Religious conversion is a topic that does not feature very prominently within the school classroom, and understandably so. It seems too personal, too private a subject. It makes for an awkward conversation even among the best of friends - especially when you consider the way religious conversion increasingly features as part of larger narratives on religious fundamentalism or radicalisation.

“It won’t surprise you that, today, conversion continues to generate suspicion,” says Ed Kessler in “The A-Z of Believing”, a series of articles in The Independent.

In the media, conversion is often linked with radicalisation - searching for the keywords “conversion”, “fundamentalism” and “radicalisation” brings up a number of articles making these alarming connections. One need only read a handful of them to see that this is a fraught topic in modern Britain. For example: “Woolwich attack: why are young British men like my brother drawn to Islamic extremism?” in The Daily Telegraph ; “Muslim converts ‘vulnerable to Isis radicalisation’, research finds” in The Independent ; “Ministry of Justice blocks study of Muslim conversion in prisons” in The Times ; or “Converts to Islam are likelier to radicalise than native Muslims” in The Economist.

It is not surprising, then, that the current political and media rhetoric makes any sympathetic exploration of religious conversion rather difficult.

Yet, religious conversion is a very human experience. It has happened to different individuals and groups for millennia. There are stories recorded of people converting to Buddhism, to Christianity and to Islam in large parts of the world, and these have not always been forced, and have not always led to violence or hate. For many converts, religious moves have been positive, leading to a sense of freedom and a new lease of life.

But how often do we hear these stories? Rather than repeatedly characterising religious conversion as dangerous and detrimental, it may be valuable to present young people with stories that offer different perspectives on conversion, including personal accounts of why people may have been attracted to a new faith and how this transformed their lives in different ways. This may well start a meaningful dialogue on the role of religious faith and conversion in contemporary society from fresh perspectives.

Another very good reason for tackling religious conversion in the classroom is the increasingly multi-faith nature of the pupil cohort. It is important to take into account quite radical demographic shifts in post-war Britain. The profile of urban Britain, in particular, has been transformed by migrant communities connected first through histories of colonial control, then by broader forms of globalisation leading to the recognition of something called “superdiversity” as a key characteristic of British cities.

Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism and other religious beliefs and practices are, of course, part of this superdiversity. But a “global Christianity”, incorporating religious and cultural practices from across the continents, is also an increasingly significant feature of urban life, flourishing in many British cities even as more familiar traditions may be on the wane. How do people identifying with these religious groupings interact with each other in Britain today? And what are the experiences of those who move across these religions?

Not just a private choice

The religious profile of the country, and the role that religions play, continue to change in response to social and political conditions. So, what is urgently needed is for young people to understand and recognise that religions and religious groups are directly impacted by the many different political and economic forces at play in British society.

Although often represented as a personal transformation or a very private choice, the act of conversion is central to an understanding of religion as part of cultural and social difference. This is why teaching religion in schools requires an engagement with the spaces in between and with movements across boundaries. That is, not treating each religion as a separate tradition with its own discrete key features but as more fluid and influenced by other religious practices, as well as how they respond to wider social and political forces.

Teaching religious conversion through narrative is the focus of a workshop planned for 1 June (see bit.ly/UoEworkshop) at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Divinity. It’s aimed at Scottish secondary school teachers who cover world religions, from National 5 to Advanced Highers. The workshop will be run by researchers who have specialised in Buddhism, Christianity and Hinduism in India, and with a keen interest in narratives of religious conversion.

Participating teachers will be invited to discuss ways to integrate stories from the three traditions to key religious, moral and philosophical studies (RMPS) topics, such as “conversion experiences”, “beliefs about God”, “morality and belief” and “living according to the Gospels/the Eightfold Path”.

Why focus on narratives of religious conversion? This situates conversion in a much broader setting and helps us to engage critically with the relationships between religious traditions. Conversion narratives tell us something about the religion that a person has left behind, perhaps of several others explored, and the new religion they embrace. This may mean a back-and-forth movement rather than a sharp turning away from one religion in favour of another. The individual(s) may even retain shades of the former religion that challenge their new beliefs or practices in productive ways.

Too often, conversion is thought of only as the one unique and special moment that dramatically changes everything, usually dubbed “the conversion experience”. But conversion narratives remind us that the decision to convert is not just the result of an isolated individual experiencing transformation on their own. Conversion accounts have the potential to tell us a far more complex story that is as much about doubt as about faith.

