What happens to people who never hear about Jesus?

This is a sharper version of the wider salvation debate, focused specifically on people who, through no choice of their own, never had a real opportunity to hear the gospel at all—not simply people who heard and rejected it.

Paul argues in Romans that everyone has access to some knowledge of God through creation itself, and that even people without direct access to biblical revelation have a moral sense—"the law written on their hearts"—by which they're genuinely accountable. This establishes that no one is entirely without any knowledge of God or moral responsibility, even without hearing the gospel specifically.

Whether that limited knowledge could ever be sufficient for someone to be saved is exactly where exclusivists and inclusivists disagree, discussed in more detail elsewhere. What both sides affirm together is that God's judgment of anyone—evangelized or not—will be entirely fair, weighing what a person actually knew and did with it, not judging them for information they had no real access to.