Ntuhresting... | 2CJC Project

From The Tennessean:

"A newly released LifeWay poll of 2,500 churchgoers contradicts a major finding of the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Pew researchers found that most evangelicals held an inclusive view of heaven, with 59 percent saying that many religions lead to eternal life.

But LifeWay found that less than a third of evangelicals believed salvation could be found outside Christianity.

Ed Stetzer, director of LifeWay research, says that, at least when it comes to evangelicals, Pew was asking the wrong question.

Pew pollsters asked respondents to choose between two options: "My religion is the one, true faith leading to eternal life" or "Many religions can lead to eternal life."

Pew researchers, who polled more than 35,000 Americans, did not attempt to find out what respondents meant by "many religions."

"We made no attempt to define the term religion," says Greg Smith, a research fellow at the Pew Forum.

Two different questions

LifeWay, on the other hand, asked specifically about Christianity: "If a person is sincerely seeking God, he or she can obtain eternal life through religions other than Christianity."

Those are two completely different questions, says Stetzer. While evangelicals believe that other Christians, such as mainline Protestants or Catholics, may go to heaven, they draw the line at other faiths.

That's a point longtime religion journalist Terry Mattingly made recently. Mattingly, who directs the Washington Journalism Center at the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, wrote about the Pew Survey at www.getreligion.org.

Mattingly says that evangelicals are less likely to condemn other brands of Christianity. But there's a world of difference, he said, between evangelicals saying that Catholics or Pentecostals can go to heaven, and saying that Muslims or Buddhists will make it to heaven.

John Green, senior fellow in religion and American politics at the Pew Forum, said its survey raised more questions than it answered.

"When people tell us, for instance, that they believe many faiths can lead to eternal life, that could mean many things," he said at the press conference announcing survey results.

"It could mean people have a universalistic view of religion. It could be they're merely tolerant. There's also the question of who constitutes the 'many' in that question.

"Is this a case of evangelicals who have decided mainline Protestants are within the fold but nobody else? Or are these evangelicals, for instance, who might include Jews and Muslims because after all, they're people of Scripture as well?"

Stetzer thinks that many evangelicals from the Pew survey weren't active churchgoers or didn't hold to core evangelical beliefs.

Eighty percent of those who held to a core set of nine evangelical beliefs said Christianity offered the only road to heaven."