Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion

by Susan Jacoby

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 Donne; 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.)

Genres: History, Religion, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Politics, Theology, Atheism

512 pages, Hardcover

Published February 16, 2016

About the author

Susan Jacoby is an independent scholar and best-selling author. The most recent of her seven previous books is The Age of American Unreason. She lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Jenna ❤ ❀ ❤ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Religious people like to cite conversion stories as proof that their religion is the One True Religion. Of course, they cite conversion stories to their religion, and not the ones from it to something else. Growing up, I'd hear stories told from the pulpit of new converts and how they proved that our specific brand of christianity (fundamentalist baptist) was the one true one (as opposed to all the others, like Methodists, Pentecostals, Presbyterians, and especially those evil, idol-worshipping Catholics, not to mention all the non-Christian religions which were all by default Satanism). I highly doubt any preacher decided to tell of my reversion to atheism (we are each of us born atheist) as proof that their beliefs are bat-shit crazy and that I couldn't possibly have learned to think for myself and reject their lunacy if atheism wasn't the right path to take. Indeed, according to their logic, I would still believe that the earth is about 6,000 years old, evolution by natural selection didn't happen, there were days and nights on earth before the sun even existed. Talking snakes, talking donkeys, virgin births, unicorns. Let's not forget the story of the 600 year old man who rounded up two of every species of animal on earth (seven for some kinds) and put them on a big boat that he built --yes, at the ripe old age of 600-- and then somehow redistributed all those animals to Australia and Antarctica, North America, South America -- to all the CORNERS of the earth -- after it rained so hard that water covered the entire earth, even all the mountains.... Shall I go on? No, I think you get the picture though this is just a tiny sampling of the absurdities I was taught to believe and came to reject. Suffice to say, one cannot claim that someone's conversion to their religion is proof of its accuracy unless that person is also prepared to say that the opposite is also true, that someone leaving their religion is proof of its fallaciousness.

Are there reasons people might convert other than that a divine being led them to the One True Religion? In Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion, Susan Jacoby looks at conversion stories from a secular standpoint. She discusses various reasons people have and do switch religions, not all of them even having to do with the person themself believing they've found the right religion.

Beginning with the conversions of the two most influential converts to Christianity, Paul and Augustine, Ms. Jacoby takes us into the lives of many people through the centuries who have left the gods of their parents and found new ones. For some, conversions are engendered by deep spiritual and emotional conviction. Many (most?) others convert for numerous other reasons, including:

•Improved economic circumstances
•Marriage to someone of another faith, and harmony within the family
•Fear of death/torture if one does not convert
•Social advantage
•Desire to be part of a community

Though many Christians like to claim that the success of Christians in converting others is proof that the Christian God is the "right" one to believe in, they often fail to acknowledge that perhaps the majority of those converts did not have much choice in the matter. They do not wax poetic from the pulpit about slaveholders in the Antebellum South forcing their human chattel to worship the Christian god. They do not sing the praises of the Inquisitors who murdered those who were not Christian. They do not even like to admit that a vast number of converts throughout the ages converted to Christianity only because by not doing so, they would have been tortured or killed. For some, their reasons for converting are more benign, such as falling in love with someone of another faith or wanting to be a part of a community, but these all go to show that conversion to one's religion is no guarantor that the religion is true in any sense.

Susan Jacoby discusses the conversions of several people throughout history who converted, not just to various sects of Christianity but also to paganism from Christianity (as was the case for the Roman emperor Julian), Islam, and Judaism. She delves into the myriad reasons for their conversions. Though Ms. Jacoby tends towards verbosity and the book is at times pedantic and dense, it is still an accessible read. Religious believers might find her style off-putting (as evidenced by a couple negative reviews I read), but secular people, and those who aren't offended by people who don't accept their particular religious beliefs, will appreciate this book's exploration into religious conversion. Philosophical, scholarly, and rich in historical detail, those interested in why people "believe" will find this book immensely interesting.

[Mikey B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book covers an enormous range of history; however sometimes it can be lengthy and pedantic. The overall theme is the coercion of religious conversion which can range from opportunistic as in blending into the majority religion – or convert, otherwise you face annihilation, which goes on in our current era.

The author provides examples where the history of Roman Catholicism has been altered and re-written demonstrating that conversion was not as pleasant and voluntary as the Church would have us believe. Several historical examples of conversion are brought up:
Augustine
Bishop Paul of Burgos
John Donne
Margaret Fell
Heinrich Heine
Edith Stein
Peter Cartwright
Muhammad Ali

The author, Susan Jacoby, is an atheist, but she has none of the loud rhetoric of Christopher Hitchens. She tends to dwell on the positive aspects of the “freedom of religion” and the purported separation of church and state in the United States. I felt she mistakenly minimizes the strong influence that the religious right has had in the last fifty years in America on restricting the rights of women, access to birth control (muzzling Planned Parenthood clinics), more restrictions on abortion, demanding more Christian Biblical doctrine in schools (like the Ten Commandments), and a growing influence on foreign policy.

