Strange gods : a secular history of conversion / Susan Jacoby.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In a groundbreaking historical work that addresses religious conversion in the West from an uncompromisingly secular perspective, Susan Jacoby challenges the conventional narrative of conversion as a purely spiritual journey. From the transformation on the road to Damascus of the Jew Saul into the Christian evangelist Paul to a twenty-first-century "religious marketplace" in which half of Americans have changed faiths at least once, nothing has been more important in the struggle for reason than the right to believe in the God of one's choice or to reject belief in God altogether.
 
Focusing on the long, tense convergence of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--each claiming possession of absolute truth--Jacoby examines conversions within a social and economic framework that includes theocratic coercion (unto torture and death) and the more friendly persuasion of political advantage, economic opportunism, and interreligious marriage. Moving through time, continents, and cultures--the triumph of Christianity over paganism in late antiquity, the Spanish Inquisition, John Calvin's dour theocracy, Southern plantations where African slaves had to accept their masters' religion--the narrative is punctuated by portraits of individual converts embodying the sacred and profane. The cast includes Augustine of Hippo; John Don≠ the German Jew Edith Stein, whose conversion to Catholicism did not save her from Auschwitz; boxing champion Muhammad Ali; and former President George W. Bush. The story also encompasses conversions to rigid secular ideologies, notably Stalinist Communism, with their own truth claims.
 
Finally, Jacoby offers a powerful case for religious choice as a product of the secular Enlightenment. In a forthright and unsettling conclusion linking the present with the most violent parts of the West's religious past, she reminds us that in the absence of Enlightenment values, radical Islamists are persecuting Christians, many other Muslims, and atheists in ways that recall the worst of the Middle Ages.

(With 8 pages of black-and-white illustrations.)

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

1 AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO (354-430)   Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. --Paul, Colossians 2:8   AUGUSTINE, a teenager studying in Carthage in the 370s, begins to ponder what he will one day consider the inevitable shortcomings of human philosophy ungrounded in the word of God. This process begins, as Augustine will later recount in his Confessions, when he reads Cicero's Hortensius, written around 45 b.c.e. The young scholar, unacquainted with either Jewish or Christian Scripture, takes away the (surely unintended) lesson from the pagan Cicero that only faith--a faith that places the supernatural above the natural--can satisfy the longing for wisdom.   "But, O Light of my heart," Augustine wrote to his god in Confessions (c. 397) , "you know that at that time, although Paul's words were not known to me, the only thing that pleased me in Cicero's book was his advice not simply to admire one or another of the schools of philosophy, but to love wisdom itself, whatever it might be. . . . These were the words which excited me and set me burning with fire, and the only check to this blaze of enthusiasm was that they made no mention of the name of Christ."   The only check? To me, this passage from Confessions has always sounded like the many rewritings of personal history intended to conform the past to the author's current beliefs and status in life--which in Augustine's case meant being an influential bishop of an ascendant church that would tolerate no dissent grounded in other religious or secular philosophies. By the time he writes Confessions, Augustine seems a trifle embarrassed about having been so impressed, as a young man, by a pagan writer. So he finds a way to absolve himself of the sin of attraction to small-"c" catholic, often secular intellectual interests by limiting Cicero to his assigned role as one step in a fourth-century boy's journey toward capital-"C" Catholicism. It is the adult Augustine who must reconcile his enthusiasm for Cicero with the absence of the name of Christ; there is no reason why this should have bothered the pagan adolescent Augustine at all. Nevertheless, no passage in the writings of the fathers of the church, or in any personal accounts of the intellectual and emotional process of conversion, explains more lucidly (albeit indirectly) why the triumph of Christianity inevitably begins with that other seeker on the road to Damascus. It is Paul, after all, not Jesus or the authors of the Gospels, who merits a mention in Augustine's explanation of how his journey toward the one true faith was set in motion by a pagan.   It is impossible to consider Augustine, the second most important convert in the theological firmament of the early Christian era, without giving Paul his due. But let us leave Saul--he was still Saul then--as he awakes from a blow on his head to hear a voice from the heavens calling him to rebirth in Christ. Saul did not have any established new religion to convert to, but Augustine was converting to a faith with financial and political influence, as well as a spiritual message for the inhabitants of a decaying empire. Augustine's journey from paganism to Christianity was a philosophical and spiritual struggle lasting many years, but it also exemplified the many worldly, secular influences on conversion in his and every subsequent era. These include mixed marriages; political instability that creates the perception and the reality of personal insecurity; and economic conditions that provide a space for new kinds of fortunes and the possibility of financial support for new religious institutions.   Augustine told us all about his struggle, within its social context, in Confessions --which turned out to be a best-seller for the ages. This was a new sort of book, even if it was a highly selective recounting of experience (like all memoirs) rather than a "tell-all" autobiography in the modern sense. Its enduring appeal, after a long break during the Middle Ages, lies not in its literary polish, intellectuality, or prayerfulness--though the memoir is infused with these qualities--but in its preoccupation with the individual's relationship to and responsibility for sin and evil. As much as Augustine's explorations constitute an individual journey--and have been received as such by generations of readers--the journey unfolds in an upwardly mobile, religiously divided family that was representative of many other people finding and shaping new ways to make a living; new forms of secular education; and new institutions of worship in a crumbling Roman civilization.   After a lengthy quest venturing into regions as wild as those of any modern religious cults, Augustine told the story of his spiritual odyssey when he was in his forties. His subsequent works, including The City of God, are among the theological pillars of Christianity, but Confes­sions is the only one of his books read widely by anyone but theologically minded intellectuals (or intellectual theologians). In the fourth and early fifth centuries, Christian intellectuals with both a pagan and a religious education, like the friends and mentors Augustine discusses in the book, provided the first audience for Confessions. That audience would probably not have existed a century earlier, because literacy--a secular prerequisite for a serious education in both paganism and Christianity--had expanded among members of the empire's bourgeois class by the time Augustine was born. The Christian intellectuals who became Augustine's first audience may have been more interested than modern readers in the theological framework of the autobiography (though they, too, must have been curious about the distinguished bishop's sex life). But Confessions has also been read avidly, since the Renaissance, by successive generations of humanist scholars (religious and secular); Enlightenment skeptics; nineteenth-century Romantics; psychotherapists; and legions of the prurient, whether religious believers or nonbelievers. Everyone, it seems, loves the tale of a great sinner turned into a great saint. In my view, Augustine was neither a world-class sinner nor a saint, but his drama of sin and repentance remains a real page-turner. Excerpted from Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion by Susan Jacoby All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Starting with the apostle Paul and ending with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), Jacoby (The Age of -American Unreason) explores the myriad cultural and social aspects of religious conversion throughout the history of the Western world. This approach is in contrast to the many accounts that trace conversion solely to spiritual or supernatural origins. People throughout history have converted for a host of complex and multilayered reasons. Many have been forced, pressured, or coerced. Others have chosen to convert in order to improve their social or economic status, to marry, or to fit in with the -majority. Covering a broad swath of contexts such as the Roman Empire, the Spanish Inquisition, and Nazi Germany, and including portraits of individuals such as Augustine, Edith Stein, and -Muhammed Ali, Jacoby passionately and thoroughly examines the multiple meanings of conversion. Throughout, she heralds the necessity of freedom of conscience as a human right. VERDICT Jacoby's thoroughly researched narrative is impressively detailed, making this a fine book for a somewhat limited audience. Recommended to those interested enough in the topic to avoid getting bogged down in the specifics. [See Prepub Alert, 8/24/15.]- Brian Sullivan, Alfred Univ. Lib., NY © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Jacoby (The Great Agnostic and Freethinkers) has spent 15 years writing this fine secular inquiry into the history of religious conversion in the West. Beginning with the famous Damascus road conversion of Saul to Paul and then moving on to Augustine of Hippo's Confessions, Jacoby travels through 14th-century forced conversions in Spain, 20th-century "socially-influenced conversions" resulting from mixed marriages, and today's headlines about ISIS's brutal religious persecution. From her atheist viewpoint, she attempts to remove the religious and psychological elements of conversion, leaving only the sociopolitical forces. She writes, "The modern American notion of religion as a purely personal choice, nobody else's business... could not be further removed from the complicated historical reality of conversion on a large scale." Missing from Jacoby's overall argument are the ways that religious belief, practiced in the public square, can contribute to the common good in a democracy. Without this, her tour de force risks marshaling history to serve her own ideological agenda. Her analysis of the dangers of a religious belief beyond personal conviction may be challenging for many readers of faith, but it's well-argued and illuminating. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