Posing difficult questions

Using these narratives from the past offers greater opportunities to probe and pose those difficult questions that may seem too sensitive to ask of present-day converts. This approach offers students insights into the cultural and social forces of their times and invites them to reflect critically on who is telling the story and from what perspective.

A number of narratives tell stories of young adults, from the ages of 16-19, converting. Many protagonists in the narratives to be presented at the workshop led very unusual lives, offering fascinating alternative perspectives to standard accounts of religious conversion, as well as to standard accounts of the history of Christian mission that we have become accustomed to.

Take, for instance, Subrahmanyam, who spent two years on foot walking approximately 1,500 miles from his home town in South India to the banks of the Ganges in the north in search of “the true God”, before he met a Hindu sadhu who pointed him in the direction of Christ. Subrahmanyam’s decision to convert to Christianity was prompted by his life-changing encounter with a Hindu holy man rather than a Christian missionary.

Then there’s Pandita Ramabai, a Marathi woman who converted to Christianity in 1883. She was a Brahmin widow who single-handedly started a home for orphaned and widowed girls in Western India, financed her travel to the UK by writing, translated the New Testament into the Marathi language, set up her own printing press and offered famine relief to hundreds of women at the turn of the century - a hard act to follow.

While she is well known as a social reformer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, what is less known is her relentless criticism of the British Christian missions in India and what she saw as institutional sexism and racism. Her forthright comments as well as sharp theological disputations meant that, rather than being appreciated for her intellect or commitment to serve her “countrywomen”, she was more often resented and marginalised from the missionary histories of Western India and from contemporary nationalist Indian history for having converted to Christianity.

Dhanjibhai Naoroji, the first Parsi convert to be baptised in Bombay in 1839, studied theology at the University of Edinburgh’s New College from 1843. He insisted on being ordained on terms of complete equality with other Scottish missionaries, with full “evangelistic power and liberty”, and was the first to return to India mid century as a missionary on a par with European missionaries. His demand addressed inequalities that existed in practice within many missionary societies and paved the way for other Indians to be treated as he was.

An added advantage to bringing such narratives to RMPS classes at secondary schools is that we can use them to challenge narratives of empire. The history of Christian mission has mostly been written and taught from a British perspective. From the late 18th century onwards, British missionaries travelled to different locations in Asia, often following trade routes and missionary channels that had been established by the Portuguese, the Danish and the French.

We have many details of individuals’ decisions to join missions, preparations before departure, the long journey by boat, of new languages learned and of the mission work undertaken. Their records tell us about mission activities, their opinions about the peoples they encountered, schools founded, hospitals built and souls saved. But since these were written, edited and preserved by missionaries, the history we can reconstruct from them is mainly from the point of view of the missionary.

Challenging perspectives

Conversion narratives, on the other hand, offer the potential to build a much broader perspective of how people responded to the different religions they encountered. How did peoples in Asia respond to Christian mission? What did they think about the new god the missionaries were preaching? What were the points of conflict? What persuaded some to convert to Christianity but not others and what were the effects of religious conversion? What was it like converting as a young person with family and missionaries assessing whether they were “mature” enough to make this decision? In short, what does Christian mission look like when written from the perspective of the “recipients of mission” ?

Asking such questions enables religious conversion as well as Christian mission to be taught from new angles, thus challenging our dependence on one-dimensional historical materials in the teaching of religions.

Narratives of conversion to Christianity written by Indians in the 19th and early 20th centuries are rich sources of information on the lives of young men and women, and the social forces of their times. Having experienced a change in faith and faced enormous personal and social challenges, they also had tremendous new opportunities to contribute to society and influence various forms of authority. Bringing these narratives into the classroom means we can study how religions relate to and shape each other and individuals, rather than as discrete and distinct traditions.

More importantly, studying personal narratives of religious conversion will allow pupils to engage sympathetically and sensitively with people who have crossed religious borders in the past and those who may be considering similar decisions in the present, instead of seeing them as dangerous oddities to be relegated to the margins.

In short, religious conversion is something that young people should be encouraged to talk about more openly - rather than it being buried as a touchy subject.

Dr Hephzibah Israel is a senior lecturer in translation studies at the University of Edinburgh. Teaching religious conversion is the topic of a free teachers’ workshop at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Divinity on 1 June. Find details at bit.ly/UoEworkshop

This article originally appeared in the 24 May 2019 issue under the headline “Past leaps of faith can inform the present”