Introduction

1

Ebrahim¹ sits across from me in a small room in his new Protestant church in North Rhine-Westphalia. He is a 32-year-old refugee² from Iran who, like most other refugees interviewed for this study, had converted to Christianity from Shia Islam in Iran and was religiously persecuted. Also like others, he explained that he practiced Christianity in secret and that a police raid of the underground house church he frequented in Teheran lead to his arrest and subsequent forced migration: “In Iran, I was praying in the church. The church is not always in one house. For example, one time it is there, tomorrow somewhere else. It is not consistent. This week one can pray, the next week not. Sometimes when the house is not safe, nobody can pray. Once I have prayed in a house and the neighbor used the telephone and the police came. Okay, you all go home, but don’t leave town. Then they called back and said I have to return to the police right away. And I left, done. Not again to the police. I didn’t wait. The lawyer said, leave immediately. If you stay, then problem. First leave, then think about a solution.”

2

Ebrahim’s conversion story and the stories of other Iranian refugees interviewed for this study are intimately connected to the processes of religious contacts, persecution, religious socialization, and forced migration from Iran to Germany, which is demonstrated below.

3

Ebrahim is one of many refugees who came to Germany during the height of the so-called refugee crisis in 2015, which gained intensity in the course of the Syrian civil war and other humanitarian and political crises. The German Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge, or BAMF (Federal Office for Migration and Refugees), recorded approximately 1.1 million asylum applications in 2015 alone (Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge 2016). Ensuing rapid cultural and religious contacts can be conceptualized with Pratt’s (1991) term contact zone: Middle Eastern, Iranian, North African, and German cultures, as well as multiple religions, negotiate their standings in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, translating into polarized publics. On one hand, we find adherents of a pro-immigration Willkommenskultur (welcoming culture). On the other hand, we find resistance groups with an anti-immigration, anti-Islam, and German nationalist agenda, such as the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West (PEGIDA) (Frindte and Dietrich 2017).

4

Ebrahim encounters a climate of public mistrust of refugees and of skepticism of their place within German society. This climate is fashioned by media discourses in two major ways: first, refugees have been associated with the umbrella term “Muslims” and have been projected as “suspect communities” and as threats to an ascribed Christian European Culture (Müller 2018; see also Juran and Broer 2017).³ A second source of mistrust are the recent so-called mass conversions of Muslim refugees to Christianity that have been highly publicized and criticized. While reliable official counts of these conversions have not been published,⁴ German mainstream media and individual churches have reported a high influx. For instance, the Alpha and Omega Persian community in Hamburg was featured in the documentary Abschied vom Islam: Wenn Flüchtlinge Christen werden (Departure from Islam: When Refugees Become Christians) of the North German Broadcasting Company (NDR) for holding mass baptisms of recent Iranian refugees in public lakes and indoor public swimming pools. Another well-publicized church is the Dreieinigkeitsgemeinde der Selbständigen Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche (SELK) (Trinity Church of the Independent Evangelical Lutheran Church) in Berlin-Steglitz. This church has grown from 150 predominantly German congregational members before 2015 to almost 1600 predominantly Iranian members in 2017, as stated by its pastor, Gottfried Martens (personal communication, see also Ragg 2017).

5

German and international media coverage has been debating the authenticity of these conversions. The German magazine Der Stern asks whether or not the conversions are just a means to expedite asylum processes (Ivitis 2016) while nevertheless acknowledging that converting to another religion from Islam is not easy for refugees since they often face ostracism from families or accusations of apostasy in German refugee camps.⁵ One of the more critical accounts is the British The Lip TV, whose hosts claim a mutual insincerity between asylum-seekers and churches in Germany and accuse evangelicals around the world of misusing this “fraud” for their own propaganda purposes (2015). These media discourses lead to “a cultivation of the reputation for possessing secrets” (Jones 2014, 59) by reporting concealment, not necessarily a secret itself, which then gains social force (see also Taussig 1999).

