Conversion porn and the "New Age" straw man

The road to Damascus is paved with clichés, I'm learning (but it needn't be)

I’d like to talk to you about conversion, and specifically a certain version of it I personally find troubling. I’m writing this piece not to make any one person wrong or even to defend any specific spiritual practices or movements against criticism. I’m writing it because I know it is a wise thing to trust our instincts, and when something feels off, my experience tells me it is important to talk about it with others, if only so they have words to express their own discomfort, should it arise.

I often follow folks’ recommendations when they send them to me, because I love the spirit of sharing. I regularly receive many lovely tip-offs of podcasts, songs, books, and articles I then go on to enjoy. But there is a certain somewhat baffling new genre of narrative confessional that people occasionally suggest I read or listen to (in good faith, I am certain) that surprises and disappoints me, both with its sinister arrogance and its uncanny familiarity.

At the risk of sensationalizing, I’ll share that I’ve privately started referring to that genre of narrative as “conversion porn.”

“Conversion” because that’s what these stories are about — people who used to identify with any of a diffuse number of non-Christian spiritual activities or ideas, which they sometimes collect under the umbrellas of paganism or New Age spirituality (terms I’ll address below), who have recently adopted or returned to Christianity.

The second word, porn, I’m using because these stories, much like those ones we encounter in the seedy world of performative sex, are nominally about something sacred and beautiful — spiritual initiation, discovery and growth — but the way they are communicated commodifies and debases the innate power of the thing being depicted. Sex deserves better than porn. Conversion deserves better than conversion porn.

What typifies these stories is a strong, even aggressive, renunciation of the convert’s former spiritual practices or alignments.

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Milan, 15th c. Jesus’ own baptism, a template for future Christian conversions. I find it fascinating to remember baptism was a common practice before Christianity.

My introduction to this genre came a couple of years ago. And you might not call this example one of the genre, but it definitely was an on-ramp for me in recognizing the genre, by felt sense. Someone had suggested the work of a particular writer who had once dabbled in Wicca, but had recently made a big, public splash when he converted to Orthodox Christianity. So I looked him up and found a podcast interview where he talked about his conversion.

I should mention here that I think conversion stories, in themselves, are really beautiful. Maybe that would surprise folks, since I identify as pagan, but I love hearing about people’s spiritual epiphanies. I don’t personally see Christianity and paganism as mutually exclusive, so I glory in examples of how people might gracefully embody greater complexity and authenticity by encountering a new religious milieu.

So I tuned into the podcast, fully expecting to be inspired.

Instead, the longer I listened to the conversation, the more my discomfort grew. I showed up anticipating a story about how someone had moved past dualism and othering to embrace a broader experience of spiritual community. But something was wrong. The vibe was increasingly off. The tone was… smug. I felt claustrophobic. His references to paganism were dismissive, even subtly mocking. Then, it seemed to me he took a coded stab at trans people. His interviewer encouraged him. My heart started racing. This was not a safe or a pleasant space for me to dwell in. So I stopped listening.

Uncomfortable as I was, I struggled to articulate the problem. I considered speaking about it publicly but didn’t want to call someone out whose work, on the whole, is probably good and generally aligned with my own values. But I never stopped thinking about the podcast interview, especially as people continued to ask me what I thought of this particular fellow’s story.

Here’s the thing about dominant cultural paradigms. Nobody has to explain themselves when they are inside of them. You can claim your perspective and choices as common sense. You can say “You know how it is” and have other people nod, knowingly. That’s what listening to this podcast conversation felt like. Like when a man says “women, am I right?” and no matter how much you love women, you are suddenly implicated in the ugly worldview that would dismiss them with a wink. That is where the claustrophobic feeling came from. Only the target, rather than women, was a vague mix of paganism and modern culture.

This guy could claim he is “returning” to “tradition” and suffer no real discomfort, do no extra homework, feel right at home. Everything suddenly makes sense when you lean into the dominant paradigm, doesn’t it? All the pieces fall into place. Especially if you are a white, middle aged man, and well, so is the priest at the front of the room.

