Conclusion: What Matters with Conversions?

Abstract

There is nothing new about religious conversions, but the way they have occurred during the last 40 years is rather different from in the past. As far as the history of Christianity is concerned, mass conversions were largely linked to political domination, from the barbarians of the late Roman Empire to the Amerindians and Africans of the colonial period. Conversions to Islam used to occur inside the Muslim kingdoms and empires mostly as a way to align with the dominant power; at the periphery of the Muslim world, where there was no political incentive, conversions, made mainly through merchants and travellers, were perceived in terms of upward social mobility, a factor often associated with conversions in general. In a word, conversions worked vertically from dominated to dominants, as if the top were some sort of magnet attracting subjects. Exceptions, such as the spread of Christianity in the early and middle Roman Empire, remind us more of the present time; in any case, Christianity in the Roman Empire was always perceived by the state as a political issue, with the aim of bringing state and religion together, either by suppressing Christianity or making it the state religion. In a given territory, mass conversions used to concern only one religion, one that was already (or was trying to become) dominant. Conversions thus appeared as a way to make the dominant religion coincide with the dominant power; exceptions, as with the Reformation in Europe, were followed by a string of civil and foreign wars, in the perspective of restoring such a convergence (according to cujus regio, ejus religio, the famous founding principle of the Peace of Westphalia).