A massive undertaking has produced a massive book: 836 pages on conversion across space and time in the Christian era. Although the author acknowledges neglect of certain regions – the Middle East (except for Christian origins), Oceania, South Korea and Canada – the range of lands and periods covered is immense, extending from first-century Judaea to contemporary Nigeria. Rarely do books attempt so much. David Kling, who is professor and chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Miami, has not merely touched on this great variety of fields but has managed to absorb the secondary literature on each of them so that the reader, assured by 133 pages of notes, can be confident of having a sure-footed guide over the terrain. Possessing an Evangelical background (his father's conversion testimony begins the book) and special expertise in the history of American Evangelicalism (his first book was on revivals in north-west Connecticut at the opening of the nineteenth century), Kling nevertheless manages to tell his story with fair-minded appreciation of a wide range of Christian traditions. He addresses the causes of conversion as much as its results. He warms to accounts of mass conversion as well as to testimonies of individual struggle. And he is concerned with the varieties of the phenomenon of conversion: from paganism to Christianity, from one denomination to another, from nominal adhesion to monastic vocation, to vital faith, to fresh emphases, to lifelong exploration and so on. A history of Christian conversion represents a remarkably comprehensive enterprise.
The book begins with the record of the New Testament, where Kling finds multiple models of conversion with scope for selective retrieval over subsequent centuries. No single pattern is evident in the history of the Early Church either, though Augustine's experience, because so vividly recounted, became a paradigm for future generations. For the early medieval period, Kling distinguishes between conversion and Christianisation, the process whereby society became permeated with Christian values. Material culture, he suggests, provides evidence about the latter rather than the former, and so the book draws relatively little from archaeology. Mass conversions in the Middle Ages were normally the outcome of political decisions and often of coercion, which Kling clearly deplores, quoting Roger Bacon, who in the thirteenth century declared that ‘faith did not enter this world by arms but through the simplicity of preaching’ (p. 167). By contrast, accounts of interior lives, complete with spiritual struggles, became gradually more common from roughly 1000 onwards. The continental Reformation, Counter-Reformation, early English Protestantism and the rise of Pietism and English Evangelicalism follow in succession. The disjunction of the last two from the Puritans and the Great Awakening in America is rather artificial, entailing the separation of John Wesley from George Whitefield and leading to the suggestion, which would be hard to justify, that the Awakening formed ‘a distinctively American evangelical culture’ (p. 361) since the two sides of the Atlantic long continued to share a common Evangelical ethos. The American Evangelical tradition is pursued down to Billy Graham, with other chapters on Catholics in colonial America (though not afterwards) and Protestants and Pentecostals in Latin America. Towards the end of the book chapters are organised more in terms of geography than of chronology. China receives three chapters, India two and Africa three, so that the global spread of Christianity in the modern world is amply covered. A conclusion summarises the evidence as it relates to a variety of topics stretching over the two millennia that have been reviewed.
Kling shows strong awareness that his subject is controversial. He discusses, for example, the controversy in India over the legitimacy of any conversion, pointing out that in mass movements the outcastes, not the missionaries, took the first step and that for Christianity to take root it had to be indigenised. Kling's firmest standpoint is against the contention of Jean and John Comaroff that missions constituted a ‘colonization of consciousness’. Their case founders, he holds, because they assume an exaggerated role for missionaries and a corresponding minimising of indigenous agency. In general, however, Kling is eclectic in his appreciation of different points of view in the historiography. The author's approach, he says, is that ‘Christian conversion, while an irreducibly religious phenomenon, comes in a variety of psychocultural forms and invariably takes place within a historical framework shaped by a multiplicity of factors and influences’ (p. 590). That perspective allows him to let the treatment of the issues in the various debates that have arisen in the secondary literature mould his discussion. Chapters do not normally take sides. Kling does not eschew theory, recognising, for instance, the importance of Robin Horton's understanding of the readiness of parts of Africa to adopt Christianity (and Islam) as a corollary of being opened to the wider colonial world. Kling's favourite analysis of conversion, drawn on several times, is the seven-stage model proposed by Lewis Rambo in 1993, but he does not allow himself to be held captive by any single technique. At times, as the author himself remarks (p. 629), the narrative can divert from the history of Christian conversion to matters relating to the peoples being evangelised and can even show resemblances to K. S. Latourette's monumental work A history of the expansion of Christianity, but to disentangle the story of conversion from that of growth is extremely difficult. The possibility of comparison with Latourette is itself significant. Kling has produced a study which has the same magisterial quality but bases itself on a far richer body of previous research than his predecessor had available. And whereas Latourette needed seven volumes for his account, Kling has condensed his findings into a single one. That is a fine achievement.
