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chapter 3 Symbolizing Distance Conversion to Islam in Germany and the United States Monika Wohlrab-Sahr It is in vogue in sociology of religion to talk about religion in terms of the market. American sociologists, especially, have advocated theories of a religious market, of religious human capital, and of “rational choice.” Some have propagated this approach as a “new paradigm” in sociology of religion. This new paradigm is supposed to replace secularization theory, which has been the predominant theoretical approach for decades (see Warner 1993). In this debate, it is striking how old theoretical assumptions are reinterpreted and given completely different meanings. Whereas for Peter L. Berger (1967) the pluralization of worldviews was a central element within a theory of secularization, in the recent American debate it has become the main argument against such a theory. For Berger, pluralization implied that religious beliefs and systems of meaning become relative and lose their formerly objecti fied status. In the recent debate, this view is no longer considered. Instead , a pluralistic supply of religious “commodities” seems to guarantee robust demand (see Stark and Iannaccone 1994; Iannaccone, Finke, and Stark 1997; Finke and Stark 1988). Constant religious needs taken for granted, this approach presupposes a religious actor, who mainly tries to realize the religious human capital that he or she has gathered in the course of religious socialization and practice. Consequently, as Iannaccone (1990) argues, those rational religious actors tend to search for contexts that optimally correspond to their religious competence. If they should undergo any changes— for example, convert to a different religion—they will not stray too far from where they came, and they will do it at a young age in order to amortize their investments. They will look for a spouse with the same religious affiliation, or if their spouse embraces a different religion and has a stronger commitment than they themselves have, they will convert to their spouse’s religion to minimize costs and conflicts. Looking at the supply side of the religious market, this approach assumes that a diversified supply and the resulting religious competition will positively stimulate religious demand; that is, “The 72 c o n t e x t ua l i z i ng c o n v e r s i o n more pluralism, the greater the religious mobilization of the population” (Finke and Stark 1988, 43). In this chapter, I discuss the reach of this approach using an empirical study on conversion to Islam in Germany and the United States. Even if personal acts of choice must be considered a necessary constituent of conversion , I argue that conversion can only be understood adequately if the biographical background of such decisions is analyzed as well. The conversion decision has a specific meaning that is related to the convert’s background; conversion fulfills a certain biographical function. On the other hand, Islam is not a neutral object of choice. The history of confrontations between the “Islamic” world and the “Christian” world adds a symbolic connotation to Islamic conversion that plays into the conversion decision as well. Taking both into account—the biographical background of conversions and the symbolic connotations of conversion to Islam in the West—the interpreter gains a better understanding of the “biographical rationality” of the conversion decision and, by means of that, the profits and losses of that decision. Conversion, Rational Choice, and Pluralization At least since the 1960s, and especially for younger generations, it has not been completely misleading to interpret the religious situation in Western European countries in terms of a religious market and to consider religious behavior to be influenced by individual choice rather than by tradition and social constraint. Broadcast by the growing international mobility and by the influence of the media, new religious “commodities” are offered on the “market ” of worldviews, and there is demand for them, more or less. Formerly closed confessional milieus—such as in Germany or the Netherlands—have disintegrated to a great extent, and we see a process of rapid detraditionalization in the field of religion, as well as in morality (see Jagodzinski and Dobbelaere 1993). Even in Catholicism, churchgoing is declining rapidly, and the consent to essential issues of confessional belief—such as the belief in Heaven and Hell or the belief in the Hereafter—is weakening enormously, even among committed church members. On top of these changes, more and more people choose to abandon religion as a whole. In general, religious...

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