Last year, leaders of the evangelical publication Christianity Today summoned the entire staff to a hotel ballroom in the Chicago suburbs for a meeting about their future.
The publication’s chief operating officer, Nicole Massie Martin, opened her presentation with a Bible verse from the Old Testament about rejoicing even in dark times, “though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food.” Then Thomas Addington, the interim president, delivered a blunt message: Christianity Today’s reputation as a staid voice of intellectual centrist evangelicalism — embodied by its proximity to Wheaton College in Illinois — had to change.
Christianity Today needed to be less like Wheaton and more like TikTok, Mr. Addington told his staff, according to several people who attended the meeting. Warning that layoffs were coming, he ended his presentation with a prayer. A senior editor left the room in tears.
Fourteen months later, more than half of the 79 employees at that time have either been laid off or resigned, including an editor in chief and four of the company’s longest-tenured journalists.
In interviews, a number of employees who have departed since the meeting in 2025 said that the changes at Christianity Today seemed to be about more than stabilizing its finances. Its new leaders, they believe, are abandoning the publication’s longtime commitment to independent journalism, a record that includes investigating accounts of misconduct by high-profile evangelicals.
Bonnie Kristian, Christianity Today’s deputy editor until last week, described its new leaders as being driven “by fear, by the kind of anxiety about reputational and financial loss that makes bold, interesting, principled journalism very difficult.”
Multiple journalists said that Ms. Martin and Mr. Addington have made attempts to discourage certain articles and lines of reporting based on feedback from their own social and professional circles. One reporter, who was granted anonymity because of concerns over the terms of his severance agreement, said he was instructed this year to slow down an investigation into a faith-based organization that had financial connections to Christianity Today.
“Every journalistic organization has debates about what content to prioritize,” Mr. Addington said. “C.T. is no different.” At the meeting in 2025, he said, he was using Wheaton and TikTok as “metaphors for where C.T. has been and where the media environment is taking us.” The outlet remains committed to independent journalism, he said.
Last week, the magazine’s new editor in chief, Erik Petrik, took down an article that discussed evidence that the popular evangelical writer Elisabeth Elliot, who died in 2015, was bisexual. Edited and fact-checked over the course of weeks, the article disappeared within 12 hours of publication, after receiving backlash from conservatives online.
The next day, the article reappeared with a note from Mr. Petrik saying that it “was not reviewed prior to publication by some key members of our content team.”
Mr. Petrik declined to say whether he would have published the article if it had been proposed under his watch. As the outlet’s top editor, “I will be cautious when facts are few and controversy high,” he said.
Christianity Today was founded in 1956 by a group of evangelicals including Billy Graham, and quickly became the flagship magazine of American evangelicalism.
Of the many Christian publications that flowered after World War II, it was the only one that insisted on “thorough reporting and professional reporters doing that work from the start,” said Daniel Silliman, who broke a major story for the magazine about accusations of sexual abuse against the high-profile evangelist Ravi Zacharias in 2020.
Mr. Silliman was later asked to investigate accusations of harassment against the magazine’s former editor in chief, the uncomfortable results of which the outlet published without having to seek review by its previous executives.
Along with reporting, Christianity Today publishes spiritual reflections, theological treatises and opinion essays that have long served as a bellwether for mainstream American evangelical sentiments. For decades, it generally avoided partisan battles and was read by Christian leaders and churchgoers across the country.
The Trump years upended the landscape of Christian journalism, and revealed gaps between publishers and the pews. Marvin Olasky, the longtime editor of the evangelical World magazine, resigned in 2021 as the magazine shifted from hard-hitting reporting to opinion journalism of the generally pro-Trump variety. The Christian Post, another evangelical outlet, also shifted to embrace President Trump.
Its 2019, Christianity Today made waves when it called in an editorial for the removal of Mr. Trump. It continued reporting both favorably and critically on the impact of the administration’s policies on refugees, foreign aid, gender policy and child care subsidies, to name a few. Russell Moore, a prominent evangelical critic of Mr. Trump, served as its editor in chief from 2022 to 2025.
