You’re Christian because you were born in America and other lies
You know the story of Superman, right?
Born Kal-El on his planet of Krypton, he’s sent to Earth by his parents in a small spaceship shortly before Krypton is cataclysmically destroyed. Fortunately for him, he lands in America and is found and adopted by the good and decent farmers Jonathan and Martha Kent who name him Clark. They go on to raise him to value truth, justice, and the American way, and so he grows up to live out those values as the Man of Steel.
Nice story. But what if baby Kal-El had landed somewhere else?
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New York Times best-selling writer Mark Millar imagined just such a thing. In 2003, Millar published a three-series work for DC Comics entitled Superman: Red Son where Kal-El lands in the Soviet Union on a Ukrainian collective farm instead of one in Kansas. He’s raised under the tenets of Communism, works for the Russian newspaper Pravda (instead of the Daily Planet in America), and fights a never-ending battle for “Stalin, socialism, and the international expansion of the Warsaw Pact”.
Quite the difference, huh? Well, I have news for you: although you’re probably unaware of it, something similar happened to you.
If you’re reading this, are a Christian, and living in America, you’re a Christ follower only because you’ve been raised in the United States. At least that’s what quite a few skeptics want you to believe.
The standard party line in this regard is that religion is mostly just an extension of culture and an invention of society. Civilizations do this primarily because they help unify people, and if you look back through history you can see how various cultures developed certain religions to do just that.
Moreover, if you look at where the bulk of practitioners are for those religions (each of which they believe is the only correct one) you’ll find they center around the birthplace of their faith. It’s a little like Richard Dawkins said: “How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, your local religion turns out to be the true one.”
Sounds a bit caustic at first, but let’s step back and ask, is Dawkins making a bogus claim? Actually, there’s some evidence to support his statement.
Somewhere around 96% of Muslims live in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. Almost 90% of Buddhists live in East Asia. Almost 100% of Hindus live in India or South Asia. This begs the question: is there any major religion that doesn’t follow that trend?
Yes — just one: Christianity.
In his book, Whose Religion is Christianity?, Yale Divinity School professor Dr. Lamin Sanneh goes to great lengths to showcase how the Christian faith differs from its rivals, one of which is that it doesn’t obey the geographical confines of other belief systems.
Noting that, professor Richard Bauckham of St. Andrews says, “Almost certainly Christianity exhibits more cultural diversity than any other religion and that must say something about it.”
But what exactly does it say?
How Christians are really ‘birthed’
Before we answer that question, let’s quickly address the cynic’s contention that you only believe X because you were raised in your current culture or family. We need to remember that there’s a distinction between truly believing something and being either implicitly or explicitly coerced to practice something. Just look at how many young people jettison their family faith once they leave home.
Further, the argument slices up the skeptic in both directions as soon as it leaves their mouth. If they are an unbeliever and were raised by unbelievers, then how can they say they’re not just practicing the family belief system? But if they were raised by parents who believed and taught them a particular faith, which they now deny, they’re living proof of their argument’s failure.
But let’s get back to why Christianity stands out from other faiths regarding its point of origin. Let’s start with the important fact that Jesus doesn't say, as every other prophet does in competing religions, that I am here to show you how to find God, but rather He says I am God and I have come to find you.
And He finds His people, as you would expect, everywhere.
Christ told His disciples, “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, (Matt. 28:19) and so we speak “the hope of the Gospel that you have heard, which was proclaimed in all creation under Heaven” (Col. 1:23).
Of course, other religions have missionaries that go everywhere as well. So why does Christianity still stand out as having massive numbers of converts in all corners of the globe, like in China where current estimates are that the Christian community there has grown from 1 million to 100 million?
Two reasons.
First, there are good, rational, historical, and logical reasons for accepting the Christian faith as being true. For example, listen to how J. Warner Wallace, a former atheist and now well-known Christian apologist, became a believer:
“I was not raised in a Christian home. The one man I respected more than anyone else (my father) has always been a committed atheist. I didn’t know any outspoken Christians growing up, and I was hostile to the claims of Christianity until the age of 35. While I had examined a number of eastern religions, Mormonism, Islam and the Bahá’í Faith, I was eventually persuaded by the evidence of the New Testament Gospel eyewitness accounts. On the basis of those accounts, I began an investigation of Christianity and the existence of God. Like so many others, I came to believe Christianity is true, not because of my surrounding influences, but on the strength of the case itself.”
But second, since there’s plenty of proof that we excel at acting contrary to even the best evidence, we next need the new birth to accept what the evidence and God tell us. And fortunately for us, the Holy Spirit knows no geographic bounds for making disciples of Christ: “The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8).
That being the case, whether you or I live in America or at the top of the Himalayas, that’s the real reason we’re Christ followers. And that’s a better story than Superman’s because it’s true.
Robin Schumacher is an accomplished software executive and Christian apologist who has written many articles, authored and contributed to several Christian books, appeared on nationally syndicated radio programs, and presented at apologetic events. He holds a BS in Business, Master's in Christian apologetics and a Ph.D. in New Testament. His latest book is, A Confident Faith: Winning people to Christ with the apologetics of the Apostle Paul.
