Word Finder - proselytizing

definition

To advertise one’s religious beliefs; to convert (someone) to one’s own faith or religious movement or encourage them to do so.

example

It is illegal to proselytize [children] in some countries

synonyms

• convert
• evangelize

definition

(by extension) To advertise a non-religious belief, way of living, cause, point of view, (scientific) hypothesis, social or other position, political party, or other organization; to convince someone to join such a cause or organization or support such a position; to recruit someone.

example

He has the annoying habit of proselytizing [his political views] at parties.

synonyms

• advocate
• back
• endorse
• peddle
• recruit

Proselytizing schools, though supported by public grants, entirely failed.

Nudism produced an extensive proselytizing literature.

Christianity was essentially a proselytizing religion, not content to appeal simply to one class or race of people, and to be one among many faiths, but believing in the falsity or insufficiency of all others and eager to convert the whole world.

Russia, which had been their warmest patron, drove them from St Petersburg and Moscow in 1813, and from the whole empire in 1820, mainly on the plea of attempted proselytizing in the imperial army.

Rome took good care to educate the priesthood far above the status of the Orthodox priests, and continued an extensive proselytizing activity.

The mother discouraged the affair, and, though Voltaire tried to avail himself of the mania for proselytizing which then distinguished France, his father stopped any idea of a match by procuring a lelire de cachet, which, however, he did not use.

The Bundelas, under Champat Rai and his son Chhatar Sal, offered a successful resistance to the proselytizing efforts of Aurangzeb.

Nor do the proselytizing enterprises of Seventh Day Adventists, Christian Scientists, Mormons and other American bodies rightly find a place here.

Their king over the water had, in a manly and magnanimous letter to his adherents, refused to change his creed, and when Bolingbroke fled from England his evangelical efforts at proselytizing James were fruitless.

The valley is connected with many early Magian traditions, according to which Zoroaster dwelt at Balkh, where, in the 7th century B.C., his proselytizing efforts first came into operation.

This character of a proselytizing faith which wins its victories by peaceful means has remained a prominent feature of Buddhism to the present day.

The only effort at proselytizing of which we have record came to an untimely end in the death of the Theatine monk, Antonio Ventimiglia, who had been its originator.

Defection from Zoroastrianism was punished with death, and therefore also the proselytizing of the Christians, though the Syrian martyrologies prove that the kings frequently ignored these proceedings so long as it was at all possible to do so.

The large English immigration is to be ascribed to the successful proselytizing efforts of the Mormons in England.

Turning from the Bible to homilies and the liturgy, we find the ancient collections of homilies in Rumania to be due to the same proselytizing movement.

On the part of the Arabs, who, though a small minority of the invaders, were the ruling element, there was a marked absence of proselytizing zeal.

Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith.

Any idea of proselytism is quite foreign to the ordinary Russian mind, and the outbursts of proselytizing zeal occasionally manifested by the clergy are really due to the desire for " Russification," and traceable to the influence of the higher clergy and of the government.

He strove, with a success disastrous to the Portuguese empire, to convert the government in Goa into a proselytizing agency.

He insisted on bringing up all the children in his school as Protestants; and he thus made his schools proselytizing as well as educational institutions.

This was due partly to the excessive proselytizing energy of the Angevins, which provoked rebellion on the part of their Greek-Orthodox subjects, partly to the natural dynastic competition of the Servian and Bulgarian tsars, and partly to the emergence of a new nationality, called Walachia was regarded by the Magyars as part of the banate of Szoreny.

Their author Milaraspa (unless the work should be attributed to his disciples), often called Mila, was a Buddhist ascetic of the I ith century, who, during the intervals of meditation travelled through the southern part of middle Tibet as a mendicant friar, instructing the people by his improvisations in poetry and song, proselytizing, refuting and converting heretics, and working manifold miracles.

Some rabbis interpreted Israel's dispersion as divinely designed for the very purpose of proselytizing (Pesahim 87b.).

As is to be expected in the case of a religion with a strong proselytizing agency, the growth of Christianity is far more rapid than that of the general population.