By Mark Owen - © 2010
Chapter 3 - The experience of conversion
'There are four rules: dramatize every move you make; advertise every move; make every success seem twice as big as it is; and make every failure work for you.' - Jean-Jacques Beineix, film director, interview Film magazine, 1987.
Christians set great store on that supposed transformation of a life which goes by one of several names - conversion, new birth, or just simply 'believing in Christ.'
All churches and sects draw their memberships from two primary sources. Either a person is effectively born into the group, their parents being followers, or else he or she is converted. Conversion may be a simple act of commitment to a statement of faith or it may be a mystical experience, such as the Born Again experience claimed by fundamentalist Christians.
Conversion is predominantly, though not wholly, a phenomenon associated with youth. All the statistics show that far and away the majority of people become Christians or Communists or followers of some guru or other during that critical period of their lives when they are making the painful transition from childhood to adulthood. This is not to deny that people change, sometimes dramatically, at any age, even quite late in life in 'deathbed conversions.' But youth prevails, hence the emphasis on teenagers in the evangelistic efforts of the fundamentalists and others. The god-squads are thick on the ground in some of our universities and colleges.
I was born again (or so I earnestly thought) at the age of 15.
Just what constitutes being born again or conversion is an extremely interesting topic. Some, the Calvinists among them, think, in effect, 'once saved, always saved.' You cannot be lost if you are truly chosen. And if chosen, then you do not choose; there is no choice. Oh those wonderful debates among Calvinists and Arminians, all about predestination and grace and choice and freewill. I loved debating and I was a dedicated Calvinist.
Suffice it to say that by all the tests of the New Testament teachings I was converted. I believed in Christ, that he died for my sins, that he had changed my life. Yes, my life did change, of that I will testify. But more of that in due course. How did it happen? I certainly had little religion in my young days, only that airy-fairy type of vague belief in GOD so many have. Had you asked my parents and grandparents they would have told you they were Christians. They would certainly list themselves as such on the census forms.
Joining in the circle of a Christian fellowship is like being received into a new home circle, a sort of alternative home. In my own case we often had Bible studies in the minister's residence, the rectory, where his largish family (five children) and motherly wife provided an atmosphere of homeliness often lacking in my own surroundings.
Anxious to understand my own conversion and my later 'fall from grace' I have spent some time studying conversion phenomena. My studies lead me to believe that the central motivation for conversion is insecurity. Oh, yes, there are other factors, cultural ones, relationships, and so on, but insecurity is, I believe, like a constant cloud hovering over the lives of many people, a cloud that manifests itself in many ways that may not always be immediately obvious.
In her thoughtful book So the Witch Won't Eat Me (Houghton Mifflin, 1978), Dorothy Bloch puts forward the theory that fear of infanticide is crucial in the early psychological development of children.
Drawing upon the study of fairy tales, coupled with an examination of the lives of 600 patients over 25 years, the author, a psychoanalyst, says she has never found anyone who did not have this underlying fear lurking in their psyche. The parental power over life and death (which is, if you think of it, true, for at a stroke a small child may be - and all-too-often is - despatched from this life by a parent) is highly threatening. It is not difficult to see how this is linked to the stern Father-GOD figure, who both threatens humans with annihilation but then holds out the promise of life if obeyed and believed.
Thus, if this view is correct, insecurity is built into the very innermost being of the growing human. Many, of course, discover in time that their parents, rather than destroying them, truly do nurture, love and provide security for them. But I strongly suspect that if we could study a representative sample of those converted to a religion, any religion (not growing up in a religious household) we would find a pattern of childhood insecurity never resolved in the emerging adult.
Now a person who is Born Again or converted usually starts displaying changes in his or her life. We are all familiar with those dramatic stories of one-time criminals 'converted to Christ' and now living good lives. The Christians love parading these people before us as evidence of the supposed 'power of Christ'. Stories like The Cross and the Switchblade reinforce the myth of religious conversion. The worse the past life the more dramatic the change.
I neither drank nor used tobacco or illegal drugs, nor danced or engaged in sexual activities before I became a Christian so the changes in my life were not as dramatic as they are in some lives. But I was certainly quite convinced in my own mind that I had changed, that life had changed for me and that Christ had done it! People DO change. But the key question is, what changed them? Is it really the ghost of a long-dead Palestinian preacher? This is the central issue we must face.
It is important to note that conversion is not an event unique to the Christian Church. Michael Baumann was an urban terrorist, a member of the notorious Red Army Faction that plagued Germany. He once wrote of his experience of conversion to terrorism. When West Berlin police shot dead one of his friends during a demonstration in 1967 he experienced a tremendous flash and he was convinced at that moment that 'we must now fight without mercy.'
