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List of converts to Christianity

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The following is a list of notable people who converted to Christianity from a different religion or no religion. This article addresses only past voluntary professions of faith by the individuals listed, and is not intended to address ethnic, cultural, or other considerations. Certain people listed here may be lapsed or former converts, or their current religious identity may be ambiguous, uncertain or disputed. Such cases are noted in their list entries.

List of notable converts to Christianity

From Agnosticism or Atheism

From Buddhism

From Cao Dai

From Confucianism

Note: It is debated whether Confucianism is a religion and some Confucians who became Christians considered themselves to remain Confucian in philosophy.

From Hinduism

From Islam

The World Christian Encyclopedia estimates that, within the United States, there may be as many as twenty thousand converts from Islam to Christianity every year. Additionally, Ahmad Al-Katani suggests in an interview on Aljazeera that in Africa, 6 million Muslims convert to Christianity every year. Furthermore, although there are Christian converts in the Middle East, there are currently no definitive figures available as Christian converts are usually persecuted in this region (and may keep their conversion hidden from society), and therefore can not be reliably numbered.

From Judaism

The Jewish Encyclopedia gives some statistics on conversion of Jews to Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, and Orthodox Christianity (which it calls "Greek Catholicism"). Some 2,000 European Jews converted to Christianity every year during the 19th century, but in the 1890s the number was running closer to 3,000 per year, — 1,000 in Austria Hungary (Galizian Poland), 1,000 in Russia (Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and Lithuania), 500 in Germany (Posen), and the remainder in the English world.

File:1st Earl of Beaconsfield.jpg
Benjamin Disraeli, convert from Judaism to Christianity.
Georg Jellinek, convert from Judaism to Christianity.
Paul of Tarsus, convert from Judaism to Christianity.

From Manichaeanism

From Paganism

Paganism is a term which, from a Western perspective, has come to connote a broad set of spiritual or cultic practices or beliefs of any folk religion, and of historical and contemporary polytheistic religions in particular.

While the term has historically been used to denote adherents of any non-Abrahamic faith, for the purposes of this list, only adherents of non-major polytheistic, shamanistic, pantheistic, or animistic religions will be listed in this section.

Constantine I, convert from Paganism to Christianity.
File:Bateme de Clovis par St Remy.jpg
Statue of baptism of Clovis I, a convert from Paganism to Christianity.
File:JomoKenyatta.gif
Jomo Kenyatta, convert from Paganism to Christianity.
Rollo of Normandy, convert from Paganism to Christianity.

From Sikhism

From Zoroastrianism

Prior religion undetermined

  • Tony Fontane - popular recording artist in the 1940s and 1950s

See also

Notes and references

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  2. "I was brought up as an agnostic... and when I first became a Christian in the Seventies I didn't really know what it was I'd adopted." Faith in Practice: Holding on to the Mystery of Love, by Bruce Cockburn as told to Cole Morton, Third Way, September 1994, page 15. (Accessed 13 June 2007)
  3. "He converted from atheism to Christianity in his twenties after seeing how radically his patients' faith transformed their experience of suffering, and after reading several works by C.S. Lewis." The Question of God: Interview with Francis Collins, WGBH Educational Foundation, 2004 (Accessed 14 June 2007)
  4. Biography.com: Larry Flynt
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  6. ;
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  15. Nathanson, Bernand Aborting America (1981 Pinnacle Books)
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  108. Time on his involvement with PTL
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  111. ;
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  135. ,
  138. ,
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  155. ,
  164. ,
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