6

In this environment, spiritual matters regarding Ebrahim’s and other Iranian refugee converts’ religion, previously reserved for the private realm, now are subject to public debate and regulated through the neoliberal concept of transparency (Manderson et al. 2015; Han 2015). The dynamics of secrecy and transparency are situated in social relations, institutions, and technologies, and demarcate the private/public divide (Manderson et al. 2015; Teft 1980). In Germany, this is evidenced by religious organizations going public about baptisms of recent refugees: for instance, the Association of Protestant Churches and the Association of Protestant Free Churches recently published new guidelines for handling baptism requests among asylum seekers and for discussing the consequences of apostasy for Muslims converting to Christianity.⁶ Moreover, the pastors of Protestant churches of the EKD, or Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland (Evangelical Church in Germany), who were interviewed for this study negotiate their standing given general social pressures to be transparent and feel compelled to bring the private sacrament of baptism, as well as refugees’ conversion processes in general, into the public debate. Some pastors publicly announced that they intend to make their baptism courses stricter to prevent refugees from obtaining their baptism certificates solely for asylum purposes. Others claim that they treat baptism as a type of Seelsorge (spiritual guidance) and that they perceive themselves as facilitators of a relationship between God and the converts. They argue that they, as mere humans, are not qualified to pass judgment on God’s work in refugees and refer to biblical history as evidence of God working repeatedly through migration (personal communication).

7

Secrecy and transparency also are means by which refugees shape their intersubjective lives within oppressive societal forces (Manderson et al. 2015). Refugees, as social persons, are the products of repeated individual and group socialization through hiding and revealing signs of their Christian conversion within various religious and political environments. In terms of secrecy, the converts learn to acquire Christian practices and rituals in secret in Iran and are concerned about hiding them from the Iranian public or even from family members. In Germany, they are pressed to be transparent and to propel their Christian identity into the open. When they apply for asylum, for instance, they are interviewed on the legitimacy of their faith by the German migration authorities. A controversial Glaubensprüfung (faith test) is administered and examines whether refugees are so spiritually moved by their new beliefs that this emotionality translates into their daily activities; they receive asylum if they can convince the interviewers that these activities would be continued in their home countries, which would then result in persecution (Franz 2017).⁷ The refugees’ preparation for such faith tests is extensive, and some hire lawyers to instruct them on appropriate answers, which additionally shapes their Christian selves. These pulls between secrecy and transparency are part of the converts’ reality and regulate their religious experience through technologies of social control (see Foucault 1977).

8

This study traces the formation of refugees’ new Christian identities through various stages (Rambo 1993) in narratives collected from interviews. These stages involve their first contacts with Christianity in Iran, the Iranian government’s censorship of Christian practices, their social exclusion in Iranian society and in refugee camps in Germany after their forced migration, and their integration into new German church communities. The study does not focus on or make claims about the “authenticity” of these conversions. Instead, it examines the correlation between refugees’ conversion to Christianity, religious contacts, and forced migration within tense religious fields (Bourdieu 1990; Dianteill 2003) in Germany and Iran. It argues that the dynamics of secrecy (Herzfeld 2009; Jones 2014; Stünkel 2017) and transparency (Manderson et al. 2015; Han 2015) are highly influential in shaping refugees’ new Christian identities. While the analysis of transparency has been controversial in the social sciences and lacks conceptual clarity (see Alloa and Thomä 2018; Han 2015, among many), cultural processes of secrecy, specifically, have gained considerable attention in anthropological and social studies for their ability to reveal the impacts of censorship, control of knowledge, and of the disclosure and concealment of identities. In its early stages since the Enlightenment, the anthropological scholarship of secrecy was largely restricted to particular bounded domains, such as secret societies, trade secrets, state secrets, or unexplored geographic regions, that rule out secrecy’s potential to influence cultural meaning (Jones 2014; see also Herdt 2003). Simmel (1906) was among the first to recognize secrecy as central to the control of knowledge within societies and paved the way for the analysis of secrecy as a form of cultural production (Herdt 2003). Both anthropology and sociology began to focus on “secrecy’s potential as a generative mechanism for constituting self, society, and perhaps most importantly, culture” (Jones 2014, 54; see also Lowry 1980; Teft 1980).

