"The greatest religions convert the world through stories"
About this Quote
Okri’s line slips a quiet provocation into a compliment: religions don’t win by winning arguments; they win by winning imaginations. “Convert” is doing the heavy lifting here. It’s not just about persuading an individual believer, but remaking a shared reality - a “world” - by giving people a plot they can live inside. Doctrine can police borders, but stories build homes.
The subtext is a theory of power that’s almost embarrassingly simple: humans are narrative animals, and the most durable institutions are the ones that supply characters, stakes, and an arc. Creation myths, parables, martyrdoms, end-times visions - these are not decorative add-ons to belief but the delivery system. A story carries contradiction gracefully. It can smuggle ethics into memory (the good Samaritan), dignify suffering with meaning (exile, trial, redemption), and turn private fear into communal ritual. Reason demands agreement; narrative can tolerate doubt while still keeping you close.
As a poet and novelist shaped by Nigeria’s postcolonial pressures and the psychic aftermath of civil conflict, Okri is also making a sideways claim about literature itself: the sacred and the literary compete for the same territory. In a century of ideological fatigue, “religion” can be read broadly as any total framework - nationalism, capitalism, fandom - that recruits converts by telling better stories than its rivals. Okri isn’t romanticizing faith so much as reminding us that narrative is a technology: it can liberate, console, or colonize, depending on who gets to speak and whose story becomes the map.
The subtext is a theory of power that’s almost embarrassingly simple: humans are narrative animals, and the most durable institutions are the ones that supply characters, stakes, and an arc. Creation myths, parables, martyrdoms, end-times visions - these are not decorative add-ons to belief but the delivery system. A story carries contradiction gracefully. It can smuggle ethics into memory (the good Samaritan), dignify suffering with meaning (exile, trial, redemption), and turn private fear into communal ritual. Reason demands agreement; narrative can tolerate doubt while still keeping you close.
As a poet and novelist shaped by Nigeria’s postcolonial pressures and the psychic aftermath of civil conflict, Okri is also making a sideways claim about literature itself: the sacred and the literary compete for the same territory. In a century of ideological fatigue, “religion” can be read broadly as any total framework - nationalism, capitalism, fandom - that recruits converts by telling better stories than its rivals. Okri isn’t romanticizing faith so much as reminding us that narrative is a technology: it can liberate, console, or colonize, depending on who gets to speak and whose story becomes the map.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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