What is the difference between social conversion and voluntary conversion according to Jerry H. Bentley?In Jerry H. Bentley's Old World Encounters:...

Bentley is a very famous and influential historian, and
his contribution was mostly to map out the different kinds of cultural change that took
place when peoples came in contact with other civilizations. Basically, in the book,
Bentley describes social conversion as the way that
"pre-modern people adopted or adapted foreign cultural traditions." In this way, when he
says "social conversion," he's thinking about how encounters
between peoples changed one group or the other, for example, the spread of Islam into
southeast Asia.

Basically, he says there are
three main ways that social conversion takes
place:

1) Through voluntary
association, in other words, one group recognizes that they might be
better off adopting some of the practices of the foreigners. Hinduism and Buddhism
spread this way, Bentley argues, as locals saw the trade and other benefits of
converting to the religion of the more powerful and wealthy
foreigners.

2) Through
pressure from the foreigners. You might think of this as
"forced" conversion. It's pretty easy to find examples of this, and Bentley thinks it's
pretty common. Christianity, especially, was spread this way: temples, etc. were
destroyed, locals were forced to celebrate Christian feast days,
etc.

3) Through assimilation,
which happens more slowly, the minority or weaker group simply adopts the cultural
practices of the power group as their own, as many conquered peoples in the Roman Empire
did.

There's one other very important thing to understand,
according to Bentley, and that is that just about all of these cultural conversions
occurred with a certain amount of syncretism, which is
basically a compromise between two different cultural practices. So while pre-modern
peoples adopted the practices of the foreigners, they
simultaneously converted them, sometimes very subtly, into
practices that were more in keeping with their own traditions. When Buddhism made it's
way into China, it took on some aspects of local traditions, like Confucionism. Same
with Roman Christianity.

People responded differently to
foreign influence, some resisted militarily while others pretty willingly adopted the
practices of the foreigners, but a certain degree of syncretism
just about always took place.