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"Religious conversion"
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Constancy and Changes in the Distribution of Religious Groups in Contemporary China: Centering on Religion as a Whole, Buddhism, Protestantism and Folk Religion
Since 1978, mass religious conversion has been a prominent feature of Chinese religious life. In the 1980s and 1990s, the “Five types of believers’ distribution (Wuduo, 五多)” were characterized by the inclusion of “more women”, “more elderly”, “more sick people”, “more rural residents”, and “more people with lower socioeconomic status”, as is the academic consensus. In the 21st century, some scholars have proposed the different view of “Three trends in faith stratification (Sanhua, 三化)”, namely urbanization, rejuvenation, and elitism. However, these claims are either based on theoretical analysis or local cases and data analysis. Based on the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) data from 2010 to 2017, this study constructed a comprehensive explanatory framework with macroscopic, mesoscopic, and microcosmic levels to verify the authenticity of the two sets of propositions by taking religion as a whole and also examining some representative religions such as Buddhism, Protestantism and folk religion. The results show that they are partially invalid, and thus, need to be further refined to be explained; the distribution of believer groups varies among religions and between urban/rural areas.
Journal Article
The Lonely Girl. External Factors in the Conversion and Failed Ransom of the Turkish–Algerian Fatima (1608–1622)
Research into various aspects of slavery and the related conversions has multiplied in recent years. This contribution investigates the case of Fatima, a young woman belonging to the Turkish–Algerian elite, who was captured in 1608 by the Tuscan Knights of Saint Stephen. Rescued by her parents and entrusted to some Corsican merchants for her safe return home, she remained in Calvi (Corsica) because she embraced Christianity. Thus, the local bishop pretended to keep her under his protection. Because of her conversion, her homecoming became considerably more complicated until it was decreed impracticable. The intervention of Fatima’s parents led to the opening of protracted negotiations between the political (Algerian, Ottoman, Spanish, Genoese) and ecclesiastical (Papal, Episcopal, Trinitarian) authorities. In dissatisfaction, the Algerian governors lashed out at one hundred and thirty Christian captives in Algiers whose rescue operation by Trinitarian redeemers was suddenly halted. Historiography, to narrate this case study, has paid attention predominantly to Spanish records and explained the political and economic mechanisms of the rescue machine with all its complications. Through other unpublished Spanish, Vatican and Genoese sources, this article focuses with a micro-glocal lens on the many psychological pressures used by political and religious agencies that accompanied such a young person by leveraging the decisive role of the Ecclesiastical authorities.
Journal Article
Becoming Armenian: Religious Conversions in the Late Imperial South Caucasus
In the nineteenth-century South Caucasus, hundreds of local farmers and nomads petitioned Russian authorities to allow them to become Christians. Most of them were Muslims and specifically requested to join the Armenian Apostolic Church. This article explores religious conversions to Armenian Christianity on Russia's mountainous southern border with the Ottoman Empire and Iran. It demonstrates that tsarist reforms, chiefly the peasant reform and the sedentarization of nomads, accelerated labor migration within the region, bringing many Muslims, Yazidis, and Assyrians into an Armenian environment. Local anxieties over Russian colonialism further encouraged conversions. I argue that by converting to Armenian Christianity many rural South Caucasians benefited from a change in their legal status, which came with the right to move residence, access to agricultural land, and other freedoms. Russia's Jewish communities, on the other hand, saw conversion to Armenian Christianity as a legal means to circumvent discrimination and obtain the right to live outside of the Pale of Settlement. By drawing on converts’ petitions and officials’ decisions, this article illustrates that the Russian government emerged as an ultimate arbiter of religious conversions, evaluating the sincerity of petitioners’ faith and how Armenian they had become, while preserving the empire's religious and social hierarchies.