Data and Methodology

9

Germany has seen predominantly Iranian Muslims converting to Christianity, despite the fact that the number of Iranian refugees is relatively small compared to the number of Syrian refugees, for instance. Table 1 shows that Iranian refugees comprise less than 10% compared to the total number of Syrian refugees in 2015.

10

Many Christian sources, including pastors of the Protestant EKD in North Rhine-Westphalia, suggest that these conversions originate in Iran (personal communication, see also Thomas 2018).⁸ These pastors explain the conversions as the result of divine intervention in Iran in the form of Wunder (miracles) or Erweckung (awakening, revival) and of Christ appearing in the refugees’ dreams. Christian news sources argue these conversion are the result of various online international missionary organizations that have been increasing their outreach through private satellite TV stations that circumvent Iranian censorship.⁹ The Christian Post reports a massive rise of Christian youths, which compels Iranian religious authorities, such as the Ayatollah Alavi Boroujerdi and Makarem Shirazi, to implement strategies counteracting foreign Christian influences (Zaimov 2017). The Iranian Christian news agency Mohabat News (2017) also underlines a high rate of converted Iranian youths in spite of a reported Islamic indoctrination through families and educational systems and in spite of the serious risks involved with denouncing Shia Islam. The Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) calls the Iranian underground church the fastest growing church in the world with over a million followers and with tech-savvy young people leading the way (Thomas 2018).

11

The data for this study is drawn from an ethnographic investigation that involves participant observations of and interviews with Muslim refugee converts in their EKD churches in North Rhine-Westphalia between October 2017 and January 2018. 19 of 21 interview participants are Iranian and this high number aligns with media claims that German churches predominantly host converts from Iran, as discussed above. Within Germany, North Rhine-Westphalia had the second highest number of asylum applications in 2015 (15.1%), preceded by Bavaria (15.3%) and followed by Baden-Württemberg (13%). Most asylum seekers identify with Islam (73, 1%), while Christianity and other religions follow distantly with 13.8% or less (Figure 1).

12

The interviews were semi-structured, posing open-ended questions and allowing for emerging themes to be explored further in follow-up questions (see Schütze 1983; Flick 2008). However, the interviewer ensured that the answers covered when, where, and how the refugees came into contact with Christianity, why they chose Christianity, as well as when, how, and why they left their original countries. As such, the interview questions elicit narratives of both conversion and forced migration as well as their symbiotic interaction. The interviews were conducted in places of the refugees’ choosing, including quiet rooms in churches, public coffee shops, and their homes. 17 interviews were conducted in German, two in English and two interviewees code-switched between English and German. The duration of the interviews ranged from 25 to 90 minutes and all interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed in full.¹⁰ Table 2 shows the demographic information of all refugees interviewed.

13

The majority of converts interviewed describe their original religion as Shia Islam—the dominant religion in present-day Iran.¹² Many emphasize that they were non-practicing, that they were born into this religion, and that they were unable to change it legally in Iran. The refugees’ ages range from 20 to 45 years and the periods of identifying as Christians also range widely, from 9 months to 21 years. Most interviewees came to Germany in 2015 (11) and 2016 (8), at the height of the so-called refugee crisis and of Germany’s open borders. It is also essential to point out that a majority (15 out of 19) of these Iranian refugees encountered Christianity in Iran. They describe their conversions and subsequent Christian practices as secretive and they eventually had to flee Iran after being persecuted for having left Shia Islam.¹³ They were being placed in one or more Auffanglager (reception camps) in Germany, where some felt compelled to continue hiding their new Christian orientations out of fear of retaliation for apostacy (see Peters and Vries 1976). All converts actively searched for new churches and eventually found Protestant church communities where they felt they could live openly as Christians.

