“If you see something you like, you stop. Conversion is a personal choice. The majority of people in America are religious, and it’s the minority who are not interested in religion.”
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| A Grammy Award winner, Dr Yousef Lateef as an American convert to Islam |
Source/Credit: Columbia News Service
By Dana Forde | March 19, 2013
At 18 years old David Hunt, who was raised Baptist, felt something was missing in his spiritual life. But when Hunt was invited to a small house turned into a Pentecostal church, he was nervous to walk through the doors. Inside were 30 to 40 worshipers audibly proclaiming the goodness of God.
“I actually was a little afraid because the outward emotional expression of worship was more than just a monologue or a lecture,” said Hunt. “I felt an intense presence of God that I had not felt until then.”
After this experience, Hunt considered something that many Americans do: converting from one faith to another. He said he realized he didn’t have to throw away the Baptist traditions he had learned as a child. Instead, the Pentecostal faith — now the world’s fastest growing Christian denomination — added to what he already knew, Hunt said.
“I wanted more than just a religion,” he added. “I wanted a relationship with God.”
More Americans are choosing not to identify with a specific religious affiliation, according to an October 2012 study conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. But many religious leaders challenge that idea, arguing that people are not losing their religion as much as finding new ways to explore it. In a separate 2009 Pew study that was updated in 2011, “about half of American adults have changed religious affiliation at least once during their lives.” This statistic, some say, show that Americans embrace the freedom to seek other ways of expressing their faith. Conversion is a fluid method of this expression.
Hunt, who is now senior pastor of the Eastview United Pentecostal Church in Lufkin, Texas, helps guide others along the same journey he began more than four decades ago. Like many Pentecostal churches, Hunt’s church organizes discipleship classes throughout the year to educate newcomers.
An enhanced interest in Judaism has also emerged in recent years, some experts say. Ongoing discussion of Israel’s place in international affairs coupled with Jewish images in the media has fostered Americans’ interest in the Jewish faith, said Shaul Magid, professor of Jewish and religious studies at Indiana University-Bloomington.
“Jewishness has become an integral part of American society through film, television,” as well as through the media. “ It has become part of mainstream American society,” Magid said. “It’s almost hard to be an American today and listen to the news or be on the Internet and not have Judaism come across your screen. That wasn’t the case 40 years ago.”
While the Pentecostal and Jewish faiths are steadily accepting converts, the Catholic Church’s numbers on a national level are dwindling.
Although nearly one in three Americans were raised in the Catholic faith, today fewer than one in four call themselves Catholic, according to the Pew Forum.
The Saint Stephen Catholic Church, however, challenges this statistic. Clergy and congregants at the Valrico, Fla.-based church expect to welcome more than two dozen converts this upcoming Easter, said Father Bill Swengros, the church pastor. The new converts join an estimated 4,000 worshipers who attend services there every weekend.
But Saint Stephen’s converters don’t go out in search of potential Catholics. Rather, a personal experience usually inspires some to seek out Catholic teachings, Swengros said.
“We don’t really think of them as leaving their faith,” Swengros said. “We actually think of them as bringing in the richness of their faith tradition.”
Nevertheless, it’s also important to properly define the term “convert,” said the Rev. Raymond Rafferty, pastor of the Corpus Christi Church in New York City.
“If a person is already a baptized Christian, we don’t refer to them as converted,” said Rafferty, who added that he has assisted in helping at least three people convert to Catholicism this year. The majority of his church’s recent converts have been in their 20s and 30s, Rafferty added.
Some Muslim leaders say they see a persistent interest in Islamic conversion each year.
Part of the steady interest in the Islamic faith can be attributed to the religiosity of Americans in general, said Imam Mohammed Zafarullah of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in Houston. He says that the Ahmadiyya community in the U.S. welcomes at least 200 converts every year. Zafarullah compares the fluidity of religious choice to retail shopping.
“If you see something you like, you stop,” he said. “Conversion is a personal choice. The majority of people in America are religious, and it’s the minority who are not interested in religion.”
A 2012 joint survey by Pew and Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly supports this viewpoint. Sixty-eight percent of those who claim no religious affiliation believe in God and most of the unaffiliated “think that churches and other religious institutions benefit society by strengthening community bonds and aiding the poor,” according to the study.
However, not all faiths try to convert people to join their institutions. Different sects and communities within the Hindu faith, for example, do not all agree on the process of conversion.
“Many traditional lineages do accept foreigners into their traditions, and bestow initiatory rites, etc., with full parity with native-born members,” said Edwin Bryant, a professor of religions of India at Rutgers University, in an email message. But, he added, “certain orthodox communities bar foreigners from, for example, priestly services in the temples.”
Still, an increase in the Asian American population has brought “growth of non-Abrahamic faiths in the United States, particularly Buddhism and Hinduism,” according to the Pew Forum.
“In Hinduism, this word,” convert “does not exist,” said Swami Adrishananda, a monk at the Pasadena Hindu Temple in California.
He says that he welcomes about three new adherents, mainly students, to the temple weekly. In past years, this number was about one new worshiper per week.
The practice of Hinduism should be viewed as an enhancement of one’s faith rather than a tool of conversion, Adrishananda said.
He added, “Even if you want to remain as a Christian, if you will follow the path of Hinduism you will become a very good and even better Christian.”
-- Email: df2471@columbia.edu
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