I didn’t like it, but I didn’t want to make a fuss about it, either. I’m someone who strongly supports women’s ordination (and resents its long omission), so it’s no surprise a prominent male pagan converting to Christianity would trigger me some, when I couldn’t do so myself without surrendering my own strong conviction in women’s spiritual equality to men.

Then a few weeks ago, in response to some of my writing about saints, someone suggested a book to me, the memoir of a young woman who had converted to Orthodox Christianity, shortly thereafter becoming a nun. “How marvellous!” I thought (as it turns out, naively.) And I tuned in to an interview with her, assuming I would then want to read her book. And the same uncanny feeling arose, but sooner and more intensely this time.

She had been experimenting with psychedelics, shamanism, meditation, a grab-bag of experiences she called paganism, and had renounced it all, along with what she called feminist ideology, calling these modes of spiritual seeking darkness in contrast to the light of Christianity. Her representation of conversion was much more dramatic, and her political shift rightwards more explicit, more hard-line than the first fellow I mentioned here.¹ Why did she think that when she entered a new spiritual community she had to delegitimize the one she had previously belonged to? And why was feminism suddenly an “ideology²”?

It’s almost as if she were falling into a pattern that has existed for centuries, one that has been hammered into the foundations of what we call Western culture. A familiar groove.

Then more recommendations came. And more posts and podcasts of the same sort continue to appear online. Yesterday an influencer I followed on Instagram made a post disparaging so-called New Age ideas she recently identified with, aligning herself anew with “truth,” which she apparently locates in some form of Christian worldview.

The pattern is becoming clear. It wasn’t just the one guy. Or just the nun. It’s an emerging genre. And I dare say it’s a sinister one.

Here’s why.

Conversion as rupture

I’m a medievalist, so I have read many conversion stories before. And I know the tropes and the blind spots. And I know these are primarily a Christian genre, when there is no other religion on earth so hell-bent on taking over the world, religiously and politically, as this one has been in recent centuries. These stories are familiar to anyone who reads medieval and early modern literature because they are one of the more prolific forms of propaganda in the European canon. The proud savage finds God. The fallen woman repents. And the missionary applauds, very pleased with his efforts to “enlighten” everybody, to make them like him.

To be fair, the literary record contains some beautiful and luminous stories of conversion too, like the tale of St. Christopher, who adopted the new religion after carrying a child across a river; the boy was the heaviest load he had ever carried. He nearly sunk into the riverbed, struggling his way across. “Why are you so heavy?” he asked the child. “Because I carry the weight of the world,” the child Jesus replied.

‘St. Christopher’ by William Young Ottley, 1816

The literary record also contains many ugly conversion stories, like the antisemitic medieval folk tale that tells of a Jewish boy living adjacent to a Christian family. He goes to church with his Christian neighbours, sees a vision of the virgin Mary, and goes home to joyfully report the vision to his father, a glassmaker. His father, the stereotype of an angry and vengeful Jew, stuffs him in his oven as a punishment. His mother goes crying for help, and returns with the mayor and bailiff. The boy is retrieved from the oven, having been miraculously spared by the Virgin Mary, and the father is stuffed in the oven and burned in his place. The mother converts to Christianity.

An image from another medieval antisemitic folktale, sharing the theme of children placed in ovens, this one from ‘Holkham Bible Picture Book’ (c. 1327-1335)

Stories like the one above proliferated and contributed to large-scale massacres of Jews across Europe in the Middle Ages³— Jews who refused to convert, as if conversion to Christianity were some sort of universal obligation.

Which it isn’t.

How about the story of the 4500 Saxons who declined the order to convert under Charlemagne’s newly Christian rule, and were slaughtered together in October of 782 for defending the right to their indigenous spiritual culture? Yes, Europeans too were once indigenous. Many still are. These Saxons would have been the ancestors to many who now consider Christianity mainstream, even normal, had they not been massacred in the name of power.

The imperial Christian worldview is typified by a belief in rupture. In hard-line dualities. In small actions that create metaphysical rifts between things. In singularity against mutiplicity. Pure god against corrupt world. Earth against sky. Man against woman. Heaven against hell. It’s why we think there is a thing called virginity, and that a single sexual experience changes a person’s (usually a girl’s, let’s be honest) identity and value forever. It’s why we have heard of and believe in the meaning of a concept called “conversion” in the first place. One guy died and now everything is invisibly different, forever.

