Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Centuryby Melanie McDonaghYale University Press £25.00ONE of the most common assumptions within the social science is that the more that societies grow, develop and industrialise the less religious and the more secular they will be. And in the initial decades of, say, the western industrialised nations there was a fair amount of evidence to support this as an overall thesis.