Religious Conversion as a Personal and Collective Accomplishment

Religious conversion has conventionally been treated as something that happens to the person. This represents a passivist paradigm within the mechanistic world view of classical science. An alternative paradigm is proposed from an activist perspective within a contextual world hypothesis typical of interactionist and dramaturgical analysis. In this view, conversion is treated as the accomplishment of an actively strategizing seeker interacting with the others constituting a religious collectivity. The approach is illustrated from the authors earlier investigations of how seekers act to discover and make use of a particular means of personal transformation offered by and institutionalized within a conversionist group. Problems of maintaining a transformed life and difficulties in conceptualizing conversion are discussed in some detail.