We seldom think about how fundamentally social our own conversion stories are until we’re reminded by newborn Christians.

Decades ago, my wife and I worked for a discipleship ministry at a small university in Georgia. The ministry was “student-led, staff-directed,” which meant we primarily invested in key student leaders while most of the evangelism and discipleship was happening student-to-student. Every fall semester, our student leaders would throw themselves into dorms, Greek life, and intramural sports teams, build close relationships with incoming freshmen, and share the gospel. And students were making decisions for Christ, often in the dozens. Many of those students are actively involved in their churches to this day, some even in full-time ministry! But occasionally I would wonder what those students were actually converting into.

Let me explain.

Each week, we had a large group gathering. Our student leaders could bring their new friends with whom they were hoping to share Christ. A team of student leaders would put on a funny skit, another leader would give a testimony of how he or she became a Christian, and one of the staff would give a talk, always with a clear gospel presentation. But one year, after dozens of students had made decisions for Christ, we decided to have some of those newborn Christians give their testimonies. No coaching; we just let them tell the audience what happened in their lives.

Their raw stories were revealing. Often through tears, they described how they felt alone and insecure before coming to college; but then they met this great new group of friends who challenged them to live for God; and they were so grateful for their new friends, and they were fired up about participating in future ministry events. That’s it.

At the time, these testimonies alarmed me. I wondered to myself, “Have we not been communicating the gospel clearly? Do these students think they’ve been converted into some cult? Why don’t they emphasize their old spiritual condition or their new faith in Christ?”

The truth is, those newborn Christian students—without the coaching on how to give a standard gospel testimony—were describing exactly what had happened to them. Their old friendships, and consequently their very social identities, had been severed in the act of coming to college. They felt isolated and alone. But then they met this new, welcoming, fun, Jesus-loving group of students who taught them how to swing-dance and play the guitar. And they were excited to be part of this new Jesus-loving group and live out their new social identity. 

Did these students actually put their faith in Christ in a salvific way? That’s a Holy Spirit question, one we can only try to answer over time. But from a human perspective, their “conversion” to Christianity was fundamentally about a slower transition from identification with one social group to identification with another, and for many that newer identification has lasted decades. I know because that’s my story, too. That’s how I became a Christian in college.

As it turns out, my story and those of all those students we discipled in college ministry reflect a key insight from the social scientific study of religion. And it’s one I’m confident missionaries in non-Western contexts know all too well. This is that “religion” is fundamentally more about social identities, practices, and in-group norms than it is about one person placing their faith in a theological claim and determining to live their life in light of that decision.

In my book, Religion for Realists: Why We All Need the Scientific Study of Religion, I argue that Anglophone Westerners often unwittingly embrace several misconceptions about how religion actually works, largely because of our dominant Anglo-Protestant culture. These are misconceptions that a social scientific study of religion (when done rightly) can correct, because it grounds our understanding of religion in empirical evidence rather than anecdotes or tradition.

Though there are a number of misconceptions the social scientific study of religion can clear up, I focus on three major Anglo-Protestant misconceptions presented in Table 1 below. The first one is that we tend to think of religion as about “faith” or “belief” as the primary cognitive force that drives religious behavior, when in fact mountains of evidence reveal that religious behavior is primarily a reflection of our attachment to social group identities and norms of behavior. The theology is often downstream. We are belongers before we are believers.

Table 1—Primary Operant in Religion According to Anglo-Protestant Tradition vs. Reality

And though my evidence for this comes from numerous studies, this is far from an unbiblical perspective. Christians do not baptize privately or in isolation. We do it publicly. But why? Because we are baptized into a community and that implies a change of social identity. In fact, in one study, my co-author and I demonstrated that Americans who undergo religious “rites of passage” (baptism, confirmation, Bar Mitzvah) in their teens are less likely to fall away from their religious tradition as adults. Why? It’s almost certainly because the rite of passage marks them socially, binding their adult identity to the faith of their youth.

There are other examples. For instance, the nature of church discipline as Jesus describes in Matthew 18 is fundamentally social, not cognitive: First your brother confronts you, then he involves the community to apply pressure, and if that doesn’t work, you face the threat of ostracism—your community treats you like you were never one of them (“like a pagan or tax collector”). We see the same emphasis in Paul’s teaching to the Corinthians where they are told to disassociate themselves from someone who claims to be a Christian but lives contrary to Christian ethics. The point as Paul reveals in his second letter to that community isn’t to help the offender to believe new things, but to apply social pressure and bring the person to repentance. 

The scientific study of religion tells us our theological faith convictions matter less than we realize, especially compared to the powerful cognitive force of in-group attachments and unspoken group norms. But then, so does the content of our faith convictions. The second misconception the social sciences correct is that the primary growth factor shaping religious futures is the merit of ideas or doctrines. In reality, it is not the best or most compelling religious ideas that determine whether Islam, Christianity, or secular humanism grow to dominate a nation. Rather it is—and always has been—more often natural population dynamics: Who is having more babies? Who is dying at higher rates? Who is migrating to new territories? We are belongers before we are believers, yes, but even more we are bodies with durable group identities and norms before we are believers. 