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

ERUDITE, RECONDITE, INTERESTING AND INFORMATIVE.

“Religious conversion is an irresistible subject for a secularist or an atheist precisely because so much human energy, throughout recorded history, has been expended on persuading or forcing large numbers of people to replace belief in one supernatural mystery with another.” (Kindle Locations 410-412).

Susan Jacoby is one of my favorite contemporary freethinkers. Her books always illuminate, always elucidate, and always make me wish I’d studied harder and was smarter than I am. Especially on the subject of religious history.

Reading “Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion helped some with the feeling smarter part. It offers a very well researched introduction to religious history, and to the role that conversion—forced, spiritual journey, and of convenience—has played over the millennia.

I especially enjoyed the last three chapters—Part VII: The Way We Live Now; particularly the stories of Muhammad Ali’s conversion, when he joined the Nation of Islam, and of the personal exchanges between him and Bertrand Russell in the late 1960s. These chapters raised my rating.

Recommendation: I suspect the secular perspective is an acquired taste, and might be offputting for some. That said, Strange Gods is a great choice for all freedom of conscience fans, and it might just whet the curiousity.

“Nullius in verba, […] take no one’s word for it…” (Kindle Locations 4205-4206).

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition, 512 pages, 9208 Kindle Locations.

[Jeff · Rating 2 out of 5]

I received this book as a gift and dove into it with high hopes which were unfortunately dashed by the end.

The book itself has a solid premise: it constitutes an argument that the vast majority of religious conversion experiences have little to do with the intensely personal crisis of conscience commonly reported by people of faith, and everything to do with the social, familial, and political pressures of the convert's interpersonal environment: that coerced conversions (whether by the sword, or by the in-laws, or by the material advantage to be gained from going along with the majority opinion) are the overwhelming norm.

As a confirmed atheist I am quite ready to accept this message, however it could have been much better argued and structured.

Structurally, the book considers vignettes of four periods of religious upheaval: the Christianization of the Roman Empire; the Christianization of Iberia after the Reconquista; the Reformation on the Continent and in Anglicanizing England; and in the United States from Pilgrim times to the present. The astute reader will have observed that the only religious conversions really being considered in depth are into or out of various Christian faiths. The author acknowledges this--and admittedly a more global perspective might have required a longer book--but it's tough to generalize the point the way the author would like, given that focus.

Structurally, each period is explored by mini-biographies of one or two converts of some significance to intellectual history. This is an interesting perspective, but structurally probably a mistake: the stories are engaging, but to the extent that the book wants to argue for a thesis, it's difficult to generalize from anecdotes; and to the extent that the book aims to be edutainment, the mini-biographies are too short and shallow, and too guided by the need to support the surounding thesis, to be really satisfying. This is especially the case as they become increasingly cursory for more recent figures.

Similarly, the book relies quite a bit on asides from the author's own personal history as a child of many generations of conversions-of-expediency, from Judaism to Lutheranism to Catholicism. I'm not one to oppose an author having a strong authorial voice, but this discussion often threatens to be more interesting than the main flow of the text, which can be quite repetitive, recapitulating points and going on rhetorical flights in a way not unfamiliar to this reviewer, but perhaps less becoming in a book that went through an editorial process unknown to this review.

I'm not quite prepared to say the book belongs in the category of "interesting nonfiction that should have been a long-form essay," but I think you could write a much more cogently supported book by scrapping the attempts to summarize the life story and religious views of John Donne in ten pages, and instead introducing something about the fascinating way the repeated waves of conversion worked in Southeast Asia, for instance.

Where the book really falls apart is in the final third. Here the thesis expands (as was promised in the introduction) to discuss the religion of... Stalinism. Now I have no beef with treating Stalinist
dictatorship as an autocratic belief system that would tolerate no dissent; but there's plenty of conflation of Stalinism with Communism more generally--and the author starts to play very fast and loose with what exactly constitutes religion. Is it a book about merely the enforcement of ideology by autocratic governments? Or by mobs of one's peers? Or something else?

