Cumplimiento de objetivos

The movement’s success depended largely upon its ability to trigger conversions. If we recall, conversion is a central theme in definitions of revival. It is also one of the

156 For extended critiques of rational choice theory, see N. J. Demerath, III, ‘Rational Paradigms, A-Rational Religion, and the Debate Over Secularization’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 34.1, 1995, 105-12; Mark Chaves, ‘On the Rational Choice Approach to Religion’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 34.1, 1995, 98-104; Steve Bruce, ‘Religion and Rational Choice: A Critique of Economic Explanations of Religious Behavior’, Sociology of Religion, 54, 1993, 193-205.

157 For a recent application of this model to the contemporary Nigerian context, see Asonzeh F. K. Ukah,

‘Advertising God: Nigerian Christian Video-Films and the Power of Consumer Culture’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 33.2, 2003, 203-31.

distinctive emphases of evangelical religion. While studies on conversion go back to the early 20^th century, since the 1980s ‘conversion has been born again as a subject of research.’¹⁵⁸ Current debates are closely linked to the issues of identity and modernisation. Hefner, for example, argues that conversion ‘implies the acceptance of a new locus of self-definition’ and a ‘reconceptualized social identity.’¹⁵⁹ Crucial to the idea of identity construction during the Civil War Revival was the idiom of new birth.

As Marshall-Fratani notes, in this experience ‘the individual is exhorted to make an absolute break with his personal as well as collective past.’¹⁶⁰ Becoming ‘born-again’, therefore, enables a person to construct a new identity and negotiate modernity.

Three fundamental issues have dominated research on religious conversion by religionists and social scientists. The first is the nature of the experience. Conversion as radical change is one theme that pervades the literature, whether theological or social scientific, and dates back to the Biblical use of the term.¹⁶¹ But scholars disagree about the precise nature of the change involved, and how much change is enough to constitute conversion. I return to this theme in chapter three.

The second issue is the analytical status of converts’ accounts.¹⁶² Recent research on African Pentecostal evangelism has provided many examples of contemporary

158 Norman Etherington, ‘Recent Trends in the Historiography of Christianity in Southern Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 2.2, 1996, 218.

159 R. W. Hefner, ‘Introduction: World Building and the Rationality of Conversion’, in R. W. Hefner (ed.), Conversion to Christianity. Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation, Los Angeles: University of Claifornia Press, 1993, 17.

160 Marshall-Fratani, ‘Global and Local’, 284-85.

161 See for example, A. D. Nock, Conversion, the Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933, 7; Stephen Neill, The Unfinished Task, London:

Lutterworth Press, 1953, 44, 46; David A. Snow, and Richard Machalek, ‘The Sociology of Conversion’, Annual Review of Sociology, 10, 1984, 169-70; Lewis R. Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993, 2.

162 Snow and Machalek, ‘Conversion’, 168; Etherington, ‘Historiography’, 215-16.

conversion for analysis.¹⁶³ However, evaluating conversion experiences is not straightforward. Converts are motivated by a wide variety of factors, which change over time. As Peel notes, the interplay of motivations that produce conversion can only be apprehended through individual case histories.¹⁶⁴ Peel also points out the difficulty of assessing the interiority of the experience, when there is little evidence about the inner states of the individuals concerned. Unlike Peel, I had access to a relatively large number of oral and written accounts produced by the converts themselves, sometimes close to the time of their conversion experience. In these, they present themselves as both active and passive agents. The problem arises of how to access motives for conversion from retrospective accounts, inevitably influenced by the expectations and discourses of the group into which the person is converted. Motives are vulnerable to reformulation and redefinition through interaction over time. Beckford argues from a sociological perspective that actors self-reported accounts of religious conversion cannot be taken as objective reports of experience, but are the creation of the convert, and combine ‘personal experience with the expectations, theology, and symbolism of the group which the person wants to join.’¹⁶⁵ Despite this caveat, I proceed on the assumption that conversion narratives, while vulnerable to reformulation and coloured by the group’s universe of discourse, are valuable sources for evaluating religious change.

