What Can Conversion Memoirs Tell Us?

Eventually, Ash gradually discovers an attraction not only to religious practice, but also to the wild disharmony of beliefs. Her mother slips into the late stages of dementia, and Ash yearns for a new source of meaning, something meaningful and hard-won. “I was there to fight,” she writes of her first visits to religious services, “to be destroyed.” She tries to understand why she feels called to Christianity, even though parts of its history disgust her. Ash's slow courtship of Vera is touching, both because it's colored by her impending loss and because of her embrace of the supernatural. “I once believed that prayer was wanting something you couldn’t hope to get,” Ash writes. Instead, she begins to see it as “radical, active and quite literal acceptance.” Remembering the memoirs “A labor of love“, which was written by the philosopher Gillian Rose when she died of cancer, and which opens with the epigraph “Keep your mind in hell and do not despair”, Ash writes:

Prayer makes me talk with my mind in hell. The version of me that prays speaks from a more truthful perspective than I ever manage in everyday life, where I always try to maintain a certain lightness, a dissatisfaction with those around me. There is nothing like saying a prayer: it requires you to weed out what you cannot or should not pray for because you imagine you are talking to something beyond the human world. Whether you believe in God or not, if I were to tell you, “Try to talk in your head as if you were talking to God,” it would sound something completely different from your usual way of speaking.

Even though Ash touches on the less accessible parts of the faith, there is a hint of moderation here too. “You are imagining yourself,” she writes. “Try” to talk “as if you were talking to God.” Perhaps, Ash suggests, you can pretend to benefit from prayer. But her anguished attempts to convey her despair into another dimension reflect something else: for it to really matter, you have to believe.

The purpose of Osgood's book is to make religious conversion understandable to the non-believer; Meanwhile, many of Ash's sources resist such intelligibility at every turn, fearing that a religion compatible with the secular world is not a sufficient religion at all. The tension between accessibility and maintaining a limited tradition is existential for every faith, especially since religion has gradually changed over the centuries to allow for greater individual choice. “Chance of salvationLincoln A. Mullen's A History of the 2017 American Conversion convincingly details how modern religion shaped—and was shaped by—the American project, giving rise to new belief systems, hybrid theologies, a backlash against fundamentalism, and a more individualized approach to faith. For some this was an ingenious innovation, for others an opportunistic distortion. “Their religion,” wrote one critic of such revivalist practices, “apart from the occasional whirlwind of excitement in which they are allowed to manifest themselves at will, may be said to be characteristically superficial and cold.”

In the religious landscape depicted in Osgood and Ash's books, conversion seems more accessible than ever before, as the Internet offers endless opportunities for chance contact with alternative versions of life. (Max, a convert from Don't Forget We're Here to Stay, is radicalized toward a conservative Christian faith after being shown YouTube videos of anti-abortion pastors.) What's striking is that their subjects seem to choose faith because they want to approach it the hard way—a way that challenges the sensibilities of the modern world. A woman named Orianna who appears in “Godstruck” enters a nunnery in part because she is drawn to lifelong celibacy. “When you marry someone, you give up a lot of things, including some things we would call freedom,” she tells Osgood. “You're attached to someone, you're attached to someone. So it's something similar.”

There's a moment in Don't Forget when Ash attends an evangelical youth meeting that she finds aesthetically and politically unappealing. (Seeing the word FAITH! spray-painted on a building upon arrival, she takes a drag from her cigarette and tells herself to pull herself together.) A teenager approaches her and tells her that she has a word from God to share, and that word is “Beloved.” Ash explains that it's an evangelism process called treasure hunting—listening for God's voice to share with strangers—and although she doesn't consider herself a Christian yet, she is surprisingly moved to tears. This encounter, like many others in the book, reflects the inherent problem of writing about faith: the realm of faith can be so personal, so bizarre, that it requires a language that cannot be counted, verified, or verified. But religion has its own language for the elements that give rise to its centripetal force: to be set apart, to be purified, to be chosen, to be chosen, to be consecrated, to be redeemed, to be sanctified. Transformed. ♦