Issues in the Sociology and Psychology of Religious Conversion

Abstract

Religious conversion is the process by which a person commits to the beliefs of a new religious tradition and shifts away from their previously held religious beliefs (Stark and Finke 2000). Religious conversion and its mechanisms have been studied for millennia (Zinnbauer and Pargament in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 37(1), 161–180, 1998) and were among the first phenomena to be studied by psychology (Paloutzian et al. in Journal of Personality, 67(6), 1047–1079, 1999). This review of conversion begins with a discussion of diverse conceptualizations, and hence multiple definitions, of conversion. Next, recurring components of major psychological and sociological conversion theories are explored—those consistently recognized as important for understanding and explaining the large amount of variance across conversions. Such components include the convert’s agency, the convert’s social integration, the temporal span of conversion, the nature of conversion’s consequences, and the roles that crisis, emotion, religion, and identity play in conversion. Identifying which components of conversion, and the issues that surround them, are consistently of significance to scholars provides future researchers practical starting points for accurately measuring the conversion process.