Christianity Today Editorial

On December 19, 2019 — the same day the House of Representatives voted to impeach Donald Trump — Christianity Today published an editorial titled 'Trump Should Be Removed from Office.' It was written by Mark Galli, who was retiring as editor-in-chief, and it was the most significant statement by an institutional evangelical voice since the movement's alignment with the Republican Party had been formalized in the late 1970s. The editorial was not primarily a political argument. It was a theological one. Galli invoked the magazine's founding by Billy Graham in 1956 as a journal committed to applying evangelical convictions to public life without partisan capture. He argued that Trump's conduct — specifically the Ukraine pressure campaign at the center of the impeachment — demonstrated 'profoundly immoral' character. He wrote: 'Trump's evangelical supporters have, in effect, adopted a number of norms that are hostile to the core convictions of Christianity.' The response was immediate and revealed exactly the fault lines the editorial described. Trump responded on Twitter calling CT 'a far left magazine' — a classification that would have been incomprehensible to anyone familiar with the publication's history. Franklin Graham — Billy Graham's son and heir to the family's evangelical brand — said his father would have voted for Trump. Jerry Falwell Jr. said the editorial proved the 'whole impeachment thing is really a coordinated attack by the religious left.' Nearly 200 evangelical leaders signed an open letter to CT defending Trump and questioning the magazine's evangelical credentials. What the response demonstrated was how completely the loyalty tests had been internalized. Christianity Today was a publication founded by the patriarch of American evangelicalism, edited for decades by men who had shaped evangelical intellectual culture, read by pastors across the theological spectrum. Its editorial calling for a president's removal was not a radical act. The fact that it was received as one — and that its evangelical credentials were immediately questioned — showed how far the movement had traveled from the convictions it claimed to hold. Mark Galli retired as planned. Christianity Today continued under new leadership. Russell Moore joined as editor-in-chief in 2022. The editorial remains the clearest single document of the fracture.

Documented themes

• Opposition / Resistance
• Christian Nationalism
• Political Strategy

Connections to Christianity Today Editorial

• Albert Mohler opposed (2019) — Albert Mohler did not sign the open letter defending Trump that circulated in response to the Christianity Today editorial, but he publicly distanced himself from the editorial's conclusions — arguing that while Trump's character was legitimately questionable, the editorial's call for removal went beyond what Christianity Today's role warranted. Mohler's hedged response was characteristic: he was never a straightforward Trump enthusiast, but he was also never willing to pay the institutional cost of full opposition. His 2020 announcement that he would vote for Trump — after years of expressing reservations — was the movement's loyalty test made explicit. Mohler passed it. The Christianity Today editors did not.
• Jerry Falwell Jr. opposed (2019) — Jerry Falwell Jr. responded to the Christianity Today editorial by tweeting that it proved 'that this whole impeachment thing is really a coordinated attack by the religious left' and calling for CT's evangelical credentials to be questioned. His response was revealing: where Galli had made a theological argument about presidential character, Falwell reframed it as a political attack by political enemies. This was the movement's standard translation — moral criticism became political warfare, and the critic became an enemy rather than a conscience. Falwell's framing was widely adopted by the nearly 200 evangelical leaders who signed an open letter to CT defending Trump in the editorial's wake.

Sources

• Trump Should Be Removed from Office (editorial) — Mark Galli (2019), pp. Christianity Today, December 19, 2019
• Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation — Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020), pp. 271–285
• The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism — Tim Alberta (2023)