The United States has a long history of religious pluralism, and
yet Americans have often thought that people's faith determines
their eternal destinies. The result is that Americans switch
religions more often than any other nation. The Chance of Salvation
traces the history of the distinctively American idea that religion
is a matter of individual choice. Lincoln Mullen shows how the
willingness of Americans to change faiths, recorded in narratives
that describe a wide variety of conversion experiences, created a
shared assumption that religious identity is a decision. In the
nineteenth century, as Americans confronted a growing array of
religious options, pressures to convert altered the basis of
American religion. Evangelical Protestants emphasized conversion as
a personal choice, while Protestant missionaries brought
Christianity to Native American nations such as the Cherokee, who
adopted Christianity on their own terms. Enslaved and freed African
Americans similarly created a distinctive form of Christian
conversion based on ideas of divine justice and redemption. Mormons
proselytized for a new tradition that stressed individual free
will. American Jews largely resisted evangelism while at the same
time winning converts to Judaism. Converts to Catholicism chose to
opt out of the system of religious choice by turning to the
authority of the Church. By the early twentieth century, religion
in the United States was a system of competing options that created
an obligation for more and more Americans to choose their own
faith. Religion had changed from a family inheritance to a
consciously adopted identity.
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