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

Nearly every seated tradition agrees Christians don't simply cease to exist at death — but they disagree sharply about what happens between death and the final resurrection, and for a couple of traditions, about whether anything conscious happens in between at all.

Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed, Methodist, Southern Baptist, and Pentecostal teaching hold the most direct "yes." The Westminster Confession states it plainly: souls of the righteous "immediately... are received into the highest heavens, where they behold the face of God," awaiting only the future resurrection of the body. Anglican and Methodist teaching arrive at the same basic picture from the other direction, by explicitly rejecting the alternative: Article XXII calls the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory "a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture."

Catholic teaching affirms the same eventual destination but adds a step most believers pass through first. The Catechism teaches that those who die "in God's grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified" are certain of eventual salvation but must first "undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven" — Purgatory, formally defined at the Councils of Florence and Trent. Only souls already fully purified at death go straight to heaven's presence; the rest arrive after this process, not instead of it.

Eastern and Oriental Orthodox teaching holds that a real judgment happens immediately at death — a settled point of dogmatic theology — but declines to formalize what follows into a system as defined as Purgatory. The soul is understood to experience some foretaste of its ultimate destiny while awaiting the final judgment and resurrection; specific imagery describing that experience, including the "toll houses" some Orthodox writers describe, is explicitly not dogma, but pious, non-binding teaching.

Seventh-day Adventist and Jehovah's Witness teaching answer no most directly of all, on a shared premise the rest of this table doesn't hold: the dead, including believers, aren't consciously anywhere. Adventist teaching states death is "an unconscious state for all people" until the resurrection, on the grounds that no part of a person survives the body to experience anything in the meantime. Jehovah's Witness teaching reaches the same conclusion from its own reading of Ecclesiastes — "the dead... are conscious of nothing at all" — and adds a further distinction for the eventual resurrection itself: only a limited class of 144,000 is ever promised heaven; the far larger "great crowd" hopes for resurrection to everlasting life on a restored paradise earth, not heaven at all.

LDS teaching describes an intermediate geography of its own. At death, the spirit goes to a "spirit world" with two regions: paradise, for the righteous, and spirit prison, for those who die without having received or accepted the gospel, where teaching and the offer of the gospel continue, pending the resurrection and a final judgment that assigns each person to one of several kingdoms of glory.

Solving the disagreement

The dispute between Catholic and Protestant teaching over Purgatory is tangled up with an earlier one: the key traditional text cited for praying for the purification of the dead, 2 Maccabees, is only Scripture at all for traditions that include the deuterocanonical books in their Old Testament. Once a tradition has already settled that canon question one way, its position here mostly follows from it — making this less an independent dispute than a downstream consequence of a prior disagreement about which books count as evidence in the first place.

Eastern and Oriental Orthodox teaching isn't really withholding a position so much as declining to systematize one beyond what it considers warranted. The particular judgment is dogma; the specific mechanics of what a soul experiences before the resurrection are treated as a mystery suited to devotional reflection, not doctrinal definition. Closing that gap with Catholic teaching wouldn't take new evidence — it would take a change in how much philosophical precision Orthodox teaching is willing to impose on a question it has deliberately left underdetermined.

Adventist and Jehovah's Witness teaching diverge from every other tradition here over a more basic anthropological question: whether a human being has an immortal soul that is a distinct component of the self, capable of surviving the body and remaining conscious apart from it, or whether "soul" in Scripture simply means a living, breathing person, with nothing surviving death until God re-creates the whole person at the resurrection. That's a real, arguable exegetical question — the Hebrew word usually translated "soul" is used elsewhere in the Old Testament for animals, which cuts against reading it as an inherently immortal component unique to humans — and centuries of debate over it haven't settled which sense the biblical authors intended in passages about the afterlife specifically.

LDS teaching's spirit-world geography depends on the same premise recurring across this format: whether revelation continued past the New Testament and can describe realities — like a spirit prison offering a second opportunity to hear the gospel — that Scripture's own text doesn't independently confirm one way or the other.

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?