Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

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  I am certain that my lifelong interest in the phenomenon of religious conversion derives in part—a very significant part—from my childhood in a family that sent decidedly mixed messages about the importance and meaning of religious loyalty. In the Catholic universe, the model of religious conversion was of course Saul on the road to Damascus: blinded by error, a man is vouchsafed a revelation from God, falls off his horse, and awakes to the light of divine, unalterable truth. That none of the converts in my immediate family ever claimed to have been swayed by a visitation from the Almighty occurred to me when I was quite young, and my sense that something other than divine grace might be at work was undoubtedly reinforced by the experience, at age seven, of grilling my father on the Baltimore Catechism when he was preparing for his conversion. There just wasn’t much spiritual mystery surrounding a conversion explained by the desire to go to Mass as a family so we could all go out together to the local pancake house for a post-sacramental breakfast. What this casual, almost flippant explanation omitted—what I did not learn until I began asking questions ten years later—was the vast importance of real and perceived anti-Semitism in my father’s emotional makeup. He and his siblings had known they were Jews while they were growing up; my brother and I, raised in a suburb where few Jews lived, did not. There was so little of what later came to be known as “Jewish consciousness” in our town that it never seemed to occur to anyone that “Jacoby” was ordinarily (if you went back far enough, always) a Jewish name.

  Despite its evasiveness, my father’s explanation contained its own truth. His conversion was quintessentially American in its pragmatism, based on the civic assumption that choosing one’s religion is as much an American right as choosing one’s place of residence. As a people, we have always believed in the possibility and, in many instances, the desirability of personal reinvention. What could be more of a reinvention than living out the idea that choosing another god, or, at the very least, a radically different way of life under the aegis of the same God, amounts to being “born again”? The concept of being born again through faith in Jesus is as old as Christianity itself, but the idea of changing one’s essential identity by changing faiths might have been made for, if not necessarily in, America. The modern American notion of religion as a purely personal choice, nobody else’s business, thank you very much, could not be further removed from the complicated historical reality of conversion on a large scale. Conversions that change entire societies, like the shift from paganism to Christianity in the late Roman Empire or the rejection of Roman Catholicism by entire countries during the Protestant Reformation, always take place within a social context that either confers significant advantages on converts or imposes serious disabilities on those who refuse to go along to get along.

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  I am often asked if I consider the exchange of one branch of Christianity for another a “true” religious conversion. One explanation for the frequency of this question (especially from Americans) is the strange belief—albeit an understandable one in terms of the long-term theological obsession of Christianity with Judaism—that any examination of religious conversion in the West must be concerned mainly with relations between Jews and Christians. That religious conversion is a much broader historical phenomenon with broader cultural implications ought to be obvious and in no way negates the particular importance of the long, fraught encounter between Judaism and Christianity in Western civilization. In any event, I doubt that there is such a thing as a “true” conversion to or from any religion, if what is meant by “true” is a purely spiritual or intellectual process uninfluenced by external social pressures. That conversion is often experienced by the devout convert as a purely individual phenomenon, motivated not by any external forces but by divine grace, does not make it so. James, in describing the 1842 conversion of a freethinking French Jew, Alphonse Ratisbonne, to Catholicism, asserts that the conditions predisposing Ratisbonne to a conversion appeared to have been slight. Then, in the next sentence, he notes that Ratisbonne had an older brother who was himself a convert and a Catholic priest. The eminent philosopher considered this familial history unimportant because Ratisbonne had a generally anticlerical bent and was not emotionally close to his brother. One can only assume that the psychological part of James’s professional consciousness must have been missing in action when he reached the conclusion that having an older brother who was not only a convert but a priest had little or nothing to do with the younger brother’s conversion. James’s obtuseness on this point is as laughable as the notion that the conversions in my father’s family from nonobservant Jewishness to Roman Catholicism and Episcopalianism had nothing to do with their marriages to Gentiles—or that their marriages to Gentiles had nothing to do with the family’s long-standing ambivalence about its Jewishness.

  Indeed, religious intermarriage has always provided powerful motivation for voluntary conversions throughout the world. The nuns of my childhood had a name for conversions, like my father’s and grandmother’s, that were the products of such marriages—invariably dubbed “mixed marriages” with a pejorative tinge. They called a switch of faith by the non-Catholic partner a “conversion of convenience.” That description did not imply the charge of treachery brought by the Spanish Inquisition against Jewish Conversos; it did imply a hierarchy of conversion, in which anyone like my grandmother, who embraced the faith to please a Catholic partner, was somehow less holy than a convert who chose Catholicism out of a spiritual ardor presumed to be uncontaminated by social forces ranging from threats of execution in the bad old days to the friendly persuasion of intermarriage in twentieth-century America. It seems to me a very traditional Catholic notion that an inconvenient change of faith—one imposing social disadvantages—is to be exalted above every other type of conversion. In its extreme form, the inconvenient conversion may lead to martyrdom, and no saints are more revered in the Catholic pantheon than those born into another faith who not only converted to the One True Church but died for their new religion.