Is it a book about freedom of conscience? It certainly seems to think so, given the way it lionizes Enlightenment ideals and the United States as an exemplar thereof; and one which stresses an American exceptionalist narrative talking about the importance of de jure support for religious toleration. This becomes especially--phenomenally--problematic in the epilogue, where the
author essentially goes on a twenty-page rant about Muslims as a terrorist force hoodwinked by religious fanaticism. She stresses that religious believers (particularly *these* religious believers) *do believe* their claims to religious superiority--the preceding four hundred pages talking about ways religious claims have been used to enforce social conformity, indeed *defining* enforced social conformity *as* religious belief, notwithstanding. She makes a direct comparison between ISIS' atrocities and the massacres of Jews in the Rhineland by mobs of First Crusaders--the image of people desperately sheltering in a church--while somehow seeing American religious tolerance as untroubled by the issuance of an 1838 executive order by the governor of Missouri calling for Mormons' extermination or explusion from the state. No comparison is drawn between the
(religiously? misogynistically?) motivated murder of Hypatia of Alexandria and the lynching of Joseph Smith in Illinois.

Now, Jacoby is commendably careful to note the existence of Christian and Jewish terrorists too, from ancient times to this; but considering she has just written a book depicting religious profession as a means and medium of social control, to suddenly suggest deep-seated conviction as the principal motivating factor of members of one particular religious polity is at the very least remarkably inconsistent. How could the Spanish Inquisition have been motivated by theological doctrine, when its main targets were conversos suspected of insufficiently fervent Catholicism--those who had generally already shown willingness to endorse whatever doctrine the State decreed, and simply weren't believed or accepted? To claim that Whittaker Chambers' source "religion" was Stalinism--a movement indisputably about the political and social control of one faction within one country, however deeply believed by its supporters--and then to ignore the extent to which ISIS' or bin Laden's religious professions serve merely as gloss for their politically motivated intolerance of
difference and attempts to exert control--is to completely overlook the way that religious identity functions *as an ultimately arbitrary identity marker* and is used to justify terror and murder *against the Other generally*, regardless of whatever ultimately arbitrary theological disputes may be ginned up as an excuse.

All that said, the book does serve as a solid atheist critique of the commingling of religious, political, and social authority. The wonder (in her narrative) is that anyone ever fails to convert under social pressure (although again this comes down to questions not of theology but of cultural identity). Jacoby is unquestionably *right* that removing the power to oppress, removing any trace of temporal power or authority, from religious institutions is essential for a just and fair society; which is why it is such a shame to see her devolve into such a reactionary conclusion from an otherwise insightful book.

Moreover, the book serves as an essential reminder of how ubiquitous acts that could be considered genocide have been throughout recorded European history. From the anti-pagan pogroms and assassinations of the late Roman empire, to the Albigensian Crusade of the 1200s (200,000 to 1 million killed at a time when the world population was perhaps 400 million), to the expulsion and torturous murders of Jews and converts from Judaism and Islam in Reconquered Spain, to the extirpation of the Huguenots in France (from 2 million people in 1572 to 100,000 by 1700), and the near-universal practice of kidnapping children of non-Catholic religions to be raised by the socially dominant group (part of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide definition), European history is full of potent reminders of the evil that takes over when people are convinced of the need to "purify" their societies. Jacoby would probably blame religious ideology for these acts, but ideological compliance has never been enough to stop them--she wrote a whole book about how conversions are always compelled, and compelled conversions never trusted. Instead I would argue that we all need to be aware of this history and be constantly on guard for the tendency in the human heart to hate and fear and--if given the chance--destroy the Other, whatever the excuse.

Edit: What I'm trying to say is, I am exceedingly frustrated by this because of the internal contradiction of which the author seems unaware. Here she has written an entire book whose underlying premise is that religious conversion--and thereby religious belief--has never been about personal conscience, but rather about social conformity and group identity. As such, the *content* of that belief is irrelevant: religious violence derives not from theological positions per se but from the generalized attempt to enforce social conformity and inter-group power struggle. (The remarkable part of the story--that people ever clung to their religious beliefs in the face of oppression--makes more sense when we see that act as an assertion of identity.) All the long history of religious genocides documented here are not about the theological content of religion, but an assertion of power from the powerful and an attempt to establish a homogenous society. They just happen to lean on religion as a convenient excuse.

This dynamic would have been far more obvious if the author had expanded her perspective and considered religious traditions other than a subset of the Abrahamic: the waves of Hinduism, Confucianism, and Islam in Southeast Asia, for instance. Even Buddhism, despite its easygoing, accepting, non-dogmatic reputation in the West, can become violent and intolerant in the hands of those who wish to use it to exert social control. We cannot locate the genocide and cultural extermination of ISIS within the content of Muslim theology any more than we can locate the genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar at the hands of ultranationalist Buddhists within the content of Buddhist theology. It does not matter that both groups of oppressors are believers or that their beliefs are (presumably) sincere: the beliefs are *motivated* by, are *an underlying outgrowth of*, the desire for social control.

