Strange Gods

Starred review from December 14, 2015
Jacoby (The Great Agnostic and Freethinkers) has spent 15 years writing this fine secular inquiry into the history of religious conversion in the West. Beginning with the famous Damascus road conversion of Saul to Paul and then moving on to Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions, Jacoby travels through 14th-century forced conversions in Spain, 20th-century “socially-influenced conversions” resulting from mixed marriages, and today’s headlines about ISIS’s brutal religious persecution. From her atheist viewpoint, she attempts to remove the religious and psychological elements of conversion, leaving only the sociopolitical forces. She writes, “The modern American notion of religion as a purely personal choice, nobody else’s business... could not be further removed from the complicated historical reality of conversion on a large scale.” Missing from Jacoby’s overall argument are the ways that religious belief, practiced in the public square, can contribute to the common good in a democracy. Without this, her tour de force risks marshaling history to serve her own ideological agenda. Her analysis of the dangers of a religious belief beyond personal conviction may be challenging for many readers of faith, but it’s well-argued and illuminating.