A Mormon recently expressed surprise that Christians believe God created people knowing that some would ultimately reject Him. The first thing that must be said is that we do not know the numbers. Christians have debated that question for centuries, but no one has been given a list of the saved and the damned. The claim that the vast majority of humanity is in hell is not something Christianity teaches as a settled fact. The deeper question is why God creates at all, knowing some will reject Him. Christianity has never taught that God creates people for damnation. Rather, God creates out of love. “God is love” (1 John 4:8). He desires our good, our existence, and ultimately our communion with Him. As Scripture says, God is “not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). Yet love requires freedom. A world containing creatures capable of loving God must also contain creatures capable of rejecting Him. God could have created a universe of beings incapable of saying no, but that would not be the human family He chose to create. St. Augustine taught that God judged it better to bring good out of evil than never to permit evil at all. God does not cause sin. He permits it and works even through humanity’s rebellion to accomplish His purposes. The Christian answer, then, is not that God creates people because He wants them in hell. The Christian answer is that God creates because existence is good, love is good, and communion with Him is good. Hell is not the purpose of creation. It is the tragic consequence of a creature’s final rejection of the God who created him for Himself. God did not create us because He delights in punishment. He created us because He delights in love, life, and communion with Him. That has always been the Christian understanding.

I'm just going to leave this here.

Dear Mormons, If you are a Saint today, you descend from the pioneers, by blood or by the grafting that makes you no less their child, and that means there is iron in your bones whether you have learned to feel it yet or not. You come from people who buried their children in the snow and kept walking, who were driven from state after state and did not break, who crossed a thousand miles of nothing and built a civilization out of salt and sand on the strength of pure covenant. That inheritance is not metaphor. It is in you, the same marrow, the same refusal, the same fire that no mob and no winter and no extermination order could ever put out. So let the haters on hate, let them sneer from their screens and their safe little distances, because they are screaming at a people who have outlasted far worse than them and forgotten more courage than they will ever own. You carry the essence of a covenant nation in your chest, and a people who know how to make cities rise out of a wasteland are not a people who bow. Stand up straight under what you were handed, square the shoulders this Church was built on, and remember in your bones that you were forged from the unbreakable.