The longer I live, the more I am grateful for early Christian religious education. Although I rebelled against it, years later it all started to make sense, and finally at age 50 I gave my heart.
So maligned and cast aside, a Christ-centered education is the most precious luxury I have ever been given, and trust me when I tell you I have enjoyed many rare luxuries all over the States and Europe. It is a luxury growing increasingly rare in the Western world; since nature abhors a vacuum, young people like your convert acquaintance are easy pickings for cults and fundamentalism. He picked Islam as the drug of the moment, like Scientology, New Age or EST were in the 60s.
And "Islam" for American blacks started recruiting even earlier, with the rise of Nation of Islam in the 1930s, contemporaneously with the incursion of communists into the American government throughout the FDR and Truman years. Totalitarian systems always recognize and help each other against Christ, the fount of individual freedom and responsibility.
Our younger generations are now consistently deprived of the very beliefs that gave our Founders such enlightened ability to reason. We dishonor the Founders by dismissing our duty to educate our children in the Judeo-Christian scriptures.