Combating Caustic Communication with Truth and Beauty: Christianity Today, Beautiful Orthodoxy, and US Culture

2021

Embedded within a discussion of problems of definition and demographics, this chapter, this chapter highlights how Christianity Today Inc., one of the foremost evangelical periodical publishers in the United States, used communication etiquette both to appoint itself leader and custodian of evangelicalism and as a means of distinguishing evangelicalism from US American culture. Taking the financial crisis of 2008 as an opportunity, Christianity Today Inc. implemented a new policy, “One CT,” to streamline its products and rebrand journalistic fairness as an evangelical maxim. This chapter uses editorial material and interviews to discuss the policy’s overarching vision of Beautiful Orthodoxy…