This paper examines conversion from animism to Christianity or Islam in Borneo and from Lutheranism to other denominations in South Australia in an attempt to discern the implications for identity among Kadazan and among Australians of German origin. Taking an historical as well as a micro-anthropological perspective allows us to examine the effect of external hegemony on local religious discourse and the negotiation of religious conversion by individuals-attitudes which are affected by external processes. Belief often has tenuous links to the assumed ‘universal’ doctrines of a faith and it is misleading to expect them to be stronger. Some believers may indeed depend on ‘orthodox’ content and boundaries, while others find doctrinal details interfere with religion as social identity. Conversion for the latter may be more a matter of changing friends and food than of changing ideology. Conversion discourses couched in religious terms may thus be a way of talking about quite different issues, which may be political, economic, or personal in nature. Tension arises from the linkages between the individual, the local group and the state with regard to religious identity. A comparative approach to this process requires an examination of the parameters of the society and state within which the person acts, as well as the actual parameters of the particular belief.‬