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This is not to say that the scales fell from my eyes and I suddenly saw that all religions are one and the differences can be handled in footnotes. Far from it. Rather, I realized that I needed humility as I thought about what faith I embraced. This was dangerous territory for me as a Christian, but I could not shake off the feeling that there might be many vectors to Truth.

The Case of Identical Twins

Let’s say there are two families, the Joneses and the Smiths. The Jones boys are identical twins; they share virtually 100 percent of their DNA. The Smith girls are just sisters; they share 50 percent of their genes. If DNA had nothing to do with the children’s spirituality, their religious intensity would be determined only by their upbringing and the events that happened to them—a run-in with a particularly vicious nun in Catholic school (which turns one person against faith), or an inspiring Pentecostal service (which turns another on to it).

If, on the other hand, genes do play a role, then you would expect to see the spiritual inclinations of the Jones boys matching each other more closely than do those of the Smith girls, because the Jones boys share twice as much of their genetic makeup. It doesn’t work to test this on an individual scale, but when scientists persuaded hundreds or thousands of twins to participate in a study, a clear trend did emerge. In study after study, researchers found that between 37 and 50 percent of the variation in spirituality appears to be explained by genes.5

To tease out the contribution of upbringing and life events (nurture) from one’s genetic wiring (nature), scientists have looked at a tiny subset of identical twins: those separated at birth. For those twins, environment (or nurture) cannot influence the siblings to be more like each other, since they were raised in different families and did not share the same environment.

Unfortunately for me, twin researchers didn’t include a category in their database for “identical twins separated at birth with strikingly similar spiritual intensity.” But fortunately for me, Nancy Segal, who heads the Twins Studies Center at California State University, Fullerton, happened to know Debbie Mehlman and Sharon Poset.

In 1952, when they were one week old, the twin sisters left a New Jersey hospital with different adopted families. For more than four decades, neither one knew that a genetic carbon copy existed somewhere in the world.

Debbie’s family moved to Connecticut, where she married and lives today. Sharon eventually moved to Kentucky. Only when they were forty-five years old did Debbie’s adoptive mother reveal that she had an identical twin.

In retrospect, it made sense, Debbie told me. “We both always felt there was something missing.”

Debbie hired a private investigator, and two months later, she and her sister, Sharon, met at the airport in Hartford. Coincidentally, the two had selected black skirts and beige tops for their meeting. Their accents fell into an identical New Jersey twang. Each had an odd habit of crossing her eyes to suggest irony.

“We did so many things alike, people were clutching their chests,” Sharon recalled.

As they pieced their stories together, they realized they shared a number of twists in life: from similar haircuts throughout their teens (not so interesting), to majoring in sociology (a little more intriguing), to raising one child each, both of whom joined AmeriCorps. But it was their spiritual journey that drew my attention. Debbie was Jewish, Sharon was an evangelical Christian, and both had always been drawn to God.

Sharon grew up Catholic; her parents and her other (nonbiological) sister displayed little enthusiasm for the faith.

“The sister I grew up with would go to church and wait in the parking lot and grab a bulletin so my parents would think she had gone to church,” Sharon recalled.“But I always wanted to go to church. I got my Holy Communion. I was fascinated with it.”

Eventually, Sharon became a born-again Christian, and she now