Journal Article
The lives of two Indians during indenture in Danish St Croix and British Guiana
The lives of two Indians during indenture in two European Caribbean colonies, Danish St Croix and British Guiana, are analyzed. Archival information and interviews are used to explore their lives. Findings reveal that despite the static and stoic aspects of indenture, there was an amazing transformation in lives through religious conversion and educational success. Studying biographical details is just as significant as examining other broad features of indenture, as they uncover hidden dynamics that may have otherwise been lost in history. Assessing biographical evidence is a great way to tell stories that reveal the individual’s life and their relationships with society. Biographical details tend to share personal, familial, or community bonds of the past, which is a valuable contribution to the study of indenture.
Journal Article
RELIGIOUS MODERATION: RELIGIOUS CONVERSION IN THE CHRISTIAN REGION OF TANAH BATAK (CASE STUDY OF PAHAE JULU DISTRICT)
The objective of the study is to analyze the process of religious conversion that gave birth to religious moderation and to know the role of Toba Batak customs in producing religious moderation in Pahae Julu.The context of different religious reference values at a certain point can increase the opportunity for friction and conflict in society. This condition requires a moderate attitude that can soften the form of religious beliefs that can confront each other in direct interaction in daily life. In practice, it can be seen in Pahae Julu that the moderate attitude is not top-down but rather bottom-up. The community consciously lives side by side with the context of different religious identities. However, the knowledge to behave, prevent and maintain interaction has been going on for several generations. This study uses a qualitative method assisted by interview techniques and direct observation in the field. The result of the study is activity of religious moderation in Pahae Julu is seen to be bridged through the Batak customary system. For the Batak tribe, it has an egalitarian nature that does not differentiate between religious identities. In the role of custom, all Batak tribes have obligations and rights that are reciprocal in nature. This customary position cannot be replaced by others arbitrarily so that there is no other way than to be obliged to follow it. This customary mechanism seems coercive but becomes a communication bridge that maintains the diversity of different religious identities in community life.
Journal Article
Toward an Integrative Theory of Religious Conversion: A Review Essay of The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion by Lewis R. Rambo and Charles F. Farhadian (2014)
This paper, a review essay of
The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion
(2014), first summarizes some of its social scientific chapters and then attempts to begin building an integrative theory of religious conversion. This theory is based upon a critical realist perspective and draws on Paloutzian’s multi-level interdisciplinary paradigm of conversion research, recent developments in the cultural sociology of religion, and the language of conversion, and it could be extended to integrate additional levels. The paper ends with a brief discussion of human flourishing and the possible role of conversion in it.
Journal Article
Memorializing the Unsung
By the time the Capuchins arrived in the seventeenth century, Kongo had been Catholic for nearly two hundred years. The European mission could not be conversion, then, but reinforcement; the Capuchins sought to establish the sacraments and a line to Rome in a lay-led church already suffused with an enduring, creative, and complex theological culture. In Memorializing the Unsung, Elochukwu Uzukwu uses the framework of this “ancient” Kongo Catholicism to explore European dependence on enslaved Kongo Catholics and the unconscionable Capuchin and Spiritan participation in the slave trade at large—a practice denounced by the lone voices of Capuchin Epifanio de Moirans and Spiritan Alexandre Monnet. Reconstructing the church that missionaries and Kongo Catholics built together on the foundations of local religion, Memorializing the Unsung contrasts the dignity denied the Kongo Catholics with the freedom they nonetheless performed. Uzukwu is particularly deft in tracing the agency of Kongo elites and laypeople from the fifteenth century through the nineteenth, carefully evaluating their deliberate engagements with southern Europeans, the role of the maestri (translator-catechists) in guiding the faithful, and the ultimate development of a unique theological vocabulary endorsed by the Kikongo catechism.Without the support and creativity of these unsung lay Catholics across west-central and eastern Africa, Uzukwu shows, the European missions in the region would have failed. Even while enslaved, the Kongo Slaves of the Church and the eastern African Slaves of the Mission served as mediators, co-creators, and reinventors of their world.
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