14

Through the narratives that emerge from the interviews, the refugee converts ordered the flow of their experiences and made sense of events and actions in their lives (Riessman 1993, 2007). As such, the narratives must be analyzed as representations of these experiences, materialized through linguistic, cultural, and religious resources of the German society in the present environment. Narrative analysis as a methodology has been a privileged tool for researchers of personal, communal, and social identity construction (Brockmeier and Carbaugh 2001; De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2012; Eastmond 2007; Ochs and Capps 2002; Onega and Landa 2014, among many). While the narratology that emerged after the 1960s as a classical structuralist discipline was concerned with rules, deep structures, positivism, and dualism (Labov 1972; Labov and Waletzky 1967), more recent approaches are more suitable for this study since they highlight the dynamic function of narratives to explain, justify, describe, or interpret human experiences through different times, spaces, and sociocultural contexts (Bal 1997; Bruner 1987, 1990; Gómez-Estern and Benítez 2013; McAdams 2013; Stadlbauer 2013). Narrative analysis has become a heuristic tool for cultural analysis and is capable of tracing how refugees make sense of discontinuities and continuities in their conversions against the background of forced migration (see particularly Eastmond 2007; Gómez-Estern and Benítez 2013). The analysis of these types of narratives is important because they are “the only means we have of knowing something about life in times and places to which we have little other access” (Eastmond 2007, 249). As such, they are essential tools in uncovering the diversity behind over-generalized notions of “the refugee experience” (Eastmond 2007, 249).

15

In order to employ narrative analysis as a heuristic tool, one has to consider normative constructions of what is a story worth telling in a specific social and cultural setting (Gómez-Estern and Benítez 2013), which is partly shaped by the encounter and relationship between narrator and listener. All refugees who were asked to be interviewed readily agreed and some even expressed a desire to be transparent and to have their voices heard in light of the German public’s negative perception of refugees in general. As such, the interviews also function as vessels of outreach, which shows that the revelation of their secrets aims at sharing experiences, witnessing injustice, seeking rapport with the interviewer, and engaging in activism.

16

Consequently, the revelation of secrets is performative: it not only reveals what was hidden but also the politics behind it (Manderson et al. 2015). The narratives function as media of secrecy and “the secret’s mise-en-scène” (Manderson et al. 2015, S183), or the secrets’ settings, subjects, objects, temporalities, spatialites, and their mobilizing powers. As Jones (2014) aptly summarizes, “secrets are charged with social tension, surrounded by a palpable aura of risk to which ethnographers are not immune” (Jones 2014, 61). An ethnographer can become a ritual extension of that which they study (see also Taussig 1999).

17

Despite the refugee converts’ openness to being interviewed, their status is volatile and requires a careful evaluation of methodological, practical, ethical, and epistemological challenges of ethnography in general (see Duranti 1997; Bucholtz 2000, among many). Some participants have expressed the concern that the exposure of private information might influence their own or their families’ asylum procedures or lead to retribution for apostacy by community or family members. At the time of the interviews, most refugees experienced a state of liminality: some were awaiting their first interviews for asylum with BAMF. Some had finished their interviews and their asylum requests were pending. The asylum requests of some had been rejected, even though they cited their conversion to Christianity as a serious risk to personal harm if they were to return to Iran. Although Article 16a of the German Basic Law¹⁴ grants all persons persecuted on political grounds the right of asylum, the immigration authorities often treat these baptisms as a selbst geschaffener Nachfluchtgrund (self-created reason for fleeing after the fact, see Dienelt n.d.) and do not recognize conversion to Christianity as a determining factor in the asylum process. Most of them were either well into their German language and official integration courses at the time of the interviews or had already finished them. Only few of them were granted asylum and had moved from refugee camps to state-assisted apartments. Most of them were hoping to find work, either in their previous jobs as civil engineers, teachers, construction workers, and accountants, or to pursue vocational apprenticeships or university degrees. All of them were baptized and active members in their new churches.

