Lewis Rambo, Lucrecia de Leon, and the Politics of Conversion
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Lewis Rambo, Lucrecia de Leon, and the Politics of Conversion Kelly Bulkeley 1 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract
This article considers the social and political impacts, both intended and unintended, of research in the psychology of religion. The article offers a detailed account of a violent historical encounter between a young woman with unusual dreams (Lucrecia de Leon) and the judicial officials of the Spanish Inquisition that revolved around issues of mental health and functioning that psychologists of religion are actively studying today. This case raises questions about how other works in the psychology of religion, such as Lewis R. Rambo’s book Understanding Religious Conversion, might be applied in different social and political contexts, with both positive and negative possibilities. Raising awareness of these possibilities and collectively thinking through the consequences will give scholars in this field a better chance of diminishing the malign effects and perhaps even preventing them from occurring in the first place. Keywords Conversion . Psychology of religion . Dreams . Spanish inquisition
Introduction One of the most important contributions Lewis R. Rambo has made to the psychology of religion is the development of a better framework for the analysis and explanation of religious conversion (Rambo 1993). Conversion has long been a central topic in the psychology of religion, with early models proposed by pioneering figures like William James (in The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1958) and Edwin Starbuck (in The Psychology of Religion, 1899). In the view of James, Starbuck, and others from this era, conversion represents an especially pure and direct moment of human-divine connection (however the divine is conceived by the given individual). Conversions provide compelling evidence of the transformative potential of religion in people’s lives. Examples like Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus highlight the key features of the experience: It involves a sudden feeling of
* Kelly Bulkeley [email protected]
1
the Sleep and Dream Database, 4636 SW Humphrey Court, Portland, OR 97221, USA
Pastoral Psychology
overwhelming divine presence; it produces a complete change of faith, attitude, and worldview; and it marks a permanent shift to a new, more religiously engaged way of life. From this perspective, conversion is a paradigm of religion itself and the psychological processes that underlie it. Rambo’s work effectively refutes each of points. He widens the analytic scope by bringing additional disciplines (sociology, anthropology, history, etc.) and religious perspectives (Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, etc.) into the discussion and applying a more nuanced methodology to gain insight into all the various factors involved in a person’s conversion from one religious faith to another. Rambo finds that the dramatic cases cited by James and Starbuck do happen, but they are relatively rare and do not represent the broader phenomenology of religious conver
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