The Chance of Salvation
The Chance of Salvation

Author: Lincoln A. Mullen

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2017-08-28

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0674983149

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The United States has a long history of religious pluralism, and yet Americans have often thought that people’s faith determines their eternal destinies. The result is that Americans switch religions more often than any other nation. The Chance of Salvation traces the history of the distinctively American idea that religion is a matter of individual choice. Lincoln Mullen shows how the willingness of Americans to change faiths, recorded in narratives that describe a wide variety of conversion experiences, created a shared assumption that religious identity is a decision. In the nineteenth century, as Americans confronted a growing array of religious options, pressures to convert altered the basis of American religion. Evangelical Protestants emphasized conversion as a personal choice, while Protestant missionaries brought Christianity to Native American nations such as the Cherokee, who adopted Christianity on their own terms. Enslaved and freed African Americans similarly created a distinctive form of Christian conversion based on ideas of divine justice and redemption. Mormons proselytized for a new tradition that stressed individual free will. American Jews largely resisted evangelism while at the same time winning converts to Judaism. Converts to Catholicism chose to opt out of the system of religious choice by turning to the authority of the Church. By the early twentieth century, religion in the United States was a system of competing options that created an obligation for more and more Americans to choose their own faith. Religion had changed from a family inheritance to a consciously adopted identity.

An American Conversion
An American Conversion

Author: Deal Wyatt Hudson

Publisher: Crossroad Publishing

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780824521264

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The publisher and editor of the influential "Crisis" magazine tells for the first time his story of how his conservative upbringing led him to convert to Roman Catholicism.

A History of Christian Conversion
A History of Christian Conversion

Author: David W. Kling

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-05-05

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0199717591

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Conversion has played a central role in the history of Christianity. In this first in-depth and wide-ranging narrative history, David Kling examines the dynamic of turning to the Christian faith by individuals, families, and people groups. Global in reach, the narrative progresses from early Christian beginnings in the Roman world to Christianity's expansion into Europe, the Americas, China, India, and Africa. Conversion is often associated with a particular strand of modern Christianity (evangelical) and a particular type of experience (sudden, overwhelming). However, when examined over two millennia, it emerges as a phenomenon far more complex than any one-dimensional profile would suggest. No single, unitary paradigm defines conversion and no easily explicable process accounts for why people convert to Christianity. Rather, a multiplicity of factors-historical, personal, social, geographical, theological, psychological, and cultural-shape the converting process. A History of Christian Conversion not only narrates the conversions of select individuals and peoples, it also engages current theories and models to explain conversion, and examines recurring themes in the conversion process: divine presence, gender and the body, agency and motivation, testimony and memory, group- and self-identity, "authentic" and "nominal" conversion, and modes of communication. Accessible to scholars, students, and those with a general interest in conversion, Kling's book is the most satisfying and comprehensive account of conversion in Christian history to date; this major work will become a standard must-read in conversion studies.

The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion
The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion

Author: Marc David Baer

Publisher: Oxford Handbooks

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 829

ISBN-13: 0195338529

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This handbook offers a comprehensive exploration of the dynamics of religious conversion, which for centuries has profoundly shaped societies, cultures, and individuals throughout the world.

A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States, Volume 1
A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States, Volume 1

Author: Patrick D. Bowen

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2015-08-17

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 9004300694

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A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States, Volume 1: White American Muslims before 1975 is the first in-depth study of the thousands of white Americans who embraced Islam between 1800 and 1975. Drawing from little-known archives, interviews, and rare books and periodicals, Patrick D. Bowen unravels the complex social and religious factors that led to the emergence of a wide variety of American Muslim and Sufi conversion movements. While some of the more prominent Muslim and Sufi converts—including Alexander Webb, Maryam Jameelah, and Samuel Lewis—have received attention in previous studies, White American Muslims before 1975 is the first book to highlight previously unknown but important figures, including Thomas M. Johnson, Louis Glick, Nadirah Osman, and T.B. Irving.