18

In order to lessen any risks associated with this ethnography, the interviewer took the following precautions: (1) the refugees were provided a consent form that details their rights, the interviewer’s contact information and academic background, the nature and goals of the study, and how the data would be used and published; (2) they were assured that their names and any other markers of identity, such as names of small towns, would be anonymized; (3) they were asked to agree to be audio recorded but assured that the audio files would only be used for transcription purposes and stored on a private, password-protected computer and in a secure online storage; and (4) they were informed in advance that they would be asked to elaborate on their forced migration and conversion. Since these are sensitive topics that might lead to reliving personal trauma, the refugees were informed that they had the right to refuse answering any questions and to revoke their participation during or at any time after the interview, without any negative consequences.

Conversion Narrative Analysis

19

Conversion testimonies in this study are treated as instrumental for religious transformations and as lending weight to the validity of conversions (Rambo and Farhadian 2014). Conversion to Christianity, specifically, has relied heavily on testimonies and narratives historically, as exemplified by the continued influence of biblical conversion stories, such as that of Paul of Taurus (Acts 9) as a template for American evangelical born-again narratives (Bailey 2008), or of historical conversion accounts, such as that of Augustine’s fourth-century conversion in The Confessions (Hawkins 2014). Nevertheless, conceptualizing conversion is controversial, even within a particular religion or denomination, because of theological, cultural, and contextual variants. Helpful for the aim of this study are conceptualizations of conversion that position an individual’s religious change within a matrix of relationships, events, ideologies, or institutions and within wider political, social, cultural, and global changes, all of which are interactive and cumulative. These dynamic approaches to studying conversion have predominantly emerged in the fields of the psychology of religion (James 1902; Nock 1933; Rambo 1993; Rambo and Farhadian, Charles E. 1999, Rambo & Farhadian 1999; Rambo and Farhadian 2014); anthropology of conversion (Gooren 2010; Keane 2007; Meyer 1999, 2011); and sociology of conversion (Lofland and Stark 1965; Lofland and Skonovd 1981; Snow and Machalek 1983).

20

The following conversion narrative analysis can be categorized as thematic (Riessman 2007) and its goal is to find patterned responses (see Braun and Clarke 2006; Patton 2014). Importantly, thematic narrative analysis reveals local (micro) and societal or global (macro) contexts, causality, and emergent categories across various interviews, which then can be theorized (53). Rambo’s (1993) stage model of conversion serves as a guiding theory for interpreting these themes. Given that no model can explain the complete reality of conversion, this stage model is suitable to highlight the protracted conversion processes in this study. Furthermore, it is arguably one of the most comprehensive tools for conceptualizing conversions to date. The model proposes the following seven stages, which are arranged in temporal sequence but can also occur simultaneously and interactively throughout the conversion process, which makes the stages dynamic, flexible, and inclusive:

21

1. context is the ecology of people, places, temporalities, events, experiences, and institutions that all operate on conversion. Context continues its influence throughout other conversion stages (20).
2. crisis is a religious, political, cultural, or personal disorientation that can precede or follow the contact with a new religion (50). Crisis often leads to the reevaluation of basic beliefs, worldviews, and options.
3. quest assumes that people seek to maximize meaning and purpose in their religious lives and to resolve inconsistencies in their relationships to the divine (56). Quest intensifies during times of crisis (56).
4. encounter with a new religion happens through people, such as missionaries, or through salient features of a religion, such as objects of worship (87). Encounter reveals the levels of access to knowledge about a new religion (94).
5. interaction with a new religious community teaches converts about this community’s interpretation of doctrines, lifestyles, and expectations of converts to become fully incorporated members (102). 
6. commitment involves observable events or rituals that demonstrate the converts’ surrender to a new religion, such as baptisms or oral conversion testimonies (135).
7. consequences of conversion are multifaceted effects that occur on spiritual, sociocultural, psychological, linguistic, and affective levels of experience (142).

