Merely Christian

[e_jo_m]

When I was a kid, my pastor said that Christianity requires its adherents to believe that no infidels go to Heaven.

My main disagreement with this is that I'm pretty sure CS Lewis was a Christian.

But this touches on a very interesting issue. How exactly do we figure out what counts as a Christian? See, we have the same problem with every religion: whenever you ask an adherent, she says "Oh, the true followers of my religion are whoever's in my denomination; everyone else is a bunch of heathens." The Latin Church in particular is infamous for taking this stance to the point of absurdity. Fortunately, a renowned expert wrote a book on this subject which is called Mere Christianity; but for census purposes, governments and NGOs should probably default to counting whoever says they're Christian and if they want to measure anything else (eg, says they believe in the literal truth of the Protestant Bible) say that.