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Richard Dawkins famously claims that religion and faith are a product of where people live and the influence of their parents and the culture in which they live. A quick look at data on religious faith might suggest Dawkins is right.

On other hand, Richard Dawkins was raised in the Anglican faith and was confirmed at the age of 13. He didn’t remain a Christian, though. In his later teens, he rejected the God and religion he was raised to believe in and the religion he was confirmed in.

Dawkins, himself, proves the falsehood of his own claims – unless, of course, Dawkins is the extremely rare outlier.

Dawkins’ assertion is generally true if we take a quick look at the data, but even the data reveals it isn’t so simple. People who live in areas in which religious belief is enforced by law and social custom tend to remain (at least) nominally loyal to that religious belief, but there are significant outliers in the data.

Iran, for instance, had 100,000-300,000 Christians in 1979, comprised of ethnic Armenians, Assyrians, and Chaldeans who had lived there for centuries. Organizations like ELAM Ministries and Transform Iran reported only 300-500 Muslim converts to Christianity in 1979.

In 1979, revolution dethroned the Shah formed an Islamic state. Since that time, Islam has been enforced by law and strong social mores. Onerous legal and social penalties are imposed on people who convert from Islam to other religions, including physical punishment, social exile, imprisonment, and even death.

For the past 44 years, Iranians who decided to become Christians have been persecuted with religious zeal and governmental force. (The World’s Fastest Growing Church, July, 20, 2023 (International Christian Concern)) “All missionaries were kicked out, evangelism was outlawed, Bibles in the Persian or Farsi language were banned and several pastors killed.” (A spiritual revolution in Iran?, September 16, 2020) Global Christian Relief))

Some people report that the number of Armenian, Assyrian, and Chaldean Christians has slowly dwindled to around 100,000. (See The World’s Fastest Growing Church) This kind of outcome is to be expected in a country like Iran in which one religion is not only predominant; it is enforced by legal decree and social coercion.

Unexpectedly, though, the number of Muslim converts has risen exponentially since 1979 according to faith-based groups that support them. Until recently, the claims of exponential growth in Muslim conversions to Christianity in Iran were largely anecdotal reports from faith-based organization.

Those claims have recently been affirmed by the secular, Netherlands-based research group, GAMAAN. A 2020 poll of 50,000 Iranians aged 20+ Iranians shows that 1.5 percent of then identify as Christian. (Survey supports claims of nearly 1 million Christians in Iran, Aug, 27, 2020, (Article 18)) With a population of 80M+, that works out to 1,200,000 Islamic converts to Christianity in 2020. (See A spiritual revolution in Iran?)

One might be hard pressed to find a country in the world as hostile to Christianity as Iran, but there are others. More significantly, Iran is not the only “outlier” in the data. In June 2013, the Center for the Study of Global Christianity, based at Gordon Conwell Seminary, published a report used to calculate the top 20 countries with the highest Christianity Average Annual Growth Rate (AAGR). (See You Might Be Surprised At The Top 20 Countries Where Christianity Is Growing The Fastest)

The top two countries were China (predominantly atheist) and Nepal (predominantly Hindu), with Christian populations projected to double in 6.6 years based on the current growth rate. They were followed by the following predominantly Muslim countries: United Arab Emirates (projected to double in 7.7 years), Saudi Arabia (7.8 years), Qatar (9.2 years), Oman (9.4 years), and Yemen (9.1 years).

The data doesn’t tell a monochromatic story. Yes, most people in countries in which one religion is predominant are members of that religion, especially when the legal and cultural environment reinforces the status quo, but the outliers are significant, and they tell a different story than what Richard Dawkins asserts.

The outliers are even more telling in the lives of individuals. One story is nothing but an anecdote. Even a hundred or hundreds of stories are nothing more than anecdotes. But thousands, tens and hundreds of thousands, and millions of individual stories are data with evidentiary import.

Perhaps, religious people are just religious? Not so: many people with no faith at all, and even people who are hostile to faith, make the opposite switch from Richard Dawkins.

Jana Harmon did a doctoral dissertation in 2019 at the University of Birmingham titled “Religious Conversion of Educated Atheists to Christianity in Six Contemporary Western Countries,” in which she studied the conversions of intellectually-driven atheists to Christianity, focusing on both functional (social, emotional) and substantive (intellectual, existential) influences. She wrote a more accessible book on her findings, Atheists Finding God: Unlikely Stories of Conversions to Christianity in the Contemporary West.

Harmon’s research is now available in the words of the actual participants in the study who she interviewed for her podcast, eX-skeptic. Richard Dawkins is correct that most people seem to adopt the religion (or no-religion) they grew up with, but the world is full of stories of people (like Dawkins) who found their ways to a different worldview.

I have been fascinated with those stories, myself. For many stories from people who became Christians after growing up in diverse ethnic, national, religious, and cultural centers, Journeys of Faith on this Navigating By Faith blog.

In response to the question posed in the title to this article, we can say that people do tend to adopt the faith perspective that is predominant where they live, that their parents had, and in the society in which they were raised. This should come as no surprise.

They real surprise is that so many people who grew up with a faith (or no faith) reinforced by their parents and the culture that influenced them have adopted a faith that was foreign to them. The answer to the question, then, is that your faith is not determined by your locality, your parents, or your society.