Discussion

60

This paper has traced stages in Iranian refugees’ formation of their new Christian identities as they were shedding enforced secrecy and governmental regulations against practicing Christianity and immersed themselves into a society and church communities that project transparency and freedom. Rambo’s (1993) stage model allows organizing the conversion narratives in the 19 interviews conducted with Iranian refugee converts. It reveals thematic patterns across narratives, which provide a timely alternative story to the overgeneralizations of the so-called mass conversions since the height of immigration in 2015. These thematic patterns involve conversion stages that the refugees deem important for narrating the development of coherent new Christian identities, starting from their first contact with Christianity in Iran, the censorship of their Christian practices, as well as their social exclusion in Iran and in the refugee camps in Germany after their forced migration, to their integration into new German church communities. The ongoing negotiations between secrecy, risk, transparency, and the benefits of being a Christian show the cumulative effects of conversion, which are particularly profound in this example of a massive historical change and global migration. The dynamic application of this model allows for the following summaries.

61

In Iran, CONTEXT 1 and CRISIS 1 melt together and constitute the preconditions of the Iranian refugees’ conversions (see Table 3). They describe this environment as persistent throughout their lives, which left them isolated and starved for a strong connection to God. The ENCOUNTER with Christianity was mainly materialized through Christians they met and their affective connections to them. They then started an intellectual QUEST to make Christianity meaningful and morally compatible with their own value systems. Their participation in Armenian and house churches in Iran despite considerable risks (INTERACTION 1 and COMMITMENT 1) led to severe consequences (CONSEQUENCES 1): the persistent crisis (CRISIS 1) that preceded the conversions is now embodied as they are penalized and forced to leave Iran abruptly. The agency of the converts crystallizes as they actively confront their environment’s limitations, resolve their ideological conflicts, fill a void left by an unsatisfying connection to God, and find avenues of transformation (Rambo 1993; see also Rambo and Farhadian 2014).

62

The converts are catapulted from a climate of secrecy and oppression in Iran (CONTEXT 1) into a climate of visibility, suspicion, and compulsory transparency in Germany (CONTEXT 2, see Table 4).

63

CONTEXT 1 and CONTEXT 2 are the most comprehensive of all the stages since they show the intensity, duration, and continuity of forces that eventually lead to redefining their perceptions of God. In their new Protestant church communities, the converts experience more intense levels of learning about their religion, beyond mere intellectual levels (INTERACTION 2). Here, they learn a new German way of life, new Christian practices, and new communication strategies through which they interpret their new selves and their relationship to God. They commit to getting baptized (COMMITMENT 2), often in a large celebratory event with other Iranian refugee converts, which they see as the consolidation of their transformation. Together, the sociocultural, spiritual, ideological consequences reveal a radically transformed life.

Further Research

64

While the thematic patterns established in this study reveal insights into the how the refugees’ religious conversion was influenced through various contacts to Christianity, societal pressures of secrecy and transparency, and forced migration, the following questions arise and must be investigated further in order to better understand the scope, causes, and consequences of these religious conversions:

1. 65

   What is the specific impact of the intensities, durations, and locations of various contact situations on these conversions (see Bhabha 2004; Keane 2007; Pratt 1991)? The findings in this study reveal high-impact interreligious contact situations, such as Iranian Shia Muslims meeting Christians in Iran, and low-impact, longitudinal intrareligious contact situations, such as converts integrating into German Protestantism. These various types of impacts need to be theorized.

2. 66

   How do continuity and discontinuity shape these conversions? Scholarship on conversion tends to focus on discontinuities or breaks with the past, but continuities are equally revealing and need to be studied further (see Rambo and Farhadian 2014). In this study, discontinuities are rampant since the converts relocate to Germany and convert from Shia Islam to Christianity. However, the analysis has also revealed continuities, such as the converts’ affective connection to a Persian culture and nationality and to Zoroastrianism.

3. 67

   What differences can be found in these conversion accounts? While this study concentrates on similarities between the narratives collected in the 19 interviews, it excluded a discussion of differences, by design. A focus on differences in terms of social variables, such as social class, gender, or education, would be beneficial.

4. 68

   What specific impact do digital platforms have on these conversions? An in-depth investigation into this question is pressing since the present so-called refugee crisis is often hailed as the first of this magnitude in the digital age (see Sajir and Aouragh 2019; Wimmer et al. 2017, among many).