When was the last time you heard about the religious conversion
of an entire nation? A region? A city? A neighborhood? A family?
In reading contemporary missionary literature, one does
occasionally come across the conversion of whole families, and
even more rarely, of entire clans. But these conversions take
place in cultures deemed to be “primitive”, offering little hope
to us in the “developed” world. The fact is that Christendom was
built on the conversion of groups, not individuals. And these
conversions flowed hierarchically from the top of society to the
bottom, not democratically as a “grass roots” movement. In the
most recent issue of the Saint Austin Review (if you are not
already a subscriber, I hope you’ll rectify the situation and
subscribe immediately), dedicated to “Religion and Politics”,
you will find the following gem by the renowned historian
Christopher Dawson: The great missionary expansion of the
nineteenth century was based on the principle of individual
conversion … There is a fundament