What about people who never heard any of it?

Romans: "when Gentiles who don’t have the law do by nature the things of the law, these, not having the law, are a law to themselves, in that they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience testifying with them." Two verses earlier, in the same argument: "as many as have sinned without the law will also perish without the law."

Acts has Peter in a Roman officer’s house: "truly I perceive that God doesn’t show favoritism; but in every nation he who fears him and works righteousness is acceptable to him."

Neither passage is about the unevangelised as a category. Both are load-bearing for the traditions that read them that way, which is an honest summary of how they are used. The Westminster Confession, in the edition printed with its proof texts, cites the same verses from Romans for the opposite point: the light of nature leaves people "unexcusable", and is not "sufficient" for salvation.

The Second Vatican Council: "those also can attain to salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience."

And: "nor does Divine Providence deny the helps necessary for salvation to those who, without blame on their part, have not yet arrived at an explicit knowledge of God and with His grace strive to live a good life."

The Westminster Confession of 1646: others, not elected, "never truly come unto Christ, and therefore cannot be saved: much less can men, not professing the Christian religion, be saved in any other way whatsoever, be they never so diligent to frame their lives according to the light of nature".

It adds that to assert otherwise "is very pernicious, and to be detested".

The paragraph before it is quieter. Elect infants dying in infancy are saved, "so also are all other elect persons who are incapable of being outwardly called by the ministry of the Word". Who that clause reaches is not spelled out.

Both documents are quoted here in full sentences on purpose. Each is easy to paraphrase into something its own side would not accept.

Neither position is new, though older versions drew the line in other places. Aquinas wrote that if any gentiles before Christ were saved without receiving revelation, they were not saved without faith in a Mediator: they believed implicitly, "through believing in Divine providence, since they believed that God would deliver mankind in whatever way was pleasing to Him". After grace had been revealed, he held, all "are bound to explicit faith in the mysteries of Christ". The Council of Florence, in 1442, took the other end, and said that all those outside the catholic church, "not only pagans but also Jews or heretics and schismatics, cannot share in eternal life", unless they are joined to it "before the end of their lives". The modern discussion sorts the same range into exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church keeps the old formula, "Outside the Church there is no salvation", and says it "is not aimed at those who, through no fault of their own, do not know Christ and his Church".

The passages above are about conscience and about impartiality, in contexts that are not asking this question. The passages the other side uses are about the necessity of hearing and of faith: "How will they hear without a preacher?", eight chapters later in the same letter, where Paul is arguing about Israel and answers his own question by saying they did hear.

A question the writers were not addressing can be answered from their words only by extension, and the disagreement is largely about which extension is more faithful.

This is a claim about what happens to people after they die, and nothing observable bears on it. It is filed near the bottom of this site’s scale for that reason and not because it is unimportant.

The opposite is true: it is the question that decides what kind of thing the whole system is, which is why the documents that address it are worth reading rather than summarising.

The council and the confession are both answering for most of the people who have ever lived, and they do not give the same answer.

That is the strongest available argument that doctrinal differences inside Christianity are not footnotes. It is an argument the stricter view can make against the softer one without conceding anything, which is worth noticing, and this page has no survey of who in fact makes it.

Notice which answer a given writer assumes before they argue. The assumption is usually easier to find than the argument for it, and this page has no survey of how often it is made either way.

Both are in the middle of it, in print, with the names of the bodies that adopted them.