What fraction of Muslims were not raised in a Muslim environment? What fraction of Christians were not raised in a Christian environment? What does it say about the validity of religious claims that people typically take on the religion of their culture?

When someone gets a religious vision, it has elements from that person’s religion—Hindus don’t get visions of Mary or Jesus, and Christians don’t get visions of Ganesh or Shiva.

To avoid the charge of special pleading, Christians who state that their religion alone is correct must argue that they were just extraordinarily lucky to live in a place and time in which the correct religion happened to be available.

This argument is concise but incorrect when stated too emphatically, as with the subtitle here, “You’d be Muslim if you were born in Pakistan.” Lots of Muslims have changed worldviews, and the same is true within Christianity or just about any other religion. Nevertheless, the strong correlation between culture and belief must be explained. If Christians deny that the correlation between upbringing and adult belief means anything, they’re left explaining why 26 countries are greater than 95 percent Muslim.

Adults sometimes switch religions, though this is rare. A 2015 study of world religions predicted that of the 8.1 billion believers expected in 2050, less than one percent will have switched into their belief.

But if atheists were raised in atheist environments, are their conclusions about religion just as suspect as those of the Christian raised in a Christian environment? No, because there is no symmetry here. Children raised in a religion-free environment usually aren’t atheists because they were taught to be atheists but because they were not taught to be religious. By contrast, Christians can only become Christian because they were taught to be. Remove tradition and religious books, and Christianity would vanish. There is no objective knowledge from which to rebuild it.

Seen another way, dismiss all beliefs about religion, pro and con, and you’re left with no opinions about supernatural beliefs at all—in other words, atheism, the lack of a god belief.

Religion is like language. You speak your mother tongue because it surrounded you growing up. You didn’t evaluate all the languages of the world before picking the best one; it was just part of the environment.

Language, customs, fashion, and traditional food aren’t evaluated on a correct/incorrect scale. The English language isn’t any more correct than French or Chinese or Farsi; it’s just what some people are accustomed to. It’s not incorrect to understand or speak or prefer French; it’s just uncommon in parts of the world.

In the United States, one speaks English—not everyone, of course, but mostly. And in the United States, one is a Christian—not everyone, of course, but mostly. There’s no value judgment behind either one. Religion and language are simply properties of society.

Christians aren’t Christian because Christianity is true, but because they were born into a Christian environment. Christianity is just a cultural trait.

Continue to chapter 49.

Image credit: Bisajunisa (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia

Notes

A 2015 study of world religions: “The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050,” Pew Research Center, April 2, 2015, http://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050.