If you have experienced no authentic conversions you’ll conceive conversion as change in belief. “I used to think this, but now I think that.” You may be pretty sure you’ve experienced conversions, but that you describe it using different language. Everything transpires within the same universe. Deep changes in how we experience the universe are psychological. Subjective reality changes, but objective reality remains the same. There is much chatter about pluralism, empathy, self-awareness, understanding, ethics and even spirituality, and these epiphenomena feel important to us. They are crowned with faint but opaque halos of vague significance.

If you have experienced one authentic conversion, you’ll conceive conversion as a revelation of a formerly concealed reality. “I was blind, but now I see.” You transitioned from a false faith to the true faith. The universe veiled something infinitely profound, ineffable and important.

Once you have experienced two conversions, though, you’ll conceive conversion as transition between faiths, each with some gain and some loss. You are converted to a radically pluralistic world where conversions are a perpetual possibility. Conversions are no longer as consequential as before, because they happen against a stable background of enworlding faiths. It is a major conversion to minor conversions and sporadic trivial conversions. Liberalism is far deeper than anyone suspected!

But then, after who knows how many minor conversions — maybe six? nine? seventeen? — deep patterns emerge. We notice: When everything changes, some subtle constants never change, and these constants become impossible to doubt, at least in practice, and only if we are subjectively fastidious. And now a major conversion happens. And this one feels like the first conversion. “I was blind, but now I see.”… transition from a false faith to the true faith… something infinitely profound, ineffable and important is now plainly revealed.