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"In a groundbreaking historical work that addresses religious conversion in the West from an uncompromisingly secular perspective, Susan Jacoby challenges the conventional narrative of conversion as a purely spiritual journey. From the transformation on the road to Damascus of the Jew Saul into the Christian evangelist Paul to a twenty-first-century "religious marketplace" in which half of Americans have changed faiths at least once, nothing has been more important in the struggle for reason than the right to believe in the God of one's choice or to reject belief in God altogether. Focusing on the long, tense convergence of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--each claiming possession of absolute truth--Jacoby examines conversions within a social and economic framework that includes theocratic coercion (unto torture and death) and the more friendly persuasion of political advantage, economic opportunism, and interreligious marriage. Moving through time, continents, and cultures--the triumph of Christianity over paganism in late antiquity, the Spanish Inquisition, John Calvin's dour theocracy, Southern plantations where African slaves had to accept their masters' religion--the narrative is punctuated by portraits of individual converts embodying the sacred and profane. The cast includes Augustine of Hippo; John Donne; the German Jew Edith Stein, whose conversion to Catholicism did not save her from Auschwitz; boxing champion Muhammad Ali; and former President George W. Bush. The story also encompasses conversions to rigid secular ideologies, notably Stalinist Communism, with their own truth claims. Finally Jacoby offers a powerful case for religious choice as a product of the secular Enlightenment. In a forthright and unsettling conclusion linking the present with the most violent parts of the West's religious past, she reminds us that in the absence of Enlightenment values, radical Islamists are persecuting Christians, many other Muslims, and atheists in ways that recall the worst of the Middle Ages."--Jacket.… (more)
User reviews
I'm also interested in the conversion of the pagans, both in antiquity and later, such as the Northern Crusades. The Jews might not have been under as much pressure if the Christians hadn't been able convert the pagans, whether voluntarily or by force. The Duke of Lithuania and later King of Poland, Władysław II Jagiełło apparently converted in 1387 partly to end the attacks of the Teutonic Knights, who were determined to force the northern European pagans to convert. While the conversion mainly involved the nobility, and he did not crack down on the commoners' religious practices at first, I imagine that the Catholic hierarchy knew that once they got their foot in the door, they could crack down.
The book had a lot of interesting material, and being a secularist, she was quite detailed about forced conversions, whereas the Medieval period is so often cast as of happy time of shared faith. There wouldn't have been punishments for heresy if there weren't dissenters. Jacoby talks about the Albigensian Crusade, when the Catholic set out to exterminate the practitioners of an alternate form of Christianity that was very popular in southern France. The Massacre at Béziers is where the phrase translated as, "Kill them all, for the Lord knoweth them that are His" is supposed to have been spoken. Getting rid of the heretics was too important to bother separating out the good Catholics.
I found the book a bit wordy. There were times when Jacoby seemed to be going off on tangents that didn't exactly relate to conversion. Jacoby talks movingly about Mohammed Ali's conversion to Islam, and his stand against the war in Vietnam, but I don't think we really needed an accounting of his fights after he was able to return to his career (the Thrilla in Manila). Small things, but over the course of the book they added up to a fair amount of padding.
As a rare secular view of conversion, it is well worth reading, especially people like to focus on the sufferings of their ancestors, not the sufferings they inflicted on others.