A reading list
Christian conversion stories, told by the people they happened to
A Muslim scholar who set out to refute Christianity and spent twelve years failing. A Brahmin who lost his caste. A river thief. Darwin’s own correspondent. These are conversion stories written by the people they happened to, not retold about them — and every one is old enough to read free.
- 1
1885 · Punjab, North India · From Islam
A Muslim Brought to Christ
Imad-ud-din Lahiz · 1884
Published as A Mohammedan Brought to Christ (1884)
A fourth-generation Muslim scholar who translated the Quran into Urdu and argued against Christianity at the 1854 Agra debate — then was baptized twelve years later. He wrote this specifically to answer people who said he had converted for money.
What it cost Almost everyone he knew. His friends and his own students turned on him, most of his relatives stopped speaking to him, and people said he did it for money. His father kept writing. (The Autobiography, last paragraph)
- 2
1905 · Ottoman Anatolia · From Islam
The Story of a Muslim Who Became a Christian
Johannes Avetaranian · 1930
Published as Geschichte eines Mohammedaners, der Christ wurde
A mullah claiming descent from Muhammad, who found a Turkish New Testament and went on to produce the first Uyghur translation of it. The closest thing to a first-person Ottoman convert memoir.
What it cost His post as a village mullah, the woman he was engaged to, and his country. He fled Turkey with the government looking for him, and men on the road planned to kill him. (ch. 7–9)
- 3
1895 · Japan · From Japanese tradition
How I Became a Christian
Kanzo Uchimura · 1895
Written in English so Westerners could follow a Japanese conversion, and notably unimpressed by the American Christianity Uchimura found when he arrived. He is a major figure in Japan and nearly unknown here.
- 4
1921 · Japan · From Japanese tradition
The Autobiography of Paul Kanamori
Paul M. Kanamori · 1921
Published as Kanamori’s Life-Story Told by Himself
Kanamori preached to enormous crowds across Japan after years of public silence following his own crisis of faith. Ten times more read in Japanese than in English — this account is why.
- 5
1892 · Maharashtra, India · From Hinduism
Baba Padmanji: An Autobiography
Baba Padmanji · 1888
A Brahmin reformer who campaigned against the treatment of widows before his conversion and kept campaigning after it. Unusually detailed on caste and on what leaving it cost him.
What it cost His wife, first of all. Her father carried her off the day she was to join him, and coached her to refuse him in court. His own father had threatened that the whole household would drown themselves if he was baptized. (ch. XIV, XVIII)
- 6
1868 · Benares · From Hinduism
A Letter to the Brahmos from a Converted Brahman of Benares
Nehemiah Goreh · 1868
A Chitpavan Brahmin and Sanskrit scholar writing to the Brahmo Samaj — reformers he had once been close to — to explain why reform was not enough for him.
What it cost His family performed the rite that declares a Hindu dead, and sent his young wife back to her father. In his own words, he went from a respectable man to “a most vile wretch and a fool” in the eyes of everyone he knew. (Part II; Dictionary of Christian Biography in Asia)
- 7
1875 · Bengal · From Hinduism
The Arian Witness
Krishna Mohan Banerjea · 1875
Banerjea reads the Vedas as pointing toward the gospel, arguing from inside a tradition he knew as a scholar rather than against it from outside.
What it cost His home and his job. His family had to put him out or lose their own caste, so he left at midnight with nowhere to go, and his baptism in 1832 cost him his teaching post. (George Smith, Life of Alexander Duff (1879); Banglapedia)
- 8
1882 · Russia · From despair
A Confession
Leo Tolstoy · 1882
The most famous conversion story of the modern age, written by a man at the height of his fame who had begun hiding rope from himself. It starts in complete darkness and takes its time leaving.
What it cost Nothing you could count. He turned his back on the outlook of his own class, made himself go through rites he did not understand, and in the end broke with the Church he had come back to. (ch. X, XIII, XV–XVI)
- 9
1895 · England · From atheism
The Examination and the Return
George John Romanes · 1895
Darwin’s friend and correspondent, who wrote an anonymous case against theism as a young man and spent his last years working his way back. Published posthumously from his notes.
What it cost His trust in his own reason. Giving up his intellect, he wrote, was the hardest sacrifice of all. His return to church is told by his editor, not by him. (Book Two, Part II, §4; Concluding Note)
- 10
1913 · Florence · From atheism
The Failure (Un uomo finito)
Giovanni Papini · 1913
A pugnacious Italian intellectual’s account of his own emptiness, written before the conversion that followed it. Papini is five times more read in Italian than in English.
What it cost The name he had made as the Church’s enemy. Raised without faith by an anticlerical father, he announced his conversion in 1919, six years after this book, and went on to write a life of Christ. (Wikipedia, citing his biographers)
- 11
1907 · Paris · From anarchism
From the Devil to God (Du Diable à Dieu)
Adolphe Retté · 1907
A symbolist poet and militant anarchist in Verlaine’s circle who turned, and wrote about it without softening what he had been. Our own translation — there is no English Wikipedia article on him.
What it cost The woman he had lived with for four years. And every book he had written against the Church came back to haunt him. (ch. X)
- 12
1876 · New York · From crime
Transformed; or, The History of a River Thief
Jerry McAuley · 1876
Jerry McAuley robbed ships on the East River, converted in Sing Sing, relapsed into drink, and then founded the first rescue mission in America. The relapse is in the book, which is what makes it credible.
- 13
1858 · Massachusetts · From addiction
An Autobiography
John B. Gough · 1845
Gough became the most famous temperance orator in the English-speaking world by describing his own drinking. Honest about the several times he went back to it.
- 14
1857 · New England · From socialism
The Convert; or, Leaves from My Experience
Orestes Brownson · 1857
Brownson passed through Presbyterianism, universalism, socialism and transcendentalism before Rome, and treats each stage as an argument to be answered rather than a phase to be regretted.
What it cost His reputation and many of his readers. He had just made his name in American letters, and becoming a Catholic made him look fickle to Protestants and suspect to Catholics. (ch. XVII–XVIII)
Questions about conversion stories
- What are the most famous Christian conversion stories?
- Augustine’s Confessions and Paul on the Damascus road are the two everyone names. Among the accounts collected here, Tolstoy’s A Confession, John Newton’s Authentic Narrative and Imad-ud-din’s A Muslim Brought to Christ are the most widely cited — and unlike most famous stories, each was written down by the person it happened to.
- Why read first-person accounts rather than books about them?
- Because a conversion is mostly interior, and the person it happened to is the only witness. Retellings compress the doubt and tidy the timeline: Newton stayed in the slave trade for years after his storm, McAuley relapsed, Gough went back to drink more than once. Those are the details that make an account believable, and they are the first things a summary drops.
- Are these stories reliable?
- They are testimony, not neutral reporting, and several were written specifically to answer accusers — Imad-ud-din wrote his to rebut the charge that he had converted for money. That is a reason to read them closely rather than a reason to discount them. Where a book’s claims are contested we say so on its page.
- Are these books free to read?
- Yes. Every one is in the public domain and every page here links a free scan. We sell typeset editions of some of them — our edition of a free text, never exclusive access to it.
More reading lists
T.S. Baker — clean editions of the classics, free sources linked.