Are You Saved?

June 16th, 2025

I've heard from Presbyterians, Anglicans, Jehovah Witnesses, and even Catholics who shared similar stories with me where somebody comes up to them and asks "are you a Christian?" And sometimes they're super suprised to the point of absolutely stunned. They're surprised because it's often asked by friends or family who know that they attend church or that they go to mass or that maybe they went to Springs when they held a big fundraiser or they volunteered for Habitat for Humanity or worked at Winnipeg Harvest Food Bank. And so they're surprised when they're asked and respond "Well, yes, you know that I'm a Christian. I go to mass. I receive the sacraments." Or for other kinds of Protestants, they say, "I go to church and pray on Sundays and do some church stuff during the week."

And then, there's the cringe follow-up question from the people I used to go to church with: "I know you do all that stuff, but tell me this: are you saved?"

When Jehovah Witnesses, Anglicans, Catholics, Presbyterians, and even many liberal Christians and progressive Christians hear this, they get confused and say something along the lines of "What does that mean? I just told you I'm a Christian! Why are you asking me that?"

Others in offense say "Well, clearly what I do means maybe you're not sure that I'm saved."

So why do some Christians ask this, and why are some people really offended by that question? Because religious people outside of the churches I've been to in the past understand that when somebody asks them "are you saved," they are questioning the authenticity of their Christian identity.

To figure out what is going on here, I need to go over some American Christian history. We'll cover the modernists vs the fundamentalists controversy in a bit but let's start with the 16th century. For there onward, there's always been a big difference in practice and relative theology between Catholics and Protestant Christians (I know I'm speaking in generalizations and there are exceptions). Generally speaking, Catholics place a greater emphasis on things like participating in mass, receiving the sacraments from a priest, fulfilling certain kind of religious obligations like confession or observance of Lent or other parts of the liturgical or the Christian church calendar. In a sense, Catholic identity (went to a Catholic private school so I get a lot of this) tends to focus more on the completion of and participation in ritual observance which bothered me all through childhood because Protestant identity was always about the spiritual connection instead of the rituals.

So some Catholics (like on my mom's side) may not prioritise reading their Bibles or personal prayer, but they're big on being at mass and receiving the Eucharist on Saturday or Sunday mass because that's what really matters to them. They also like attending the high holy days like Ash Wednesday, Easter, and Christmas. And that tends to be a difference from Protestants.

What people who didn't grow up Protestant unlike myself need to understand when they're asked "are you saved?" is that from the very beginning, "being saved" is CRITICAL to Protestant Christian identity. The spiritual identity of "knowing one is saved is the reason why Protestants were critical of what they saw in the ritualistic focus within Catholicism. They are critical of Catholic rituals because they emphasize individual salvation (being saved) through a direct connection to God through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is what the language of being "saved" means.

While a lot of Catholics also obviously affirm the death and resurrection of Christ, they tend to place a much greater emphasis on the institutions of the church and the role of the clergy in helping to mediate that divine human relationship (in the past, I thought this was all stupid but I'm not that guy anymore). The thing is that when a Catholic gets harrassed by a Protestant about whether they are saved or not, part of it is reflecting the person who is asking them that. And that reflection is most likely coming from a conservative American Christian Protestant. And when they ask "are you saved" it is most likely because of the difference between Protestant and Catholicism (or also other kinds of religions and practices that are Christian adjacent).

For these kinds of evangelical straight white and most-likely western Christians, what they're trying to ask is if the "unsaved person" understands it as more than ritual because they're conservative Protestants. And they deeply believe that ANY religious ritual can get in the way of a relationship with God if there isn't one. To conservative Protestant and even charismatic and non-denominational Christians, any ritual doesn't make a person a Christian unless they confess with their mouths and believe in their hearts that Jesus Christ is lord (Romans 10:9).

Let me switch gears and focus on Protestantism for a bit. Around the turn of the 20th century, there were heated debates within American Christianity about the relationship of traditional beliefs and practices. Did Jesus rise from the dead in three days? Was there an actual global flood with an ark that sailed around the world? Is the world just a few thousand years old? Were all living things created directly by God? My point is that in these debates, the insights of modern science, and anthropology, and comparative religion, and geology etc were challenging and questioning traditional and biblical views of Christianity in itself from both Catholic and Protestant contexts.

