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

This is the question the Protestant Reformation was fought over, and the seated traditions split largely along the lines that dispute drew five centuries ago — though not entirely, since two traditions here don't accept the terms of the argument at all.

Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed, Methodist, Southern Baptist, Pentecostal, and Adventist teaching all affirm justification by faith alone. Article XI states it almost as a slogan: "that we are justified by Faith only, is a most wholesome Doctrine." Lutheran teaching originated the formula as the Reformation's own defining claim. The Westminster Confession states the position with a built-in qualifier repeated in some form across most of this bucket: faith is "the alone instrument of justification," yet "is it not alone in the person justified" — good works follow justification as its necessary fruit, but contribute nothing to earning it. Adventist teaching, despite a history sometimes read from outside as more works-oriented than this, affirms the same substance: "we can add nothing to the perfect righteousness of Christ."

Catholic teaching rejects the formula directly — the Council of Trent specifically condemned it. On this view, faith is necessary but must be joined to love to justify; grace-enabled good works and the sacraments don't just evidence a salvation already secured, they're part of how justification is actually worked out over a lifetime, cooperatively, not something faith secures in an instant on its own.

Eastern and Oriental Orthodox teaching decline the question's own premise. Salvation, in this framework, isn't a single legal verdict a person receives once, through any one instrument, but theosis — a lifelong process of transformation into union with God, worked out through grace and human cooperation together. The distinction between "faith alone" and "faith plus works" presupposes a courtroom model of salvation this tradition doesn't use in the first place; asking whether it's faith alone, on Orthodox terms, is a bit like asking which single ingredient a marriage is made of.

LDS teaching holds faith is where salvation begins, not where it's completed. Its own scripture states people are "saved by grace... after all we can do" — grace is necessary and salvation can't be earned outright, but ordinances performed by priesthood authority and sustained obedience are also required, not merely faith's evidence.

Jehovah's Witnesses hold a related but distinct position: salvation comes through faith, not works, but their own teaching explicitly rejects the claim that faith alone, without works, is sufficient — works aren't only evidence of a faith that already saved someone, they're part of what's required.

Solving the disagreement

Between the traditions affirming faith alone and Catholic teaching, this is close to the oldest, most argued-over exegetical dispute in the Reformation's wake, centered on how to read Paul's letters ("justified by faith apart from the works of the law") against James's ("faith without works is dead"). Both texts are in the same Bible; reconciling them has run for five centuries without full convergence, though not without any convergence at all — the 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification produced real, substantive agreement between Lutheran and Catholic teaching on this exact question, evidence the gap isn't fixed in place even if it hasn't fully closed.

Eastern and Oriental Orthodox teaching isn't a position on that same debate; it's a rejection of the premise both sides of the debate share — that salvation is fundamentally the kind of thing a legal verdict can capture. Settling that wouldn't take a better argument about faith and works, because the disagreement sits one level up, over which category is even the right one to argue in.

LDS teaching's answer depends on the same premise this format keeps running into: whether authoritative revelation and priesthood authority continued past the New Testament. That's a historical-institutional claim, not something resolvable by a better reading of Paul or James alone.

Jehovah's Witnesses land on a position that, structurally, is the same fork Catholic and Protestant teaching are already having — a dispute over whether James's "faith without works is dead" means works are required alongside faith, or only ever proof that faith was genuine to begin with. Their teaching reads that verse as requiring the former; the faith-alone bucket reads it as only ever describing the latter. It's the identical exegetical question, decided the other way.

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?