Conversion and Faith - Roy Allan B Tolentino

Robert Hefner’s analyses of the various factors affecting religious conversion suggest a broad spectrum of reasons and motivations behind such a choice. From the almost-flippant conversion owing to social or political expediency to the more serious dissatisfaction with one’s religion leading to an honest searching to the abhorrent forced conversions still practiced in some parts of the world today, there is a whole host of reasons why an individual chooses to convert, and no one theory can explain them all. Hefner also discusses the phenomenon of world religions, and while I am somewhat uncomfortable with the term, I agree that certain religions have shown a resiliency and persistence; indeed, “they are the longest lasting of civilization’s primary institutions.” (Hefner 1993:34, italics his)

I think, however, that Hefner stumbles in one critical area, and this has to do with the way the social sciences construct religion and faith. In discussing the phenomenon of conversion to Christianity in Java, Hefner remarks:

"An actor’s identification with a particular religion implies an act of faith, which is to say the acceptance of a cultural authority whose full conceptual and sociological entailments may never be entirely clear... It suggests that in our efforts to understand conversion, we have to pay as much attention to the moral and political consequences of membership in a community as we do to its intellectualist doctrines. This truth has been recognized by Christian theologians for centuries. As they stress so clearly, faith must be greater than reason." (Hefner 1993:121)

Hefner’s generalization here seems to reduce faith to the “acceptance of cultural authority,” a definition which makes faith no different from joining a club or accepting a legitimate form of government, both of which have “conceptual and sociological entailments which will never be entirely clear.” Inasmuch as religion may become appealing through a certain rationalization of experience and social order, the act of faith taken in its theological sense implies more than rationalization. There are indeed moral and political consequences to conversion, but there are also spiritual ones, which the social sciences appear to reduce to epiphenomena. In my view, Hefner employs the word faith here in such a way that robs the term of its theological and phenomenological significance.

Hefner goes on to say that “an individual can be committed to a particular belief system without fully understanding its conceptual truth and social entailments.” (Hefner 1993:122) Again, such a description can apply not only to religion but to democracy or capitalism as well, phenomena in which we participate but do not understand fully. In the quest for objectivity and general theories, one pitfall is that we can sometimes fail to consider the unique status of phenomena. Faith and religion are sui generis, and as such cannot simply fall under reference or group theory; one must also consider the claims of religion and the place of these claims in human experience and understanding. This means recourse to theology and phenomenology, a recourse which social scientists are sometimes unwilling to make.

Shusaku Endo’s novel, Silence, explores the dynamics of faith from the perspective of Christians in feudal Japan. At the novel’s climax, Rodrigues, the Jesuit protagonist, is forced to apostatise in order to save the lives of Christian converts. The missionary-priest finds that the higher call of his faith is to abandon it for the sake of these innocents. While I cannot capture Endo’s eloquence in describing the anguish and consolation that Rodrigues undergoes, I also feel that this is something Hefner’s theory cannot explain. Inasmuch as Endo’s work is fictional, it sheds light on the complex dynamics of faith which many experience interiorly, but which social scientists can only approach from the outside, as it were.

Hefner, Robert. “World-Building and the Rationality of Conversion,” and “Of Faith and Commitment: Christian Conversion in Muslim Java” in Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation. Ed. Robert Hefner. Berkley: University of California Press, 1993.