In the early 1990s, the Southern Baptist Church of Alabama produced the first mathematics-driven estimates of how many people are going to hell.
The estimates were a practical tool, a guide for where to concentrate the church’s evangelical efforts and where not to bother. Any well-run modern business does this. A company that sells insurance or cereal or cars likes to let its sales force know how many dependable customers are in each region, how many potential new customers, and also how many marginal prospects – people not worth wasting time on. With this information, the sales force can focus its efforts productively. So it is with the Southern Baptist Church of Alabama.
The church assumes that in a given neighbourhood, nearly all the Southern Baptists are already saved (they also assume that, people being people, a certain small percentage are damned idiots). Other Baptist and evangelical denominations are a mixed lot – some are still savable, others have irrevocably blown it. Most, but not all, Catholics are a lost cause. Non-Christians – Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Confucians, atheists and others who refuse to accept Jesus – can be written off, evangelically speaking.
The Southern Baptist Convention’s Home Mission Board did all the work on this. It devised a secret mathematical formula, estimating what percentage of each religious group will go to hell: X% of Southern Baptists, Y% of Episcopalians, Z% of Catholics, and so on. The Home Mission Board puts great faith in these percentages.
Fascinating! Speaking of Hell….
This American Life – A NPR Radio program was interesting this weekend.
Heretics –The story of Reverend Carlton Pearson, a renowned evangelical pastor in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who cast aside the idea of Hell, and with it everything he’d worked for over his entire life.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=304
I want to hope the author of this article misinterpreted the Southern Baptist Church of Alabama project, but I’m guessing the story is accurate. Catholic theologians also attempted in the past to put an estimate on the numbers of people destined for an eternity of burning in hell. This is one of the strengths of any Christian denomination: join us or suffer perpetual, unendurable physical torment. It is also one of its greatest weaknesses. That an all-knowing and all-powerful Creator would deliberately design an Earth, taking billions of years to evolve, so that, as an end result, he would see a majority its beings punished for all eternity. For me it completely defies logic. It would be fascinating to see how they developed their Algorithm of Damnation.