But this cosmology of rupture is not how everybody naturally views the world. It’s a very specific trait of imperial Christianity.

Christianity made its way to the broader world in two ways: one was sincere adoption, inspiration, epiphany, the kind of story I long to hear when someone says “I know someone who converted to Christianity and is talking about it.” In many places in Europe, women were at the fore of the drive to convert, as the life offered by Christianity was slightly more empowered, perhaps more focused on love, than the warrior-aristocracy versions of religious and political culture that dominated in the Iron Age.⁴

The second way Christianity spread was through empire and colonialism. That’s how many of our ancestors would have met it. An investment in rupture and in centralized, absolute authority is a very handy tool for centralizing worldly power. “If you’re not with us, you’re against us,” spouts every corrupt leader in history, and strangely, a certain troubling brand of Christian converts.

I know the people whose conversion stories I’m encountering now chose Christianity of their own free will, but it is important to mention that for many people Christianity arrived at the point of a sword, and I fear the divisive logic these sensationalist stories embody falls in line with the chauvinism that animated the mass destruction of cultures worldwide.

And that’s an important thing to be aware of if you’re someone who believes in a beautiful future for Christianity, and for humankind in general.

The clever twist of the knife that makes these stories what they are

The word “pagan” (paganus) entered common use in the 4th century, in the context of the Christianized Roman Empire. It originally meant country-dweller, much like “heathen” meant heath-dweller, and was used perjoratively for folks who hadn’t adopted the new, mostly urban, religion. Like today’s “redneck” or “hick,” it suggested someone with an outdated, crude way of seeing the world.

Let’s pause for a moment and admire the incredible cleverness of this rhetorical turn, which been normalized over the centuries, but stuns with its pure audacity:

Mainstream Christianity insists that everyone who doesn’t adopt this religion (which, rather extremely, holds itself mutually exclusive with all other ways of being) is morally bankrupt, even eternally damned. Taken at face value, the suggestion is somewhat ridiculous. Taken seriously, it is a weapon.

So let’s have a reality check, shall we?

In the larger picture of human history, Christianity versus-everything-else is a very new way of seeing the world, because Christianity itself is relatively new. If Christianity were a pebble on the shore of the divine, paganism would be every other stone on that beach.

A big practical problem arises when you call your new discovery “truth” in opposition to literally every other thing that ever has been. The problem is, you can never stop battling the other thing’s advance, because the other thing is constantly, naturally arising.

A new pagan is born every second. I imagine this is annoying.

New name, same boogeyman

I’ve noticed a trend among many of these conversion porn narratives. It’s the fact that before their conversion to Christianity, these folks might have referred to what they were up to spiritually as any number of things including paganism, spirituality, tarot, Buddhism, plant medicine, herbalism, witchcraft, wicca, yoga, really, any old thing.

Then, post-conversion, a new word emerges in their vocabulary that encompasses all, and becomes the foil to their newfound enlightment.

Introducing… New Age.

The hip, modern Christian convert has a new option for writing off their past spiritual experience (and perhaps community) that doesn’t smack so much of ignorance and colonial sentiment as bashing paganism does.

New Age is shiny. It suggests this whole not-being-Christian thing is a new idea, and a deluded one. It suggests a cohesive, perhaps manipulative, movement.

Only, of course, it’s a straw man.

I find it telling that New Age as a term emerged in British and North American vocabulary at the very same moment that Christianity’s hegemonic armour cracked a little, right after the hyper-conservative fifties, when young folks began experimenting with and talking about other spiritual options than the ones their parents had handed down. Maybe for the first time since the pre-Christian era.

New Age is like the bermuda triangle of religious movements. Things disappear into it. Has anyone ever been in the same room as this New Age? I’m not entirely sure. I’ve heard a lot of people renouncing it, saying they have visited there and left, but never have I heard a call from inside the New Age house.

It would seem I myself have been working in the New Age movement for years, and yet, somehow, never once have I heard someone identify themself with the moniker.

Maybe that’s because “New Age,” like its political cousin “woke,” is a chimera.

