Religious Choice and Religious Change in Classical and Late Antiquity: Models and Questions

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to think broadly about the transformation of religious identity from classical to late antiquity, and the part played in that transformation by conversion.  Beginning with a simple three-point model of religious change, I reconsider A. D. Nock’s classic distinction between conversion and adhesion.  I argue that what really distinguishes classical from late antiquity was not the appearance of religious choices that offered the possibility of a radical reorientation in a person’s understanding of the cosmos, as Nock implies, but rather the development of social structures that transformed that possibility into a necessity, that effectively disallowed adhesion and made conversion the only possible type of religious choice.