Eastern peoples record many intense experiences of 'enlightenment'. Gautama Buddha immediately comes to mind. And Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the Indian guru, wrote of his experience of becoming 'enlightened' at age 21: 'That night another reality opened its door, another dimension became available. Suddenly it was there - the other reality, the separate reality, the really real or whatever you want to call it. That night I became empty and I became full. I became non-existential and I became existence. That night I died and was reborn.'' These words have a very familiar ring - they could well have been uttered by a newly-converted Christian.
Conversion experiences tend to go in waves, the phenomenon of contagion, seen at times when, for example, a group of schoolgirls all suddenly experience nausea and nobody can find a tangible cause. Conversion was all the rage in Wesley's day. The activities of the Reverend John Wesley in the 18th century prefigured the massive assault on people's credulity that came during the 19th century, continuing into our own time, more recently through the millionaire televangelists. William Sargent has a good description of Wesley's techniques and their link with modern revivalist/evangelical conversion techniques in his book Battle for the Mind (Pan Books - highly recommended).
Horace Walpole said: '[Wesley was] as evidently an actor as Garrick. He spoke his sermon, but so fast, and with so little accent, for I am sure he has often uttered it, for it was like a lesson. There were no parts and eloquence on it; but towards the end he exalted his voice, and acted very ugly enthusiasm.'
Sargent also compares the Wesleyan conversions with effects noted by doctors in cases of war neuroses: 'The mute can talk, the deaf can hear . . .' after treatment of affected personnel. These effects were also common back in 19th century France when Emile Coué worked his miracle cures. But Coué did not use mumbo-jumbo, or have the effrontery of the spiritual healer who claims 'divine' assistance for his productive work. Coué knew the cures were in the minds of his patients.
'The leaders of successful faiths have never . . . dispensed entirely with physiological weapons in their attempts to confer spiritual grace on their fellow men. Fasting, chastening of the flesh by scourging [whipping] and physical discomfort, regulation of breathing, disclosure of awesome mysteries, drumming, dancing, singing, inducement of panic, fear, weird or glorious lighting, incense, intoxicant drugs - these are only some of the many methods used to modify normal brain functions for religious purposes.' (Sargent: Battle for the Mind, pages 79-80).
A study undertaken by Starbuck in the early part of the 20th century showed clearly that the age of religious conversion in girls reached two peaks - at thirteen years and again at sixteen. Very significant indeed! At that period of history the average age for the onset of menstruation would have been about thirteen so there is at least here a strong hint of a possible link between sexuality and developing sexual awareness and religious conversion.
In this connection we have further evidence provided from the many stories of the experiences of young girls in receiving religious visions or beholding apparently miraculous events. In 1858 an event occurred (or, more correctly, was said to have occurred) in a remote French village, destined to have far-reaching consequences in the religious world. No centre of the miraculous could equal that which grew up at Lourdes, a little town nestling in the foothills of the Pyrenees, about 220 km from Bordeaux. Mind you, many other places have tried to gain such fame but none has surpassed Lourdes. It was here that 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous was visited by the goddess Mary on 11 February 1858. At 12.30 on that day, for that is the precise detail given. (Presumably the child had some sort of timepiece with her!)
Bernadette was peasant-born, very poor and able neither to read nor write. She was of delicate health and an asthmatic to boot but had until recently been compelled to work as a shepherdess at Bartres. Now she was back at Lourdes, to prepare for her first communion and, being of strongly religious inclination, no doubt in a state of spiritual exaltation. On the day of the visitation she went with her younger sister, Toinette, and a friend, Jeanne Abadie, to collect firewood. An icy stream crossed the path they were on. The other two girls took off their stockings and sabots and went barefoot through the water. Bernadette, however, fearing a chill would bring on her asthma, did not follow at first. The two ran ahead, Jeanne making some rude remarks about Bernadette as she went.
Bernadette, after some thought, began to remove her footwear. She was near a cave, or grotto, in the rock face. Suddenly she heard a great noise 'like a storm coming,' in her own words. 'I looked across the water at the grotto and saw that a bush in one of the openings was waving about as if it was in a strong wind. Almost at the same time a cloud of colour like gold came out of the grotto, and soon after a young, beautiful lady, more beautiful than any I have ever seen, came out and stood in the opening above the bush.' Bernadette knelt and fingered her rosary 'which she carried over her right arm' (a significant statement; a very pious accoutrement for a young girl out gathering firewood!).
