The Right to Convert

In the roughly two thousand years of its existence, the Church of Christ on earth has known periods of relative stability and periods of acute instability. There is no doubt what kind of a period we are living through now. Protestantism has been in almost constant turmoil for fifty years with theological and ecclesiastical divisions crossing denominational lines and such a bedlam of opinion being voiced that it is difficult at times to perceive what, if anything, is meant by Protestantism.

Earlier during this period, more than a few sensitive souls slipped away to find spiritual stability in the monolithic shelter of the church of Rome. Now that shelter is no longer available, for the winds of change are blowing through that church with an even greater force. It is impossible today in ecumenical discussion to know immediately whether a speaker is Catholic or Protestant. Some of the most radical ideas I have recently heard concerning doctrine, liturgy, and Christian action have come from Catholic clergy. The total picture now is one of confusion and instability paralleled only by the times of the Reformation and the first four centuries of the Church.

It is in this situation that I raise the issue of conversion, meaning the turning of a man or woman from unbelief to belief or from one kind of belief to another. The phrase “the right to convert” has two meanings, according to whether we are using the verb intransitively or transitively. Intransitively it means my right to change to another religion. Transitively it means my right to attempt to persuade someone else to accept the religion I believe to be true.

The question of conversion is bound to come to the surface in a period of instability like ours. With no strong convictions locking us into the traditional denominations and with a rampant secularism undermining basic beliefs in every church, “conversion” means something very different from what it meant a generation or two ago. The questions used to be of this sort: “Why did so-and-so convert to Catholicism?” and “How can we convert the heathen?” Now they are more likely to be: “Why shouldn’t I become a Buddhist?” and “What right have we to impose Christianity on anyone else?”

Many of the hymns in our book were written during what was roughly the last great period of stability. That’s why we often find them so unsatisfactory today. They date from a time when nearly everyone in the Western world was securely lodged in a church home labeled Presbyterian, Anglican, Methodist, Baptist. Catholic, or whatever. It was considered perfectly proper, indeed desirable, that occasionally someone from outside should be converted into our church home, but calamitous, if not unthinkable, that anyone should be converted out. Beyond these church homes lay the heathen world, usually thought of as distant and foreign. The accepted view within the churches was that there was an obligation to export the Gospel to the heathen, and despite the caricatures of this missionary effort, we should recognize the heroism and devotion behind it and the lasting effects of much that was done. What troubles us now is not the adventure of the missionary but the attitude of those at home. I balk at asking a congregation to sing the old missionary hymn “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains” since it contains these lines: “Can we whose souls are lighted with wisdom from on high,/Can we to men benighted the lamp of life deny?” However differently you and I may conceive of Christian mission today, at least we would agree in saying: “Let’s not put it that way.”

Perhaps some reader is now thinking: “Yes, thank God we’ve finally got rid of that old-fashioned idea that we should export our religion. I’ve always thought we should leave other people with the religion that suits them.” May I quickly add that this notion of a religious status quo to be respected is equally old-fashioned. We are not living in a world of fixed religious frontiers. We are in perhaps the most fluid situation for faith the world has ever known. Conversion is happening on a huge scale whether we like it or not. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and the secular ideologies of Communism and nationalism are competing for the soul of modern man. In many parts of the world these faiths are moving in as tribal religions die out. Perhaps some Christians are now ready to write off the command of Christ, “Go forth therefore and make all nations my disciples” (Matt. 28:19). The indications are, however, that others are hearing and obeying in the name of their lord. There has been no more missionary-minded faith since the early days of Christianity and Islam than modern Communism. One way or another across a rapidly contracting world, this is the era of conversion.

Let’s look first at the right to convert in the sense of our right to choose a new religion. You may want to say that this is a fundamental right recognized universally as “freedom of worship.” But this right has not been recognized in the past, nor is it recognized everywhere today. When all Europe lay under the sway of the medieval church, there was no right to convert; the very suggestion that you might be toying with other religious ideas than orthodox Catholicism was enough to threaten you with the ultimate sanctions of church and state. Nor was there any right to convert in most of the Protestant states formed after the Reformation. The Pilgrims sought out this land as an escape from enforced conformity, but we cannot pretend that the new society they created here happily recognized everyone’s right to convert.

Real religious liberty has grown very slowly within Christendom. Until comparatively recent times, the ideal was nourished of a community in which everyone accepted the prevailing religion. Not to do so was regarded as a crime against the state. Anyone asserting a right to convert to another religion was a “miscreant”—literally, one who believes wrongly.

One or two countries still deny or legally hamper the right to convert. In others, converting from the established faith leads to social ostracism and loss of rights. But the ideal of complete religious freedom is now accepted by the leadership of both Protestant and Catholic churches. The document on religious liberty proclaimed by Vatican II was a landmark in this struggle.

But there is a difference between a theoretical acceptance of the right to convert and our reaction when such a right is exerted in our own immediate circle. Religion is tied in with so many other social traditions and prejudices that anyone asserting the right to convert is apt to run into trouble. When the hero of Love Story presents his fiancée of Italian-Catholic background to his thoroughly WASP parents, the freeze-out that followed has religious implications. These two young people had no thought of converting, but we realize that his father is typical of many of his generation who would infinitely rather that their children lapsed quietly and decently from conventional Protestantism than conscientiously embrace another faith. The question is: Do you and I really admit the right of persons dear to us to convert from the faith in which they were raised?

