The outrageous imposture of Christian Churches as gatekeepers of Heaven

Looked at retrospectively; it seems extraordinary that all the major Christian churches went down the path of claiming to be the gatekeepers of Heaven: of claiming that the eternal salvation of every individual Man depended on the say-so of a church on earth. 

It is not really difficult to understand this in terms of sociological advantage; in terms of how a church - which is a mortal, material, human institution - can enable itself to grow, survive and expand. 

It is clearly an advantage in this-world, if an organization can persuade enough people that it is essential for resurrected life in the world-to-come. 

This applies even when the fundamental basis of the Christian religion is one of the primacy of each individual person's spiritual relationship with the ascended Jesus Christ. 

While there are insufficient historical records concerning the mainstream Christian churches, the trajectory can be seen for the Mormon church (CJCLDS). 

Mormonism was built around assertion of the primacy of personal revelation (a direct spiritual relationship between each person and the divine), and a conviction that salvation to a kind-of Heavenly state was the default outcome for all but the most depraved persons. 

But the church rapidly developed a gatekeeping role analogous to (although not identical with) the mainstream Christian churches; in that access to the highest levels of eternal Heavenly exaltation after death; were asserted to depend upon church membership and the performance of particular rituals on this mortal earth. 

I suppose that something similar applied to the mainstream churches. For example, the individual and non-church family-like Christianity described in the Fourth Gospel ("John"), lost out to the organizational church by which salvation was institutionally mediated. To be "a Christian" soon became a matter of formal membership of (and submission to) a defined institution, and participation in official and prescribed procedures.  

Such gate-keeping claims as churches make, elide the distinction between earth and Heaven. Of course anyone can claim anything, and we need to ask why such claims were accepted. 

I think the ability of churches to make this elision probably rests on a capacity to provide - albeit briefly and partially, but with some degree of sureness and reliability - experiences of Heaven while still on earth.

It has been the progressive decline, since Medieval times, of Western churches ability to provide to the mass of people such "religious experiences" (e.g. by means of their earthly symbolism, ritual, scriptures, and spiritual training); that has perhaps done more than anything to erode belief in the necessity of any particular church to salvation. 

And when a person "sees through" the false claims of any Christian church to gate-keep Heaven; this involves a recognition that the church is constructed upon a lie. 

At this point, most people seem to give-up on both church and Christianity, together and altogether. 

But the proper conclusion is to separate church from Christianity. 

And then to choose Christianity, while recognizing that any particular church is secondary - maybe helpful to our salvation, but maybe (and more often!) not helpful...  

But responsibility for our salvation after death is always primarily our own; and a matter of our spiritual relationship with Jesus Christ. 

My (or your) decision to be or not to be a Christian, and to choose to follow Jesus to eternal salvation, should not be mediated.

And cannot be blocked, by any earthly church...

Unless you choose to make it so.