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Book Reviews / Pneuma 34 (2012) 95-159
Henri Gooren, Religious Conversion and Disaffiliation: Tracing Patterns of Change in Faith Practices (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). xiv + 181pp., $80.00 hardback.
As a topic of academic study, conversion occupies a rather strange position. It is fair to say that it never really falls completely from scholarly favor — at any given time there are always at least some people in the humanities and the social sciences who are dedicated to study- ing it. Yet major theoretical statements or considerations of the state of the art are few and far between. The last widely influential one, Lewis Rambo’s Understanding Religious Conver- sion (Yale University Press) was published as long ago as 1993. Gooren’s ambitious book is thus a welcome and necessary effort to take stock of the field after a lengthy stretch in which synthetic work has been noticeably absent. It also offers a subtle but important reconsidera- tion of how questions of conversion can best be posed. Given its comprehensive coverage and original theoretical contributions, it is poised to become for the rising generation what Rambo’s book was for those that came immediately before it — the standard jumping off point for work on conversion across a wide range of fields.
After reviewing much of the literature on individual conversion, particularly work focused on conversion to Christianity and to new religious movements, Gooren presents his own approach which focuses not only on the moment of conversion, but on what Gooren refers to as the entire “conversion career.” The key shift here is from worrying primarily about documenting and accounting for a single change in religious affiliation to looking at pat- terns of religious activity and quiescence across the life-course, and to trying to explain shifts in religious activity over time in individual lives. To facilitate the study of changes in religious activity, Gooren offers a typology of five kinds of involvement. There is “preaffilia- tion,” a level of activity that involves considering potential affiliation with a religious group; “affiliation,” which involves formally joining a religious group, though not embracing it as a central part of one’s life; “conversion” strictly speaking, which involves “a (radical) personal change of religious worldview and identity” (49); “confession,” when one becomes a core member of a religious group; and “disaffiliation,” when one ceases one’s involvement in a religious group. Gooren notes that these are not stages arrayed in a fixed progression that every convert goes through. Although there is a certain order that appears likely to link these types of involvement in many cases (e.g., it’s not really possible to disaffiliate if one has never affiliated or converted), it is possible for people to miss out some of them, and to move through others so quickly that they hardly register. The analyst’s job is thus to examine the various ways people can concatenate these different types of involvement as they move through their religious lives, and to explain why people who follow different patterns of concatenation move from type to type as they do. Gooren models how this can be done in one chapter focused on the analysis of conversion narratives from Europe and North Amer- ica and another focused on Pentecostal and Mormon conversion narratives and Catholic disafilliation narratives in Latin America.
The conversion career approach is a welcome advance for the way it encourages scholars to ask new questions about religious life. The focus on changing kinds of religious activity sensitizes us to aspects of the lives of converts that most other approaches leave to one side. What moves someone from affiliation to full conversion, for example, or how do people reach the stage Gooren calls “confession,” and why do so many who count as converts fail to
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI: 10.1163/157007412X621923
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Book Reviews / Pneuma 34 (2012) 95-159
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do so? Furthermore, one can ask if some religions promote more of one kind of religious activity than another. For example, Gooren argues that in Latin America in most cases he is familiar with people only affiliate with Pentecostal churches, rather than fully converting to them in his sense. Other scholars may want to debate this point (and the cases he presents in detail do not, as he recognizes, bear it out), but even those who might disagree with it should be grateful for the way Gooren’s subtle typology of kinds of religious activity allows him to pose important questions such as this one. Along similar lines, the move to bring disaffiliation into the study of conversion represents a major advance, forcing analysts to recognize that leaving a religious commitment behind requires discussion in the same frame as other kinds of changes in religious activity.
Along with presenting the typology of kinds of religious activity that is at the heart of the conversion career approach, Gooren also considers causal arguments one can make to explain movement between the types. Although he has some respect for market models of conversion, and discusses them at length, he also discusses many of their problems, and ultimately includes them as only one among a wide range of causal accounts. Other factors that shape changes in religious activity include those he groups as contingency factors (e.g., a personal crisis), social factors (e.g., participation in networks that link one to a particular religious group); individual factors (e.g., having a religious worldview on the basis of prior socialization); institutional factors (this includes the kinds of interreligious competition so important to market models); and cultural factors (e.g., the cultural politics of a religious group). Gooren’s discussion of each of these factors is valuable in itself, and for those who are attracted to models that strive to keep multiple variables in play there is much to be learned in joining him in thinking about the different ways they can come together to influ- ence the shape of particular conversion careers.
Religious Conversion and Disaffiliation is an impressive accomplishment. Gooren has brought order to a vast literature and has developed a genuinely new approach in an area in which such innovations have been hard to come by in recent years. Full of ideas, I imagine it will join Rambo’s book as one of the very few recent standard and indispensible works in the field of conversion studies.
Reviewed by Joel Robbins Professor and Chair
Department of Anthropology University of California, San Diego [email protected]
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