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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/42660
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Sure. There are two possibilities.

Oh, you used religion as the example so let's continue with that example. Similar things would apply to an ethnic heritage, or for that matter to the subculture built around a hobby like video games or Civil War re-enactment or whatever.

One, you can throw in an allusion to your religion, and people knowledgeable about your religion will get it and people who aren't knowledgeable won't. If it doesn't matter to the story, that's fine. It's like an inside joke: the insiders see it and nod knowingly, the outsiders don't get it and either don't notice there was an allusion at all, or are briefly puzzled and move on.

Two, if it's important to the story or to some point you are trying to make, then you have to explain it. Sometimes you could explain it right there. Like,

> "I've decided to keep the money," Abdul said. "My house has only four pillars."
> 
> George realized that he was referring to the Five Pillars of Islam: faith, prayer, charity, fasting, and pilgrimage. Abdul didn't practice the third.

In other cases, explaining at the moment you make the allusion could ruin the dramatic value. Like explaining a joke usually ruins any humor. In that case, find some reason to explain it earlier in the story. Then when you get to the place where the allusion is important, the reader will (hopefully) remember the explanation from an earlier chapter and get it.

Maybe not the best example, but one that comes to mind: I saw a movie once about the birth of the nation of Israel. There's a scene where a group of Israeli soldiers are celebrating Passover, and suddenly the commander stands up and loudly declares, "THIS year in Jerusalem!" And the soldiers all get up and attack Jerusalem and capture the city. I have no idea if anything like this happened in real life, but it was a dramatic scene. But ... it only makes sense if you know that for almost 2000 years, every year during Passover celebration Jews would say, "Next year in Jerusalem". It was something they had been wishing and hoping for for centuries, and now, the time came that it was reality. If right after the commander and made his statement about "this year", they had stopped and explained this for the viewer who was unaware, it would have ruined the drama of the scene. They had to either assume the audience knew this, or they had to explain it earlier in the movie.

Original score: 9