Is religious conversion possible?

This is a piece that I wrote 25 years ago -- the date of the file on my home computer was October 23, 1995 -- but I still think the basic point is not wrong. I have made some minor adaptations (by dropping out proper names, for example).

Is it possible to convert someone from one religion to another?

In a trivial sense, of course it is. Anyone with a big enough army can force the people around him to enter certain buildings on certain days and do certain things. After enough repetition, belief will follow. A religion that offers social advantages can attract converts for purely secular reasons. And there are always people who want to be like their friends and therefore join their friends' religion for that reason.

But all these are uninteresting cases, because they have no real reference to anything beyond this world. The more interesting case is this: Is it possible for one person to convert another, when the latter is pondering the issue for himself, in the absence of any secular motivation?  I suspect that the answer here is "No," but this requires explanation. For I do not deny that such conversions take place. C.S. Lewis was such a man, and became famous for his conversion in adulthood. What I deny, to be precise, is not conversion but converting. I deny that in the most serious case, the verb convert can be transitive: Lewis certainly converted to Christianity, but J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson did not convert him.

The point is that religion is rooted in experience and not ratiocination. Therefore, absent secular motivations or the like, persuasion is impossible without that personal experience, in the same way no one can be persuaded to like Mozart until he has heard Mozart. Consider a couple of examples.

I have twice been asked to help someone decide whether a religion is true. When I was at university, a friend once prayed intently for something improbable that she didn't really want; and when she got it she was rather scared. (She was depressed over something involving her current boyfriend, and prayed for a painless way to die that wouldn't make anyone feel guilty. She woke the next morning to find a gas leak in her room.) So she came to me to ask whether this was proof that prayer works. She said she chose me because she knew if she asked her ostentatiously Christian friends they would say Yes, while her ostentatiously atheist friends would say No, in each case categorically and by rote. But she thought I would give the matter serious thought, and she didn't know in advance what I would say.

Some years later my father was attending a Bible study circle lead by a buddy of his, and asked me what I made of the proofs of Christianity that this fellow urged on him. I asked, "Why do you ask me? Why not ask someone else who could give you a more certain answer?" He said that anyone else he asked would give him an answer that he could already predict, so he wasn't interested.

Think about that for a minute.  In my father's eyes, testimony was worthless from someone whose answer he could already guess. Now supposing I gave him an answer, Yes or No. Would he accept it? On the contrary, once I'd answered with any certainty, I would become someone whose answer he could thenceforth guess, and so my testimony would become worthless. I would not have answered any questions for him about the truth or falsity of Christianity; I would only have given him information about me -- namely, that I was now predictable as far as that question goes.
 
In a real sense, then, nothing I could have said would have convinced him either way. If he were predisposed to believe, and I disagreed, I would become in his eyes an Atheist and therefore wrong. If he were predisposed to disbelieve, and I disagreed, I would become in his eyes a Believer and therefore wrong.  Once you are prepared to discount the testimony of people who are (as you think) required to say what they say by blind adherence to some kind of dogma, then you can only convert yourself. And that in turn can take place only when you have had something happen inside you to prepare the way, to make you predisposed to convert. Anyone who tries to convince you of something which you have not experienced in some way -- for which the soil of your mind has not been somehow already prepared -- becomes in your view a lunatic or an idiot, whose testimony cannot be taken seriously. So you will only take seriously the testimony of someone preaching to you a faith which you want to hear, where the hard work of re-setting your emotional disposition (the crucial part of conversion) has already been done by you. In this sense, you can convert to a different religion, but no one else, in the most serious sense, can convert you.