Gospel Privilege

Something that I have heard and read a few times, mainly from proponents of social justice gospels, skeptics, and liberal Christians, is that we, as Americans, are privileged in a way that is unfair to less Christianized or non-Christian countries and their countrymen. We live in a predominantly Christian nation where the Gospel is readily available in a grand array of different formats. There are Christian television and radio stations, a church on every corner, and even Christian bookstores that sell books, DVDs, and CD's that, in one way or another, talk about the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We are saturated with the Gospel message in all aspects of our lives. Even our politicians pander to the "evangelical vote" because of the perceived impact of faith-informed voters.
Contrast that picture with the one in say, a village in the deep rain forest of Brazil or somewhere like that. No television, no radio, no Christian bookstores, no pandering politicians claiming they love Jesus. It might not be unthinkable that some of our hypothetical villagers hear the Gospel one time their entire lives from a lone missionary or missionary couple. The perceived implication is that we have a much greater opportunity to come to know the Lord here in America and that ultimately, people are lost (non-Americans) without having heard the Gospel. How is that fair? How could God have set-up such an unfair world system? Why would He allow that to happen?
I would like to offer three points that perhaps, won't answer these accusative questions directly, but will cause everyone on both sides of this issue to pause and think more deeply about their own worldview; particularly if you claim to have a Biblical worldview centered around the person and work of Jesus Christ.
The first is that I converted to Christianity when I was 32 years old. I did not grow up in a Christian home and when I left home for the Marines I didn't go to any church or ascribe to any religion for the 13 years between my initial enlistment and my conversion. My wife grew up Christian and then wandered from the Lord until about 10 years ago. So for the first 5 (or so) years of our marriage, we lived a Godless life devoid of anything that anyone would call spiritual or religious. What's the point of this you ask? In all my years on Earth before I converted, I heard the Gospel twice. One of those was from my wife and one from my father-in-law and both of those were in the last 10 years. For 22 years, I knew exactly bupkis about the Gospel of Jesus Christ which Paul says is "as of first importance" (1 Cor. 15:3). I was never saturated with the Gospel even though I lived in America.
The next point deals with an implicit assumption in this line of reasoning. The assumption is that people go to hell because they haven't heard of Jesus. This assumption also has its own assumption as well; that everybody is generally good and would go to heaven if they just hear of Jesus. Both of these are wrong. No one goes to hell because they haven't heard of Jesus. We all are or were deservedly on the road to hell because we sin and God's justice must be satiated. The other part of this is found in Romans 1-3. Specifically, 1:18-32 and 3:10-23 that says everyone is guilty and even though we know God exists, we ignore that reality and don't follow or seek Him. Without the "bad news" of our inherent and guilty sinfulness, the good news doesn't make any sense. Jesus just becomes some arbitrary marker that must be reached for no apparent reason for entry to heaven instead of the understanding that we all are dying of a disease of which Jesus is the only cure. Why is Jesus the only cure? Because God poured His wrath out on Him on the cross (Isa. 52:13-53:12; especially 53:10-12) in order to "make many to be accounted righteous" (53:11). Now we can ask: Is it fair that God Himself in the person of Jesus Christ came and lived among men in order to live a sinless life and sacrifice Himself willingly that we might have eternal life even though we were, for instance, trying to live a good life to get to heaven or suppressing the truth of God's existence so we could remain the lord of our own lives? The reality of this line of thought is that it is incredibly shallow and human-centered when the very foundational message of the Bible is absolutely God-centered.
The final point I have is just a thought exercise that I conjured up when discussing this topic with both my wife and a friend of mine at separate times. We had been discussing these very questions in an attempt to parse out some serious Christian answers that deal with the mechanics of how God accomplishes all his saving purposes with people who may only hear the Gospel once in their lifetime. For the sake of argument, I will grant that Americans are saturated with the Gospel message contrary to my first point above. Paul says in Acts 17:26-27 that God has "determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him." God has personally put every one of us in both the time and place where He knew that we had the best chance to find him. That is a comforting thought. Since God has done this, we can presume that He knows our personality and sensitiveness to Him better than we do. If you have been around followers of Christ for any length of time you know that some people are just naturally more sensitive to God's presence and moving than others. Even non-believers can be incredibly sensitive to God though they do not really know Him (Albert Camus in his book The Fall for instance). With this in mind, maybe we as Americans are not the privileged ones. Maybe we needed to hear the Gospel from every possible medium, repeatedly, in order to find our way to God. Maybe we are weak and totally insensitive to God. Since God knows everything, He knew that fact about all of us and knew that our weakness needed a profoundly Gospel swamped "allotted period" and "dwelling place" so we might succumb to His grace. And on the other hand, maybe it is the distant villager who really has the privilege. Maybe he is the one who is sensitive to God and thus, the stronger one compared with an average American. He only needed to hear the Gospel once in his life in order for it pierce him to the soul and change his life forever. Maybe he only needed to hear the only name that can save, the name above all names, Jesus Christ, once, before the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual barriers in his being came crashing down and he embraced what he knew had been missing from his life for as long as he could remember. I hope that this will give you something to think about when you consider the (apparent) problem that deals with: What about those who have never heard?