Most research on conversion has focused on identifying causes. Broadly speaking, believers have speculated on the nature of the divine-human encounter, while social

163 Etherington, ‘Historiography’, 218.

164 Peel, Religious Encounter, 226.

scientists have identified a range of social and psychological forces at work. In this thesis, I explore what conversion means to the convert, and because of this take religious motivation seriously.

Snow and Machalek identify three phases of research on causes.¹⁶⁶ The first was dominated by theological and psychological explanations.¹⁶⁷ The second saw the development of the ‘brainwashing’ or ‘coercive persuasion’ model of conversion. The publication of the Lofland-Stark conversion model in 1965 signalled the arrival of a third phase that relied on sociological thinking.¹⁶⁸ Some social scientists have focused on mono-causal explanations. Others, such as Lofland and Stark, see conversion as involving a variety of processes in interaction. As Hefner rightly insists, accounts of conversion must explore the interpenetration of psychological and socio-political factors.¹⁶⁹ My thesis will draw upon Rambo’s sequential stage model.¹⁷⁰ Rambo stresses the significance of both the external socio-cultural milieu, and internal motivations, experiences and aspirations. Particularly relevant is his assertion that the existing religious matrix gives shape to the conversion experience, and his argument

165 Robert Beckford, ‘Accounting for Conversion’, British Journal of Sociology, 19.2, June 1978, 149.

See also Snow and Machalek, ‘Conversion’, 177.

166 Snow and Machalek, ‘Conversion’, 178-84.

167 For example, W. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, New York: Longman, 1902; E. T.

Clark, The Psychology of Religious Awakening, New York: Macmillan, 1929; Nock, Conversion.

168 J. Lofland, ‘“Becoming a World-Saver” Revisited’, American Behavioural Sciences, 20, 1977, 805-18; Max Heirich, ‘Change of Heart: A Test of Some Widely Held Theories About Religious Conversion’, The American Journal of Sociology, 83.3, Nov. 1977, 653-80; J. Lofland and N. Skonovd, ‘Conversion Motifs’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 20, 1981, 373-85.

169 Hefner, ‘Rationality of Conversion’, 28.

170 Rambo, Religious Conversion, 44-55. Rambo’s model involves seven stages: context, crisis, quest, encounter, interaction, commitment, and consequences. He adapted it from the work of Lofland and Stark, and the missiological model of Alan R. Tippett. See Alan R. Tippett, ‘Conversion as a Dynamic Process in Christian Mission’, Missiology, 2, 1977, 203-21; Alan R. Tippett, Introduction to Missiology, Pasedena, California: William Carey Library, 1987, 74-8. Tippett’s model conceives conversion as a process involving a period of awareness, a point of realization, a period of decision-making, a point of encounter, and a period of incorporation. Tippett, Missiology, 76.

that some form of crisis (be it social, political, cultural, or religious) normally precedes conversion.¹⁷¹

The debate on African conversion was initiated by Horton, who argued that the response of traditional societies to the shattered boundaries of the microcosm, caused by exposure to modernising forces, is for less attention to be paid to the lower tier of lesser spirits and more to the upper tier occupied by the Supreme Being. Horton put forward the controversial thesis that even if confronted with modernity without the presence of Islam or Christianity, traditional religions had the capacity to develop a monotheistic cosmology.¹⁷² Horton’s intellectualist theory has met with critical response,¹⁷³ not least for its neglect of the religious dimension of world religions, its overemphasis on the

‘boundedness of traditional communities,’¹⁷⁴ and its marginalisation of political and structural influences on conversion.¹⁷⁵ However, for all its limitations it does draw

171 Rambo, Religious Conversion, 17, 34, 46, 54.

172 See Robin Horton, ‘African Conversion’, Africa, 41.2, 1971, 91-112; Robin Horton, ‘On the Rationality of Conversion’, Part 1, Africa, 45.3, 1975, 219-35. Horton takes as his point of departure Peel’s 1968 study of Aladura Christianity, in which the author adopted an intellectualist explanation of the Aladura Church movement as an attempt to adapt traditional concepts of explanation, prediction, and control of events in a new and unfamiliar social situation resulting from modernisation. Thus, for Peel the hermeneutical key to conversion among the Yoruba was the concern for explanation, prediction, and control. Peel, Aladura.