That Jacoby has missed this--in favor of yet another rant about Sharia--is a tragedy.

[Steven Meyers · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Strange Gods’ is the fifth book I’ve read by Ms. Jacoby. I’ve come to trust her judgment. The lifelong atheist has addressed important topics such as the myth and marketing of the new old age, America’s odd celebration of anti-intellectualism, a history of American secularism, and a biography about Robert Ingersoll. They are all written in a thought-provoking approachable manner but demand your concentration. The same can be said about ‘Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion’ which was published in 2016.

While Ms. Jacoby does make snarky remarks, the book is not dripping with vitriol. ‘Strange Gods’ is not some godless rant in an effort to persuade the reader to ditch their faith. It is a reasoned serious work, backed with reputable sources and presented from a secular perspective. Her argument is that conversions are typically a gradual process and social factors play an important role, but there have been many periods where draconian force was used to quickly make believers switch sacred teams. Her presentation highlights important historical conversions that had long-term consequences. It focuses on the three major religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) and their impact on the Western world. Many of the people or events in the book did not even sound remotely familiar to me. However, there are some notable ones such as the Spanish Inquisition, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Second Great Awakening. It also includes the huge impact of the printing press; state-sanctioned religions; the forced Christianization of American slaves; the long history of anti-Jewish sentiment and discrimination; the dangerous positions that high-profile secularists put themselves when questioning church doctrines; why the Catholic Church eventually shifted from papal infallibility towards a more present-day ecumenical approach; how the various faiths still try to whitewash their less-than-holy histories; the growth of liberal Protestantism and evangelical fundamentalism in the United States; the conflicts arising from intermarriages; America’s religious pluralism; and an interesting analysis of Muhammad Ali’s conversion to Islam. Lord knows, the frequent power struggles between the different faiths certainly led to an overabundance of imprisonments, tortures, and gruesome deaths. The Catholic Church comes under more review simply because they retained power over the other religions for a longer period of time. However, Ms. Jacoby shows that whenever the shoe was on the other foot, other religious factions and faiths were more than willing to go on their own holy warpath in an effort to exterminate or convert nonbelievers. I especially enjoyed the author’s last chapter “Darkness Visible” despite me not totally agreeing with her take on Karen Armstrong’s insights. The book includes eight pages of black-and-white photos.

‘Strange Gods’ is not a book for the casual reader. It’s very likely you will develop MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over) Syndrome if you don’t have a keen interest in the subject matter. No question the author is strutting around with one of the big brains and gives a clear-eyed secular presentation. The book drives home the point that “Free religious choice was the exception, not the rule for most of Western history and the history of monotheism” and religious oppression and terrorism still plays a part of all three major faiths. I learned a great deal from reading it. It’s yet another history book that shows religion has inflicted a breathtaking amount of harm, pain, and death to people simply because they were not of the “right” faith. It took guts to write ‘Strange Gods.’ Good for her.

[Ryan Bell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is a link to my conversation with the author:
http://www.lifeaftergod.org/026-what-...

[Lydia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was worried this would be a real snoozer as I started it in the car with my husband when it was my turn to drive and he almost immediately fell asleep, but I ended up thoroughly enjoying it. I'm not sure whether listening to this audiobook was an opportunity to learn things I was never taught in school, to actually bother to learn for the first time things I ignored when it was presented to me initially, or to relearn what I've forgotten - probably all of the above - but I feel much more informed of religious history for having read it.

Ms. Jacoby clearly has a perspective - that of an atheist - and completely fails to hide her derision for belief in any afterlife, if any attempt was made at all. I can see why religious folks would take offense at some of the language that is used here, but would hope they would stick it out with the book anyway. As a proud member of the ELCA, I definitely think this book was worth reading, and I also think that the United States and the world in general would be a much better place if people would genuinely engage with religious philosophy in the context of history.

This book was perfect for where I'm at in my personal spiritual journey, and I highly recommend it. It is extremely academic, though - know what you're getting into! I think the audiobook was perfect in this regard. While at times I would have appreciated having time to reflect and reread, the tendency to do so can prevent me from making progress in challenging books. The audio marched on, and so did my progress and learning, in spite of myself and the much-appreciated challenges to my perspective this book provided.

[Steve Donoghue]

Any new book by the great Susan Jacoby is a stop-everything-and-read-it occasion (even the one she inexplicably wrote on the mind-numbingly boring spectacle of baseball, go figure), and this one is a pure example of why: here Jacoby studies not just the mechanics of conversion but also the long history of god-swapping. It's a fantastic and utterly thought-provoking read. Here's my review:
https://www.stevedonoghue.com/review-...