The account continued to describe Mary speaking to her, the return of the other girls (who saw nothing) and how she then waded across the river, the water seeming now to her to be but lukewarm. In time there were more apparitions and the people of the area began to make pilgrimages to the place. In all Bernadette met with Mary eighteen times, according to a tablet set up at the grotto. Those who accompanied her on all subsequent visits neither heard nor saw anything unusual. But they still believed - in spite of this awkward fact. The crowds grew. Asking the lady for a name on one of her visits, Bernadette received the nonsensical reply, 'I am the Immaculate Conception.' Bernadette was told by the apparition to tell the world to come to Lourdes. The priests were commanded to build a chapel there, to arrange processions and to drink from and bathe in the miraculous stream of water, said to have been started by Bernadette scratching at the earth in the cave, and to 'eat of the grass which is there.' (Perhaps she had heard of that early Christian sect called the Grazers who crawled around naked eating grass!).
So today, if we visit Lourdes, which still flourishes in the face of all the doubters and critics, we see that Mary's instructions were carried out. To the right of the grotto is a life-size statue of the Virgin Goddess, in the centre a solid altar. Above, on top of an overarching cliff, has been built a large church. Its doors face the cave and to right and left are wide ramps, so that wheelchairs and other conveyances may be brought up bearing the sick seeking aid and comfort from the Christ-god. But only some - very few in fact - who visit the shrine go away cured. The deity is evidently very selective. But cures aplenty are claimed and paraded forth as proof of divine assistance. Now there are cures, perhaps many, but they are such as one might expect when dealing with illnesses that have their genesis deep within the human psyche.
Above and behind the altar in the grotto hang crutches and abdominal belts, discarded by the healed ones, placed there as trophies to the power of the Christ-god. But George Bernard Shaw, in his usual insightful way, remarked once that he considered Lourdes to be a blasphemous place, for they kept there all the crutches and wheelchairs of those who walked away cured, but among these trophies was not to be found one wooden leg, one glass eye, nor one hairpiece. After all, only some diseases and disabilities start in the mind. Cures there may be, for which we can be thankful, but cures from deity? I think not!
Then there was the Maid of Orleans, Jeanne d'Arc. It was also from the French countryside that Jeanne d'Arc burst forth into history - and into legend! It is difficult to do justice to the complex figure of the Maid of Orleans in a brief space. But it was at the age of thirteen, that she first heard her 'voices', and she died at the stake at the tender age of nineteen, so her whole 'miraculous' life was that of a teenager.
Her story is one of intense drama, well portrayed in several movies, but surely none more intense and gripping than the Jeanne portrayed by Leelee Sobieski (Joan of Arc, 1999). Jeanne was undoubtedly impelled by powerful forces. But things are not always as they seem, especially when dealing with religious miracles. Jeanne was, like Bernadette, an unhealthily religious child, decking church statuary with flowers, praying frequently, and preferring to attend church services rather than go dancing with the other village girls. It is surely significant that her voices began to affect her when the child reached the age of thirteen. (I shall return to Jeanne d'Arc at a later stage in my narrative.)
Frequently at the centre of supposedly psychic activity, e.g., poltergeist manifestations, is a child, more often female than male, at about this critical age of transition. As we have seen, young girls reaching or passing through the age of puberty are more likely to have mystical religious experiences of one kind or another than any other group in the community. Bernadette was fourteen, Jeanne thirteen.
Coming closer to our own time we have, In 1917 the famous 'miracle of Fatima' - when three children in Portugal were said to have received a visitation from the peripatetic Mary (who seems to be by far the most active member of the hierarchy of the Christian heavens). Their ages are variously given in the stories but they appear to be between ten and thirteen and two of them were females, including the thirteen-year-old.
Thus we see that religious conversion is not quite the clearcut process it appears to be. There are many factors at play and the experience of conversion is not unique to the Christian faith. If it is not unique then perhaps there are other factors at work here. Insecurity, puberty, and not least of all, pressure, the pressure exerted by the friend who believes he or she must see you 'saved' or you will end up in hell, the friend who drags you along to an evangelistic meeting where a smooth-talking gospel salesperson will exert more pressure.
I know what I am talking about for there was a time (to my shame) when I was involved in this whole game of 'winning souls for Christ.' I remember once being so intent on saving a sinner that I accosted a drunken man on a train in Melbourne, helping him off at his station and taking him home. Alas, home turned out to be a boarding house, a fact not immediately obvious, and the man started producing chicken and other goodies for us to eat. An angry landlady soon appeared in the kitchen and beat my drunken acquaintance with a broomstick while I did some beating as well - I beat a hasty retreat, vowing to take more care next time I tried to aid a sinner.
