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Learning about the processes that deal with spiritual conversion and religious transformation is a goal central to the development of religious and psychological studies of modernity. This is because many scholars are concerned with learning how human beings change and develop effective methods to change them. Indeed, the study of learning, development, attitudes and persuasion, motivation, psychotherapy is at the core concerned with some aspect of human change. It is understandable, therefore, that the study of the particular change called spiritual or religious conversion was one of the first psychological topics ever studied scientifically (Allport 1999, 67). However, in contrast to learning, development, and maturation, conversion is a more distinct process by which a person goes from believing, adhering to, and/or practicing one set of religious teachings or spiritual values to believing, adhering to, and/or practicing a different set. The transformative process in conversion may take variable amounts of time, ranging from a few moments to several years, but it is the distinctiveness of the change that is its central identifying element (Allport 1999, 69). In contrast to someone arriving at a point of belief through the process of socialization and other developmental mechanisms, the convert can identify a time before which the religion was not accepted and after which it was accepted. This paper, by referring to a number of scholarly articles and sources, studies and analyzes the phenomenon of spiritual conversion, centering on the beliefs, social, and moral factors having the major impact on the persons deciding to convert to a different religion. Until now the search on spiritual conversion was limited. Each individual piece of research occasionally was guided by a particular theoretical orientation, but these interpretative frameworks were for the most part separated from one other and what few efforts there were to integrate them did not last. The one comprehensive review of the research on religious conversion did succeed in organizing the research around one core question, namely, ?Does religious conversion cause personality change?? (Allport 1999, 69) Although this degree of synthesis of the findings is good as far as it goes in answering one outcome question, it was not done within a framework that can explain the findings in an integrated way. The need for an intellectual device that could do this has been an obvious one since the first empirical study of conversion over 100 years ago (Baumeister 2001, 34-35). Fortunately, the recent introduction to this area of research of the concept of spiritual transformation may together emerge as the intellectual device that has been needed. The review by Ullman (1982,184-185; 1989 45) concluded that some aspects of personality seem to change following religious conversion and some do not.Altemeyer and Hunsberger (1997, 89-94) suggest that the concepts of religion and spirituality overlap but are not synonymous. Religion often but not necessarily brings a belief in a faith system, whereas spirituality denotes those values, ideas, or goals and purposes that surpass a person and to which he or she is committed. Both religion and spirituality involve commitment to something that surpasses the individual person. At a psychological functional level, each one seems to imply the other and there may be little difference between them other than personal preference for which language one uses to describe transcendent values and ultimate concerns (Miller and C?deBaca 2001, 93). Whichever terminology one employs, the functional dynamics among the components of the meaning system seem to be the same. People have individual preferences for which terminology they prefer. A large proportion of the people prefer to call themselves spiritual but not religious, and in the population as a whole a number of interesting combinations of spiritual and religious are used to represent an individual's own orientation (Altemeyer and Hunsberger 1997, 12, 102). To continue, it is better to proceed on the assumption that even though people may use either or both of these terms to describe their own orientation, there is a common psychological process by which they function (Altemeyer and Hunsberger 1997, 12). In fact, this assumption would be the only valid basis for expanding the research on religious conversion to overlap with the topic of spiritual transformation of a meaning system. The argument of Zinnbauer and Pargament (1998, 162-165) is based on the idea that spiritual transformations occur, that a model for such transformations can be described and tested empirically, that spiritual transformation partially overlaps with religious conversion, and that a spiritual transformation constitutes a change in the meaning system that a person holds as a basis for self-definition, the interpretation of life, and overarching purposes and ultimate concerns. In other words, religious conversions constitute one variety of spiritual transformation and are so described because traditional language and concepts are used. However, other life changes occur that are based on the same fundamental psychological mechanisms but are not necessarily touched in traditional religious language (Zinnbauer and Pargament 1998, 162-165). These changes may invoke the alternative terminology of spiritual transformation. Some implications of this argument are that (1) there must be pressures on the system?doubts, cracks, breaks, or strains of some kind?prompted by the discrepancies between the implicit or intended expectancies about how an aspect of meaning would be expressed or a need associated with it would be met; (2) the traditional type of spiritual transformation that has been studied in the psychology of religion has been religious conversion; (3) the concept of spiritual transformation is broader than the concept of religious conversion because people can be spiritual in ways that they do not regard as religious; and (4) spiritual transformation constitutes a change in the person's meaning system (Altemeyer and Hunsberger 1992, 124). Therefore, Zinnbauer and Pargament (1998, 166-169) take the approach that religious conversion and spiritual transformation are functionally equivalent and that religious conversion is one among a larger category of phenomena called spiritual transformation. In order to explore the implications of this model to its limits, Zinnbauer and Pargament (1998, 175) suggest to do the following: 1. Present a working model of religious conversion as spiritual transformation. 2. Identify research on religious doubts, strain, and other pressures on the system in order to illustrate how they may contribute to the process of transformation. 3. Briefly summarize research on religious conversion with a particular emphasis on recasting it into the meaning-system model as a framework for understanding spiritual transformation. 4. Assess how well the existing research fits the model, and set the agenda for future research and theory. The overall process can be summarized in the following way: spiritual transformations, religious and otherwise, occur because people are confronted with discrepancies in life that require them to build a new meaning system because the old one no longer works. Some changes in a meaning system may be partial and may not result in objectively identifiable outcomes, since some changes in people are not expressed in overt behavior. However, when spiritual transformations occur in their fullest form there will be measurable changes in self-perception and identity, life purpose, attitudes and values, goals, sensitivities, ultimate concerns, and behavior (Barker 2004, 33-35). Traditional literature on religious conversion placed great emphasis on the idea conversion involves a change in the self. Allport (1999, 23) said that a ?hitherto divided? self becomes unified. Zinnbauer and Pargament (1998, 170) document that other writers referred to ?a transcending self,? a change in the ?core identity construct,? and a change in ?identity consolidation? to describe what a religious conversion is. Such terminology places the emphasis on self-transformation at the core of the process. The general pattern of research is consistent with this and shows changes in aspects of self in a number of ways. For example, Ullman (1989, 34-39) found that converts to Judaism, Catholicism, Bahai, and Hare Krishna showed that sense of self increased and perception of stress decreased with conversion.