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

Ten of the twelve seated traditions affirm real, libertarian-style freedom — the ability to have genuinely chosen otherwise — though for different underlying reasons. Catholic and Orthodox teaching frame it as a feature of being made in God's image, exercised in cooperation with grace rather than overridden by it. The Arminian-descended traditions (Methodist, Adventist, most of Pentecostalism, and the dominant strand within the Southern Baptist Convention today) build their whole account of salvation around a real, uncoerced human response to God's offer. LDS teaching goes furthest of any seated tradition: agency isn't simply granted by God, it's inherent in an eternal, uncreated part of every person that predates God's own creative activity, which means even God doesn't originate it.

Lutheran and Reformed teaching both deny libertarian free will specifically regarding salvation, and both descend from the same 16th-century Reformation moment, but they don't actually hold the same position. Lutheran teaching draws a hard line between two domains: totally bound in spiritual matters (the Formula of Concord's own language is that the unregenerate will is like "a log and a stone"), but genuinely free in ordinary civil choices — what to eat, whom to marry. Reformed teaching doesn't carve out that same civil exception in the same way; it locates the entire question inside a comprehensive decree that governs everything that comes to pass, evil and salvation both, with human choice operating freely only in the compatibilist sense of flowing from a nature that decree has already determined.

Solving the disagreement

This is a case where the traditions disagree about a definition before they disagree about a fact. "Free will" doesn't mean the same thing across this table — Reformed and Lutheran teaching would both agree humans make uncoerced choices that flow from their own desires; what they deny is that those desires themselves could have been otherwise without an outside cause. The traditions on the other side mean something stronger by "free": that a person, all prior causes held fixed, really could have chosen differently. Once that difference in definition is on the table, a lot of the apparent disagreement turns out to be two groups answering different questions with the same word.

What's left after that clarification is a real dispute, not just semantic. It's the same problem philosophy has debated independently of theology for centuries: whether genuine, uncaused choice is even a coherent idea, or whether every choice needs some explanation for why it went one way rather than another, in which case it was never fully open in the first place. No new Bible verse settles that, because it's a question about the structure of causation and agency generally, one Christian theology inherited rather than invented.

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?