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The following is an edited excerpt from the new book “Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda,” by Megan Basham (Broadside Books/HarperCollins, July 30, 2024).
Not long ago, I received a text from my childhood pastor Randy Brannon, wanting to know what had happened to Christianity Today. Brannon had retired some years earlier from his large Southern Baptist church, and it had been awhile since he’d picked up a copy of the magazine Billy Graham founded in 1956. The character and emphasis of its coverage has ebbed and flowed over the years, as all publications tend to do under the leadership of different editors, but it had generally reflected the broad outlook of a traditional pastor like him. Or, at least it had the last time he’d paid attention to it. What he’d read while leafing through a couple of back issues early in 2023 shocked him—so much so that he began to poke around the Christianity Today website to see if perhaps he had just stumbled on one or two outlier months. He quickly discovered he hadn’t.
In one interview, a self-professed Christian psychology professor bemoaned the fact that states had been banning transgender medications and surgeries for children because these are “complex clinical issues.” A highly racially divisive essay, titled “White Churches, It’s Time to Go Pro-Life on Gun Control,” said “alt-right racism” was responsible for making Donald Trump president. The author demanded that white pastors lobby their governors for gun restrictions. Then there were the dozens of reports promoting lax border policies with no counterbalance to show the harms of unfettered illegal immigration (a topic Brannon knew well as a California resident of some forty years). It was all far more political than he’d ever remembered and far more progressive. Recalling that he had a family friend familiar with the inner workings of evangelical media, he texted me. “Is Christianity Today going woke?!”
I texted back a laughing emoji. “How long has it been since you read it?”I asked. He confessed that he couldn’t remember—a long time. When I told him Christianity Today’s progressive slant was nothing new, though it had become more overt since 2016, he wondered how the magazine could stay afloat when it was so obviously out of step with the mainstream of evangelical views. Didn’t it need to serve the interests of its readers?
What he didn’t realize was that these days, a significant portion of the magazine’s funding doesn’t come from readers, or even Christians.
Unequally Yoked
In 2016, evangelicalism’s “flagship” publication began receiving substantial support from one of the wealthiest private foundations in the world, the Lilly Endowment, a charitable institution founded in 1937 by the Eli Lilly family of pharmaceutical fame. After evangelicals propelled Donald Trump into the presidency, Lilly awarded, for the first time, a sizable grant to Christianity Today—just over $2 million for a project to “[Create] a Future for Christian Thought.”
That same year, Lilly gave the outlet a separate grant for $750,000 as part of a “faithful pastors” project. Combined, it was a substantial sum for the magazine—nearly the total amount of grant money it received that year and more than six times the funding it had received the previous year. It was also well over the magazine’s net income for the year.
Protestant organizations have understandably accepted funding from secular foundations in the past to minister to the homeless, poor, and sick and for any number of other related humanitarian projects. The issue with the Lilly grants is that they’re specifically going to evangelical institutions for pastoral and ideological efforts, and they appear to have no commitment to orthodoxy. To wit, the endowment’s Thriving in Ministry Initiative is so overtly left-wing that its participants promote abortion, reparations, illegal immigration amnesty, and LGBTQ ideology.
Broadside Books/HarperCollins
Of course, it doesn’t necessarily take financial incentives to shift the nature of an organization if the worldview of the staff has already shifted. As Jesus observes, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6:21). And a quick look at public campaign records shows that when it comes to political donations, Christianity Today’s heart is most certainly with the party of abortion and the LGBTQ agenda.
Between 2015 and 2022, the outlet’s staff and board members made seventy-four political donations. Every single one went to Democrats. That tally includes Christianity Today president and CEO Timothy Dalrymple who in 2020 donated $300 to failed Georgia Senate candidate Sarah Riggs Amico, who ran on a platform of protecting abortion “without exception” and of repealing the Hyde Amendment, which prevents federal tax dollars from funding abortions. Amico also declared herself a “staunch LGBTQ ally,” promising to support the Equality Act, a radical bill that would, as the Heritage Foundation has detailed, threaten parental rights over children who claim to be transgender, decimate conscience rights for medical workers, and “cancel religious freedom.” Theologian and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler put the Equality Act in even starker terms, saying it “represents the greatest threat to religious liberty in the United States in our lifetimes” and would “totally transform the United States as we know it.” Yet the man at the helm of evangelicalism’s most recognized and influential publication twice donated to the campaign of a Senate candidate pledging to vote for it.
