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A generation ago, scholars of comparative religion thrived on notions of congruency and conformity. Religion in all its variety possessed a universal experiential core, a primordium, that, once identified, made homo religiosis more intelligible. Today, scholars of the history of religions are animated by the power of plurality. Many of them reject the notion that religions are grounded in a common essence, nor do they find it very interesting or illuminating to generalize across religious boundaries. When similarities are observed, they are relatively isolated in nature. Perhaps some component—a particular belief or practice—may have analogies elsewhere, but it can only be properly understood in terms of the intrinsic pattern of interrelatedness from which it derives.
This radically pluralist view—increasingly prominent in the academy, though hardly evident in popular discourse—acknowledges the jarring reality of religious differences across the globe and underscores a scholarly preference for description over explanation. A hodgepodge of essays gathered under the title Religious Conversion: Contemporary Practices and Controversies, edited by Christopher Lamb and M. Darrol Bryant, serves as a revealing case in point. Contributors to the volume treat the subject of conversion rather delicately, aware that it is not only a complex concept—certainly impossible to define in any universal sense—but also a particularly "troubling issue" for champions of religious pluralism. While a vast smorgasbord of spiritualities in the West encourages individualized seeking, blending, and movement from one flavor to another, boundary-conscious religious groups, especially in less mobile societies, view conversion with a great deal more anxiety, often with an eye to wider ethnic, economic, or political implications. Conversion may signal a change of religious identity, but it will manifest itself in strikingly different ways depending on the boundaries that are crossed. That is why conversion must first be examined from within its own religious context. An indigenous understanding of conversion, based largely on what participating groups or persons say it is, will shed a great deal more light on the sort of tensions that arise between religious traditions. This is particularly evident when religion provides an anchor or, borrowing from William James, a "personal center of habitual energy" that nurtures and sustains life.
Buddhism, for example, begins with its own conversion story and, through the Awakening of Siddhartha Gautama Sakya, perceives the world according to the principles of karma, an incipient form of the Four Noble Truths, and, ultimately, nirvana. The history of Buddhism is punctuated by the conversions of emperors, entire nations, and recurring debates between "gradualists" and "suddenists." In India today, Dalits (members of the caste formerly known as Untouchables) sometimes convert en masse to Buddhism, though adherents to the new faith view their liberation or moksa primarily in social and political rather than spiritual terms. Meanwhile, converts at Dharma centers in the West resonate with the pratyekabuddha or "solitary realizer" who becomes gradually enlightened in isolation from others. Some Mahayan Buddhists assume that a conscious conversion is not even necessary, since everyone already possesses the Buddha-nature.
A number of religions, including Judaism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, and many forms of Hinduism, have generally avoided proselytizing because they view conversion to their respective faiths as exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. Zoroastrians, or Parsis, in India, for example, may reject "horizontal" conversions—from another faith into their own—based on ethnic exclusivity. On broader cultural and political grounds, Mahatma Gandhi represented the views of many fellow Hindus in his criticism of the missionary enterprise, calling instead for a kind of "vertical" conversion to the higher truths or universal values contained in the religion of one's birth.
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