Sociological and Institutional Factors of Religious Conversion in Burkina Faso

This article develops a document-based, theoretically integrative sociological analysis of religious conversion in Burkina Faso, a country marked by deep religious plurality and an accelerating pace of affiliation change. It bases its analytical framework on the classical sociology of religion — Durkheim's account of collective effervescence and moral solidarity, Weber's theory of charismatic authority and theodicy, Simmel's distinction between religion as form and as content, and Troeltsch's church-sect-mysticism typology — and brings these tools into direct dialogue with Lewis Rambo's stage-model of conversion, Afrocentric frameworks developed by John Mbiti, Lamine Sanneh, and Ousmane Kane, Pierre Bourdieu's field theory, and Birgit Meyer's ethnography of West African Pentecostalism. Focusing on a thematically organized, qualitative synthesis of the historical, ethnographic, and demographic literature on Burkina Faso, the article identifies five interacting sociological drivers of conversion — economic precarity and health-seeking behaviour, the institutional capacity of competing religious networks, kinship and marriage pressure, forced displacement linked to the Sahel security crisis, and the persistent cosmological substrate of Mossi traditional religion — and shows how each is refracted through the historically specific configuration of the Burkinabè religious field. On this basis, the article proposes an original four-level model, Religious Capital under Structural Stress (RCSS), linking macro-historical, meso-institutional, micro-relational, and cosmological-symbolic dynamics of conversion, and formulates a set of testable propositions for future empirical research. The article concludes by discussing the methodological limits of document-based synthesis and the policy implications of treating conversion as a structurally conditioned rather than purely doctrinal phenomenon.