That loud crack heard throughout the evangelical world when national research showed that more than half of American evangelicals believe people of other religions can go to heaven wasn’t thunder from an angry God.

This crack came from the rock upon which the modern American evangelical movement sits. It was splitting right down the middle.

There is both rejoicing and lamentation.

I am among those rejoicing.

The universalist/evangelical finding, which came from the Pew Forum’s U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, was one more sign that American Christianity is entering the most exciting era in our lifetime. Some people believe a new awakening is at hand. Others believe a reformation is in the making. No one knows how long it will take or how far it will go.

What’s clear is that people in the pews are taking back their faith, wresting it from leaders who helped sell the idea that only the most fundamentalist brands of Christian belief could succeed and that their words alone represented that belief.

As an evangelical from Corsicana wrote recently about a powerful evangelical leader, "I found myself not wanting to be this ventriloquist’s dummy anymore."

Southern Baptist Convention leaders were among those lamenting. So they did their own study, which showed that only 20 percent of evangelicals think people of other religions will get a go-to-Heaven pass.

That would be good news for them, except Southern Baptist researchers didn’t use the same criteria in picking their evangelicals that the Pew study used. The Pew study counted anyone who called themselves an evangelical or some variation thereof. That standard reliably returns 25 percent of Americans.

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Courtesy The Star-Telegram.