There is, of course, a question of maturity. I am not suggesting that children should be encouraged to convert to any religion that happens to take their passing fancy, and we have a right to caution against conversion under the influence of some attractive personality or temporary passion. But I am saying that in this age of religious instability we must assert the right of any mature person to follow the truth as he sees it, no matter how wrongheaded it seems to us. Genuine religion is a matter of free choice. “Choose you this day whom you will serve,” said Joshua to the people of Israel. “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” We have a duty to search for the truth that is offered us, a responsibility toward whatever light is given, and the right to convert.

Christians, of all people, should be prepared to grant the right of free inquiry and free decision. For if we believe that Jesus Christ is indeed “the way, the truth, and the life,” we cannot be afraid of religious freedom. We need to recapture the confidence once nobly expressed by John Milton:

Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injury by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?

“A free and open encounter.” These words remind us of the other way in which we speak of the right to convert: our right to proclaim and persuade in the name of the Truth we believe. From the beginning the Christian Gospel was presented to the world in a free and open encounter. It was a missionary faith. The apostles were, by definition, those who were “sent out”—and sent out to convert, to make disciples. No other kind of Christianity is found in the New Testament. If we today meet as Christians at worship, if we find strength in the faith and inspiration in Christian service, we owe all this to those who long ago went out to convert. When St. Paul stood on an Asian promontory and had a vision of a European beckoning him with the words, “Come over and help us,” it never occurred to him to reply: “Why should I? They’ve got their own religion.” The Gospel—the evangel—immediately developed a verb; to “evangelize” was part of what it meant to be a Christian.

What has panned to evangelism in our day? Why is there an almost visible tremor of resistance when a congregation is summoned to go out and evangelize? There is intense evangelistic activity among the churches and sects that are regarded as narrow or fanatical, but the mainline churches seem to have suffered a fearful loss of nerve. Why? What makes our traditional congregations so loathe to commit themselves to the work of evangelism, so terrified of the right to convert?

There seem to be two major reasons.

First, there is the confusion between evangelism and proselytism. Proselytism is an arrogant and often unscrupulous attempt to win converts to one’s own particular brand of religion. If members of one church set out to recruit members from other churches or faiths by offering all kinds of inducements and threats on the assumption that only in their church can anyone be saved, that is proselytism. It may come as a shock to many Christians that some of the strongest words Jesus ever used were in condemnation of this sort of thing. Addressing a particular school of religious leaders he said: “Alas for you, lawyers and Pharisees, hypocrites! You travel over sea and land to win one convert, and when you have won him you make him twice as fit for hell as you are yourselves.” He is talking of fanatically religious people whose aim is to thrust their own brand of religion on others and who deny others the right to discover a greater truth for themselves. “You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces: you do not enter yourselves, and when others are entering, you stop them.” This is the tragedy of proselytism: it not only acts with a ruthless imperialism but actually hinders the discovery of the Gospel of Christ.

What has made evangelism a dirty word for some in our day is actually an experience of proselytism. We have seen people of a ferocious religious intolerance win over to their views some decent soul who thereupon in the name of God is transformed into a fanatic. We have known religious scrap-hunters who would do anything to convert their neighbor to their narrow community with its suffocating rules. So we tend to say: “Let’s try to be Christians and leave others alone.”

But this is to confuse evangelism with proselytism. To put it briefly: The proselytizer is the one who grabs his neighbor by the throat saying: “I have the whole truth; accept it or be damned!” The evangelist is the one who says: “I have found something wonderful; I have found the Christ; come and see!” These two attitudes are as different as heaven and hell. The true evangelist forswears all pressure, all physical or mental bullying. He is not concerned primarily with the expansion of his own particular religious community or with the success of his own techniques. He simply knows what Christ has done for him and means to him, and longs that others should share this experience. He is concerned with people, people in their deepest needs, and not with triumphant argument or spectacular results. He wants to be an instrument of the Holy Spirit, a communicator of Christ. And he quietly asserts the right to convert, knowing that it is not he but Christ who really does the converting.

Here we come to the second, and more serious, reason why we have muted the right to convert. Is our failure to evangelize not in the end traceable to a weakness of belief, a lack of total commitment to Christ? If he does not really mean all that much in our lives, if he is not really central, then naturally we have nothing we feel is important enough to pass on. It is when we realize what Christ means in our lives, when we awake to the thought of what it would mean to try to live without him, that we are irresistibly drawn to make him known. The “right to convert” is a rather pompous way of expressing this impulse, but the answer to anyone who says, “You have no right to try to bring others to Christ,” is, “When I happily share all my other enthusiasms and discoveries, why should I bottle up what means more to me than anything else?” The first disciples were told by the authorities in Jerusalem after Pentecost that they were not “to speak at all nor teach in the name of Jesus,” and their reply was: “We cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard.”

Evangelism began some years before that. The Fourth Gospel tells usthat Andrew met Jesus in the company of John the Baptist. “The first thing he did,” the story goes on, “was to find his brother Simon. He said to him, ‘We have found the Christ.’ He brought him to Jesus.” That is evangelism. It happens in a thousand ways. There is no pattern. There is only the deep desire that others should know who Christ is and what he can be for them.

Around us are thousands who profess no faith at all, who are totally unconnected with any religious community. If Christ means to us what we say he does, can we have no desire that they should find him too? May the Spirit move among the churches, not only to reanimate our faith, but also to help us become more outgoing, more committed to evangelizing. Somewhere there is this week a piece of evangelism for each of us, in his own way, to do. For the Lord is still saying to us all: “Go … and make disciples.”

David H. C. Read is minister of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City. He was born in Scotland and has the B.D. from New College, Edinburgh. He previously served as first chaplain of the University of Edinburgh and a chaplain to the Queen in Scotland. The latest of his many books is “Religion Without Wrappings.”

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.