The Patriot Post® · Christianity Today's Drift

Christianity Today is a long-running evangelical Christian magazine that was founded in 1956 by the late, great evangelist Billy Graham. At the time of its founding, Graham envisioned CT as a magazine that would offer commentary on American culture from an explicitly evangelical Christian perspective. He wanted to “plant the evangelical flag in the middle of the road, taking the conservative theological position but a definite liberal approach to social problems.”

In its first issue, published on October 15, 1956, an editorial titled “Why ‘Christianity Today’?” explained: “Christianity Today has its origin in a deep-felt desire to express historical Christianity to the present generation. Neglected, slighted, misrepresented — evangelical Christianity needs a clear voice, to speak with conviction and love, and to state its true position and its relevance to the world crisis. A generation has grown up unaware of the basic truths of the Christian faith taught in the Scriptures and expressed in the creeds of the historic evangelical churches.”

In other words, the original aim of Christianity Today was to offer America and the wider world an accurate and historically faithful Christian perspective on culture and world events.

And throughout most of its history, CT, for the most part, sought to avoid presenting any explicit political opinions. The few exceptions were in 1974, when CT weighed in on the Richard Nixon scandal by suggesting that “the constitutional process should be followed,” yet observing, “If he is acquitted, the nation will have to wait out the term of a President whose ability to function has been seriously eroded.”

Again in 1998, CT printed an editorial prior on Bill Clinton’s impeachment to say that his “unsavory dealings and immoral acts” served to compromise his leadership.

But the most politically strident position CT took was following Donald Trump’s first impeachment, when CT’s chief editor Mark Galli asserted that Trump had used the office “to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit” his potential presidential opponent Joe Biden. Galli claimed that Trump’s action was “not only a violation of the Constitution,” but “more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.” Galli would leave CT not long after.

Following Galli’s anti-Trump take, many evangelical Christians took umbrage with CT, though the truth is CT has been drifting to the progressive Left for years. It merely took a polarizing figure like Trump for CT to more clearly expose this shift from conservative to liberal Christianity.

CT is far from the only conservative Christian organization to drift away from its original worldview and slide into liberalism. Indeed, like a boat in a lake, unless it is securely moored, it will invariably drift off.

For Christians, our anchor has always been Scripture, for it is by the Bible, God’s Word, that our faith and doctrine is established. The Bible does not change because God does not change, so as long as Christians hold fast and uncompromisingly to Scripture, they will be secure.

But of course, that’s exactly where the rub comes, the unbelieving world rejects Scripture, constantly challenging, dismissing, maligning, belittling, and mocking it. And when Christians are temped to become ashamed of the Bible because of its teaching on the nature of both God and mankind, what can result is a gradual abandonment of it. And what often results from this abandonment is an embrace of liberalism or even leftism, which offers a “Christianity” acceptable to the world because it is less offensive.

This liberal drift has plagued mainline Christian denominations for generations now. Almost all have them have become so overtaken by liberalism that there is almost no room for true biblically consistent Christianity.

At the root of this drift is often found a pride in human knowledge over that of biblical revelation. To believe in the Bible is viewed by many as embracing uneducated silliness and denial of reality. As noted above, the temptation is to bend to this pressure, to seek to find a way to not only find acceptance with the world, but even more boldly to seek to win the world’s embrace.

For CT, it appears that the temptation to gain wider acceptance with the world has been to become increasingly critical of conservative Christians, not merely over their political views, but more broadly in regards to their views on culture and society writ large.

Graham’s goal was to win people to Christ; to see souls saved for eternal life. Now, CT’s goal appears to be that of winning broader acceptance from the unbelieving world by agreeing with their liberal assessment that those Bible-thumping conservative Christians are the real problem holding back the nation from advancing into a more socially just society.