Kings and conversion
William
Hamblin and Daniel Peterson, Deseret News March 4 2016
For most of us today, religious faith is considered
a very personal, private and individual thing. Throughout world
history, though, nations have often followed the religious beliefs
and ideologies of their rulers.
In our modern world, with widespread political and
religious liberty, it’s often assumed that conversion to a religion
is fundamentally a personal and spiritual event. Throughout
history, however, one of the most significant factors in religious
success or failure has been the conversion of rulers. Convert a
king, convert a kingdom.
Moses is an example of a visionary prophetic ruler
who brings the entire Israelite nation to worship his newfound God,
who seems to have been completely forgotten at the time of his
Sinai theophany. The Israelite religious reforms of Hezekiah and
Josiah, described in the Bible, were imposed by kings upon Israel,
though with prophetic guidance. In ancient Egypt, Pharaoh
Akhenaten, a monotheistic visionary, briefly succeeded in
establishing quasi-monotheistic Atenism as his state religion,
though it was ultimately rejected after his death.
The most famous royal convert of antiquity was
Darius of Persia (who died in 486). His royal predecessors ruling
the massive Persian empire had been polytheists. Darius’
grandfather, however, had been converted to Zoroastrianism, and
when Darius ascended the throne, he made his family religion the
state religion of Persia.
The most well-known and historically significant
example of this phenomenon is Constantine the Great. Before his
conversion to Christianity in 312, perhaps only 10 percent of
Romans were Christian. Within a century after his death, that
number reached 80 percent to 90 percent. Imperial patronage was a
key factor in Christianity’s ultimate success.
But Constantine was hardly the only or even the
first pagan king who converted his kingdom to
Christianity.
Tiridates III of Armenia converted in 301. He was
followed a few decades later by the conversion of Ezana of Axum
(Ethiopia) around 350. Although France had been largely
Christianized under the Roman Empire, the conversion of the
Frankish barbarian king Clovis in 486 led to the establishment of
Christianity as the religion of the kingdom of the
Franks.
The Anglo-Saxons, on the other hand, remained pagans
for two more centuries. When Olaf Tryggvason became king of Norway
in 995, he attempted to force the Vikings to convert to
Christianity, launching decades of civil war in Scandinavia. The
conversion of Duke Mindaugas of Lithuania to Christianity around
1250 led to the eventual conversion of the Lithuanians, the last
European people to be Christianized.
The conversion of the Slavs of Russia to Greek
Orthodoxy was likewise facilitated by the Grand Prince Vladimir of
Kiev. When he was baptized in 987, he ordered the entire population
of Kiev to march to the river and be baptized as well. Vladimir’s
neighbors to the east, the Turkish Khazars living north of the
Caspian, converted to Judaism following the example of their Khan,
who built a replica of the Mosaic Tabernacle and renewed Jewish
biblical sacrifices.
The pagan Mongol conquerors of Iran ultimately
converted to Islam following the example of their Khan Ghazan, who
became a Muslim in 1295. West African king Mansa Musa (1312-1337),
a devout Muslim, was instrumental in spreading Islam through the
empire of Mali.
Buddhist history also contains many similar examples
of the conversion of kings as the catalyst for converting kingdoms.
The most famous is Ashoka, the Hindu emperor of India who converted
to Buddhism around 270 B.C., spreading it throughout India.
Missionaries from Ashoka ultimately converted both Devanampiya
Tissa, of Sri Lanka, and Menander I (Milinda, c. 145 B.C.), the
Greek successor of Alexander the Great and ruler of Bactria (north
Afghanistan). Afghanistan remained a majority Buddhist country for
the next thousand years.
Further east, Kubilai Khan’s conversion to Tibetan
(Lamaistic) Buddhism made it the official religion of China in the
late 13th century. Likewise, the conversion of the Mongol Altan
Khan to Tibetan Buddhism in the 16th century facilitated its spread
throughout Mongolia, where it’s still predominant today.
The Protestant Reformation survived in the early
16th century in large part because of the conversion of German
princes to Protestantism. The divide today between German-speaking
Protestant and Catholic regions still reflects the patterns of
which princes in the 16th century converted to Lutheranism or
remained Catholic. Most notoriously, Henry the Eighth’s
“conversion” to Protestantism was instrumental in transforming
England from Catholic to Anglican.
Throughout history, until the development of the
idea of separation of church and state in the 18th century, the
religion of kings has been a decisive factor in the conversions of
peoples. The secular ideology and religious beliefs of rulers
continue to play an important, though no longer decisive, role in
societies today.