Religious Conversion as Religious Contact—the “statement conversion”

John Henry Newman and Malcolm X

Abstract

Some famous religious conversions, happening in a great variety of contexts, are carried out by intellectuals who use their conversion to make a statement about the world. Arguably, all conversions to some extent make a statement about the world, but some more publicly than others. My contribution will compare the conversions from Anglicanism to the Roman Catholic Church during the Oxford Movement in the 1840s with those of African Americans to (the Nation of) Islam in the 1960s. This is done on the basis of the aforementioned framework, which enables a view of both instances as asymmetric religious contact with a broad public scope. This allows me to compare the conversion trajectories of such disparate figures as John Henry Newman and Malcolm X using their public statements and appearance.