Title: Changing Your Faith

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Brian: Back live now. To end the show, we'll now open up the phones to those of you who have ever converted religions. Why did you convert, and what aspects of your chosen religion are the most important to you today? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Again, it's a call-in for those of you who have converted religions. Why did you convert? Often it's because of marriage, often it's for reasons of your own, changing relationship with faith or culture, whatever the reason. It's a call-in for those of you who have converted religions. Why did you convert, and what aspects of your chosen religion are the most important to you today? 212-433-WNYC, that's 212-433-9692. You can also text your answer to that number, of course.

Why do we ask this today? We were inspired by the singer-songwriter Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens, who has a new memoir coming out, and he writes about how he converted to Islam a few years after a near-death experience back in 1975. After that experience, his brother gave him a copy of the Islamic holy book, the Quran, and by 1978, he legally changed his name to Yusuf Islam and made his last album as Cat Stevens.

Listeners, if you've ever converted from one religion to another, what was the driving force behind your conversion? Maybe it was a near-death experience like Cat Stevens' Yusuf Islam or another tough moment of your life that led you to seek a higher power or a different power. Maybe you, like Yusuf Islam, were gifted a religious text like the Torah, the Bible, or the Quran, and resonated with the text, or maybe it was marriage or something else. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text.

Now, one of the more common reasons people do convert to a different religion is because of marriage, so some of the calls might be from some of you who have converted for a spouse, for a marriage. What does your new faith mean to you in that context? Maybe what parts do you enjoy or respect or identify with the most, and what have been some challenges for you? Maybe you even kept that faith after a divorce or became more religious than your spouse. I've seen that happen. Or the opposite.

Maybe it's been a name only for the sake of not confusing your kids, perhaps, and you just go along to get along. For anywhere on that spectrum, tell us your conversion stories and what finding a new religious home through your partner has meant to you. Maybe, as with the reason for many of our call-ins, this will help other listeners having similar experiences. 212-433-WNYC, that's 212-433-9692.

A point of statistical background, whether or not you call with a marriage conversion story or just a personal change of faith, a Pew study from February of this year of nearly 37,000 respondents shows that 80% of US adults say they were raised Christian, but upwards of a quarter of them, 22% of all US adults, no longer identify as Christians. Now, most of those who no longer identify do identify as unaffiliated with any religion. Just 3% identify with a religion other than Christianity after having been raised Christian. Does one of those sound like you? Tell us your story. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text.

If you simply become unaffiliated, you can even say if you consider that a conversion of sorts. Some of you may, some of you may not. Maybe you were raised with one Christian denomination and converted to another. Vice President JD Vance is an example of that. As many of you know, he grew up "loosely evangelical Christian," according to Slate, but converted to Catholicism in 2019. The reason, he said in 2021, "I really like that the Catholic Church was just really old," a quote from JD Vance.

If you switched from one Christian faith to another, why did you do it? Maybe like Vance, one aligned more with your conservative or maybe your liberal politics, or because it was just very old and that resonated with you. 212-433-9692. Apparently, maybe you went back, maybe you went back even further than Catholicism. Hinduism is widely considered the oldest surviving religion in the world. Did you convert to that, and why? Maybe from any Western religion to any other Eastern ones and Buddhism, maybe, or something else, some of you are probably in our midst who practice in Buddhism.

Did the age and longevity of a religion appeal to you, or maybe the opposite? Maybe there's a newer religion that you thought better addresses your modern spiritual needs. Tell us what that was. 212-433-9692. It's a call-in for those of you who have converted religions. Why did you convert, and what aspects of your chosen religion are the most important to you today, or for that matter, do you struggle with? 212-433-9692. We'll take your calls and texts right after this.

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Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now to 10 minutes of why you converted religions. By the way, I'm going to be off tomorrow observing the religion I was raised in, Rosh Hashanah off Rosh Hashanah. Brigid Bergin will be filling in tomorrow, just a programming note. Monk in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Monk.

Monk: Hi, Brian. I just wanted to tell the story. I'm from North Carolina. I was raised by an Argentinian mother who denounced Catholicism very early on and a Black father from California who, when my bunny rabbit died, he told me God has a way, and I kind of denounced religion there. Then I met my beautiful Bangladeshi wife here in New York City. The way she spoke about Islam and the way she told me that her mother and grandmother spoke about Islam really blew my mind. I'm still surprised to this day that I was willing to convert to any religion. I converted to Islam to marry my beautiful wife, and it's been the best thing I've ever done.

Brian: Monk, you have a great name for someone who's concerned about religion. Is there a particular thing about Islam that you most identify with to this day that makes you say it's a beautiful thing?

Monk: Yes. Part of it is the way that my wife told me her grandmother spoke about nature, how nature is God, nature is Allah. Beyond that, in Islam, or at least the way her family practices it, Allah is not some guy in the sky. Allah is beyond personification, is beyond being a person that's in control of everything. It's beyond that. It's just the higher power, and it's the river that we're all floating down. That really made it beautiful to me.

