In a groundbreaking historical work that focuses on the long, tense convergence of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam with an uncompromising secular perspective, Susan Jacoby illuminates the social and economic forces that have shaped individual faith and the voluntary conversion impulse that has changed the course of Western history—for better and for worse. Covering the triumph of Christianity over paganism in late antiquity, the Spanish Inquisition, John Calvin’s dour theocracy, American plantations where African slaves had to accept their masters’ religion—along with individual converts including Augustine of Hippo, John Donne, Edith Stein, Muhammad Ali, George W. Bush and Mike Pence— Strange Gods makes a powerful case that nothing has been more important in struggle for reason than the right to believe in the God of one’s choice or to reject belief in God altogether. “In book after book [Jacoby] has been a paradoxically effective religion teacher, and this new book, her most ambitious yet, is no exception. Atheists as self-conscious and purposeful about their irreligion as she are a small minority in America and a tiny minority in the world at large, but her improbable strength is that she makes the  subject  of religion, a subject she can never be done talking about, contagiously interesting….True to her calling as a heroine of free thought, she fights the good fight for irreligion as she goes, treating her reader to many a saucy aside, many a laugh-line for the baptismally decertified….Jacoby’s book is a page-turner, not so much because it tells a single, forward-rushing story but because, in the manner of a good teacher each of whose classes leaves you eager for the next, any two of her chapters will leave you ready for a third.” — Jack Miles, Los Angeles Review of Books “Susan Jacoby turns her feisty brilliance on the history of religious conversions, famous and infamous, simultaneously giving us a history of religious intolerance. Her combination of intellectual rigor, vigor, erudition, and integrity makes Strange Gods wonderfully lively and enlightening.” —Rebecca Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex “The modern wave of secularist books has seen no author more historically erudite than Susan Jacoby. Immensely learned, yet with a lightly witty style, she smoothly surveys the whole phenomenon of religious conversion, from ancient times to our own. The section on slavery in America is especially moving, giving the lie to the myth that abolitionism was primarily motivated by religion. And—a  blessed bonus—she has no truck with that pretentious gimmick favoured by so many historians, the historic present tense.” —Richard Dawkins, author of Brief Candle in the Dark “Susan Jacoby’s Strange Gods is an astonishing work: an audacious attack on idées reçues about conversion, an exposure of a legion of hypocrisies, a spirited guidebook to religions and heresies one remembers at best dimly, and a passionate defense of the right to reason and choose. Jacoby is a supremely intelligent and brave writer. It is impossible to praise her book too highly.” —Louis Begley, author of The Dreyfus Affair “Rare is the person who can combine deep scholarship with powerful narrative abilities and a capacity for autobiographical detail. Susan Jacoby’s Strange Gods does all of these things, and in the service of a fascinating subject.  Those who change their religion, those who do not, and those who could care less will all find much of value in her book.” —Alan Wolfe, At Home in Exile “One of America’s most astute cultural critics, Susan Jacoby writes more intelligently and insightfully than any author I have read on the vexed issues of religious identity, freedom, ideology, and the collision of secular and theological forces.” —James Shapiro, author of The Year of Lear “In a work blending culture, religion, history, biography, and a bit of memoir (with more than a soupcon of attitude), the author of The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought returns with a revealing historical analysis of religious conversions….The author…impressively combines thorough research and passionate writing. Jacoby draws the first detailed maps of a terrain that has been very much in need of intelligent, careful cartography.” — Kirkus Reviews *starred review* “This militantly secular history of religious conversion reconsiders famous converts, from Augustine to Muhammad Ali, to reveal the complex web of political, economic, and social forces that can lead to individual conversions….Its conclusion—that religious coercion inevitably “produces a false uniformity that collapses as swiftly or slowly as social conditions permit”—is powerful.” —The New Yorker   “A vivid picture of the ways in which conversions happen and the myriad reasons behind their happening.” —Booklist “Neither a scathing New Atheist tract nor a dry academic history, Jacoby’s sweeping account of religious conversio