You’re born in 1950 to a devout family in Mecca instead of a Baptist one in Tennessee. By age five, you are reciting and memorizing the Qur’an. By twelve, you are standing alongside your father, observing the dawn-to-dusk fast of Ramadan. By seventy, your entire worldview is naturally anchored in the faith of your upbringing: you firmly believe Jesus was a revered prophet who was never crucified—just as Surah An-Nisa (4:157) states — and you deeply venerate Mary, knowing the Qur'an devotes an entire chapter to her, honoring her purity and her unique selection for the virgin birth.
Would you still be defending the inerrancy of the Bible, the Trinity, and Muhammad cartoons as freedom of expression?
Friday is for staying with the questions most of us wave off: what a map of world religions tells you, how Christianity and Islam each admit the problem in their own scriptures, and the best reply a believer can give.
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A Religion You Can Predict From a Map
Although my parents weren’t atheists or anything, I was brought up in a non-religious home. It may sound strange to you, but I don’t even know exactly what my parents or my siblings believe. Still, there was a dominant religion at school and among my friends, and I was assumed to share it because it was part of my cultural identity, and not sharing it was close to treason.
My biggest problem with religion was its direct link to geography and to the culture of my immediate family.
Shade a world map by religion and you get borders that follow old empires, trade routes and conquests. Practically every citizen of Saudi Arabia is Muslim. Thailand is overwhelmingly Buddhist, Tamil Nadu is overwhelmingly Hindu, Mississippi’s largest church body is Southern Baptist, and Utah’s largest is the Latter-day Saints. If religious truth spread by evidence, you’d expect it to scatter across the map the way the germ theory of disease did. It spreads by birth, and by the army that happened to win a war a thousand years ago.
People do switch, but mostly they switch next door, from Methodist to Baptist, or out of religion altogether. Somebody raised Southern Baptist in Alabama who becomes a Shia Muslim is rare enough to make the local paper, and the same holds in reverse for a Shia raised in Iran. Almost everyone dies in the tradition their parents handed them or in no tradition at all.
Brought up by atheist parents? If you convert, you’ll most likely pick the religion that dominates the culture you were born into, or something popular like Buddhism, because geography shapes the pool of religions you choose from too.
The Church Began as the Religion You Left Home For
The first generation of Christians were all converts. Every one of them had been raised Jewish or pagan and walked away from their family’s religion to follow a crucified preacher. Jesus warns in Matthew 10:35-36 that he came to set a man against his father and a daughter against her mother, and Paul spent his life telling people to break with what they’d inherited.
Two thousand years later, Christianity is among the most inherited religions on earth. It grows today mainly where families are large, and it shrinks where they’re small. So is a faith that spreads through birth rates the same faith that spread through persuasion, or has it become exactly what its founders asked people to leave?
Islam Named the Problem Fourteen Centuries Ago
The Qur’an takes this on directly. In chapter 43, verses 22-23, it mocks the pagans of Mecca who defended their gods by saying they’d found their fathers following a religion and were walking in their footsteps. A well-known hadith in Bukhari’s collection goes further: every child is born in a natural state of faith, and it’s the parents who make the child a Jew, a Christian or a Zoroastrian.
That hadith concedes the whole point, that parents make religion, and then exempts one religion from it by declaring Islam the default setting. Christians make the same move when they say the Holy Spirit leads the sincere seeker to Christ. Each tradition sees the accident of birth with perfect clarity in everybody else. Would a Christian accept the hadith’s logic if a Muslim offered it? And if not, why accept the mirror image from a pulpit?
The Best Reply, and the Question It Leaves
The strongest answer a believer has is that where you learned something doesn’t make it false. You learned arithmetic from your parents and teachers too, and nobody thinks multiplication is a cultural accident.