Religious conversions serve as turning points throughout history. Though conversion narratives are popular, the social and cultural situations that surround them often receive less attention than the personal stories. Conversions do not occur in a vacuum, and Jacoby's book traces the religious lives of famous (and some less famous) converts and seeks to firmly anchor their narratives in particular places and times. Beginning with the rise of Christianity and the conversion of Augustine of Hippo, and tracing historic conversions up through the twentieth century, Jacoby highlights historical figures including Edith Stein and Muhammad Ali, painting a parallel portrait of the massive cultural changes surging around them. Jacoby clearly has a point to prove, and she paints a vivid picture of the ways in which conversions happen and the myriad reasons behind their happening.--Engel, Christine Copyright 2016 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

In a work blending culture, religion, history, biography, and a bit of memoir (with more than a soupcon of attitude), the author of The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought (2013, etc.) returns with a revealing historical analysis of religious conversions. Jacoby's introduction uses the prism of her own family history of conversions to cast color on the topics she will cover. Then she begins her chronological pursuit of her story with Augustine, a pursuit that ends with the Islamic State and the enduring attempts to coerce conversions. Throughout, the author writes candidly about her own atheism and allows herself at times to snap at ferociously religious people; near the end, she mentions the "goofy religious myths" that allow groups of people to feel superior to others. In some sections, Jacoby uses key individuals to introduce and/or illuminate a topic or historical period. There are chapters on John Donne, Margaret Fell, Heinrich Heine, andperhaps a surprise for some readersMuhammad Ali, whose conversion to Islam was "inseparable from the contemporary social upheaval." Jacoby argues that conversion is a far more complex issue than other writers have acknowledged. She spends lots of time on coercive conversionsfrom the early Roman Catholic Church to modern radical Islambut she also shows how other factors cause conversions, including intermarriage and personal security. She celebrates the United States, which, from its beginning, refused to endorse a state religionthe founders had seen the consequences of this in the bloody European religious warsnoting that our vast geographical space also allowed various religious groups to establish their own communities and havens. The author, whose political and religious views will no doubt alienate some readers (not to mention her slashing comment about adult fans of Harry Potter!), impressively combines thorough research and passionate writing. Jacoby draws the first detailed maps of a terrain that has been very much in need of intelligent, careful cartography. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Susan Jacoby began her writing career as a reporter for The Washington Post. Her first book, Moscow Conversations, was based on the articles she contributed to the Post from Moscow between 1969 and 1971. Her other books include Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge, The Possible She, Half-Jew: A Daughter's Search for Her Family's Buried Past, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, The Age of American Unreason, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought, and Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion.

(Bowker Author Biography)