I recently ran across an interesting news article about Liberty University’s seminary dean in The Huffington Post’s college section—the story brought together two topics which I love to research and occasionally skewer, namely religion and higher education, so I couldn’t resist reading about the scandal in Lynchburg, Va. Here’s the gist:

Everyone loves a good conversion story and so did the administration of Liberty University, when it came to selecting Muslim-convert Ergun Caner as dean of their Baptist seminary.  Ergun Caner claimed to have converted from Islam to evangelical Christianity sometime during his high school years in Ohio: from Sunni religion to Sunbelt faith, so to speak.  Perhaps he heard a calling on the road to Cincinnati!  The story of this wayward lamb finding his way propelled his ministries as well as his ascendency to a deanship at rapidly growing faith-based institution, founded by Jerry Fallwel no less.  ChristianityToday, though, recently  uncovered evidence that Dr. Caner had embellished his conversion story and misrepresented his biography.  The evangelical blog  contends that he lied about “growing up in Turkey, when he actually grew up in Ohio, being raised in a devout Muslim home, rather than a nominal one, having been involved in Islamic jihad and having debated dozens of Muslims about the Islamic faith.”

Since I am not Baptist or affiliated with Liberty, I am not overly concerned with what this shepherd did before he took up the pulpit or what he tells his flock about his adolescence.  I am, however, fascinated by the continued allure and power of the conversion story. Why would someone lie about  their former religious devotion?  Paul claims in Galatians  to have “persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it,” which made his zeal for Jesus and dedication to his message all the more poignant.  Paul’s repentance and his blinding on the road to Damascus becomes the archetypal conversion, but the conversion topos doesn’t reach its apex until Augustine’s supposed Confession circa 397 c.e.  

In the African bishop’s magnum opus, Augustine crafts his spiritual autobiography as an extended confession to God for his past sins.  He brings in a rich cast of characters to explain how he wandered in philosophical angst and sexual promiscuity until a heart-wrenching, theophany in a Milanese garden: he hears a voice, “Tolle, Lege, get up and Read”; he runs to Bible, opens the first page he finds, and is amazed to find a verse in Romans that speaks to his conditions.  Miraculously, he seeks baptism from that point on.  Like Caner, though, there is evidence that Augustine embellished “his life” before this revelation, Augustine’s pious mother Monica had tried to bring him to the Christian faith throughout his life, but he was too busy with women and philosophy.  Then Augustine fell into a trendy new religion/heretical version of Christianity Manicheanism, which held sway over him for nine years according to Augustine.  By his own accounts, though, Augustine stayed with the Manichean community for eleven years—apparently for two years, he was present in body, but not mind or spirit.  Augustine also worked in a Christian Roman court, so assuredly he had to at least feign some affiliation with Christianity; and lastly, he was married through most of his life and among the sex-fearing Manicheans, so one might doubt the degree of his obsession with “concupiscence” or horniness.  But which makes a more compelling character:  a recalcitrant, sex-crazed heretic who finds his way or a skeptical man of typical passions?  Which one draws the distinction between sinner and saint more clearly?

I can’t help but think that Dr. Caner had read Augustine’s Confessions or at least was influenced by the topos of zealous conversion.  How easy it would be to shape a parallel conversion story for a  Muslim from a distant, heretical land (Turkey/Sweden) whose mother is named Monica (that’s her name)! Augustine fought rumors about his past for most of his life, so perhaps Dr. Caner should consider this the first of many attacks.  But things worked out pretty well for Augustine and his nachleben, so don’t worry Ergun…