Nearly two-thirds of Americans — Christians and non-Christians alike — believe in a literal hell, according to Pew Research’s Religious Landscape Study. And by hell we mean that place of fire, brimstone, “eternal conscious torment” — the whole bit.
So much ink has been spilled on the subject throughout the centuries — what does the Bible say about it? Where is it? Who goes there? But we felt one crucial question was not being asked, and that it deserved an answer.
If hell is real, just how many people are there right now?
It turns out the question is harder to sidestep than it looks. Belief in the great unknown is quintessentially human, and hell has been a central component to Christian teaching on life, death, and what comes after for centuries. Christian theology has always implied a number — some fraction of humanity who do not meet the conditions for salvation.
What this site does is simply try to work out what that fraction looks like when applied to real population data. This isn’t technically an argument for or against any particular belief. It’s an attempt to simply follow a widely held set of beliefs to their logical, numerical conclusion.
The method
Start with 117 billion — the estimated number of humans who have ever been born on this planet according to the Population Reference Bureau. That’s our starting point — every person who ever lived, from the earliest humans to today.
The survey below applies a set of beliefs to that number: who gets saved, what happens to children, which traditions qualify, how far back we count.
What’s left is the theoretical population of hell.
The question you may be asking right now is: why do this? Why are we wasting our time on what is quantifiably a ridiculous endeavor?
Well, if the majority of modern Americans truly do believe in a literal version of hell, and if they believe that a large majority of humankind is destined to someday go there, that seems like a big deal to us. Hell is the type of paradigm that has the potential to have a wide impact on just about everything in modern society — from governing policy, to the environment, to how we view ourselves and other human beings.
We think that an idea that far-reaching deserves a better explanation than just an opinion of an interpretation of a translation of an ancient manuscript. That powerful and persuasive of an idea deserves a full-on, analytical deep dive that, at least to our knowledge, hasn’t been attempted before.
The data
The underlying figures for this model come from PRB’s historical birth estimates along with relevant research from sources like Gordon-Conwell — among others — on religious membership distribution throughout history. What we’ve built on top of this data isn’t perfect, but is grounded in real numbers from reliable sources.
Though still high, belief in a literal hell is on the decline. Its impact on the wider culture, however, remains indelible.
Our aim is simple: bring an idea born in the Iron Age into the light of the Information Age.
Hell obviously isn’t remotely falsifiable — it can’t be proven true or false with empirical data. And since we obviously can’t sample a current cross-section of hell’s population, we decided to start compiling data on the next best thing: hell’s inputs. Or as they’re more commonly known: deceased human beings.
By gathering historical population data and comparing it with religious and denominational adherence data over the centuries, we realized we could build a fairly robust model of hell’s “population” based on the views and beliefs of any particular Christian denomination.
To us this seems like relevant data to any Christian who hopes that the “inputs” going into heaven outweigh the “inputs” going into hell.
For more on the methodology behind the model, click here.
Curious? See how your beliefs stack up.
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This is a thought experiment using historical birth and religious adherence data and is not a statement of belief.
How Big Is Hell?
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Running estimate
Updates with each selection
117B
Total lives in human history
Unsaved—
Saved—
Earths needed
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× Earth's current population (8.1B)
Ratio
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unsaved per 1 saved
Time elapsed on this page
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people have died globally
Further reading
About the methodology
The raw data
The table below shows the underlying cohort data — births by historical era alongside estimated Christian membership by megabloc. This is the actual dataset the model runs on.
Era
Total births
Catholic
Orthodox
Protestant
Independent
Children
The denominator: 117 billion births
The foundation of this model is the Population Reference Bureau's estimate that approximately 117 billion human beings have ever been born on Earth — from the emergence of modern Homo sapiens roughly 200,000 years ago through today. This figure was calculated by demographers Toshiko Kaneda and Carl Haub using estimated population sizes at different historical periods combined with assumed birth rates: approximately 80 births per 1,000 people through 1 CE, declining to below 20 per 1,000 in the modern era. Full methodology at PRB.org.
Of those 117 billion, approximately 50.1 billion were born before year 0 C.E. — before Christianity existed. The model treats these births as outside the scope of gospel-available salvation under all views. The remaining ~66.9 billion births (year 0 C.E. through 2025) form the active pool to which the survey's belief settings are applied.
The cohort data
The original dataset behind this model was compiled in 2017 by a group of people who grew up inside evangelical Christianity — not outside looking in. We had been raised to believe, with genuine conviction, that the majority of humanity was on its way to hell. What we had never done was sit down and actually run the numbers. What does that belief look like when you apply it to real population data across all of recorded history? We found that nobody seemed to have asked that question directly, so we decided to try to answer it ourselves.
The dataset covers 23 historical data points from year 0 C.E. through 2007. For each era, it records estimated world population, estimated Christian population by megabloc (Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Anglican, Independent, Marginal), and estimated total births per period. The core methodology is straightforward: take the percentage of a given era's population that belonged to each Christian tradition, apply that percentage to the estimated births for that period, and you have a rough count of how many lives in each era fall into each theological category.
Filling in the gaps between historical data points — particularly in the early centuries of Christianity — required some educated guesswork. We borrowed from the theory of Diffusion of Innovations to model how Christianity likely spread through early populations, using the familiar S-curve of adoption to interpolate adherence rates in eras where hard data doesn't exist. Additional cross-references for population estimates came from Phil Vaz's historical population and salvation analysis, Luke Muehlhauser's earlier attempt at this calculation, and Scott Manning's interpolated and averaged world population estimates.