[Kate Elliott · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fairly good history, but what a condescending tone. She doesn't really respect the emotional nuance of religious experience. This tightness makes her approach brittle. The book could have been much more dynamic if she had railed less and took more time to seek to understand.

[Scout · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very cool, but VERY LONG, book, had no idea how much history has hated Jews since the very beginning (super gross)

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a slow burn. The author offers a ponderous personal introduction to her interest in conversion and starts the book proper by taking us through a lot of very well-trod territory, including Augustine’s famous move to Christianity. I was bothered at first because I was hoping that the author would have had something more philosophically or sociologically original to say about the meaning or process of conversion. But after a while I settled down to enjoy the myriad fascinating stories she tells about famous or infamous conversions in European and American history. There are stories related to the Spanish Inquisition, Reformation (Anabaptism, American Puritanism, Mormonism), slavery, Nation of Islam, etc.

The accumulation of these stories gradually gave me a new and deeper sense of the importance and rarity of religious freedom. The book also has something important to say about Judaism in particular, since Jews have obviously been one of the main targets of a coercive conversion efforts.

And I guess, when I think about it, the author does make a case that conversion is a largely a social rather than personal matter. People have generally converted for social or political or economic rather than philosophical or psychological reasons. So perhaps Durkheim is the silent partner here. Anyhow, I was fascinated by the stories, including one Papal abduction and apparently coerced conversion of a Jewish boy as late as the 19th century.

[Eugenea Pollock · Rating 4 out of 5]

First of all, the choice of artwork for the cover of this book (“The Conversion of St. Paul,” 1601, by Caravaggio) is inspired; it has been a favorite of mine since I first saw it in an Art History class in college because of its dramatic lighting, color selections, and extreme foreshortening.

Divided into seven major parts, the text is organized chronologically to cover the significant personalities, ideologies, and hallmark historical events that characterize and animate its twenty-one chapters (plus “Conclusion”). My Sunday School Class chose this a few months ago to read, and we have covered a chapter each Sunday ever since. I personally learned a lot from this book and, for the most part, enjoyed doing so.

[Earl · Rating 5 out of 5]

T'was a really long read, but I appreciate how conversion was framed from a secular perspective with great consideration of religious voices and sources. It's a must read for those who engage in missionary work, as well as those who study the trajectory and the geography of religious traditions being shaped by time and circumstance.

[Ayman Fadel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full review with hyperlinks & formatting here: http://muslimmediareview.blogspot.com...

If you, like me, grew up receiving religious education, you likely encountered conversion stories. For Muslims, an important topic of our weekend school education in the United States is the siirah (biography, "gospel") of the Messenger Muhammad ﷺ. It is replete with stories of how courageous and noble individuals, beginning with his wife Khadija and cousin `Ali, recognized him as God's Messenger. Implicitly and explicitly, those who rejected him were cruel and venal.

Susan Jacoby examines how European Christians told stories about conversion, which, under the scrutiny of modern historical method, reveal how those stories concealed varying degrees of coercion, and how the post-fascist Catholic Church has attempted to shift blame away from itself for the most grievous period of coercion, the enslavement and murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany.


She ends the book discussing the United States's contemporary attitude towards conversion and implications for atheists like herself. While the number of practicing/professing atheists has grown rapidly in the 21st century, Jacoby is concerned that a far greater number of Americans, particularly those who self-identify as "No religious affiliation" or "Spiritual but not religious" are in fact atheists who are coerced into concealment. She hopes that more of these people will declare for atheism and educate their children about religion so that they will not, as low-information consumers, fall prey to religion later in life.

Being accused of intending to murder our non-Muslim neighbors, we Muslims often point to this passage of the Qur'an:

لا إكراه في الدين

There is no compulsion in religion.

There are other texts which also urge Muslims protect the rights of non-Muslims.

Nevertheless, I assume that a historian could follow Jacoby's methodology and write a similar history of coerced conversions to Islam from the time of the Messenger ﷺ through the era of decolonization and post-independent states. It particularly galls me that many Muslims preachers in the United States will claim that the existence of a Muslim majority in Indonesia is proof that Islam never spread by the sword. Of course, none of these preachers know anything about the history of Southeast Asia, especially East Timor and the killings targeting Chinese (largest non-Muslim minority) in 1965. Were they to learn of these atrocities, the majority of whose victims were non-Muslims, they would claim they were the result of Muslims following secular ideologies, not Islam. Sounds familiar to the Catholic Church's claims regarding the Holocaust, doesn't it?

