Why a Theologian Says Radicalization Looks a Lot Like Religious Conversion

In an era when radicalization is usually framed as a security problem, a new paper argues that the term may be pointing us in the wrong direction. Klaas Walhout of Princeton Theological Seminary, writing in the journal Pastoral Psychology, proposes that what we call radicalization is often best understood as a project of self-transformation, a conversion in the classic religious sense, undertaken by individuals, frequently men, who are trying to escape a deeply internalized sense of failure. The argument, presented as part of the 2026 Philadelphia Group for Pastoral Theology with Men and Boys, reframes one of the most contested concepts in contemporary political psychology through a pastoral and theological lens.

Walhout’s starting point is a close reading of how the word radicalization actually functions, both in popular discourse and in the academic literature. In public debate, the term tends to carry an implicit geography: there is assumed to be a reasonable political center, and radicalization describes movement away from it toward the extremes. Scholars of extremism have long noted the analytical difficulties with this framing. Work by researchers such as Donatella della Porta, Stefan Malthaner, and Kylie McDonald has emphasized that radicalization is better seen as a relational and evolving process than as a linear march from moderation to violence. Walhout pushes this critique further, suggesting that the field should stop measuring radical beliefs against an imagined political midpoint altogether.

Instead, he proposes a different yardstick. What matters, in his account, is not where an individual lands on a left-right spectrum but the nature and degree to which that person seeks to radically transform the self. Radicalization, on this view, is primarily an inwardly focused undertaking, a campaign to remake one’s own identity, even when it borrows the language of political struggle. This inversion has practical consequences: if the driving engine is internal rather than ideological, then interventions aimed purely at countering extremist ideas may be addressing the surface of the problem while leaving its psychological core untouched.

The engine of that internal drive, Walhout argues, is an internalized sense of failure, often entangled with humiliation. His argument draws on a body of scholarship that connects violent extremism with wounded masculinity. Michael Kimmel’s research on how young men enter and exit violent extremist movements, and more recent work by Lucas Gottzén on remasculinization as both an individual and a political project, suggests that extremist movements can offer aggrieved men a kind of restoration: a story in which personal failure is reframed as collective victimhood and violence becomes a route to recovered status. Studies of humiliation as a self-conscious emotion likewise document how profoundly it can reorganize a person’s sense of self and social worth.

To give this inward transformation a conceptual vocabulary, Walhout reaches back more than a century, to William James’s classic 1902 lectures published as The Varieties of Religious Experience. James, the Harvard psychologist and philosopher, treated conversion not as a niche theological event but as a general psychological process: the divided self, torn by guilt, failure, and inner conflict, undergoes a sudden or gradual unification around a new center of energy. What was once sick and fragmented becomes whole, and the convert typically experiences the change as a rebirth. James’s account was built from hundreds of first-person testimonies, and it deliberately bracketed the question of which tradition the conversion served, treating the transformation itself as the phenomenon worth explaining.

Read through James, contemporary radicalization acquires a familiar shape. The recruit arrives at an extremist milieu carrying a divided self, a painful gap between who he is and who he feels he should be. The movement supplies a total interpretive framework, a new community, and a narrative in which the convert’s failures are explained, dignified, and redirected. The resulting change of identity can be as psychologically complete as any religious conversion, complete with a new name for oneself, new loyalties, and a cleaned-up moral account of one’s past. Walhout suggests that the widespread prevalence of this inner divided self among those who radicalize would become clear if case studies were examined closely, and he points to recent incidents described in public reporting as the kind of cases that invite this reading.

The comparison is not merely historical color. It changes what counts as an intervention. If radicalization is a conversion, then deradicalization is also a matter of transformation rather than simple persuasion. Here Walhout offers his most distinctive proposal: prevention itself should be understood as a different kind of conversion, one in which the individual converts not to a new ideology but to a new way of relating to his own perceived failures and humiliations. Rather than recruiting the wounded self into a crusade, a successful intervention helps the person metabolize failure without needing to annihilate it, joining a long pastoral tradition of counseling that treats shame and loss as materials for growth rather than ammunition for war.

This framing situates the paper within a growing body of work that treats spiritual and identity struggles, particularly among boys and men, as serious objects of study. Walhout’s own field has explored these themes before; Robert Dykstra’s essay on the spiritual quest of the loser and his recent reflection on whether life is still worth living both examine how failure and despair shape the inner lives of men. By connecting that pastoral literature to the empirical study of extremism, the paper builds a bridge that security-focused research has rarely attempted, and it echoes earlier theoretical concerns about liberty and self-development that stretch back to John Stuart Mill.

The approach also aligns with recent scholarship that pushes back against top-down models of radicalization. Hilary Pilkington’s edited volume on young people’s journeys through radicalizing milieus documents how individuals resist, negotiate, and reinterpret the extremist narratives around them, reinforcing the point that radicalization is never simply a matter of absorbing doctrine. Walhout’s contribution sharpens that insight by locating the decisive transformation inside the person: doctrine is less a cause than a vehicle for a project of self-remaking that was already underway.

The paper, received in August 2026 and published in October, does not claim to have solved the problem of extremism, and its evidence base is conceptual rather than experimental; the author notes that no datasets were generated or analyzed. Its value lies in the reframing it offers. If violent radicalization is, for many who undergo it, a conversion in William James’s sense, then the most important questions may not be about ideology at all, but about failure, humiliation, and the human need to turn a broken self into a whole one. And if prevention can become its own kind of conversion, one that offers the humiliated a different relationship to their pain, the pastoral tradition may have something practical to say to one of the most urgent policy problems of the age.

Subject of Research: Radicalization understood as self-transformation and conversion through a pastoral theological lens

Article Title: Radicalization as Conversion: A Pastoral Theological Perspective

Article References: Radicalization as Conversion: A Pastoral Theological Perspective. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-026-01383-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11089-026-01383-y

Keywords: radicalization, conversion, William James, pastoral theology, masculinity, extremism, humiliation, self-transformation, deradicalization, Pastoral Psychology, identity, prevention