Correcting the Record

Responses to my recent Christianity Today post

First things first.

My recent post about changes at Christianity Today contained a factual error, and not an insignificant one.

I wrote that Bonnie Kristian came to Christianity Today in 2025 as part of the changes under Olasky’s leadership, when in fact she was promoted to deputy editor in 2025. She had been a columnist since 2020, was hired under Russell Moore in 2022, and served as a senior editorial role for more than three years. Olasky promoted Kristian to her current position, but she was already working there. This isn’t just a factual error. My erroneous timeline (which I had constructed with the help of an obviously insufficient Google search) added weight to my suggestion that we may be witnessing a deliberate change in orientation and tying that change to Kristian and Olasky.

I’ve corrected my original post, but the problem with corrections of this sort is that they rarely get the same attention as the original. So, I’m writing this one to help rectify that.

First, here’s Kristian’s full rebuttal:

Hey, Kristin Du Mez, thanks for reading my work. I wanted to hop on to correct a factual error in your post:

I did not join CT in 2025. I was hired by Russell Moore in 2023, and before that, I was a CT columnist from 2020 onward. So I’m not part of some new guard; after Russell, I’ve been CT’s most consistent and prolific opinion writer for 6.5 years and in senior editorial leadership for half that time.

This is all easily verified online with some basic due diligence, and the narrative sketched here, including the statement that I arrived “in the midst of this shakeup,” is simply not true.

I’d also suggest you’ve misread me in the Wilson and Kirk articles. The first opens by describing Wilson as a “theocratic Christian nationalist” rejected by his own Reformed tradition. I thought that made my opinion of him pretty clear, as Christianity Today readers don’t need to have it spelled out for them that theocratic Christian nationalism is bad. They already know.

And in the latter article, so far from “find[ing] much to admire,” I wrote that I did not like Kirk’s book—while, as you note, breaking news that it seems to be substantially AI-generated—but would much prefer young men be under its influence than that of “Holocaust deniers, gooners, groypers, and fascists.” A reasonable preference, no?

Finally, the single clearest theme in my writing for CT in 2026 has been critique of the Trump administration for its brutal and lawless immigration enforcement, militaristic foreign policy, and blasphemous self-aggrandizement. I’ll put some links in the comments for any who care to read.

I’d invite readers to look at my Substack and judge for themselves whether my thinking and work is as Du Mez describes.

While owning my error with regard to Kristian’s employment history, I stand by my analysis of the Wilson coverage and the Kirk book review, and Kristian stands by hers. I invite readers to consider both perspectives. (Kristian also invited readers to read several articles she’s written critical of Trump, including this on Trump as AI Jesus, on presidential power, on Iran, Alex Pretti, and immigration protests and ICE.) I also stand by my analysis of Simon’s piece, which seemed so specious in its arguments that I genuinely wondered whether such a piece would have been published in an earlier era.

CT writer Sho Baraka also took issue with the suggestion that CT “is far-right or unwilling to publish critiques of conservatives or MAGA” (not the precise argument I was making, but a fair response), and pointed to this recent article on reparations as one example that contradicts that thesis.

What I did argue in my post was that CT has always published a range of evangelical views, but that that range of views shifts over time. And, I suggested that it does appear to be shifting somewhat rightward under new leadership. I still think this is the case, and I know many others have sensed the same, before and after reading my post. But I don’t think this shift can be defined exclusively or even primarily in terms of a pro-Trump/anti-Trump spectrum. As I noted, Olasky left World in part because he didn’t want to turn the conservative news magazine into a pro-Trump opinion rag. But Olasky also platformed Wilson early on, as did CT. So again, it’s complicated.

After the original post published, I didn’t just hear from critics. I also heard from nearly a dozen former writers and staff members of Christianity Today, all of whom affirmed that they, too, perceived changes at CT in the past few months. They spoke to a mix of ideological and managerial changes that they felt contributed to the turnover, and some also pointed to individual articles that seemed representative of a shift in coverage. (Shifts in coverage at a place like CT can be difficult to discern in real time, but all agreed that some sort of change appeared to be afoot.) Some former contributors talked about their work no longer being welcome. (It can be hard, too, to discern whether any individual case illuminates larger shifts; I have my own story of having been asked to write an article on abuse for CT a few years back. I submitted a piece that was exactly what the editor had hoped it would be, only to have it unexpectedly “killed at publication gate.” They paid me and apologized and gave no explanation. This was before Olasky took over.)

One former staff member who read my post confirmed that there were indeed changes implemented under Olasky, specifically with respect to moving CT away from investigations and reporting that felt like “a poke in the eye” to evangelicals and their institutions. Going forward, reporting on abuses inside evangelicalism would no longer be deemed central to CT’s mission. In this respect, it’s worth noting that Mike Cosper, the mastermind behind The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, the popular podcast on Mark Driscoll, was also let go under Olasky. Sources also told me there may be more personnel changes ahead.

For those interested in discerning any possible shifts at CT, I think it’s worth noting that understanding the relationship between “mainstream” evangelicalism and the “fringes” is far more complicated than most would have you think. Note how I closed my original post:

Christianity Today has a long track record of making people mad on the left and the right ends of the evangelical spectrum, but not necessarily evenly. (It’s worth noting that there’s little “leftist” presence there, evangelical or otherwise, despite what critics on the right insist.) The spectrum from center to far right is generally where the struggle plays out.

All of which is to say, things are complicated. As the “flagship magazine of American evangelicalism,” Christianity Today has always been a contested space, and a space worth watching. Reflecting evangelicalism itself, it needs to be understood not in static terms, but rather in terms of shifting alliances, and shifting centers of power. In the run-up to the midterms, keep your eye on CT. I think we’ll learn more about the direction new leadership will be taking the magazine.

The story, then, isn’t that CT “is far-right or unwilling to publish critiques of conservatives or MAGA.” But rather, how CT is navigating the ever-shifting evangelical marketplace with an evangelical base that certainly appears to be shifting to the right. For a few years, it seemed that CT saw its role at least in part in pushing back against this rightword drift and holding the center. They also thought it important to expose corruption and abuses inside the fold. They took a lot of flack for both. (Even if they never fully grappled with the role they played in platforming men like Wilson that arguably helped facilitate this drift.)

I think it’s fair to say that at least part of CT’s mission has always been shepherding the evangelical brand. As times change, how they execute that mission will inevitably change as well. For this reason, it remains an important space to watch.

But I want to end where I began, and apologize to Kristian and to readers here for my factual error that muddied rather than clarified the questions I wanted to surface.