  In my grandmother’s case, her conversion to Catholicism obviously had nothing to do with a desire for metaphoric or literal martyrdom and was intended mainly to facilitate her life as my grandfather’s wife. Nor, as her comment about “it’s the same God” indicates, did her acceptance of Catholicism have anything to do with the intense spirituality of famous converts ranging from the church father Augustine to Edith Stein, the German Jew who converted in the 1920s, became a Carmelite nun, was gassed at Auschwitz in 1942, and was canonized by the church in 1998 as a “martyr for the faith.” When Pope John Paul II used the latter phrase, he was referring to the Catholic faith. This reference was deeply offensive to both secular and religious Jews, because Stein was murdered by the Nazis not for having become a Catholic but for having been born a Jew.

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  Another important factor in many conversion-redemption stories, spanning the centuries from Augustine (again) to President George W. Bush, is the desire to overcome some personal failing. Bush, as is well known, went through a profound life change by giving up alcohol when he exchanged the antiseptic mainstream Protestantism of his Episcopal New England forebears for devout evangelical fundamentalism (a shift that would surely have horrified his ancestors).

  My father’s conversion to Catholicism resembled Bush’s “born-again” conversion in some respects—the most important one being the presence of a strong, beloved wife who told him he had to straighten himself out or she would leave, taking the children with her. I did not learn any of this until I was an adult, when Dad told me he had known that he must give up gambling or lose his family. He believed—correctly, as it turned out—that practicing a religion would help him gain control of a compulsion that threatened to ruin him. What better religion could there be than the one already practiced by his wife and children? But—unlike many other Catholic converts I have known—my father did not interpret the doctrines of the church strictly. He once told me that the only aspect of
Catholicism he found truly meaningful was Confession, with its call to repentance and its promise of forgiveness. It is certainly easy to see why the sacrament would hold special significance for a man who needed to overcome a compulsion in order to make a new start. That he was also a man who talked flippantly about his newfound Catholicism as a chance to go out for pancakes after Sunday Mass underscores the complexity and diversity of motivations for conversion on the part of many people—and often within the same person—in pluralistic societies.

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  For purposes of this book, I define genuine conversion—whatever its mixture of spiritual, intellectual, and pragmatic motives—as any change of faith that requires a substantial change in the way a person lives. It hardly matters whether the convert is a secular Jew who becomes a Catholic, or an Episcopalian who becomes a born-again Baptist, if a change of faith turns the person from a ruinous to a productive path (or, in the case of some conversions, vice versa). A conversion is any shift of belief that significantly alters the course of a life. I would not, however, draw as sharp a line between conversion and what political scientists Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell call “switching” in their massive study American Grace (2010). For Putnam and Campbell, self-described conversions are essentially meaningless if a convert reports no major change in religious beliefs or practices (such as a change in church attendance or frequency of prayer). Such Americans, they say, “are not really converts in any ordinary sense. The only thing that changed was how they described their religious identity.”*4 This definition is too limited, because major life changes do not always take place immediately and are not always reflected in fidelity to religious rituals. To pass a more emotionally informed judgment, one would have to talk to a convert five, ten, even twenty years after the fact. Putnam and Campbell, in their skepticism about conversions that do not produce demonstrable short-term changes, are at the opposite end of the spectrum from James, who was unduly impressed by the capacity of sudden conversions to produce “an altogether new level of spiritual vitality, a relatively heroic level.”

  Across the ages, unwillingness to part with behavior condemned by traditional religions as sinful and by modern self-help ideology as destructive has often posed a powerful barrier to spiritually motivated conversions. Augustine, as he revealed in his Confessions at the end of the fourth century, was convinced for many years that the paganism and polytheism still practiced by most inhabitants of the Roman Empire were false religions and Christianity was true, but he nevertheless delayed baptism because he was unwilling to accept the restrictions that becoming a Christian would place on his sexual life. “Make me chaste, O Lord, but not yet,” also meant, “Make me a Christian, O Lord, but not yet.” That this equation between Christianity and chastity was not required by Christian doctrine at the time (except by sects eventually deemed heretical) is, and has been, a subject for psychiatrists understandably interested in the “case” of Augustine. In similar fashion, my father did not convert (or switch, if you prefer) to Catholicism until he was ready to give up the gambling that had created a crisis in his life. If Putnam and Campbell had questioned my dad in 1953, I doubt he would have reported that he prayed more frequently than he did before his conversion, or even that he went to church more regularly. (He had, in fact, been going to Mass with the family for years.) But his was a real conversion in that it was linked to a major change in destructive behavior.

