The Geographic Objection

“Have you noticed that Christians tend to live in the West, people in the Middle East are Muslim, and people in the Far East are Hindu or Buddhist? Being a Christian is just a matter of where you were born, and if you were born in Iran, you’d be Muslim.”

Have you heard this objection before? The implication (if they don’t flat out say it) is Christianity is just another regional myth, and you simply subscribe to the one that’s local to you. Let’s look at how we can answer this.

First, we should acknowledge a certain amount of truth in that. You’re more likely to be exposed to Christian ideas in the West than in other parts of the world. You’re more likely to find Christianity reasonable if you were raised in it. Of course, it’s entirely possible to be inoculated against true Christianity by growing up around it, but that’s a distinction the skeptic isn’t interested in.

But family history is not why we are Christians. We are Christians because we are convinced it’s true. I serve the God of my father and his father and his father. I will not be ashamed of that. But I do not follow Jesus because of my family history. Every believer who grew up in the church has always had to make a conscious decision to follow Christ, to make their parents’ faith theirs. And especially in the modern world, that will require facing hard questions about the Bible, the existence of God, and miracles. Growing up in the West may make this slightly easier, but it doesn’t make it easy.

Also, Christians do not, in fact, tend to live in the West. They tend to live in what is called the “global South”. This charge does not account for Christians who grew up Christian in non-Christian countries. It also doesn’t account for Christians who grew up non-Christian but converted. There are Christians all over the world who grew up Christian in a nation hostile to Christianity, that didn’t reinforce Christian beliefs. There are also Christians all over the world who grew up Muslim or Hindu or atheist, in a society that reinforced those views, and still converted to Christianity. Today a lot of Iranians are coming to Christ. So this charge of “you’re only Christian because of where you grew up” falls pretty flat.

Finally, the same charge could be leveled against them: You’re much more likely to be an atheist if you’re a modern, affluent Westerner. If geography proves Christianity is untrue, then it proves atheism is untrue. But of course it proves no such thing. Ideas and beliefs systems stand or fall on the merit of their arguments and the facts that support them.

This whole charge is a kind of Bulverism. Saying, “You just think that way because of where you grew up” doesn’t refute what you think; it just attacks it.

CS Lewis, who coined the term, explains the error:

Suppose I think, after doing my accounts, that I have a large balance at the bank. And suppose you want to find out whether this belief of mine is ‘wishful thinking’. You can never come to any conclusion by examining my psychological condition. Your only chance of finding out is to sit down and work through the sum yourself. ... In other words, you must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly.¹

I was fortunate in where and when I was born. Growing up in the US in the late 20th century allowed me to be taught amazing facts about the world, horrifying truths of history, and mind-bending theories of science. And Christianity. All of those things are true or false no matter where or when I grew up.


1 “Bulverism”, in God in the Dock. Read a little more of the passage here.

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