Nor is the issue just that a number of Christianity Today staffers donate to Democrats. It’s also which staff have done so. It might not make much difference if the IT guy or the woman who sells advertising places some chips on blue before an election, but when the CEO, a board member, and a vice president do so, and no one in the executive ranks appears to counterbalance their views, there’s a question of how much that’s influencing the content of the magazine. Even worse is when the editorial staff are making campaign donations. Then it’s not just a question of a political outlook that’s wildly out of step with the audience the magazine purports to serve, but also of a violation of professional ethics.
How serious a breach is it for journalists to donate to candidates? Serious enough that back in 2010, MSNBC suspended host Keith Olbermann over three campaign donations even though his show was clearly marketed as opinion. The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, NPR, and just about every other major secular newsroom do not allow editors or reporters to contribute to campaigns, and they’ve suspended journalists who got caught doing so.
Five different editors at Christianity Today contributed to Democrats (and only Democrats) between 2015 and 2022, including news editor Daniel Silliman. He gave to five different pro-abortion candidates, among them, Elizabeth Warren, who is so committed to the cause of death that she has pushed to shut down all crisis pregnancy centers across the country.
After he left the magazine, former editor in chief Mark Galli admitted in a since-deleted essay that the staff is driven by a deep desire for the approval of secular elites:
Elite evangelicalism (represented by CT, IVPress, World Vision, Fuller Seminary, and a host of other establishment organizations) is too often “a form of cultural accommodation dressed as convictional religion.” These evangelicals want to appear respectable to the elite of American culture …
Part of the reason for this, Galli explained, was because these members of the evangelical media fancy themselves as elite:
For the longest time, a thrill went through the office when Christianity Today or evangelicalism in general was mentioned in a positive vein by The New York Times or The Atlantic or other such leading, mainstream publications. The feeling in the air was, “We made it. We’re respected” …
Galli acknowledged that this hunger for worldly respectability drives Christianity Today’s editorial decisions as well, not just in what editors cover, but also in what they choose not to cover.
We said, for example, that the magazine did not take a stand in the complementarianism or egalitarianism debate. But we rarely if ever published an article that endorsed complementarianism; we did offer many that assumed egalitarianism in family and church life (not to mention the many women pastors who [sic] we published).
It was also no coincidence, Galli said, that Christianity Today has not run an article in the last 30 years that “argued for or assumed six-day creation.” Instead, it publishes writers who take the respectable secular position that the Earth is a billion years old.
Before I came across Galli’s essay, I noticed this same kind of selective coverage, though over issues that demonstrate cultural accommodation in far more glaring fashion.
At the same time that Christianity Today is putting out the progressive-slanted reporting that my old pastor Brannon noticed, the magazine offers virtually no coverage of the dozens of laws being passed across the country that ban transgender surgeries and treatments on minors, or of states outlawing drag queen performances in front of children, or of bills mandating that schools keep gender indoctrination out of the classroom. As I write, the existence of such bills is briefly mentioned in only one interview and as a one sentence aside in an article about an intermural denominational battle, but the magazine has not devoted a single article to covering this massive legislative trend. Yet few cultural topics have been more important to evangelicals in recent years. For Christianity Today to all but ignore it speaks volumes about the value it places on the views of ordinary believers and with whom it prefers to align.
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Megan Basham is a culture reporter for the Daily Wire and the author of “Beside Every Successful Man: A Woman’s Guide to Having It All.” She is a frequent contributor to Morning Wire, one of the top 10 news podcasts in the United States. She has also written for the Wall Street Journal, the Telegraph, First Things, National Review, and World Magazine, where she worked as a film and television editor. Follow her on X: @megbasham
This excerpt is taken from “Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda,” by Megan Basham (Broadside Books/HarperCollins, July 30, 2024)
SHEPHERDS FOR SALE. Copyright © 2024 by Megan Basham
Reprinted here with permission from Broadside, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
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FOOTNOTES:
CHAPTER 4: Christian Media and the Money Men
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