While I don't believe Islam mandates these gross human rights violations, and while I don't consider the actions of the so-called Islamic State (Daesh) to be in conformity with my understanding of Islam, after reading this book I've decided not to argue the point with the proselytizers of atheism as long as they don't advocate USA militarism. I have decided to be a voice arguing for disestablishment of religion in the United States, where I live, and if anybody from a Muslim-majority country asks me, I'd recommend it follow the path of the United States government in avoiding establishment of religion and restricting its practice.

[Jill Meyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Susan Jacoby's "Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion", is a bit of a mish-mash. Now, that's not said in a bad way; Jacoby tries to cover the topic from Augustine to Mohammed Ali and his daughter, with stops in England, France, Spain, and Egypt, in between. What Jacoby is trying to say, I think, is that as long as there have been religious belief, there have been conversions both to and away from those beliefs. And if she's not right, then I don't know what would be the point of the book.

Susan Jacoby, herself the daughter of a man who converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism upon marrying Susan's mother, looks at how conversions can be of "coersion" by threats of death (Spain) or "opportunity", where the ease of shedding an old religion (in this case Judaism) in 19th and 20th century Europe will give the converter entrance into higher social and economic rank. (Or, like Jacoby's father; his conversion was an attempt to make a family together with his wife.) But, and this is a big but, conversion to a dominant religion doesn't always bring safety. Edith Stein is only one of many Jewish converts to Catholicism whose new religion didn't protect her from being sent from the convent straight to Auschwitz. But the Jewish-Christian conversions are not the only ones she covers. She links history with societal events to make her points.

I'm giving Jacoby's book four stars instead of five only because I think she does try to cover too much. Her writing is lively and I found the book quite interesting. (And, curiously, she and I both had Jewish fathers at Dartmouth at the same time.)

[Grace · Rating 3 out of 5]

There was a lot of powerful information and useful perspectives on conversion and social and economic reasons for conversion, rather than just the spiritual. I particularly liked the chapter on Muhammad Ali. Nonetheless, some of the language and rhetoric tended toward the bombastic, which I didn't need to appreciate that religion has done a lot of damage, and some of the parallels seemed overextended. I also wondered if the author should apply that same reasoning - economic and social and environmental issues - to the Islamic extremists she decries in the Conclusion. Is there not an argument to be made about why people cling to extremism - power and success when you do not have any other way to get it - that she makes about the converts in the rest of her book? It's definitely worth reading, but there are some holes.

[Ted Sibly · Rating 3 out of 5]

In each chapter, I searched for the point she was trying to make. A simple introductory paragraph would have helped. Apparently her target was the simple traditional view of a specific person's conversion. Her goal was to show many other factors driving that event. She presented a mountain of scholarly evidence to support her thesis, but it was difficult for me to find the specific thesis in each chapter. Her overview of history in a specific time and place was very interesting. The three big headlines of 1492 Spain were very helpful.

[Mark Stidham · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author has provided for me an unprecedented account of religious conversion in western culture dating from Roman times. The case is made that religious conversion as an activity has evolved through time. Whereas Roman culture commanded nominal fealty to the emperor, they otherwise accommodated local religions, so long as the emperor was granted homage. to each culture they conquered, there was apparently little effort to convert newcomers to the Roman family to religion. The persecution of Christians by Romans was sporadic. Considered a sect of Judaism, Christians 'posed the classic political dilemma: how far can one show tolerance to a group that itself condemns the tolerance of the state in allowing pagan worship." After the conversion of Constantine to Christianity, there was a gradual transition to Christianity as the state religion. As Christianity grew, so grew the notion of religious purity. In 363, the pagan emperor Julian (who had been raised Christian) issued an edict of toleration that allowed Jews to return to Jerusalem and provided for the rebuilding of the temple. However, Julian was killed in a battle, and Christians interpreted his death as a sign from God to persecute Jews. Successor emperor Theodosius, after squashing a rebellion of tax payers, many of them Christians, offered penance to Ambrose, the Archbishop of Milan, in the form of banning all worship at pagan shrines. Roman citizens interpreted the the action as Theodosius ceding authority to God as represented by Ambrose. Christians throughout the empire began destroying all non-Christian parts of civilization, including Jews, classic libraries, and other idolatrous features of civilization. Thus began the concept of heresy and religious purity.

From these early dates, the author takes accounts of various conversions mostly centered on Christian conversions. Part I is 'Young Christendom and the Fading Pagan Gods', Part II 'From Convivencia to the Stake'. Part III is 'Reformations'. Part IV 'Conversions in the Dawn of the Enlightenment'. Part V ' The Jewish Conversion Question: Where Christianity Stubbed Its Toe' Part VI 'American Exceptionalism' and Part VII 'The Way We Live Now'. The book shows how conversions to Christianity throughout history as a range of processes, most of them not involving a lightening bolt of inspiration about the truth of 'Christianity' in all of its evolutionary and varied forms. Most early converts were surprisingly not from Judaism but from paganism, and clearly the coercion of the Roman state was a dominating reason. In the Iberian peninsula, Catholicism expelled Jews and Muslims alike, or offered them a choice to convert. But even conversion was eyed suspiciously, with many tortures and murders in the Spanish Inquisition. Throughout Europe, murder and coercion was perpetrated in alternate battles of Protestants and Catholics. The Protestant movement then sought various forms of purification from within. Until the founding of the U.S. and the separation of church and state, conversion and religious purity was a deadly part of political life.

