New Faith, Old Fear

The War That Awakened Identity

Lviv, spring 2026. The synagogue on Brativ Rohatyntsiv Street is bursting at the seams. Among those praying are people who, just a year earlier, would not have been able to tell Yom Kippur from Shabbat. This time, they have come to say Kaddish.

Ukraine is estimated to have around 150,000 Jews. The war has made thousands of them cross the threshold of a synagogue for the first time in their lives. “People are searching for meaning and hope,” Rabbi Mendel Gottlieb of Lviv told Jewish Action. “Suddenly these Jews realize that no one else cares for them except the Jewish community,” he added.

This is not merely a return to faith. It is a sudden, often unexpected awakening of identity, one that meets all the criteria of neophytism. As the spring 2026 issue of Jewish Action describes, 23-year-old Yura Urshansky, a new ba’al teshuvah, joined the army. When his father died, a rabbi advised him to say Kaddish for him. Another newly awakened Jew, Olena Yurchin, said: “Maybe the war happened for this reason — to bring us and our children back to our roots.” That statement, seemingly radical, captures the essence of neophyte thinking: even suffering acquires meaning as an instrument of conversion.

France and the United States. A Catholic Renaissance

At the same time as Jews in Ukraine are rediscovering their roots, something equally unexpected is happening in Catholic Europe.

The French Bishops’ Conference announced on 25 March 2026 that 13,234 adult catechumens would be baptised in France at Easter 2026. That represents a 28 percent increase over the already record-breaking year of 2025. As Rome Reports noted, these are the highest numbers in decades. In January 2026, Catholic World Report reported that new Catholics are mostly young: members of Generation Z who did not grow up in practising families.

In the United States, the figures look equally striking. In April 2026, the National Catholic Register published the results of a survey covering 71 dioceses. Los Angeles recorded a 139 percent increase in converts, Pittsburgh 108 percent, and Philadelphia 60 percent. According to estimates based on March 2026 data from the Hallow app, around 110,000 new adults joined the Catholic Church across the United States this year — a level not seen since 2008.

The Zeal of the Convert: Why Faith Becomes Armor

This phenomenon has a name in the sociology of religion: the zeal of the convert. In a study published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, researcher Nadia Beider showed that converts are not automatically more zealous than lifelong believers. Most simply blend into the background.

Yet when Beider examines the phenomenon scientifically, she suggests that where the zeal of the convert appears in its more intense forms, its causes often lie in a deep crisis of identity. Religious overactivity then becomes a kind of “armor,” meant to protect the convert from returning to an old, unstable life.

The exception matters. Extreme convert zeal appears among those who come from a profound identity crisis or consciously choose the strictest and most rigorous religious environments. For them, the new faith is not merely a change of views. It becomes a radical strategy for survival.

In such cases, overzealousness becomes a necessary “entry ticket.” It allows a new believer to build authority and loyalty quickly in a place where they lack roots or a family history that would legitimise their presence. The neophyte must shout louder and pray more fervently to drown out their own sense of foreignness and prove absolute loyalty to the “old” believers.

The Psychology of Convert Zeal: The Causes of Dissonance

Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance, first described in 1957, reaches deeper. The more you have sacrificed to change your life — friends, habits, worldview — the more fiercely you must defend the rightness of that decision. Before the world, but above all before yourself.

Overzealousness is armor. The neophyte cannot afford nuance or doubt. For them, the world becomes black and white: the old, “bad” past and the new, “holy” present. The excessive zeal of the convert does not signal the strength of faith. It signals its fragility.

Islam. The Search for Order in the West

Does a similar phenomenon appear in Islam? It is difficult to say with certainty, because precise data on conversions in Europe is lacking. According to a 2025 Pew Research Center report, the growth of the Muslim population, now around 6 percent in Europe, results mainly from demographics and migration.

Still, one cannot rule out that Islam is also gaining followers among young Europeans searching for “order and hierarchy.” There is, however, no hard data on this.

What Does It Mean?

The phenomenon of neophytes is neither pathological nor extraordinary. It is a social mechanism. The greater the change, the stronger the need to prove that it was worth it.

Human maturity rests on inner coherence: on accepting one’s history, including the “old” part of it, as part of oneself. True faith does not need constant defense. It can be a quiet foundation rather than loud armor.

A convert who wants to survive in a new faith for longer than 2 years must ask one question: is my faith the fruit of love, or of fear that if I loosen my grip, everything will collapse? That question reveals the deepest truth about the zeal of the convert: it may begin as fire, but it matures only when it no longer needs to burn everything behind it.

Sources: Jewish Action spring 2026, French Bishops’ Conference, 25 March 2026, Rome Reports, National Catholic Register, April 2026, Hallow, March 2026, Pew Research Center, 2025, and Nadia Beider’s study in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 2020. Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance is cited as a widely recognised concept in social psychology.

Read this article in Polish: Neofici. Skąd u nowo nawróconych taka gorliwość?