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Cycling down the widening gyre

Cycling down the widening gyre

Last updated on: October 27, 2026 at 4:32 pm by Fred Clark

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Cycling down the widening gyre 2026-10-27T16:32:46-04:00 Fred Clark

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The thing about laying off a bunch of writers and editors is that all of those people are going to turn around and write about it.

So right now there are a whole bunch of posts and articles about all the upheaval at Christianity Today. We looked at Bonnie Kristian’s post the other day — “Why I Left Christianity Today.” Here is Sho Baraka: “ I’m No Longer at Christianity Today.” And Katelyn Beaty: “The Stakes of What’s Happening at Christianity Today.” And Daniel Silliman: “Notes on a Burning Flagship.”

The first thing to understand about all of this is that Christianity Today is a print magazine that is somehow still printing in 2026. And printing a magazine in 2026 is an almost impossible thing to do.

The crisis at CT is, for the most part, no different from the crisis happening at every other print magazine or newspaper. The former business model no longer works and nobody seems to have a new business model to replace it. CT is cycling through leaders and interim leaders, some of whom seem to be acting out of panicked desperation, but this is all utterly familiar and predictable in a digital world dominated by a cartel of tech monopolies who have set up a system in which online publishing and advertising can be immensely profitable, but only for them.

Print is not yet entirely dead. Some print magazines continue to do well, but those tend to be publications with a well-defined and established niche. Think Bride or Modern Bride or Great Lakes Boating or the like. A friend of mine worked for a magazine like that back in the pre-internet 1990s, when I was struggling to sell enough ads to keep my tiny religious activist rag afloat. He said that for them the challenge was always the other way around — trying to come up with enough content to fill the space between all the ads that various competing vendors automatically purchased for every issue.

Alas for Christianity Today, their niche is not aligned with the guaranteed ad revenue that comes from the wedding industry or the boating industry. The kinds of advertisers seeking the niche readership they serve aren’t really big enough to call an “industry.” How big can the total ad budget for InterVarsity Press and Eerdmans really be?

The other big problem for CT is that it is a niche publication that does not know what its niche is.

Yes, sure, it’s the “flagship evangelical publication” or whatever, but what the heck does that mean? What is the fleet that this is the flagship of? Who is the intended readership? They don’t really seem to know. They seem to assume that everybody already knows, and that this is obvious and simple — it’s a magazine for, like, Christians, um, today, like … our kind of Christians. But none of that is saying anything other than they have a host of unstated and ill-defined assumptions about their audience and readership that may or may not actually be accurate.

And if you simply try to describe that apparent niche readership, they tend to perceive that as a criticism or an attack. Broadly speaking, I’d say their readership is mainly older, white pastors and people employed by white evangelical churches and institutions, but only those white evangelical churches and institutions that are not Pentecostal or charismatic.

But that description prompts such defensiveness and denial that it prevents them from either managing to focus on reaching that niche audience or from understanding how that audience might be expanded.

So those are two of the key things to keep in mind about this crisis at Christianity Today. The first is that everything happening there is similar to what’s happening throughout the publishing world. And the second is that CT is particularly poorly positioned to face these challenges because it’s a niche publication that cannot tell itself what its niche is.

But there’s also a third big factor here which is that, when it comes down to it, Christianity Today is usually gonna Christianity Today. All the issues that Silliman and Kristian and Beaty and others raise about ownership meddling with content due to financial and “reputational” concerns is not new.

I described this as like “one of those time-loop stories from a sci-fi show or from David Ives or Groundhog Day.”

That was a post here from 12 years ago discussing a similar crisis at Christianity Today from 61 years ago.

The white evangelical “flagship” is, like white evangelicalism as a whole, stuck in a cycle of recurrence, with the same thing happening again and again due to the same choices being made again and again for the same reasons.

The template for that recurrence, I suggested, could be found in five sentences from Peter G. Heltzel’s book Jesus & Justice: Evangelicals, Race & American Politics. These five sentences, I said, contain everything you need to know about white evangelicalism in the United States:

In 1965 [Carl] Henry sent Frank E. Gaebelein to cover the march in Selma, Alabama. An associate editor of Christianity Today and the founder and headmaster of the Stony Brook School, New York, Gaebelein went to Selma and was so inspired that he wired Henry in Washington, DC, that evangelicals needed to join the march. But Gaebelein’s stories of the Selma march never saw the light of day. The resistance at Christianity Today was coming primarily from two people: J. Howard Pew, the Texas oil man and the financer of Christianity Today, and L. Nelson Bell, Billy Graham’s father-in-law and an editorial adviser at Christianity Today, who still had segregationist views. Pew and Bell did not want Christianity Today to speak out too critically against racism and capitalism, because they thought it would alienate important segments of the magazine’s constituency.

Henry, to his credit, published Gaebelein’s first dispatch from Selma, which ran in CT on April 9, 1965. And it did, indeed, “alienate important segments of the magazine’s constituency.” It also infuriated Bell — the magazine’s segregationist spiritual adviser. And, more importantly, it infuriated Pew, “the Texas oil man and financier.”

Henry understood that if he ran any more of Gaebelein’s reports from Selma, the money would walk away and the segregationists would attack. So that was the last of Gaebelein’s reporting the magazine printed.

Cut to a close-up of an old flip-number digital clock-radio as it rotates from 5:59 to 6:00. The radio alarm springs to life, blaring the ending of Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe” …

So on the one hand you’ve got that pastors and professors and such who make up the niche audience and readership of Christianity Today and on the other hand you’ve got Pew and Bell — the billionaire and the firebrand segregationist. The interests and needs of the former are not the interests and needs of the latter. Those interests sometimes overlap, but more often they’re in conflict. And when they conflict, Christianity Today — and white Christianity today — tends to side with those who sign the biggest checks.

Pew and Bell are, happily, both dead now, but their archetypal heirs — the billionaire capitalist and the right-wing culture warrior — still make up the donor class that shapes not just one magazine, but every church and white evangelical institution that its readers belong to.

If there’s a hopeful note to be found here it’s that even now, the interests and needs of the Pews and Bells are sometimes in conflict with the interests and needs of all those white evangelical pastors and laypeople. Think of all the money those donors have spent and all the work they have put into muzzling and bullying and extorting Christianity Today and other white evangelical institutions to reshape all of white evangelicalism in their image. They’ve spent decades donating and withholding donations to do that and they still have not yet 100% succeeded.

That’s something, I suppose.

OK, campers, rise and shine, and don’t forget your booties because it’s cooooold out there!

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