Mark Galli, the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, will be retiring January 3, 2020 – an announcement he made on October 7, well before his controversial editorial in which he called for President Donald Trump’s removal from office.
In the October press release announcing his retirement, Galli stated, “I’ve been EIC for about seven years now, and as it goes with many jobs, I think I finally understand what I should have been doing all along!”
Christianity Today [CT] chief executive officer Dr. Timothy Dalrymple said Galli will be replaced by Dr. Daniel M. Harrell, the senior minister of Colonial Church in Edina, Minnesota since 2010.
“I’m incredibly proud of everything Mark Galli has achieved, and equally excited about Daniel Harrell and the work he will do together with our outstanding writers and editors,” said Dalrymple.
“I believe [Harrell] will represent CT extraordinarily well in his writing and in public settings,” Galli also said in the statement, “continuing to demonstrate our commitment to beautiful orthodoxy.”
Catholic author Dave Armstrong at Patheos wrote:
No wonder Mark Galli wrote his editorial in Christianity Today, condemning President Trump and calling for his removal. He had already announced two months earlier that he was departing his position as editor.
According to the Chicago Tribune, Galli denied his editorial, in which he referred to Trump as “profoundly immoral” and accused him of violating the Constitution, was “a parting shot.”
“There are simply times and places, he said, when you must speak up,” the report noted. ‘You feel called,’ he said.”
Galli added he is retiring to “spend more time fly-fishing, fixing up the house, playing with grandkids and working in a program that helps settle refugees.”
As Armstrong noted in his column, Galli was raised in California and had served as a Presbyterian pastor in the PCUSA denomination for ten years, from 1979 to 1989, according to his LinkedIn profile.
In recent years, PCUSA has grown increasingly publicly liberal, voting in 2014 against protecting babies born alive after botched abortions, and even against Kermit-Gosnell-style murders of babies who survive abortions.
Also in 2014, PCUSA endorsed divestment as a protest against Israeli policies toward Palestinians and, in 2015, approved the redefinition of marriage and same-sex weddings.
Galli ultimately joined the more conservative Anglican Church in North America, and, according to the Tribune, refers to himself as “center-right” politically and a “huge pro-life guy.”
However, in 2016, he penned another Christianity Today editorial in which he wrote about same-sex marriage:
Jesus suggested we should look beyond the symbolic condoning of injustice (helping a soldier) to a deeper ethic. Jesus told his disciples—to put it into today’s terms—that when asked to bake a cake for a gay wedding, we might offer to bake two (Matt. 5:41).
Regarding the pro-life issue, Ryan Bomberger, co-founder of the Radiance Foundation, also observed at the Christian Post that liberal evangelical sites such as Christianity Today [CT] have failed to call out the conduct of left-wing politicians, “especially when those politicians are advocating issues that CT champions”:
[W]here was the call for removal of President Barack Obama? For the first time in history, an American President keynoted a fundraising gala for the leading killer of those made in God’s image—Planned Parenthood.
Though Obama campaigned on “middle ground” rhetoric regarding abortion, he never sought it as President. In fact, he was the most radically pro-abortion President in history. Eerily echoing Democrat Governor George Wallace’s famous segregation declaration, Obama proclaimed at the gala: “Planned Parenthood is not going anywhere. It’s not going anywhere today. It’s not going anywhere tomorrow.” The response from the crowd was thunderous applause. He ended the speech to the organization that kills over 330,000 of the most marginalized and most victimized in our society: “God Bless Planned Parenthood!”
As Galli ends his tenure at Christianity Today, Keith Pavlischek, a retired U.S. marine colonel, wrote at Juicy Ecumenism that by his insistence that Christians have a moral obligation to ensure Trump is booted out of office, Galli “has now implicitly endorsed whoever Trump’s Democratic opponent is in 2020.”
“One must not, according to Galli, even prudentially weigh and balance the Democratic alternative to Trump – for to do so would violate the moral imperative that Trump be removed,” Pavlischek said, adding:
Every Democratic candidate publicly favors the legality of abortion until the moment before birth. Each supports public funding for abortions and the repeal of the Hyde amendment. But I am told – upon pain of being charged with being a bad and unfaithful Christian, by the Editor-in-Chief of Christianity Today – I must not vote for Trump and that I cannot even contemplate doing so.
Bomberger, a pro-life leader and an evangelical Christian, said he refuses to worry about Galli’s prediction that failing to remove Trump from office in 2020 “will crash down on the reputation of the evangelical religion.”
“I don’t live for an ‘evangelical religion,’” Bomberger asserted. “I live for Christ.”
“Until then, I consider this partisan feigned outrage more of the predictable noise from the Left that we’ll continue to hear through the 2020 elections and beyond,” he said.