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  In addition to my family history, my own atheism—which I recognized and acknowledged to myself in my early teens—has spurred my interest in not only the personal but also the larger historical implications of religious conversion. I do not define “losing” the faith of one’s childhood to atheism, agnosticism, or secularism as a “reverse conversion.” I dislike this commonly used phrase, because it implies that the embrace of a traditional religion, based on supernatural beliefs, represents some sort of forward motion, whereas the adoption of a secular worldview, based on evidence adduced from the natural world, amounts to some sort of regression.

  By my definition, a switch from a traditional faith to atheism is the equivalent of a religious conversion only when it is coupled with surrender to a secular ideology and an organization, such as the Communist Party in the 1930s, possessing many of the characteristics of anti-evidentiary authoritarian religion. If a secular belief system brooks no evidence-based challenge, it is indeed just another religion. Primo Levi makes this point forcefully in his discussion, in The Drowned and the Saved (1986), of believers imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps. After Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army, Levi—one of the few survivors in the camp infirmary—was sent to be shaved by a French barber, a Communist Party member who had also lived through the Holocaust. Levi remembers commenting on the improbability of their survival to the barber. “We were men sentenced to death and freed on the guillotine’s platform, wasn’t that true? He looked at me open-mouthed, then exclaimed with deep disapproval: ‘Mais Joseph était là!’ Joseph? It took me a few moments to realize that he referred to Stalin. He had not, he had never despaired; Stalin was his fortress, the Rock sung in the psalms.”

  This resemblance between orthodox religion and evidence-proof secular ideology is confirmed, ironically, in the extensive body of confessional literature by former Communists who were able to break the thrall of the Party only by converting (or returning) to a traditional but equally evidence-proof religion. It is not surprising that Roman Catholicism held a deep attraction for many who became disillusioned with the Party in the 1930s and 1940s, because the Catholic Church of that era, like the Party, provided both a structure for daily living and instructions from the top down about what to believe. (Many former Communists, it should be noted, remained philosophical secularists and did not become involved with any religion. There are no reliable data on the proportion of former Party members who turned to any traditional faith.) In the United States during the Cold War years, there may have been a tendency to exaggerate the number of fallen-away Party members who sought solace in Catholicism, in large measure because Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, the first American televangelist and best-known Catholic cleric in the nation during the 1950s, had made a specialty of converting and publicizing the conversions of prominent American Communists.

  For the vast majority of atheists and secular humanists, whose rejection of belief in any deity has nothing to do with politics, the development of a nontheistic worldview does not ordinarily require significant changes in everyday life. An exception must be noted here for secularists fleeing authoritarian forms of religion defined by a myriad of prohibitions, but that would be equally true if the cult member converted to a less rigid religion. At a panel sponsored in New York City in 2010 by the secular Center for Inquiry and by All Souls Unitarian Church, dozens of students who had been raised as strict Mormons or Hasidic Jews showed up to hear speakers who had left those sects and built adult lives on another philosophical basis. The main problem of the refugees from strict faith communities was not the beliefs they had converted to, which included Unitarianism, Reform Judaism, and a humanism rejecting any divinity, but the rigidity of the beliefs they had converted from. When one is raised in a religion that issues orders about the most trivial as well as the most important activities of daily life, leaving for any other faith—much less abandoning religion altogether—is an earthquake in which the ground never stops shaking. “I came here because I wanted to talk with older people raised the way I was who’ve built happy lives,” one young woman, born into a devout Mormon family, told me at the symposium. “Over and over when I was growing up, we were told that there was nothing but misery outside the church. I didn’t know anyone who wasn’t a Mormon. And sometimes today, when I’m having what I know is just a normal life problem that all people have, like a fight with a boyfriend or a screwup at work, I worry that it’s happening because I abandoned my faith.” I was reminded of her when another young woman, who became an atheist in college after being raised in a devout
Muslim family, told me that many of her relatives had suggested that her “apostasy” was motivated solely by the desire to have sex, drink alcohol, and generally throw aside all Muslim restrictions prescribing modesty for women. “The truth was that, for a long time, I had no idea of how to construct a new life,” she recalled. “I was a hijab-wearing atheist for quite a while, because I couldn’t figure out how I wanted to dress. It had all been laid out for me in the past.”

  For atheists raised not in fundamentalist environments but in more moderately observant religious families, the diminution of belief tends to occur gradually and is characterized by an incremental rejection of dogma. Atheism rarely manifests itself either as Saul’s sudden knock on the head in the Acts of the Apostles or as Augustine’s tortuous spiritual passage described in his Confessions, often dubbed the first tell-all memoir in Western literature. The form chosen by Augustine is that of a letter (or a very long prayer) to God, but Garry Wills’s description of Confessions as a “spiritual psychodrama” is more accurate in an emotional sense. Although an atheist raised in ordinarily rather than extraordinarily devout fashion can usually identify memorable intellectual turning points, these become clear only in retrospect and are rarely accompanied by the intense emotions (including guilt) pervading Augustine’s account of conversion.