The Torpor Of ‘Converts’

But then, that's what makes them suspect, what raises the eyebrows of the already faithful and the question of who, really, belongs to the faith, and to whom it belongs, and above all who will determine where it goes. Paul, the one-time persecutor of the troublesome Jesus-followers, and not any of the original disciples who actually knew Christ, is credited with transforming Christianity from a radical Jewish sect into the universal Church. This has long been a subject of contention, or at least conversation. What was lost, and what was added in, when the original encounter was supplanted by the message, the idea, and, eventually the institution? For some purists today, that's where it all went wrong. For others, elsewhere: Everyone picks their own beginning. The self-possession of the convert, so much a double-edged sword within their chosen confines, is also what makes them a source of fascination in the wider world of our secular modernity. For years now we've been told in reporting and opinion pages about the great swathes—or small, indicative pockets—of people taking up traditional faiths, largely Roman Catholicism, though with some seekers finding their home in the presumably even more traditional Eastern Orthodoxy. The most famous of these adult converts is the current American vice-president, JD Vance, who, under the twin influences of Rod Dreher and Peter Thiel, entered into the Church in 2019. Against the arid monoculture of liberalism, or else against the florid multitudes of multiculturalism, these neophytes seek out the depths and the heights, adventure and homecoming, the paradoxical and the irresistibly rational. This morass, in any case, is how people tend to talk about converts and conversions and the questions around which these words turn.