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?)
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