The dataset has been extended from 2007 to 2025 using real data from two primary sources: UN World Population Prospects 2024 (annual global birth counts, interpolated year-by-year) and Gordon-Conwell's Status of Global Christianity 2025 (Zurlo, Johnson & Crossing, IBMR 2025), which provides megabloc adherent counts for 2000, 2020, and 2025. Real births for the 2007–2025 period total approximately 2.641 billion.
Note: for simplicity, the percentage of world population belonging to each Christian tradition at a given census point has been applied uniformly across all births in that era. In reality, birth rates varied between religious communities — but given the limitations of pre-modern demographic data, this is the most defensible approach available.
The age of accountability — and why it matters more than you might expect
The original 2017 model did not include an age of accountability variable. That was added later — and it turns out to be one of the most consequential additions in the entire model.
Across most of human history, childhood mortality was staggering. In the Roman era, roughly 48% of all births ended before a child reached adolescence. Even as recently as 1900, that figure was still around 30%. When you apply era-specific childhood mortality rates across 67 billion post-Pentecost births, the number of children who died before reaching the age of moral accountability is enormous — and under any theology that extends grace to those children, they move entirely out of the unsaved column.
The effect is dramatic: selecting "age of accountability applies" roughly halves hell's population compared to a strict accountability-from-birth view, depending on your other settings. Without that caveat, the numbers produced by this model are almost incomprehensibly large. With it, they are still very large — but considerably more bearable.
It's worth pausing on that. The age of accountability doctrine has been a fixture of evangelical theology for centuries, often justified on pastoral grounds — it offers comfort to parents who have lost young children. But the data suggests there may be another reason the doctrine has endured: without it, the implied population of hell becomes so vast that it strains even the most committed theological frameworks. The doctrine, whatever its origins, does an enormous amount of numerical work.
The pre-Schism problem
One of the more interesting methodological challenges involves the Great Schism of 1054 AD. Before that date, the Christian church was formally undivided — there were no separate Catholic and Orthodox traditions, only one church. The dataset awards the estimated ~5.3 billion Christians who lived before the Schism to both the Catholic and Orthodox columns, which would normally create a double-counting problem.
This model resolves that by tracking pre-Schism lives as a separate pool (~7.9% of post-year-0 C.E. births) that is added once to the saved total if either Catholic or Orthodox — or both — are selected. Selecting only Catholics and not Orthodox still credits those pre-Schism Christians. Selecting both still only counts them once. This is a more accurate representation of the underlying history than either ignoring the problem or splitting the pre-Schism pool arbitrarily.
The four belief variables
The survey's four questions determine the saved fraction of the post-year-0 C.E. pool. Here is what each one does:
Pre-Pentecost Israel. An optional checkbox allows the inclusion of Jews who lived under the Mosaic covenant before Christ (~1500 BCE to 33 AD). Many Christians hold that faithful Israelites were saved through their covenant with God, and this represents that theological position numerically. The estimate of ~106 million pre-Pentecost Jewish births is derived from historical Jewish population benchmarks (Baron, DellaPergola) integrated across known population eras. These lives are added directly to the saved count and are not filtered through the exclusivity modifier, since the Old Covenant is treated as a distinct category from the question of saving faith in Christ.
Who gets into heaven? — This is the largest single driver. Choosing "explicit conscious faith only" applies the tradition fractions at face value. Choosing "sincere seekers may qualify" applies a 1.30× multiplier to the saved fraction, reflecting the additional pool of people who may have responded to general revelation without direct gospel exposure.
What happens to children? — Rather than applying a single flat childhood mortality rate across all of history, the model applies era-specific rates to each census period in the dataset. Roman-era births (48% childhood mortality) contribute a much larger pool of children than modern births (4%). The rates used are: 0–500 AD: 48%; 500–1000: 47%; 1000–1500: 45%; 1500–1700: 42%; 1700–1800: 38%; 1800–1900: 30%; 1900–1950: 20%; 1950–2000: 7%; 2000–2025: 4%; pre-Christian: 50%. "Children" in this model means those who died before reaching early adolescence — generally understood as the threshold at which a person becomes capable of conscious moral and spiritual accountability. Choosing "age of accountability applies" saves all such children across every era. "Not sure" saves half.
Which traditions count? — Each tradition's fraction represents its estimated share of all post-year-0 C.E. births, derived from the cohort dataset. Catholic: 11.6% (post-Schism) + 7.9% pre-Schism if selected. Orthodox: 4.0% (post-Schism). Protestant traditions collectively: ~2.3%. Non-denominational and independent churches: ~1.2%. Anglican: ~0.6%.
How far back? — Choosing "all of human history" uses 117 billion as the denominator, with pre-Christian births (~50.1B) treated as entirely outside the saved pool. Choosing "since Pentecost" uses ~66.9 billion as the denominator, focusing only on the era in which the gospel was available.
This model is an estimate, not a census. Reliable demographic data exists for only a tiny fraction of human history. Membership figures for pre-modern Christian communities carry wide uncertainty. The belief settings are approximations of complex positions that vary significantly even within individual traditions.
The Protestant sub-denominations in this model represent relatively small fractions of total post-year-0 C.E. births — all Protestants combined account for roughly 2.3% of the post-year-0 C.E. pool. Splitting these further into sub-denominations is largely splitting hairs at the scale of 117 billion lives. The more consequential variables by far are the scope question, the exclusivity question, and whether Catholics and Orthodox are included.
This tool is a thought experiment, not a statement of theological position. The purpose is to make concrete what is normally left abstract — to follow a widely held set of beliefs to their numerical conclusion and let the reader decide what to make of the result.