Incorporating Conviction: J. Howard Pew, Christianity Today, and the Business of Evangelical Culture

Founded in 1956 by evangelist Billy Graham and edited by his missionary father-in-law, Dr. L. Nelson Bell,  Christianity Today was – and still is – the world’s foremost evangelical periodical.  As a self-touted “journal of evangelical conviction,” Christianity Today and its editors sought to brand it as a new forum for fundamentalist discourse and public expression.  Given its conservative theological underpinnings, it garnered financial and personal support of J. Howard Pew, an arch-conservative Presbyterian and Pennsylvania oil tycoon.  This paper considers Pew's contributions to the creation and proliferation of Christianity Today until his death in 1971 as a way of understanding the vital role played by businessmen and business interests in the construction of evangelical institutions and politics during the early Cold War.  Additionally, it examines the often-fraught relationship between Pew, Graham, and Bell to tease out the internal conflicts of evangelical institutions as they sought to re-brand Protestant fundamentalism into a “respectable” mode of religious belief, popular culture, and intellectual engagement.  Still, despite their often-personal disagreements, through Christianity Today, conservative Christian capitalists like Pew and evangelicals like Graham and Bell were able to build networks of interchange that outweighed the abilities of their religious and political opponents, thereby explaining how fundamentalism advanced rapidly in public notoriety and influence in the 1950s and 1960s. 

By offering a business and institutional history of the first fifteen years of Christianity Today, I seek to link modern evangelical history to the history mid-century conservatism and pro-business activism.  At the same time, I endeavor to shed light on the construction of evangelical culture and identity during the early Cold War, a construction that served as both the forerunner and early fomentation of a similarly political–and business-backed–Christian Right movement of the 1970s and 1980s.