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A Multidimensional Approach to Understanding Religious Conversion

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Abstract

Lewis Rambo’s conversion stage model provides an invaluable heuristic device for ordering data on religious conversion and has been used extensively to explore conversions to different religions. Recent empirical research on the conversion to Christianity of previously unchurched Australians extends this model, demonstrating the importance of affect, as well as the roles of other Christians and God, across the entire conversion process rather than during particular stages. This article briefly outlines Rambo’s stage model of conversion, describes my research process, and introduces the multidimensional model (and substantive theory) of conversion the research revealed before exploring five key differences between the two models. Being attentive to the roles of each agent, and to affect, provides a fuller, multidimensional picture of contemporary conversion.

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Notes

  1. All participants’ names have been changed.

  2. My dissertation provides a thorough description of the research and analysis process (Taylor 2017a, pp. 25–83).

  3. I am using the term “affect” here in its broader psychological or philosophical sense, contrasting affective processes and cognitive processes. My use of the word “affect” recognizes that “many bodily (and mental) processes take place subliminally, below the threshold of awareness” (Leys 2011, p. 456; see also Forgas 2000; Zajonc 1980).

  4. Of course, what the research participants reported to me (and what I understood from their reports) was not their actual experience of conversion but a narrative reconstruction of that experience. While this is relevant to all areas of their reporting, it is particularly relevant when we consider their reporting on the role that the other agents played in the conversion process. Not only were those interviewed constructing a narrative that described an experience; they were also interpreting the activity of others (other Christians and God) and constructing a narrative that sought to describe that activity. My purpose is not to make definitive statements about the nature and activity of other Christians or of God but rather to seek to understand how that nature and activity was experienced and understood by recent converts.

  5. Religious studies scholar Maha Al-Qwidi (2002) similarly found that a “life shattering or devastating” crisis was not precedent “to all or even most” of the conversions to Islam she studied (pp. 243–244). Al-Qwidi preferred the term “significant event” (p. 245).

  6. Directed by Martin Scorsese, Paramount Pictures, 2016.

  7. James Coleman, one of the sociologists who first employed the rational choice perspective, noted that his theory “is constructed for a set of abstract rational actors. It then becomes an empirical question whether a theory so constructed can mirror the functioning of actual social systems which involve real persons” (1994, p. 18).

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  1. Theology Programme, School of Arts, University of Otago, P.O. Box 56, Dunedin, 9054, New Zealand

    Lynne Taylor

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Taylor, L. A Multidimensional Approach to Understanding Religious Conversion. Pastoral Psychol 70, 33–51 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-020-00934-1

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