The Christianity Today editorial marks a new era in religion media
Mark Galli’s Christianity Today editorial calling for Trump’s removal has set off a maelstrom within the evangelical Christian community. Nearly 200 evangelical leaders condemned the top Christian publication for questioning the “spiritual integrity” of millions of Americans, and President Trump lashed out against the editorial on Twitter.
And yet the platform has also already received “three times as many subscribers” as it lost in the wake of the editorial.
These complex and disparate responses are a fascinating testament to the state of modern media, especially within the faith-based community. Thirty years ago, the evangelical Christian community was seemingly far more unified and far less diverse than it is today. The Christian Right movement that began in the 1970s and 1980s – a conservative Christian response to political developments like Roe v. Wade and the banning of prayer in public school – has essentially fractured into various subsets that believe strikingly different things.
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With this fracturing, it has become impossible for any group or form of media to claim to speak for – or to – them all. According to a recent article in The Atlantic, the term “evangelical” that “once described a vital tradition within the Christian faith now means something else entirely.”
One cause of this is that there are far more Americans who identify as evangelical Christians today than there were in 1980. While the percentage of mainline Protestants has steadily declined over the past several decades, the percentage of evangelical Protestants has risen. That increase has led to an increase in diversity of experiences, viewpoints and politics.
What’s more, the increasing ethnic diversity of the evangelical movement means that evangelical viewpoints on political and other issues have inevitably diverged. According to Gallup, 61% of blacks, 44% of Hispanics and 38% of non-Hispanic whites identify as evangelical. And yet it’s the white evangelical population, not “the black born-again/evangelical population [that] is usually… the focus of political analysis.” In fact, the evangelical population is highest among blacks, who are overall the most religious ethnic group in America. And yet, as the mainstream media loosely uses the term “evangelical” in the context of politics, are they referring to African-Americans? Mostly not.
It’s not surprising that recent political decisions, like border control, healthcare reform, or abortion, would be received differently by different groups of Christians. Modern evangelicalism has, according to The Atlantic, transformed from a theological position to a political one.
The changing Christian landscape combined with the changing media landscape means it is impossible for one medium today to resonate with all people within one group. A media spread that once consisted of radio, television, a few magazines and newspapers has burgeoned into podcasts, blogs, social media, online magazines, websites, video streaming, and more. The evangelical Christian community is more diverse, and so is the media that speaks to it.
The result is that we can no longer use the term “Christian media” as a one-size-fits-all blanket statement to refer to media that appeals to evangelical Christians. The reality is that there is no one media platform that speaks for all Christians, evangelical or otherwise. Just as cable TV news has appealed to either conservatives or progressives, religion media appears to be heading that direction now.
Sadly, much of this change can be attributed to the recent divisiveness of politics. The political division that has fractured America in recent years has been used and allowed to fracture the faith community as well.
Whether or not Mark Galli was fulfilling Christianity Today’s mission of “equipping Christians to renew their minds, serve the church, and create culture to the glory of God” is irrelevant. I suspect he thought he was. And there is an argument to be made that this mission should include guiding Christians on how to engage in politics.
But this commentary also runs the risk of further fragmenting not just those who call themselves evangelicals but the church as a whole. The number of religion publications has grown significantly in recent years, and the market has organically become more segmented. This editorial, it seems, will end up exacerbating this trend.
The problem is that people with strong convictions can land on two very different positions and believe in them entirely. Because of this, it seems we’ve come to the end of a time when one platform or publication can pretend to speak for a majority.
What the backlash over this editorial shows us is that partisan politics is dividing the Christian community like we’ve never seen before. The Christian community doesn’t just risk “winning” or “losing” an election in 2020 (depending on who’s judging it); it also risks losing the cohesiveness that has brought forth important societal change over the past several decades, combatting everything from illiteracy and poverty to homelessness and human trafficking.
To overcome this, Christian leaders – whether they’re pastors or editors – should resist partisan division and focus on those things that unite them and on healing the fractures within the church in 2020. Partisan division isn’t just bad for politics, and it isn’t just bad for media. It’s also bad for the evangelical Church.
