Christianity Today began a series a little more than a year ago that traces all 70 years of the magazine’s history. Each installment walks through older issues, showing what news and commentary looked like in the 1950s and 1960s. I’ve read every release with interest. It’s like stepping into a time machine, perusing the archives to see what occupied the minds of evangelical pastors and church leaders in a different era.
What stands out most in these archival trips isn’t how foreign the commentary feels, but how familiar. Familiar in two ways. First, in the topics addressed. Second, in the way those challenges were framed as new, unprecedented, and urgent, often with the language of “crisis” applied to the cultural moment.
A Shaking World, Once Again
Here’s an example that captures what appears throughout the coverage, as commentators sought to awaken Christians to greater faithfulness in light of the times. Note the language used to describe the era:
What matters most is whether, in the light of the world-shaking and possibly catastrophic character of what is happening under our eyes, evangelicals are ready to confront this revolutionary age with deeper commitment to our Christian calling and a sense of urgency that is geared to the crises of the hour.
The world is shaking. Catastrophic developments. A revolutionary age. Multiple crises. This was written in 1960.
Sexual Chaos and Technological Fear
The similarities extend to subject matter as well. Consider the sexual revolution. In 1965, editor in chief Carl F. H. Henry called for “moral indignation” in response to the spread and exploitation of sexual immorality:
Every American dedicated to common decency must become morally indignant and let this indignation burn righteously in an articulate protest against an exploitation of sex that is unparalleled in the history of the world. Never before in human civilization has sex been so pervasively prostituted to financial gain, for the technological possibilities were not present until our time.
Note the “never before” language, alongside concern that new technologies were amplifying moral corruption. A few years earlier, in 1958, Christianity Today lamented how easily obscene material could be purchased, even in Washington, DC:
It is high time that our churches awaken to the kind of material being circulated to teen-agers and young adults of both sexes, sold openly at drug stores and newsstands under the guise of sophistication and respectability.
If smut sold at newsstands in 1958 was alarming, one can only imagine how those editors would respond to today’s reality, where pornographic material is easily accessible, even to children, through the privacy of a smartphone.
Discouraged Pastors in a Supposed Golden Age
As the pattern continues, the sense of déjà vu only grows stronger. Church leaders frequently expressed discouragement and helplessness in the face of cultural change and spiritual apathy. Ministers and laypeople bemoaned nominal Christianity:
For clergymen, a chief source of frustration was what to do with the latest variety in a historic strain of hearers-only Christians. The 1963 crop of professing believers whose lives reflect so little of New Testament teaching drew many a pastor into the lonely garden of perplexity.
It’s worth remembering that this was written at the tail end of a historic surge in church attendance that filled pews and launched ministries throughout the 1950s. Even during periods we now romanticize as spiritual high points, faithful pastors felt weary, disillusioned, and unsure how to respond.
Division Has Always Haunted the Church
Nor is evangelical division a recent problem. In 1961, an editorial lamented the fractured state of the movement:
Evangelicals often seem to be one of the most divided and divisive forces in the ecclesiastical world even in their internal dealings. Splits, suspicions, wordy campaigns are common features. Squabbling about less essential matters seems to absorb the energy that should go to working together on essentials. And the tragedy is that the world both needs and would unquestionably be impressed and affected by a genuine manifestation of unity in spirit, purpose, and action on the part of evangelicalism.
Evangelical infighting didn’t begin with social media. It’s been a common challenge of the movement, just as it has been for local churches going all the way back to the Corinthians.
Faith, Politics, and Public Relevance
Questions about the church’s role in public life also loom large in these archives. In 1960, Christianity Today worried about a Roman Catholic president but discerned a deeper cultural shift:
The real significance . . . is found not in a growing emergence of a Catholic bloc or party, nor even in a shift of the American political mood into the post-Protestant era, or into an era of pluralistic religious balances. The deeper fact is the widening public judgment that all religion is irrelevant to political attitudes and acts. The American mentality rapidly is losing any distinction of true versus false religion.
That concern proved remarkably prescient. It connects to an even older debate from 1956 that still resurfaces today: Is America a “Christian nation”?
In the absolute sense and on the perfectionist basis there is no such thing as a “Christian nation.” In terms of the higher order of the Kingdom of God, no political entity, in this imperfect world, is thoroughly Christian. But some nations embody more Christian principles than other nations. . . . When America is most faithful to its origin, to its truest self and to its God, it is that kind of nation.
On the one hand, editors warned churches against politicizing the gospel, the ever-present tendency to exploit “religion as a weapon of ideological conflict,” when “God is to be worshipped and served for God’s sake” and “righteousness is to be sought for righteousness’ sake.”
On the other hand, they warned against withdrawing from public life altogether. In 1958, they feared churches were failing to engage society robustly, especially amid the Cold War:
Today not Nero but the churches fiddle while Rome burns. The churches have even approved leaders who support socializing and collectivistic trends in the name of the Christian community, and have permitted them without protest to speak for Christian conscience.
Old Anxieties About New Technologies
Even concerns about technology feel strikingly modern. Columnists worried about advertising techniques that relied on subliminal messaging and psychological manipulation . . . in 1959. An analog version of today’s concerns about the “algorithm,” if you will.
They also foresaw how technological dependence could reshape church life, with congregations relying on “special lighting, microphones, and other electronic gadgets” and the gospel itself in danger of being marketed like a product.
Many today wonder if Christian colleges and seminaries will survive the upheavals in the world of academia. Well, in 1958, the headline was “Can the Christian College Survive?” Apparently, back then, colleges faced similar problems:
We Haven’t Lived Through the Worst of It
I could go on. Christians in the 1950s wrestled with the ethics of artificial insemination. Commentators worried about the distractions plaguing the youth—“our entertainment-loving children” who aren’t “interested in the rigorous discipline that makes scientists and men of learning. Rather than in studies, they are majoring in football.”
They lamented the commercialization of Christmas, calling it “an occasion for inexcusable excesses” marked by “blatant commercialism.” Debates over the church’s role in race relations were ever-present, with both positive and negative views of the aims and methods of the civil rights movement.
After reading through these archives, I’m struck by how easily I fall into the trap of believing our moment is uniquely troubled. Things feel more chaotic than ever, we tell ourselves. Therefore, the church must act differently, urgently, even desperately, because this crisis surpasses all others.
But measured against history, this claim doesn’t hold. Many believers came of age during world wars that claimed tens of millions of lives. Pastors shepherded churches through the Great Depression. Earlier generations endured plagues that wiped out entire cities, persecution that sent Christians to prisons or to their deaths, and political upheavals that shattered ancient civilizations. Even now, in many countries, public worship is illegal, Scripture is contraband, and faithfulness carries immediate physical cost.
It’s true, today’s challenges are real. But not unrivaled.
This is why the insistence that we face the greatest crisis ever reveals something less about the moment and more about ourselves. It’s generational narcissism, the temptation to view our struggles as uniquely severe and our responsibilities as uniquely heroic. Every generation is prone to it. And every generation must learn, again, the discipline of faithfulness without panic, courage without exaggeration, and hope grounded not in the urgency of the times but in the steadfastness of God.
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