With more than 30% of Americans changing religious affiliations during the course of our lifetimes, it makes sense to ask what it means to convert. Is it about leaving home and striking out for new territory, never to see the old homestead again? Is it more like a remodeling project in which we add on to the existing structure to make it more livable? Is it even limited to religion?
This Beliefnet gallery lists the Top 10 Recent Celebrity Converts, but did they really convert? Madonna has adopted practices rooted in Kabbalah, but is adopting new practices the same as a conversion? Would making such changes have satisfied Sacha Baron Cohen, whose love Isla Fisher went through a formal conversion to Judaism? And if not, why not?

William James writes in Lecture ix of The Varieties of Religious Experience about conversion as follows:

To be converted, to be regenerated, to receive grace, to experience religion, to gain an assurance, are so many phrases which denote the process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided, and consciously wrong inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously right superior and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon religious realities. This at least is what conversion signifies in general terms, whether or not we believe that a direct divine operation is needed to bring such a moral change about.

By James’ measure perhaps I too am a convert, having grown up with a profoundly different way of expressing my Jewishness. On the other hand, I never felt the internal divisions which he describes as the convert as feeling previous to their conversion. So, perhaps I am not.
At the end of the day, these celebrities are finding/have found a spiritual path that works for them. That’s what we should all be doing and frankly whether that “counts” as a conversion or not, is probably just a question for social/communal bean-counters. And it seems to me that spiritual identity is worth a whole lot more than beans. Perhaps we are all in an ongoing process of converting — converting our lives into ones filled with ever-greater purpose and meaning.