Christianity Today

What Christianity Today is

Christianity Today is a magazine and digital publication that covers the church, theology, culture, missions, and ideas from a broadly evangelical Protestant editorial perspective. It was founded in 1956 by Billy Graham and Carl F.H. Henry to provide a more reflective alternative to the era's revival-circuit and fundamentalist press, and it has spent the decades since becoming the closest thing the movement has to a general-interest publication of record.

In 2026, the product is much bigger than the magazine. CT runs a daily newsroom at christianitytoday.com, a sister publication for ministry leaders called CT Pastors, international editions in Spanish (Cristianismo Hoy) and Mandarin, a growing podcast network — including The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, The Bulletin, Quick to Listen, and others — and a CT Premium subscription that unlocks the full seventy-year archive. Most reading is free; the most reported features, the magazine, and the back catalog sit behind a paywall around $59 a year.

Why serious readers still subscribe to Christianity Today

The reason CT keeps earning subscriptions in a free-content internet is that it is one of the only places left producing actual, edited, sourced religion journalism in English at scale. The single biggest practical difference between CT and most of its peers is the reporting bench — pieces are reported, not posted; correction notices appear when they should; bylines stay attached to mistakes as well as wins. Readers who care about that pay for it, and CT keeps doing it because they pay.

The other reason is the archive. Seventy years of editorials, book reviews, and reported features turn out to be a research tool in their own right — anyone writing about late-20th-century evangelicalism, the rise of the megachurch, the missions movement, the worship-music industry, or the politics of the religious right ends up in the CT archive eventually. That kind of institutional memory is rare in any field. In religion media, it is almost unique.

News and reporting: the magazine-of-record assignment

CT's daily newsroom is the part of the site most readers will actually use most days. It covers denominational news (Southern Baptist Convention meetings, PCA and ECO and EPC developments, Methodist realignment), global Christianity (church growth and pressure in China, India, Nigeria, the Middle East), institutional stories (Christian universities, seminaries, parachurch organizations), and the cultural ground where the church meets the wider world. Features run long. Investigations get real word count. The CT Pastors brand sits alongside this with ministry-focused reporting aimed at working pastors — preaching, leadership, conflict, money, burnout.

Why it matters: in a media environment where most Christian publishing has collapsed into opinion or aggregation, CT still funds people to make phone calls, fly to meetings, and read documents. That makes the site indispensable for anyone — pastor, scholar, journalist, or curious reader — who wants to know what is actually happening in the church rather than what someone on social media wishes were happening. It also means CT will sometimes report on stories its own audience would prefer were quieter, which is one of the better signs that the journalism is real.

The podcast network: where CT is doing its most cultural work

The CT podcast network has become, almost accidentally, the part of the publication with the widest cultural reach. The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill — host Mike Cosper's reported series on the Mark Driscoll era at Mars Hill Church — was the breakout, and it deservedly drew comparisons to the better narrative-journalism podcasts of any genre. It was carefully reported, well scored, structurally ambitious, and willing to sit with difficult material rather than tidy it. The Bulletin is the network's weekly news show, covering the headlines of the week with a CT editorial sensibility. Quick to Listen takes one story and goes deeper, usually with reporters and scholars in the room. Other shows rotate in around them.

Why it matters: long-form audio is where a lot of the thinking class of American Christianity now does its serious listening, and CT has built a network that earns space in that habit. For readers who never subscribe to the magazine, the podcasts are often the entry point — and for many, they are the reason the brand still feels current. It is rare for a 70-year-old publication to do its best new work in a new format, but that is the situation CT has put itself in.

CT Premium and the archive: the version that earns the subscription

CT Premium is the paid digital tier — somewhere around $59 a year as of writing — and it does three things the free tier doesn't. First, it removes the article meter, so you read everything without hitting a wall. Second, it unlocks the full bimonthly magazine, with the long features, profiles, and essays that are the publication's flagship work. Third, it opens the seventy-year archive: editorials, reviews, reporting, and ideas pieces going back to 1956. That archive turns CT from a daily news site into a research tool, and it is the single best argument for paying.

Why it matters: a lot of CT readers will be happy with the free tier forever, and that is a real product, not a tease. But the readers who get the most out of the subscription are the ones who write or teach or pastor — people whose work involves citing, quoting, or thinking through how American and global evangelicalism actually got here. For that reader, the archive alone is worth the price; the unmetered current reporting is a bonus. Most readers do not need CT Premium. The ones who do, need it a lot.

Pricing

Where Christianity Today falls behind

Editorial vantage point is real and worth naming. CT is a broadly evangelical Protestant publication, sitting roughly center-right theologically and roughly center-left politically inside that world. Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Latter-day Saint readers will find the site useful for understanding the evangelical conversation, but news coverage of their own traditions will be written from the outside. That is not a flaw — it is what the publication is — but readers should know it going in rather than discover it mid-article.

Paywall on the deepest content. The most reported features and the full archive sit behind CT Premium. Readers who insist on free-only will hit walls, and the meter is real. Most of the daily newsroom is still readable without a subscription, but the magazine-flagship pieces usually are not.

Site architecture is busy. The homepage is trying to surface news, opinion, magazine features, podcasts, CT Pastors, and topic verticals all at once, and the result is more crowded than a publication of this quality really needs. Readers who arrive via a direct link or a podcast app rarely notice; readers who try to browse the homepage will feel it.

No serious mobile reader app on the level of, say, a New York Times or Apple News experience. The iOS and Android apps are functional and Premium subscribers can use them, but most CT reading still happens in a browser or in a podcast app, and the on-site mobile experience is fine rather than exceptional.

Podcast discoverability on the site itself is weaker than it should be. The shows are genuinely great, but most listeners find them through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. The on-ct.com podcast hub is improving but is not yet the place most fans go to find new episodes.

Christianity Today vs. The Christian Post vs. Relevant

Different products serving different appetites. Christianity Today is the magazine-of-record option — reported features, edited journalism, a real archive, a serious podcast network, a price tag for the deepest material. The Christian Post is a free, high-volume daily-news site with a more conservative editorial posture and an aggregation-plus-original-reporting model that produces a lot of headlines fast. Relevant is the millennial-and-younger lifestyle-and-culture title — music, film, politics, faith, design — with a much breezier voice and a much narrower demographic focus.

Different strengths. CT is better at depth, reporting, and institutional memory. The Christian Post is broader and faster in daily headline coverage. Relevant is better at culture and tone for a young-adult audience that finds traditional Christian media stuffy. Most serious readers end up reading more than one — CT for the long pieces and the podcasts, one of the news-aggregation sites for the daily skim, Relevant for the culture coverage when it lands.

If you are choosing only one, the answer depends on what you actually do with religion media. If you read for understanding — the long view, the reporting, the archive — CT is the right pick and it is not particularly close. If you read for headlines and have ten minutes a day, a faster free site will suit you better. If you read for cultural and creative-class coverage and you are under forty, Relevant will hit notes the others do not.

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