CONVERSION AND CONSONANCE: A SOCIOLOGY OF WHITE AMERICAN CATHOLIC CONVERTS.

This note is concerned with why Protestants embrace Catholicism, since data show that the strong majority of Americans feel that all religions are relatively equal within the American culture. Since religion is intimately bound up with family behavior, it was hypothesized that conversion might be related to the balance existing between the perceived religiousness of the parents and the perceived religiousness of the Catholic spouse whom the convert has married. Those conversion would be most likely in those circumstances where the Protestant came from a relatively weak religious background and his Catholic spouse was perceived as religiously fervent. The tables show that this hypothesis is supported by the data: the Q correlation between religious background in such an "unbalanced" situation and conversion is in excess of .5.