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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.

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