Nobody can agree on the definition of either of these terms because they don’t refer to any specific thing. Poorly defined as they are, “New Age” and “woke” blame a vague other for something beyond a person’s control that (it seems) they wish would stop being so beyond their control. And I’m sure these terms have their use value. But when someone pulls them out in conversation, I personally find myself needing to ask a lot of questions before I know what they are really trying to say.

The shame game

At the risk of passing judgement, the strong vein of renunciation among these conversion porn narratives smacks of shame to me.

A person who sows division is more often than not internally divided, projecting their self-rejection onto everybody else who doesn’t affirm their (in this case newfound and fragile) vision of purity. It hurts to watch, and it hurts when someone you might have imagined was an ally in the path of sincere spiritual growth takes one step up the cultural hierarchy and immediately begins punching down.

What can we do when we enounter these narratives or the people who create them? I don’t honestly know, but maybe we can continue to accept those people, even from a distance, even as they neglect past versions of themselves. Maybe we can encourage them to continue tuning into their own inner knowing, no matter what teacher or path they choose to follow, today. Or I suppose we can just leave them to it.

An open letter:

Dear very excited convert,

I know you probably won’t hear this right now. But let me try.

You are complete, and you always have been.

I get it, you were lost and now you are found, but here’s the thing. Later, you will get lost again. You will lose sight of the horizon again. And the thing that saved you this time, and will save you again at that later date is love. Love doesn’t ask you to jettison who you were. Love doesn’t ask you to discard the people you once knew. Love repairs. Love expands. Love doesn’t sever or blame. You are more, and better than you think. You were more, and better, than you think.

You deserve this new community, this new ritual, this new insight. And you weren’t wrong before when you tried what you tried and it didn’t work out the way you hoped.

To be honest, I’m dying to hear about the ecstatic spiritual experiences you’ve had that have brought you closer to the source of aliveness in the world. I am genuinely (possibly even a little overbearingly) happy for you in your moment of transformation.

But baby, your new insight doesn’t automatically imply everybody else’s error.

Framing new age spirituality or paganism, or witchcraft, etc etc etc as corrupt, disorganized, immoral, illusory, deceptive or demonic is not as revolutionary as you might imagine. This is one of the biggest lies of the powerful — the idea that if you’re not my friend you are my enemy.

The many human spiritual paths are not mutually exclusive, and never have been. Nothing in this world is. I breathe your breath and you breathe mine. I drink your waters and you drink mine. My blood is your blood is Christ’s blood, is the blood of the robin on the branch and of the doctors working in Palestine.

I love you, and I make you real, as surely as you love and make me real, because you and I are Earth. We are one body and one blood, one water, sky, and sunbeam.

There are so many more than only two options here. It’s not Christians vs pagans. It’s not good vs. evil, and it’s not even order vs. chaos.

Oversimplification is a poison chalice because we are alive, goddammit. Nothing is finished, nothing is decided, nobody is disposable (not you or your old guru), and even gods can change their minds, reproduce, die, and be reborn.

And I know the uncertainty is painful. We are all exhausted with it. But labeling and bashing whatever it is you’re not into right now feeds into the ongoing culture war that is constantly hurting and bamboozling us all, and distracting us from the reality that we are all siblings. This is what your Jesus taught. And I love him for it.

I’m truly very sorry some pseudospiritual teachers led you astray. The first step is to stop letting them. Take deep responsibility for yourself and you’ll find the bad guys quickly shrink away into the shadows. Looks like you’ve arrived at that step yourself. Good work.

Next step is to help other people to recognize and reject the specific sort of behaviour those false teachers embodied, rather than publicly congratulating yourself for noticing it and painting vast groups of people with the tar brush to put on a show for the internet. (Sorry, maybe harsh, but true).

Dear sibling under the sun,

One day when “paganism,” and “new age beliefs” and “feminist ideologies” are words we don’t even recognize anymore, we will still need to know how to listen deeply to our inner knowing, and to use what we hear there to look out for one another, tenderly. And the way to do that is beyond language, and beyond “us” and “them.” It lies in a faith bigger than the Faiths we’ve heard of. I hope and believe you can feel that too.

Love,

Danica

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