The book chronicles certain notable individuals in conversion (and unsuccessful conversions) experiences, including Augustine, Hypatia (a learned pagan woman who was brutally dismembered by a Christian mob), bishop Paul fo Burgos (a converted Spanish Jew who abetted the expulsion of remaining Jews), Michael Servetus a Renaissance humanist burned at the stake in Geneva but hated by both Catholics and Protestants, John Donne, and many others in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her history describes the murderous struggle for 'the truth' in Christianity within the Catholic church and then against Protestants, who in turn sought purity within itself.

Today, she cites terrorism within Islam as the present day version of murderous pursuit of purity. Her ending conclusion includes the observation that within American culture, nearly anything goes except atheism! In the west, we are left with a decidedly secular European absent of religious obsession and a religious U.S. that is not unified in its Christianity. Near the end of the book, the author speculates that "American civil society might well be as secular as France or Spain if we, too, had encoded in our national DNA the memory of having been imprisoned, tortured, or murdered by the state for our choice of the wrong religion." The last sentence: "That would be the glory of the world in which the liberty to choose any religion or no religion is recognized as a universal human right, and forced conversion becomes, finally, nothing more than a hideous oxymoron from the past."

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some times I go crazy putting books on hold at the library. I don't remember what, why, when, or that I even ordered so many books, but suddenly library text alerts start ringing - three, four, five, six dings - in a row. This was one ordered in a half crazed, reading frenzy moment.

Currently, I'm inquisitive about the roots of Christianity with pointed inquiry on Catholic Church inception. How did history go from simple, non materialistic, understated Jesus to an empire that wealth, power, and corruption define?

I began pondering Catholicism some days ago. I ordered this book weeks ago. So just like that, Divine intervention works its magic and I'm holding Susan Jacoby's book that gives awareness to most my current questions.

Ms. Jacoby did not set out to satiate my fleeting curiosity. All happenstance and I didn't read her whole text because I'm cherry picking then moving on. The whole point of her book is to discuss the depth and breadth of conversions between religions. It's not all about spiritual awakening. I might revisit Strange Gods farther down the road, but for now I got what I needed in the first three chapters.

Nutshell Ah-Ha Moments

Basic Jesus Message
Into 1st & 2nd Century Small Christian Sects:
--personalities

Basic Jesus Message
Into Centralized Roman Christianity:
--Constantine, Augustine, paganism

Basic Jesus Message
Into Roman Catholicism:
--politics & power

Okay. Good for me. Moving on.

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A kind of grab-bag of historical episodes in which religious conversion played an important part. Thematically, Jacoby emphasizes that conversions have often been done less for theological motivations than for practical ones: they are often coerced, or they often helped individuals marry certain people or get ahead in society.

There are some very interesting chapters. I’ll highlight the earlier chapters on the Convivencia, al-Andalus, and Paul of Burgos as the strongest part of the book, with great historical details, and discussion of tolerance and how religion and blood “purity” played roles in Islamic Spain. Similarly, I enjoyed the discussion of the rise of Protestantism, with a particular hard look at the wide differences between Protestant sects and how some of them were as intolerant as the establishment Church that they rebelled against.

There are also some uneven, less coherent chapters. I found the later chapters on America to be kind of unfocused; they felt a little bit like they were adapted from notes or talks and not honed down to key points. And throughout, Jacoby also has an occasional irritating tendency in her writing to inject asides and pose series of rhetorical questions and hypotheticals. Perhaps an attempt to be conversational and accessible, I wish the editor had cut these out.

The good stuff is really good though, and is inspiring to go read and learn more.

[John Allen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love how Susan Jacoby delivers a message and discusses a topic. Freethinkers remains one of the most important books on my shelf. I was very excited to see this new work from her, especially since she would be focusing on religion exclusively and from many different angles. I do regret to say, however, that the rest of the book didn't live up to its introduction. Maybe I misunderstood the introduction, I'll fully entertain that as a possibility. I was expecting a variety of conversion stories discussed within the context of their respective milieu, which Jacoby did accomplish. But I was also expecting there to be a point. Some kind of conclusion, where the reader could make sense of all this information and after slogging through the lengthy stories and context building there would be revealed some common theme or tragic mistake all these historically important men and women made. Maybe that is an impossible task. Maybe I was asking too much. But at the end I just felt like I had studied extensively for a test to only find out it was just the study guide.

