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Wort presents a study of conversion in the sixteenth century by focusing on the life and work of the evangelical reformer John Bale (1485-1563). Bale wrote several accounts of his conversion over a twenty-year period. Through a scrupulous examination of these published and unpublished works, Wort reinterprets Bale's conversion, moving away from standard assumptions of a 'clean break' towards a gradual metamorphosis where both aspects of Bale's character and beliefs can be seen to coexist. Wort uses this case study to establish a new set of critical perspectives on the subject of religious conversion and so offers a novel way of thinking about the English Reformation.

This essay examines the Indigenous social and diplomatic context behind New England Protestant missionary use of the spiritual question, or the postsermon question-and-answer session—a genre in which English authors recorded the questions asked and answered by potential Indigenous converts in order to showcase their readiness for salvation. The first recorded use of the question-and-answer session in the New England missionary context came during John Eliot's 1646 attempted proselytization of the Massachusett sachem Cutshamekin. By looking closely at Cutshamekin's linguistic and diplomatic history, I illustrate the connection between the question-and-answer session and Indigenous treaty-making practices. The generic relationship between treaty making and the question-and-answer session meant that Indigenous participants often approached the sessions as a forum for negotiating and renegotiating the terms of their prior agreements with the English. In providing an alternative generic history to these sessions, I illustrate the ways in which colonial genre formation resulted from active discursive collaboration between Indigenous people and English settlers.

This book is the scholarly study of former Catholic priests who had to make a major life decision as they struggled with their commitment to celibacy and their desire to marry. In order to unite those two incompatible identities, they had to shed their Catholic affiliation. This is the first study of its kind.

Wright and Zimmerman-Liu investigate when, why, and how previous political dissidents in China have become Protestant, and how their political attitudes and behavior have changed since their conversion. They draw on interviews with dissidents-turned-Protestants as well as public statements made by these individuals. With regard to the questions of when, why, and how previous political dissidents have become Protestant, they find that both psychological and sociological factors played an important role.

In the late 1850s and early 1860s, the attention of the Catholic and Protestant religious communities around the world focused on a few small settlements of French Canadian immigrants in northeastern Illinois. Soon after arriving in their new home, a large number of these immigrants, led by Father Charles Chiniquy, the charismatic Catholic priest who had brought them there, converted to Protestantism. In this anthropological history, Caroline B. Brettell explores how Father Chiniquy took on both the sacred and the secular authority of the Catholic Church to engineer the religious schism and how the legacy of this rift affected the lives of the immigrants and their descendants for generations. This intriguing study of a nineteenth-century migration of French Canadians to the American Midwest offers an innovative perspective on the immigrant experience in America. Brettell chronicles how Chiniquy came to lead approximately one thousand French Canadian families to St. Anne, Illinois, in the early 1850s and how his conflict with the Catholic hierarchy over the ownership and administration of church property, delivery of the mass in French instead of Latin, and access to the Bible by laymen led to his excommunication. Drawing on the concept of social drama—a situation of intensely lived conflict that emerges within social groups—Brettell explains the religious schism in terms of larger ethnic and religious disagreements that were happening elsewhere in the United States and in Canada. Brettell also explores legal disputes, analyzes the reemergence of Catholicism in St. Anne in the first decade of the twentieth century, addresses the legacy of Chiniquy in both the United States and Quebec, and closely examines the French Canadian immigrant communities, focusing on the differences between the people who converted to Protestantism and those who remained Catholic. Occurring when nativism was pervasive and the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party was at its height, Chiniquy’s religious schism offers an opportunity to examine a range of important historical and anthropological issues, including immigration, ethnicity, and religion; changes in household and family structure; the ways social identities are constructed and reconstructed through time; and the significance of charismatic leadership in processes of social and religious change. Through its multidisciplinary approach, Brettell’s enlightening study provides a pioneering assessment of larger national tensions and social processes, some of which are still evident in modern immigration to the United States.

In this paper, I address the important yet under-examined role of charismatic Protestant Christianity in the reconfiguring of personhood and social relations in the remote Yolngu settlement of Galiwin'ku. I focus in particular on the ways in which this form of Christianity, locally articulated, brings together indigenous concepts of personhood with those introduced by the market, the state, and evangelism to produce what I refer to as Christian individuality and Christian relatedness. These dialectical tendencies in postcolonial settlement life call attention to the ways Yolngu converts use their Christian practices both to continue kin-based moralities in the present and to engage (if selectively) modern individualism. This paper addresses post-colonial conditions where demands of state institutions and modern governance interact with changing ideas of personhood and sociality. It contributes to the growing anthropological literature on Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity.

Why do immigrants abandon their traditional religion and convert to Protestant Christianity? Existing sociological theories of conversion are mostly based on studies of individuals who convert into cults. Factors of individual personality and interpersonal bonds in small networks, or assimilation motives, cannot adequately explain the growing phenomenon of conversion to evangelical Protestantism among new immigrant groups from Asia and Latin America. Based on interviews and ethnographic observations in Chinese churches in the Greater Washington, D.C., area, I argue that social and cultural changes in China in the process of coerced modernization are the most important factor for Chinese conversion to Christianity; identity reconstruction of immigrant Chinese in a pluralist modern society also contributes to Chinese conversion to evangelical Christianity; institutional factors are of secondary importance. This study also has important theoretical implications to the ongoing debates concerning the reasons for and sources of growth among conservative Christian churches in the US.

Following the Reformation, a growing number of radical Protestants came together to live and worship in Catholic France. These Huguenots survived persecution and armed conflict to win-however briefly-freedom of worship, civil rights, and unique status as a protected minority. But in 1685, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes abolished all Huguenot rights, and more than 200,000 of the radical Calvinists were forced to flee across Europe, some even farther. In this capstone work, Geoffrey Treasure tells the full story of the Huguenots' rise, survival, and fall in France over the course of a century and a half. He explores what it was like to be a Huguenot living in a \"state within a state,\" weaving stories of ordinary citizens together with those of statesmen, feudal magnates, leaders of the Catholic revival, Henry of Navarre, Catherine de' Medici, Louis XIV, and many others. Treasure describes the Huguenots' disciplined community, their faith and courage, their rich achievements, and their unique place within Protestantism and European history. The Huguenot exodus represented a crucial turning point in European history, Treasure contends, and he addresses the significance of the Huguenot story-the story of a minority group with the power to resist and endure in one of early modern Europe's strongest nations.

William Apess, a Pequot Indian, expressed a social vision in his conversion narrative that was shaped by his relationship to Methodism. Apess applied rather than rejected Protestantism in revealing the values held by the Protestant elite that caused rifts between Native Americans and white settlers. The conversion narrative served as a vehicle for Apess to express his views for social change and antiracist values to a wider audience.