October 15, 1956, was the date of Christianity Today’s first issue. Tomorrow we’ll begin a weekly feature of highlights from each year. Planning for that issue, though, began a year earlier, when Billy Graham gathered a small group to discuss the need for a new Christian magazine. Here’s an abridged version of what he said:
For nearly three years I have been deeply concerned about the situation of evangelicals in the United States. We seem to be confused, bewildered, divided, and almost defeated in the face of the greatest opportunity and responsibility possibly in the history of the church. This burden and concern has been growing month by month. I have found this same burden exists among many evangelical leaders.
It has come to me with ever increasing conviction that one of the great needs is a religious magazine on the order of The Christian Century that will reach the clergy and the lay leaders of every denomination presenting truth from the evangelical viewpoint. This vacuum in the United States and Britain must be filled. There are many other areas that we can attack, but this must be our first concern.
For a long time The Christian Century has been the voice of liberalism in this country. While its circulation is small, its influence is tremendous. It is constantly quoted in Time, Newsweek, and other secular magazines and newspapers. Its intellectual popular journalism is a must for thousands of ministers each week. It influences religious thought more than any single factor in Protestantism today, in my opinion. At the moment there is no evangelical paper that has the respect that can challenge it.
Therefore, I have called you men together for prayer, for consultation, advice, to seek the will of God in this matter and to present some concrete proposals for our discussion, prayers, and thought.
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I propose that this magazine consist of hard-hitting editorial on current subjects—that these editorials be popular, well-thought-out journalism very much like The Christian Century—that we discuss current subjects very much as The Christian Century does from the evangelical viewpoint.
[Editorial policy should be:]
- Pro-church—this magazine should not take sides in fights on various councils in the United States, such as “The American Council,” etc. We should be constructive, positive, and not anti-church.
- This magazine should be thoroughly biblical, evangelical, and evangelistic. However, I would suggest that we not use the term fundamentalist or even conservative. I think the word evangelical is far better and far more disarming.
- This magazine should be nondispensational.
- We should not be either amillenial or premillennial.
- Certainly this magazine should be anti-Communist, giving the intellectual reasons why the Christian church is anti-Communist. There are thousands of Americans, including thousands of ministers, who are against communism, but they have no genuine intellectual reasons as to why. In a debate with a Communist, they would lose nine times out of ten.
- This magazine must be for social improvement. We must take the great social issues of our day, such as the starving people of India, the racial problem, and others, and take a positive viewpoint. We must be for the underdog and the downtrodden, as we all believe Christ was, without being socialistic in our tendencies.
- While we do not want to get into politics yet, we will take a mildly conservative political position in our interpretation of current events. (In other words, the editorial policy should be “down the middle of the road.”)
I suggest the name of the magazine be Christianity Today. I suggest this magazine have a maximum of 30 to 50 pages that would be on the same type of paper as The Christian Century. That it be intellectual yet popular journalism—that the articles be brief.
