Where the traditions land

Population figures are each tradition's own most recent published count. Eligibility is set against the World Christian Database, the standard reference for global denominational data.

Why the disagreement

Every seated tradition answers no at the literal level — none teaches God directly authored or created evil as a thing. The disagreement is about mechanism, not the top-line answer, and it splits four ways. Catholic and both Orthodox families hold the oldest explanation: evil isn't a substance, only a privation, a lack of the good that should be present, the way blindness is an absence of sight rather than a thing in itself — evil doesn't need a cause the way an object does.

Reformed/Presbyterian teaching holds something structurally different: God's eternal decree ordains whatsoever comes to pass, evil included, while insisting in the same breath this doesn't make God sin's author — a real tension the confession names but doesn't resolve. Lutheran, Anglican, Methodist, Baptist, Pentecostal, and Adventist teaching avoid that tension by locating evil's origin entirely in the misused free will of angels and humans, with no comprehensive divine decree standing behind the choice.

LDS and Jehovah's Witnesses both step outside the privation/free-will framework entirely. LDS teaching holds that opposition is a necessary structural condition for moral agency to exist at all, not just a possible misuse of it. Jehovah's Witnesses frame evil's origin as a specific challenge to God's right to rule, raised by Satan in Eden, that history is still settling.

Solving the disagreement

The privation-versus-free-will fork is a metaphysical dispute, not an empirical one: whether evil is the kind of thing that needs a cause at all, or whether it's simply an absence that doesn't. No verse settles that by itself, because both sides can read the same texts through their prior answer to that question — it's a commitment made before exegesis starts, not a conclusion reached by it.

The Reformed tension is unusual in this format because the tradition doesn't claim to have resolved it. The Westminster Confession states both halves — God ordains whatsoever comes to pass, and God is not the author of sin — without explaining how both are true at once. That's not an oversight a future theologian could fix with a sharper argument; it's presented as a limit on what can be said, not a gap waiting to be closed.

LDS and Jehovah's Witnesses both depend on a specific narrative — the premortal council, the challenge in Eden — that doesn't come from the Old and New Testament text other traditions are working from. Resolving those forks would require first settling which sources of revelation count as evidence at all, a question no verse from either side's accepted text can answer from outside itself.

Sources

Same standing source per tradition on every post, not hunted per question.

• Catholic — Catechism of the Catholic Church
• Eastern Orthodox — Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (binding across all jurisdictions); The Longer Catechism of St. Philaret of Moscow (widely used, not binding on every jurisdiction)
• Oriental Orthodox — Catechism of the Coptic Orthodox Church, Fr. Tadros Y. Malaty (Amazon — no full free text found)
• Anglican — Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion
• Lutheran — Book of Concord
• Reformed/Presbyterian — Westminster Confession of Faith
• Methodist/Wesleyan — Articles of Religion
• Southern Baptist Convention — Baptist Faith & Message 2000
• Pentecostal (Trinitarian) — Assemblies of God Statement of Fundamental Truths
• Seventh-day Adventist — 28 Fundamental Beliefs
• LDS — Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants
• Jehovah's Witnesses — What Does the Bible Really Teach?