30-08-2017, 04:40 PM
While religious change has recently become an important topic of analysis in the discipline of political science, little attention has been paid to the process or meaning of religious conversion. This chapter provides an overview of recent developments in the study of politics, secularisation and religious change, and points out areas in which conversion study can enrich such research. Political studies of religious change should focus on conversion as a process rather than a single event, paying attention to the networks and narratives framing conversion and channelling individuals to religious and political affiliations and moving away the implicit assumptions about conversion used in analysis models. Integrating knowledge from conversion studies can help political scientists avoid the pitfalls of over generalization, understand the multiple lines of causation involved in conversion, and use methods that better capture the complexity of interactions between religion and politics.