Center for Metanoia Studies (Centre d'Etudes Interdisciplinaires de la Métanoïa)

Leaving one’s religion can be understood as deep personal change. Both the motivation and the consequences of either conversion or becoming an atheist should however not only be understood from the perspective of the individual but also studied from the context of the social group the individual belongs to. This paper discusses a new approach to understand the role the group plays in understanding conversion by using a macro-historical lens. I showcase how historical data on both governmental restrictions and societal pressures on conversion fits with wider historical data on religious tolerance, how such dataset can help us understand processes of building societal resilience, and how this data can be used to build diagnostic tools for societal crises.