Conversion Motifs Among Muslim Converts in the United States

Although much is now known about religious conversion in general, there is still relatively little known about how and why conversion to Islam takes place in the United States. Expanding on previous research, the current study examines types of conversions among United States Muslim converts. Seventy-three converts to Islam, all United States residents, provided detailed qualitative descriptions of their personal experiences of religious conversion through a free-response item. Using consensus coding, multiple coders classified these responses according to Lofland and Skonovd's (1981) conversion motifs typology. Researchers also categorized responses using natural language processing and machine learning text analysis techniques. Results indicate that conversions to Islam in the United States have predominantly intellectual motifs. These results reinforce previous research findings, indicating that across cultures and temporal cohorts, converts to Islam tend to actively seek meaning and purpose, feel illuminated upon encountering Islam, and come to believe in Islam before they participate in its practices. Based on manual coding, 58.9% of our sample described their conversion experiences in ways that matched criteria for the intellectual motif. This was substantiated by the results of our computational text analysis, which found that 68.5% of conversion experiences semantically corresponded to the intellectual motif.