[Zachary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jacoby's premise is interesting - let's look at features of conversions across history that may or may not have anything to do with actual religious belief or faith. And for the most part, the majority of her profiles deliver on this premise. But what is lacking in the book is any kind of real argument about what any of it means, or what connects these various strained kinds of "secular conversions." There is some bit at the end about how we can use this history to understand contemporary religious fanaticism (specifically from Muslims), but that strain isn't as fully developed throughout the book as maybe I'd have liked. In addition, Jacoby's style is a bit distracting, with each profile of a historical convert (and usually martyr) being kind of a rambling exploration of their lives rather than a focused, detailed engagement with their thinking. There are some useful ideas scattered throughout the book, and some curious people profiled, but beyond that the book was remarkably tepid, in my eyes.

[Jakub Ferencik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Susan Jacoby is phenomenal. I have no idea how one writes a book like this. This is the second book I've read by Jacoby. I'm absolutely in love with her. I plan on reading EVERYTHING she's written. OK on with the brief review.

This is a large volume (500 dense pages). It was great for the research I'm doing on Christianity and the book I want to write.

Jacoby goes through the nature of conversion in Christianity from it's early beginnings in the Roman Empire and Augustine to Jews & the Spanish Inquisition to John Calvin's gory rule in Geneva to Luther's hateful anti-Semitic prose. Jacoby is a genius. Her vocabulary and intellectual honesty in her scholarly pursuit could be one of the best things for secularist thought of this century thus far.

I am grateful to her and her work. I am slow to recommend it, however. It's great, but not as important as her other books. Hopefully, I'll be able to meet her one day.

[Gina · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book had a lot of potential and in other hands could have been great. This is partially a memoir. Rather than putting forth an objective history of conversion Jacoby writes a limited history of Jewish conversion to Christianity. The bigger problem though is that Jacoby is a proud athiest and biases her writing accordingly. She deems all religious people to be stupid and gullible. When laying out historical events, rather than laying out facts she repeatedly inserts her very anti-Christian and anti-Catholic opinions. I would've enjoyed an objective, unbiased book about the history of conversion but this is not that book. This is a rant against religion as a whole but also a rant against the conversion of Jewish people to Christianity with a quarter of the book talking about Nazis and the Holocaust.

[Jc · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I have only read [now] two of Jacoby’s works, she has already become one of my favorite authors on the history of religious, especially American christian, thought. Her books are dense and long, but eminently readable. And the amount of information she packs into them, and her very professional, well-informed analyses of what that information means, is impressive and makes them MUST reads if you have any interest in the topic. Her works are eye-opening and informative. If you were only allowed to choose two books to try to understand what christianity means, has meant, to America, and how it got that way, Jacoby’s Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, and Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion should be at the top of any list of potential choices.

[Michael Samerdyke · Rating 1 out of 5]

I decided not to finish this book.

I read it because I was greatly impressed with Susan Jacoby's book on the Alger Hiss case. If there is one topic that really infuriates people it is (was) the Hiss case, and Jacoby did a splendid job of laying out the facts of that case and explaining why people believed the way they did.

That is not the case with "Strange Gods."

Jacoby seems to be on every page of this book. She knows how to interpret St. Augustine, for example, while preceding generations apparently missed the boat. I quit the book when she told us that she read "City of God" at age 16 and didn't like it.

That was on page 15, and I realized that I couldn't handle another 400 pages in the company of this author.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting history of the idea of conversion in the western world. Jacoby examines the socio-economic as well as historical factors that drove most conversions historically. Intriguing read, if a bit untidy. She doesn't really present a thesis or a strong conclusion, but there is so much historical information here that I learned quite a bit. The learning was the difference between a 3 and 4 star review for me.

[Anthony Faber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting book which goes from the early days of Christianity up to the near present and looks at the reasons people converted. A history of religious tolerance is inextripically tied up with that, so that is covered, too. Her last chapter points out interesting differences between the U.S. and other developed, developing and devolving countries.

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a book that our Sunday school class has been reading, one chapter a week, for a number of months. It details the long and often bloody history of religious conversion, both forced and voluntary, throughout history. It is well-researched, and I learned many things I did not know. At times, Jacoby's writing was well beyond my scope of knowledge, but overall, I enjoyed the book.

[Amy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ok, I didn't read it. I just am checking it off my list. I tried the first couple chapters since the subject matter is interesting to me, but it's too darn academic to wade through. Maybe I'll try again later...