However, ignoring social structural changes and its impact on people’s inner minds, Horton’s approach is harshly criticized by Ifeka-Moller, who assumes that a social structural theory is much more fruitful than his approach. By saying “conversion,” Ifeka-Moller believes that “neither Peel nor Horton spell out clearly what they mean.” Instead, she takes conversion to mean “a change of affiliation from cult to church, or from orthodox Christianity to spiritualist church” and leaves aside problems “concerning the extent to which a move from one kind of religious group to another is associated with changes of attitude and behavior.” Ifeka-Moller doubts Horton’s intellectualist theory, because she assumes that his argument “is open to the charge of tautology,” “his ‘thought-experiment’ is question begging,” “his monolatric theory also leads him to contradict himself,” and there is no ethnographic evidence could support his monolatric hypothesis. In replying to Ifeka-Moller’s criticism, Horton and Peel list her principle objections according to their understandings:
“1. Horton claims that responses to the world religions would, given the appropriate conditions, have occurred in some recognizable form even in the absence of such religions. However, he produces no independent evidence of anything of the sort occurring in the absence of the world religions; and his reasoning in this respect is circular and question-begging.
2. Horton makes the weakening of the boundaries insulating the local community from the wider world crucial for the development of a more monolatric religious life. But the comparative evidence from India and other places suggests that such weakening of boundaries is by no means always followed by monolatric developments.
3. Horton claims that prior changes in traditional beliefs facilitated acceptance of mission Christianity. But if such prior changes had already taken place, why did people bother to change their religious affiliation? Why did they not simply greet the new message with: Oh yes! There is God: just what hw thought he would be?
4. Horton’s monolatric theory also leads to contradict himself. He says that mission Christianity is in some respects so like the modified traditional religion that people can easily switch from the one to the other. If this is so, Horton cannot at the same time argue that conversion to the Aladuras comes about on account of the tension and conflict that exists between mission cosmology and traditional modes of thought.
5. Horton would have been better equipped to deal with these and other problems if he had bothered to analyze the social factors in which religious change is encapsulated, rather than leaving them unexamined and unexplained. This being so, he is unable to assess the significance in conversion of intellectual factors.”
Ifeka-Moller considers that Horton’s intellectualist theory is unconvincing. She points out, “first, ethnographic evidence does not support Horton's hypothesis that monolatric innovation in traditional cult facilitated conversion to mission Christianity. Second, Horton’s intellectualist theory obscures rather than clarifies the situational complexity of religious change.” In discussing the causes of conversion to mission Christianity and the growth of Aladura churches in eastern Nigeria from 1921 to 1966, she argues that mass conversion was a consequence of social change rather than the exchange of ideas. Then she discusses how they were incorporated into the new world economy, the imposition of new political roles under the colonial system, and a growing realization among the inhabitants of these communities that they had failed to obtain the rewards promised by acceptance of these radical changes. Noticing the structural changes and their significant roles in influencing people’s conversion to other religions, she believes that “social structural factors are the most fruitful field of research, rather than the ideas and values which form the core of a belief system.”
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