Religion: Conservatism Today

Thanks to its well-heeled backers, the magazine is sent free to 140,657 Protestant churchmen; only 38,208 subscribers actually pay to receive it. But after nearly six years of thumbing through its bristling defense of oldtime religion, most of the readers on the free list would probably make a point of getting the fortnightly Christianity Today even if they had to pay for it. For it is a magazine of evangelical Christianity that tries to make traditional Protestant theology clear and interesting—and nearly always succeeds.

Recent issues of Christianity Today have included an impressive sample of the kind of alert religious reporting and comment that makes the magazine indispensable—if often irritating—reading in manses and seminaries across the U.S. One editorial took a rough swipe at clerical complacency, and then lambasted a recent Vatican statement that Protestants could achieve church unity by returning to the Catholic fold. The issue now going to press runs a long survey of religion in non-Communist Europe based on reports of some of its 37 foreign correspondents. The general consensus: materialist, religiously indifferent Europe is ripe for evangelical missionary work.

Byproduct of Billy. Christianity Today preaches a kind of literate, highbrow fundamentalism. Strongly conservative in its economic and political views, strongly Biblical in its theology, it is a byproduct of the one-man refurbishing job done on the U.S. Protestant church by Billy Graham, a frequent C.T. contributor, and in fact its cofounder. In 1955 Graham and his father-in-law, Dr. L. Nelson Bell, a Presbyterian layman, asked a number'of church leaders if they felt that Christianity needed a new nondenominational magazine, not-so liberal as the old and prestigious Christian Century (circ. 37,500). Bell organized a committee of clerical sponsors, raised the capital funds from a number of millionaire Protestant laymen, including Oilman J. Howard Pew and Chairman Maxey Jarman of GENESCO, Inc., who still make up most of the magazine's annual $225,000 deficit. To edit the new magazine Graham's committee chose Baptist Professor Carl Henry, 49, of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. He agreed to take on the job for a year "to get things moving in the right direction." Henry is still keeping Christianity Today on the move. Raised as an Episcopalian, Henry was editor of the weekly Smithtown, N.Y., Star at the age of 20, when he underwent what he calls "a dynamic Pauline conversion." He studied for a divinity degree at Chicago's Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Boston University, has written and edited 17 books.