormal, Bader et al. 2010) and religious conversion. For example, Edgell writes about a recent study of conversions to Islam in a Midwestern Islamic cultural center (Winchester 2008) in which religious conversion is seen “as a form of embodied becoming that is embedded within the routine of Islamic religious practices” (p. 254). She also relies on Smilde’s Reason to Believe (2007), an ethnographic study of Venezuelan men’s conversion to Evangelical Christianity, their backgrounds, conversion accounts and paths, and the role of networks, as an important work in this line of research.

  7. See also (Jindra 2014).

  8. Swidler’s toolkit theory proposes that our “toolkit” shapes how we “routinely organize action” and is either “supporting” or, on the other hand, curtailing the pursuit of those action strategies (Swidler 2003, p. 69).

  9. Stromberg (p. 123) favors Staples and Mauss’s (1987) view of a change due to religious conversion as “a change in self-consciousness” over Snow and Machalek’s (1983) conceptualization of “language as a marker” of the transformation.

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  1. University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA

    Ines W. Jindra

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Jindra, I.W. Toward an Integrative Theory of Religious Conversion: A Review Essay of The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion by Lewis R. Rambo and Charles F. Farhadian (2014). Pastoral Psychol 65, 329–343 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-014-0635-z

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