“One-quarter of born again Christians said that all people are eventually saved or accepted by God (25%)…”
https://www.barna.com/research/what-americans-believe-about-universalism-and-pluralism/
This explains why so many of the churches I have visited in the last few months (we are looking for a new church, my wife’s decision) always seem to take sniping shots at God saving all. It makes me chuckle, because they set up a straw man and knock it down with very weak evidence. It is bad enough they misrepresent the views of Christian Univeralists (admittingly, there are differing views, but they seem to take the most far out ones) but they don’t stop there, then they provide some of the weakest arguments I have ever heard.
So, again, I am seeing this around where I live, because I am sure the pastors are starting to lose their theological grip over the masses. What happens when you start losing your base? You attack the enemy… Sadly this doesn’t work and history proves that. They can attack and snipe all they want, but the numbers are growing. I’d hazard a guess that this number would have been less than 5% 20 years ago.
Okay… if 25% of evangelicals are universalists… where are the churches??? I must admit, this is frustrating to me. You can probably count on two hands the number of Christian Universalist churches in the United States, and probably not that much more in the whole world. A few liberal Catholic churches, 3 or 4 UUA churches that are still Christian, a few Primitive Baptists… a few independent churches… a few affiliated with the CUA. Maybe 20 altogether. And yet… if the number of Christian Universalist churches reflected the percentage of Christians that are universalist, there would be thousands and thousands of congregations. Think of how much we could do together! I just don’t buy the whole done with church mentality. I don’t really get it. I would never shame or judge a Christian who no longer feels comfortable with the visible church, but where two or more are gathered in Christ’s name, powerful things happen!
The churches are in people’s hearts, but really CUs don’t usually talk about this aspect of their beliefs because they don’t want to debate or be targeted or hassled. I spoke about it to my wife’s friend who is a strong believer and she got angry. Actually i simply said that there was no real evidence that people can’t be saved after physical death and i offered to refer to a Lexicon to prove this. Not a good response from her!
What Steve said. I am not scared to debate anyone, but I find it a fruitless discussion that just creates unnecessary strife and division. I am sure there are many like me in the church who just roll their eyes and stay quiet for the sake of keeping the peace.
The OP quote of the article referred to “born again Christians” not “evangelicals”. See the article for how “born again Christian” is defined.