Brian: Monk, beautifully said. Thank you very much. Jill in Warren, New Jersey, you're on WNYC. Hi, Jill.

Jill: Hi. I grew up Episcopalian with all of the ritual and the-- One thing was beautiful was the music, but I just didn't find it spiritual at all. I converted to be a Quaker and found a lot of direct experience of my higher power, whatever you want to call him, her, him, whatever. There's seven principles that Quakers live by. One of them is community, and I find that really important. Another is simplicity. Those two things, along with a lot of other ones, are important to me.

Brian: Nicely said, Jill. Thank you very much. Peter in Midtown, you're on WNYC. Hi, Peter.

Peter: Hi. Thank you for taking my call. I was raised in a fairly non-religious household. Parents were Unitarian, but they didn't really go very often, and that was really the only religious exposure I had. Then probably in the last 10 years, I started just exploring intellectually a range of religions, even including Scientology and Mormonism, just from almost a historical standpoint.

A friend of mine reached out to me about two years ago and said, "Hey, I do these Talmudic studies with a teacher once a week. Would you be interested in joining me? This is via Zoom." I got interested in that, and I was really attracted to the Talmud. I've been practicing that, and I'm converting to Judaism slowly. I'm at the beginning stages, but it speaks to me in ways that none of my other explorations ever did.

Brian: You're in the process right now. Is there something you can say in very short form about a particular story from the Talmud or something that particularly spoke to you as an example?

Peter: You're putting me on the spot, but I will just say that I find that the wisdom that is imparted in these Talmudic studies really just speaks to me as-- Ancient texts have some of the wisest views on life and how to live and how to live a virtuous life. I think more and more important in today's society is if you're going to battle evil in some small way, lead a virtuous life. That's the best I can put it.

Brian: Thank you very much, Peter. Nicely put. Oh, I think we have a caller who converted from one thing to something else and then converted back. Is that right, Allegra, in Brooklyn? Hi, Allegra. You're on WNYC.

Allegra: Hi, Brian. Good morning. Yes, I grew up here in Brooklyn in the Episcopal Church. As a young person, I was very interested in mysticism and found my way into Buddhism and Hinduism, and actually lived in India for a while in a sort of mystical Hindu community. After some time, I started feeling some dissonance that a lot of these kinds of mysticism-oriented traditions aren't really engaged in the world or the concerns of the world. I actually found my way back to Christianity as a tradition that historically has often held both a strong sense of devotion and a strong commitment to service to people and planet. I've been working--

Brian: When you say too detached from the world, I'm trying to remember your exact words from a minute ago, but that it was more about kind of individual-- I don't want to dismiss it as feelings, but individual quest for enlightenment rather than participation socially?

Allegra: Certainly, some people who are in these practices have a strong social commitment that is tied with their spiritual experience, but for many, there can be a sense of focus on personal devotion, even sentimentalism. There can be a risk of trends, such as maybe someone like the vice president is tied up in right trends that can kind of lead us into certain kinds of ideas that are detached from actual reality of what's happening in the world.

Brian: Allegra, thank you so much for your call and your story. Let's see. Here's a text that says, "I've always been a Christian, but as a young 20-year-old man, I was tired of most churches always asking for money and their random teachings, making a business of the church. Jesus made it clear his teachings were to be given free of charge. Money and random teachings, no. I became a Jehovah's Witness, never asked for money, and all teachings directly from the Bible."

Another text, "I became disenchanted with my birth religion, Christianity. When I started to read about Native American spirituality, I wanted to find out more. I began participating in full moon circles, but then had the opportunity to experience a sweat lodge. The ceremony changed my outlook on life. It was as if I was born again," writes that person. Kuba in Astoria, you're on WNYC. Hi, Kuba.

Kuba: Hi, Brian. How are you doing? My story is that I was born and raised Roman Catholic in an Eastern European country. Everything around me was Catholic as well, with a very, very minor Greek Catholic population, but everything close to traditional Christianity. I kind of grew into basically being agnostic. In my late 20s, I was trained as a scientist, and that actually didn't push me away. I often still try to defend Christianity, perhaps in some arguments, which was not very productive for either way.

What pushed me away was seeing all the suffering in the world and seeing not only how I didn't see how the teachings of Christianity I found helpful, I just found them to add more judgment and more conflict to the entire situation. Ultimately, that left me with some kind of spiritual emptiness that I never would expect myself to say as a scientist, but that's how it felt. Ultimately, through suicidal depression, I ended up finding Zen Buddhism and found that as a path for me to both solidify what I consider my values and somehow put them into words and find a philosophy, basically, that I'm very happy to live by.

Brian: Thank you, Kuba. Thank you for telling that story very movingly. Kuba gets the last word. Thanks to all of you for, I guess, being so intentional about spirituality. We could have kept going. We've got so many calls of people who've converted from one thing to another, and always for very concrete reasons. Thank you for your calls and your thoughtfulness.

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