The new Christian right that embraced Mr. Trump derides the magazine as “woke” and irrelevant.
The magazine’s woes are not straightforwardly partisan. In one case, Ms. Martin, who wrote in Christianity Today that she voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, proposed publishing a response by a group of Latino evangelicals who objected to an editorial by a Trump supporter.
But its issues reflect wider dilemmas within evangelicalism a decade into the Trump era, when many traditional conservatives still feel politically homeless.
“Can you have a centrist evangelical magazine?” asked Kara Bettis Carvalho, a former senior editor who left for The Boston Globe in May. The magazine’s leaders, she said, have “struggled to figure out our audience.”
Christianity Today has also been buffeted by the ordinary vagaries of the 21st-century publishing industry. The outlet has just over 50,000 paid subscribers in print and digitally, down from 80,000 magazine subscribers a decade ago. It increasingly relies on grants and fund-raising to pay the bills.
Ms. Martin, whose academic and professional background is in Christian ministry, was named president and chief operating officer at the end of last year. Mr. Addington, a former board member who founded an Arkansas-based e-commerce and logistics company, became its chief operating officer. Both immediately became involved with editorial decision-making to a degree that rattled many editors and reporters.
Christianity Today has a code of ethics that emphasizes its independence. “We maintain strict separation (the news industry term is a firewall) between editorial decisions and sources of all revenue,” it reads.
Ms. Kristian, the magazine’s former deputy editor, said Ms. Martin and Mr. Addington had discouraged or tried to dramatically revise multiple articles, apparently under pressure by the articles’ subjects or others unhappy with their impact.
Ms. Martin said she does not have formal oversight over content, but has asked to be notified before publication when something “may cause contention or affect our external brand in any way.” She said she has not intervened in editorial decision-making, but has simply asked questions about planned articles and passed along feedback from outside the company.
The future of Christianity Today is as a “journalism ministry that helps people make sense of the world through a biblical lens,” she said.
“Nicole has repeatedly affirmed C.T.’s journalism and C.T.’s editorial independence even though she’s violating it,” Ms. Kristian said. “In the meantime, Tom has been openly hostile.”
In a meeting in July, according to notes Ms. Kristian took at the time, Mr. Addington said that “editorial independence and autonomy are taken way too far,” and complained that he had no input into what writers were working on.
Mr. Silliman was suspended last fall by the magazine’s editor in chief at the time, Mr. Olasky, formerly of World, over a news article about a lawsuit against a California megachurch and its high-profile pastor, Greg Laurie.
It soon became clear to the reporter that it was Mr. Addington who had initiated the punishment. Mr. Addington told Mr. Silliman and his editor, Kate Shellnutt, that he was going to fly to California to personally apologize to Mr. Laurie for the article, which he described as unfair. (Mr. Addington said he and Ms. Martin offered to meet with Mr. Laurie, but schedules prevented the meeting from taking place.)
At one point, Mr. Silliman recalled, Mr. Addington wondered out loud why so many of his friends said Christianity Today was “feminine” and “woke.”
Mr. Silliman and Ms. Shellnutt quit the magazine in protest in late 2025. Ms. Kristian resigned in September. Mr. Olasky moved up his planned retirement from the end of the year to last week, after a new wave of layoffs in September left him with half his original editorial staff.
“The end of this era for us also represents something bigger about the evangelical movement,” Ms. Shellnutt said. “It’s a real narrowing of where hard stories can be told and where good stories can be told alongside them.”
In a recent virtual meeting with the staff, Mr. Petrik, the company’s sixth editor in chief in less than seven years, laid out his vision for Christianity Today’s next chapter. The outlet would be smaller, he said, but would maintain its high standards.
And, he added, “we’re going to be gentle in our tone.”
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