The Problem of Religious Conversion Today
*** Published in Italian @ https://www.informazionecattolica.it/2024/05/06/gli-usa-e-quelle-conversioni-di-vip-al-cristianesimo/
The recently resurging phenomenon of celebrities converting to Christianity suggests that traditional religion remains very much a viable option for disenchanted atheists or materialists. Why not pick a religion that is most likely to sooth the pain of an existence in which we can chose all goods, but never a supreme one? Today, more than ever before, our liberal societies make it possible for us to choose God himself, the highest good, by joining one of many churches or religious denominations that represent him (for the avant-garde, a her or a them), provided of course that we learn to interpret religious teachings to conform to the notion that conversion is the individual’s free choice, that we can chose our religion, our very God just as we can chose to de-convert: to “de-transition”. Yes, our liberal technocracies make both transitioning and de-transitioning possible. The last thing we would want today is to be forced into conversion, to be compelled to transition from materialism or narcissistic spirituality into traditional religiosity. And yet, precisely here lies the reason to question our liberal conversions; a reason to doubt.
In illiberal, even patriarchal societies, religious conversion has always been understood in terms of a supreme calling and our duty to respond to it. The Latin conversio, as the Greek periagoge, is not a personal choice or existential leap, no matter how committed, but a providential gift resulting from our letting go of all choice, or any hunger for leaps (pace Kierkegaard). Inevitably there will be two senses to “conversion”: 1. a formal one whereby the convert is integrated into a politically autonomous traditional community of faith (an impossibility in technocracy) and 2. an apocalyptic one whereby ordinary political life is exposed to its providential ground. St. Paul’s “turning back” on the way to Damascus is of the second register, as all conversion is primarily, “formal conversion” being but an image of an un-covering or re-velation exposing the true nature of our daily lives and so of political life in general.
The primordial, apocalyptic sense of conversion must pertain to the reflexive turn of the senses, of our sensing consciousness, of our imagination, our very sentiment, upon itself, to face its creative spring (the form of experience itself, beyond the graspable contents of our experience). Conversion will then entail primarily the apophatic turn (stripping of attributes, giving up of “possessions”) by which man negates himself, his determination, becoming a question mark grounded in nothing falling short of an absolute question mark. Conversion as entrance into a dimension of pure reflection wherein “the self” is nothing other than thought itself—thought as indissoluble link between the absolutely indeterminate and its indeterminate or ever-changing determinations.
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