Take the case of another convert, Shia LaBeouf. Born of a Cajun father and a Jewish mother, he had a Bar Mitzvah and was baptized as a child to make both sides of his family happy. Unchurched and irreligious, his increasing fame as an actor led him down the typical path of drug abuse, the abuse of women, and petty criminal convictions. His religious life, such as it was, followed a tortuous path from Judaism, to the rejection of all religion as senseless, to the declaration (in 2014) that he had become “a Christian man” in the process of working on the World II film Fury. All the while, the public scandals in which he had embroiled himself were leading him to the brink of suicide: “I had a gun on the table. I was outta here.”