Why the evangelical editor who called for Trump’s removal became Catholic
A screenshot of Mark Galli appearing on CNN to talk about his controversial editorial calling for President Trump’s impeachment.
When Christianity Today editor in chief Mark Galli published a December 2019 editorial calling for the impeachment and removal of President Donald J. Trump from office, the evangelical magazine’s leader was “mentally converting” to the Roman Catholic faith, a move Galli will make official on Sunday, Sept. 13.
Indeed, for the past two years, Galli attended daily Mass at a Catholic church, participated in confession twice a month and completed formal instruction to become a Catholic, rejoining the church in which he was baptized as an infant and had received his first communion before age 7. In the intervening decades, Galli had become an evangelical Christian, was an ordained Presbyterian pastor and ultimately was a member of the Anglican Church in North America, an Episcopal Church offshoot.
Galli, 68, acknowledged this in an email to Religion Unplugged on Sept. 11, one day after Religion News Service ran an article announcing the now-retired editor’s plans.
The RNS report said, “Galli made his decision to join the Catholic Church the very week a Pennsylvania grand jury issued a report showing at least 1,000 cases of abuse by 300 predator priests spanning seven decades.” That grand jury report was released in August 2018, some 17 months before Galli’s CT editorial.
Reporter Shimron also asserted Galli’s instructor for the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults, John Ellison, “knew Galli’s mind was made up” to join the Catholic Church when in 2018 the veteran editor first “expressed an interest” in attending the RCIA classes. In an email to this reporter, Galli wrote, “Yes her timeline is correct” as expressed by Shimron in the Ellison quote.
In an email, Galli said that despite his “personal journey” to Catholicism, he still considered himself an evangelical, and will remain so until his conversion is formalized.
“[T]he simple fact is I was NOT Catholic the last two years of my stint at CT,” Galli asserted. “In Protestantism, one becomes something by changing one's mind. But as a factual matter, I will not be a Catholic until I'm confirmed on Sunday [Sept. 13]. You cannot become Catholic by wishing it so; you have to go through a rite of initiation (confirmation). And thus I very much was still an evangelical leader in the sense most would understand that when I wrote that editorial, as well as my last two years. I did not tell our leaders that I was Catholic, but that after I left CT I would become one.”
None of this was known to CT’s readers when “that editorial” appeared under Galli’s byline, however. The commentary was framed as coming from an evangelical viewpoint, something subsequent media coverage repeated.
“Whether Mr. Trump should be removed from office by the Senate or by popular vote next election—that is a matter of prudential judgment,” Galli’s editorial stated. “That he should be removed, we believe, is not a matter of partisan loyalties but loyalty to the Creator of the Ten Commandments.”
Galli wrote that a “stacked deck of gross immorality and ethical incompetence” on the part of the 45th President would “crash down on the reputation of evangelical religion and on the world’s understanding of the gospel.”
In both the CT editorial and media interviews at the time, Galli emphasized his concern for the standing of evangelical Christianity and its adherents. He told The New York Times, for example, “People wrote to me and said they had felt all alone and were waiting for someone in the evangelical leadership to say what the editorial said.”
Both Trump and evangelist Franklin Graham, a son of CT founder Billy Graham, attacked the editorial. The younger Graham claimed his father would “disappointed” by Galli’s commentary.
Although both the Roman Catholic Church and the evangelical Protestant movement profess belief in Jesus Christ as God the Son, whose death on a cross provides propitiation for sins, there have been vast differences between the two Christian groups for more than 500 years. While some evangelical and mainline Protestant groups have established more cordial relations with Rome since the mid-1960s Second Vatican Council, there remains a theological gulf that is not easily crossed.
So, for the top editor at CT (as the magazine is widely known) to actively plan his migration to the Catholic faith while remaining at the helm of evangelicalism’s top news-and-thought leadership publication raises a number of questions.
Was Galli an evangelical at the time of the Trump editorial? Did he sign the magazine company’s “Statement of Faith” in 2018 or 2019, something CT editors are required to do annually by company policy? And did CT’s leadership know of Galli’s conversion plans when he put the magazine’s name behind the editorial calling for the president of the United States’ removal from office?
Candor With Employer, Statement of Faith
In an exchange of emails with Religion Unplugged, Galli responded to these questions.
Galli said he has remained evangelical until his confirmation this week and going forward, he would consider himself an “evangelical Catholic” and he retains “the deepest respect for the evangelical movement.” Galli also said he was candid with his employers about his pending conversion.
“[A]s soon as it became clear in my mind that I would eventually convert to Catholicism, I told our executive team, and the president in turn made sure the chairman of the board knew,” Galli wrote in his email. “But I assured all the leaders that I had no intention of even subtly making CT more Catholic,” he added.
And Galli said he did sign the firm’s Statement of Faith in both 2018 and 2019.
Via email, Galli said, “[E]very phrase of it [the Statement of Faith] begins with ‘we believe…’ which to me suggested that we were not expected to mentally sign off on every jot and tittle of the statement of faith, but we were affirming that we believed it overall, that we would not publicly deny any of its statements, and that I, as editor in chief would defend and promote its evangelical beliefs.”
He added, “I could happily do this even as I was mentally converting to Catholicism because there's nothing in the statement of faith about which Catholics disagree. Well except one, which talks about the Scriptures and it says, ‘They constitute the only infallible guide in faith and practice.’ In that case, when the subject came up in editorials or articles I had to write, I would not use the first person singular, but simply state what evangelicals believe and why they believed it.”
But readers weren’t told, and Galli said he didn’t feel compelled to disclose his intention to affiliate with Catholicism.
Galli wrote, “I didn't think it necessary to tell readers as my personal journey had no bearing on how I conducted myself in my duties as editor in chief. As it is, readers knew very well that I drew from all manner of sources—Catholic, Orthodox, mainline, evangelical, and Pentecostal—in my writing. That was not going to change.”
Timothy Dalrymple, current president and CEO of Christianity Today, said via email that Galli’s post-retirement plan to join the Roman Catholic Church was unrelated to the Trump editorial.
“Mark’s journey toward Rome had nothing to do with his critique of the Trump administration,” Dalrymple wrote. “The former did not motivate the latter; the latter is not undermined by the former. Mark was an influential voice within American evangelicalism at the time he wrote the Trump editorial, and he will likely remain influential because he writes powerfully on themes that matter to all Christians, evangelical or otherwise.”
Asked about the reaction of CT leadership to Galli’s announced intentions, Dalrymple said, “When I became President, I learned that Mark was in the retirement process and that he was gravitating toward the Catholic Church. We had a warm discussion about how he would manage editorial direction for the remaining months of his editorship. … We love him and wish him well.”
Mark Kellner is a Nevada-based journalist who has reported on issues of faith and freedom since 1983, including as a national correspondent for the Deseret News. He was a freelance news contributor to Christianity Today from 1993 to approximately 2003. During that time, he knew and occasionally worked with Mark Galli. In 1999, he decided to join the Seventh-day Adventist Church after 17 years of church membership in The Salvation Army. He informed CT’s then-editor, David Neff, of his intentions, and was permitted by CT to continue as a freelance contributor.