173 See Humphrey J. Fisher, ‘Conversion Reconsidered: Some Historical Aspects of Religious Conversion in Black Africa’, Africa, 43, 1973, 1, 27-40; Hefner, ‘Rationality of Conversion’; Caroline V.

Ifeka-Moller, ‘White Power: Social-Structural Factors in Conversion to Christianity, Eastern Nigeria, 1921-26’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 8.1, 1974, 55-72; Emefie Ikenga-Metuh, ‘Critique of Explanations of Conversions in Black Africa’, in Emefie Ikenga-Metuh (ed.), The Gods in Retreat.

Continuity and Change in African Religions, Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1986, 257-79; Jehu Hanciles, ‘Conversion and Social Change: A Review of the Unfinished Task in West Africa’, Currents in World Christianity. Christian Expansion in the Twentieth-Century Non-Western World, paper presented at The Oxford Consultation, St. Catharine’s College, Oxford, July 14^th - 17^th, 1999, 4-6.

174 Hefner, ‘Rationality of Conversion’, 21, 23; Terence O. Ranger, ‘The Local and the Global in Southern African Religious History’, in Hefner (ed.), Conversion, 65-98.

175 Ifeka-Moller, ‘White Power’. In her social-structural approach, a critique of Horton’s intellectualist theory, Ifeka-Moller argues that frustration at ‘exclusion from sources of secular power’ (i.e. communal deprivation) explains differential responses to mission church and Aladura Christianity in Eastern Nigeria. For Horton and Peel’s rejoinder, see Robin Horton and J. D. Y. Peel, ‘Conversion and Confusion: A Rejoinder on Christianity in Eastern Nigeria’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 10.3,

attention to the way modernising influences have provided significant motivation for conversion.

Research on Igbo Christian conversion has included contributions from historians, social anthropologists, and theologians (mainly Igbo scholars).¹⁷⁶ They divide loosely into two groups: those who focus on sociological factors and secular motives (functionalist approaches), and those who regard conversion as primarily a religious encounter, with sociological factors as catalysts. Representatives of the first group argue that instrumentalist factors, such as communal deprivation¹⁷⁷ or insecurity induced by the colonial encounter,¹⁷⁸ provided the primary motivation for conversion.

Representatives of the second group present Igbo conversion in terms of a power encounter between two systems of salvation, and argue that inherited religious beliefs are the determinant factors. They do not deny the significance of sociological factors, but view them as catalysts rather than causes.¹⁷⁹

This thesis adopts a holistic approach, acknowledging that conversion to Christianity has both social and religious causes. As Ikenga-Metuh rightly observes, scholars tend

1976, 481-98. For further responses to Ifeka-Moller’s thesis, see Okorocha, Religious Conversion, 292;

Ikenga-Metuh, ‘Critique’, 264-66.

176 For surveys of works on Igbo conversion, see Okorocha, Religious Conversion, 10-35; C. N. Ubah,

‘Religious Change among the Ibo during the Colonial Period’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 18, February 1988, 85-7.

177 Ifeka-Moller, ‘White power’, 55-72.

178 F. K. Ekechi, Missionary Enterprise and Rivalry in Igboland 1857-1914, London: Frank Cass, 1972, 114, 147-49. Ekechi also suggests that mission education and Western medicine provided significant motivation for conversion. Ekechi, Missionary, 149; F. K. Ekechi, ‘The Medical Factor in Christian Conversion in Africa: Observations from South-Eastern Nigeria’, Missiology, 21.3, 1993, 289-309.

179 See for example, Okorocha, Religious Conversion, 294-95, xi; Kalu, Embattled Gods, 318-19, 49, 334, 324. Kalu employs the concept of covenant and argues that Igbo appropriation of Christianity involved the breaking of existing primal covenants and the acceptance of a new covenant, a process that was often prolonged due to the enduring quality of inherited religion. The success of the missionary

to stress the one and underplay the other depending on their theoretical or faith assumptions.¹⁸⁰ Despite drawing attention to the importance of social factors, functionalist approaches are reductionist and treat religion in a highly rationalist manner.¹⁸¹ This study stresses the primacy of religious motivation. Most research on African conversion has focussed on the colonial era. This thesis reflects on an encounter between a particular brand of Christianity and a local society in post-colonial Africa, and the process of (re)-conversion that transpired.