But what factors shape the population dynamics that influence how our bodies, group identities, and norms proliferate or change? The third and last Anglo-Protestant misconception the social scientific study of religion corrects is that large-scale religious change does not primarily take place person-to-person like some contagion. Rather, beneath religious transitions lie structural shifts in whole economies, governments, and technological developments. These transitions affect information flows, minority rights, access to public education, social safety nets, and so on. What often looks like a grassroots religious revival or sudden religious decline is—again, from a human perspective—the consequence of massive and interconnected legal, economic, technological, and organizational shifts. 

The implications for understanding religious growth and decline in the Western context are legion. But the social scientific study of religion also helps us understand other pressing social problems. Take, for example, political polarization.

Remember how it sounded like the newborn Christians in my college ministry were somehow confusing being a Christian with just being part of our particular social group? Research on group identities shows that happens on a much larger scale in that our religious identities often overlap with other important identities like race, nation, or political regime. And that makes intuitive sense. Just like we unconsciously conflate “Hindu” with “Indian” and “Muslim” with “Middle East,” we can do the same with our own Christian identities. If all the Christians I personally know in the world are White, American, and Republican, when I think “Christian,” I might intuitively start to conflate that category with those other social identities.

In fact, I’ve witnessed this. About five years ago, while dropping my kids off at school, I was listening to a popular Christian talk radio station that is strongly conservative. The show host for that hour asked listeners if their radio station had played a role in their spiritual conversion and to call in with a testimony. Caller after caller shared a story that went like this: “I used to vote Democrat; I was very liberal. But then a friend of mine recommended that I start listening to your radio station. It made so much sense. And now I’m a solid conservative.” Is that what a Christian conversion looks like? It did for these people because the social identity of “conservative” or “Republican” and “real Christian” have become so conflated that to ask these Americans about their own spiritual journey was to ask them how they went from Democrat (spiritual darkness) to Republican (light).

And this likely happens on both sides of the political spectrum. But in a culture where “Christian” is rapidly becoming synonymous with one particular political party, and “secular” is becoming synonymous with another, our political disagreements are becoming religious conflicts, with cosmic stakes. Reasonable people can disagree about climate policy, tariffs, police reform, and education funding. But those disagreements are virtually impossible to overcome when one’s political opponent is viewed as an “Army of Satan,” and they view your party as “Theocratic fascists.” It’s not theological conviction that amplifies the conflict, but identity.

What is the relevance of all this for the task of global missions?

First, decades of social scientific research on religion confirms what missionaries in Muslim-majority contexts have long experienced: the work of seeing Muslims become Christians is daunting not primarily because it is difficult to convince Muslims that Jesus Christ was who he said he was. Our theologies are often loosely held and more fluid than we like to admit. Rather, what is more challenging is getting Muslims—with all their lifelong social connections to Muslim family and friends whom they still love—to imagine themselves as Christ-followers who have left Islam behind. For many, it is absolutely unthinkable. We tend to characterize Jesus as being hyperbolic for effect when he told his disciples to “Hate your family” and to “Hate your own life” for Christ’s sake. But to these Muslims, neither command feels like hyperbole; both are connected through the power of in-group attachments and identity.

What is more, there are structural barriers in place in the form of anti-proselytizing laws, anti-conversion laws, and the systematic persecution of Christians to suppress their numbers. Tertullian was empirically dead-wrong when he asserted, “We spring up in greater numbers the more we are mown down by you: the blood of Christians is seed.” On the contrary, research shows systematic persecution is quite effective at suppressing targeted religious groups.

And this is not merely a reflection of Muslim theological commitments or individuals who hate Christians. As it turns out, autocratic regimes around the world are much more familiar with how religion actually works than many Western scholars and journalists. They understand that suppressing religious change to maintain a particular social order is much less about convincing citizens with ideas and more about setting up structural barriers to stifle communities of religious minorities and prevent them from gaining cultural and political influence.

Incorporating these facts within our missiology, the missionary task becomes less about convincing Muslims (or anyone from a non-Christian context) of theological claims (though that certainly takes place eventually) and more about making it possible to build thriving communities of committed Christian nationals with whom group membership becomes a structural—and eventually a social—option for former Muslims.

In addition, the implications of these findings invite us to pursue structural change, which means political change. Perhaps lobbying our government to use greater diplomacy and apply pressure on Christian-persecuting nations to cease and adopt religious liberty reforms would help? Though there are few bipartisan positions left in American politics, encouraging nations with histories of human rights violations to protect the religious liberties of their own citizens may be one.

Ultimately, insights from the scientific study of religion require us Anglophone Westerners—steeped in the ambient folk theology of our Anglo-Protestant culture—to think differently about what “religion” means in any context. Confirming much of what non-Christian religious groups and missionaries who minister to them already understand: Religion is more social, less private; more embodied, less cognitive; more contextual and fluid, less doctrinaire; more ritual, less textual; and more systemic, less individualist. Understanding this not only makes us more effective in ministry, it helps us understand our own Christian experience in a deeper way, one more tethered to reality. A religion for realists, if you will.