What happens after death to trinitarian Protestants who have been baptized and who firmly and utterly reject the Catholic Church?
The answer to a lot of these is going to necessarily be, "it depends", unfortunately. First,
why do they firmly and utterly reject the Catholic Church? Like Athanasias said, some of them are going to have true invincible ignorance. In that case, provided that they loved God and were perfectly contrite (meaning sorry for sin due to a love of God) at the time of death, then yes, they would be saved.
What happens after death to trinitarian Protestants who have been baptized as infants and then have grown up as cultural Christians and don't care a fig about any church?
It's impossible to judge an individual, but terms like "cultural Christian" suggest someone who doesn't really hold any meaningful belief in Christianity. A person like this would have a much harder time entering Heaven, due simply to the fact that religion and God are further from their minds than would be the case for a person who held more active religious beliefs. If they genuinely wanted to follow God and really cared about Him and loved Him, then they wouldn't be held accountable for things outside of their control which they didn't cause in any way (like growing up in a climate apathetic to religion).
I feel like the difference is probably pretty clear from the answers, but to be a little more explicit, the difference is that, in the case of a cultural Christian, they're less likely to actually care about God.
WisdomTree said:
I have a more personal question for you: what is your religious background and how did you become a Catholic?
First, I'll have to warn you that this is going to be a bit of a long story. Sorry for the doorstopper.
Anyway, I come from a family where I'm the first Catholic in about three centuries
While I was growing up, I considered myself non-denominational, but my beliefs were very close to Baptist. In practice, I tended to care what God thought to some degree, but I was still very much a "cultural Christian". I picked up my knowledge of the Bible mostly second hand. I rarely attended any sort of worship service, and frankly, my life was a lot more characterized by sin than by grace. Entering my senior year of high school, I started to care more deeply about my faith and about my relationship with God, and I joined a Bible study group. I actually read some parts of the New Testament during that time, and started to think about religious matters more than I had in the past. I was a somewhat liberal Protestant then, but I was beginning to care more about my faith.
After I entered college, my family started attending religious services more regularly, and I went with them pretty often. I did make some progress then, and started leaning more toward the conservative side of the spectrum after doing some reading in the letters of Paul. That would have been in the fall of 2009. I still didn't really have a very proper understanding of Scripture, but I was coming along, and in my second semester of college (spring of 2010), I started to reform my life. It was also at around that time that I became a four-point Calvinist. This was through the guidance of a website that I had discovered promoting Calvinist theology.
Over the summer between my first and second years, I had a pretty rough time. I came closer to God in a lot of ways, but by August of my second year in college, I was starting to fall into a pattern of obsessive compulsive disorder. I've had OCD since I was a child, but that was probably the worst that it ever hit me. Essentially, it was the worst year of my life, and it probably will continue to be so unless I have a year in which I am mauled by multiple bears and paralyzed from the neck down due to their vigorous chewing. At any rate, it was partially because of my OCD and partially because of the fact that I, quite frankly, can't tolerate contradictions, that I started to drift away from Calvinism. It was the fourth point of four-point Calvinism, the idea that a believer, once saved, cannot lose salvation, that I got hung up on. Reading parts of the Epistle to the Hebrews (and the Gospels, along with other parts of the New Testament), it was pretty clear that people could reject God's friendship and become lost. Other parts of Calvinism are, obviously, problematic as well. That part was just the one that got me at the time.
At any rate, I did start to recover somewhat from my OCD in the spring of 2011 (although it remains with me to this day, but much diminished). It was probably around that time that I finally let go of Calvinism entirely. I felt a little bit cut loose at that point, and I started exploring different groups. The two that I found myself gravitating the most towards were the Free Will Baptists and the Restoration Movement. The Restoration Movement, if you're not familiar with it, includes three different branches. One of those is the Churches of Christ (by far the most conservative denomination), another is the Independent Christian Churches (conservative in a more typical sense), and the most liberal is the Christian Churches-Disciples of Christ. The CoC and ICC both hold to baptismal regeneration by believer's baptism. I was convinced by their apologetics that baptismal regeneration was a Biblical doctrine, and I can provide evidence for that, if you would like.
I became disturbed, though, by some of the more extreme positions in the CoC. It seemed that a lot of the more conservative members believed that only those baptized as adults with knowledge of baptismal regeneration could be saved, meaning that essentially all of Christianity since the fifth century would have been left unsaved until the 1800s. I don't really know that I was ever willing to totally accept this. I started looking into the history of their beliefs, and particularly into infant baptism.
It was at that point that I really found Catholicism for the first time. There had been times in the past when I had looked into the Church, but I had always had a hard time believing in its doctrines. At that point, though, I started to really do some historical research. Not only did I become convinced of infant baptism, but I also came to believe in the other sacraments. Infant baptism, I noticed, went back at least to the second century, and probably much earlier, since its validity had always gone uncontested (Tertullian challenged its purpose due to his denial of original sin and recognition of the more difficult nature of receiving forgiveness for sin after baptism, but he was the only one, and he never wrote a challenge to its validity). Other sacramental beliefs, like belief that the Eucharist literally became Christ, went back to Ignatius of Antioch, and belief in the sacrament of penance (ie., confession) goes back to the second century text
The Shepherd of Hermas. Belief in Apostolic succession went back to the late first century writer Pope St. Clement, and to the early second century Irenaeus of Lyons.
Even with all of that, had the Bible contradicted it, I still wouldn't have been able to believe any of it. But, on further reading, I did find that the most logical conclusion from reading the New Testament was the same one that those early writers had come to.
Confession was a particularly disturbing idea for me, and I have to say that, for reasons that weren't the best, I actually had a hard time accepting Catholicism because of it. I tried to ignore the idea for a while, but by late fall of 2011, I realized that I wasn't Protestant and that I couldn't just keep holding to something that I didn't believe because I was afraid. So, I entered the Church, starting classes in November of 2011 (which actually isn't the usual process for baptized Christians, btw; we're supposed to go to a priest directly), and entering the Church at Easter Vigil of 2012 (ie., 4 months ago).
So, yeah, that's about it. Sorry again for the novel