Within Protestantism, this led to a split between the fundamentalist Christians (the tradition of Christianity I grew up with) amd the modernist Christians (people I listen to from time to time but I also broke away from their faith because most of what they do is study theology I'm not interested in). Modernist Christians were willing to modify or reimagine Christianity in line with certain "secular" ways of looking at the world. And example of this is that they might say that Jesus' resurrection was a spiritual event, not a literal event, because dead bodies don't come back to life. They might say that the global flood was not a thing, or that the language in the Bible about God directly creating all living things needs to be understood as a metaphor, because they accept evolution as fact. On the other side, the fundamentalists reject these modern insights in the name of preserving what they understood as the fundamentals of the Christian faith. They even reject the mainline or liberal Christian denominations to the point of claiming they are "an anti-Christ" or "deconstructed" or even demonic institutions that are the opposite of Christian.

So if you are an Anglican and somebody asks you, "are you saved?" and you respond "what does that mean?" it's because you're part of a "mainline" Anglican tradition. There'd be groups like some Methodists I know that are mainline, some mainliners act more evangelical, a lot of Presbyterians, Lutherans, United Church of Christ, and other congregationalists do descend from the fundamentalists. Culturally conservative Christians see these believers as "Christian lite" To them, they're Christian but not as serious, not as robust, or not as authentic. And when they find out that some of these Christians, like MLK Jr, Rachel Held Evans, Shane Claybourne, Bishop Buddy, or Benjamin Cremer participate in social justice initiatives within a church, that's a big red flag for them.

Within the mindset of most conservative Christians, their version of Christianity is the ONLY authentic form of Christianity. To be a Christian is to be a theologically Christian who is a conservative, or a holy-spirit on fire for god non-denominational Pentecostal that speaks in tongues or talks to anyone they know about how "saved" they are. When these Christians ask "are you saved?" it's code to determine if you're really THEIR kind of "real Christian."

This whole thing is confusing for Christian non-evangelicals because there are Catholics and mainline Christians who talk about having faith in Jesus. There are non-evangelicals and non-pentecostal Christians, Anglicans etc who talk about being saved from sin and so forth. If you ever heard a sermon in a liberal mainline church, they'll still talk about sinfulness and God's saving power etc.

In some mainline Christian churches, being saved might mean saving the world, fighting poverty, advancing causes of social justice, fighting climate change, working to ban nuclear weapons, seeking to alleviate the refugee crisis? But this is part of what it means when Christians say that God saves the world or brings salvation. And in response, some evangelicals might say, "Well, it's good to do those things. It's good to alleviate poverty. I'm glad that you're raising money for Seria and so forth. But that's all of secondary importance because the real focus of Christianity is saving souls so that when we die, we go to heaven. Salvation is otherworldly. It is spiritual."

Being saved for evangelicals is that there's a focus very much on the individual. So God's salvation is for me and you. It's saving my soul as well as yours if you pray "The Sinner's Prayer." So when I die, I'll go to heaven. Are you coming with me?

That's what evangelicals and the conservative religions like that will go on about then they'll imply that at best, social justice or relief work is nothing more than a gateway. Because to evangelicals, working to help people with material needs is primarily done so they can then speak to their spiritual needs. It's a transaction to get people "saved." They help in a food bank or get people off the street so they can take advantage of their vulnerability to give them spiritual salvation, which to these religious conservatives is the real focus of Christianity. And even worse, for HUGE MEGA CHURCHES, social justice is actually a bad thing for the membership of those churches. Social justice initiatives, for those elite churches, stray from the real mission of the church, which should be bringing about spiritual salvation, not the transformation of the world.

Like evangelicals, liberal mainline progressive Protestant churches talk about belief in Christ or having faith will having different views on it. They will still have Sunday sermons that are going to be based on a different non-fire-and-brimstone interpretations of biblical text because that's part of Christianity across the spectrum. All churches will use the language of salvation or "being saved," but not all Christians mean the same thing while saying the same thing. A question like "are you saved" highlights why American conservative evangelical Christianity as a cult and a threat needs to be decoded. If we're going to really understand the features and bugs of American religion, we must understand that Christians of all different kinds are going to use a lot of the same words or terms or phrases that are really close together.

I know I'm going on a long info-dump with this but my aim is to decode this question as best as possible because "Are you saved?" is a loaded question from a theological Christian or culturally conservative evangelical. And when I discovered how intense it is to come at someone with a question like that, I accepted that it is perfectly okay that understanding what it means to be a Christian can be very different from evangelicalism of other kinds of Christianity.

I believe that every spiritual person has the right to feel about their faith whatever they feel about that faith. And to close this post off, I just want to say on behalf of Catholic or mainline church members reading this who I respect even though we don't share the same spiritual views, it's quite offensive to be told by somebody "you're not really a Christian because you don't do Christianity the way that I do." Christians who speak with this implication in their words or tone when meeting other spiritual people need to stop that or their churches will eventually be completely empty and lifeliess.