REPORT: Christianity Today funded by major Planned Parenthood donor

Christianity Today, a news outlet originally founded by Billy Graham, is reportedly financially backed by the Hewlett Foundation, a major donor to Planned Parenthood.

Key Takeaways:

• The Hewlett Foundation is a longtime funder of abortion and of Planned Parenthood, the nation's largest abortion corporation.

• Christianity Today has received over $1 million in donations from the Hewlett Foundation, despite claiming to maintain a pro-life ethic.

• Abortion is inherently contradictory with Christian ethics and values.

The Details:

Megan Basham, Daily Wire reporter and author of the book "Shepherds for Sale," found evidence of the Hewlett Foundation's significant funding for Christianity Today when negotiations began for the magazine to be sold to Canon Press. According to tax filings, Christianity Today has received over $1 million from the Hewlett Foundation — which is also Planned Parenthood's second-largest private funder:

Since 2022, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has become a major patron of Christianity Today, donating well over $1,000,000 to the outlet, records show. Included in the contributions is $400,000 for general operating support, $75,000 to develop a mobile app, and $600,000 to cover U.S. elections. This makes Hewlett one of the magazine’s top disclosed donors, even though the NGO’s extensive abortion backing makes it a strange bedfellow for a Christian publication.  

This is concerning, as Hewlett is a major donor to the abortion industry. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation was created in 1966 by William R. Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, alongside David Packard of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, which also funnels enormous amounts of money worldwide for abortions.

Over the years, the Hewlett Foundation has funded multiple abortion organizations, including:

• NARAL (now renamed Reproductive Freedom for All)

• Planned Parenthood

• The National Abortion Federation (NAF)

• The Center for Reproductive Rights

• abortion pill studies

• the debunked Turnaway Study

And that is just a sampling; there is much, much more.

Basham noted that Christianity Today has increasingly relied on grants and donations rather than on subscriptions from readers, with the former increasing from 20% to 50% in just the last five years. Canon Press told Basham they hope to restore the magazine to its original ideals - including severing ties with the Hewlett Foundation.

“When you look at CT’s financials, it is not the media side of the business that is growing, it’s the grants and giving, basically the NGO side, which almost doubled from 2022 to 2023,” said Aaron Rench, co-founder of Canon Press. “The Hewlett Foundation is one such NGO, and they tout their 50-year commitment to promoting abortion services as well as efforts to support the transgender movement. So in a successful acquisition with new leadership, the Hewlett Foundation will not think of CT as a partner, nor will their funds be accepted by the new CT administration.”

Canon Press cited the evangelism of Charlie Kirk, who was a pro-life Christian, as its inspiration for pursuing Christianity Today.

“[He] carried the torch of Christianity Today’s founder, Billy Graham, as a global evangelist, and it is his legacy that we see the future of Christianity Today,” the publisher said in a statement.

The Backstory:

This is by no means Christianity Today's first scandal.

Sexual harassment claims

Back in 2022, CT itself published an article detailing how several CT female employees had complained for many years about the inappropriate behavior and sexual harassment they experienced from editor-in-chief Mark Galli and former advertising director Olatokunbo Olawoye, yet no action was taken against them. (Olawoye was eventually arrested in a sting operation in 2017 and sentenced to three years in prison for attempting to solicit sex from a minor. He is currently registered as a sex offender.)

Galli, who left the outlet in 2020 and converted to Catholicism later that year, wrote an editorial in 2019 calling for President Trump's impeachment and labeling him "profoundly immoral." According to CT's article, multiple female CT employees accused Galli of touching them inappropriately.

Attempts to redefine "pro-life"

After Galli left, another editor-in-chief held the position for a short time until the magazine's current editor-in-chief, Russell Moore, took the job in 2022 — the same year the Hewlett Foundation became a major donor to CT.

Moore had resigned as the head of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission in 2021, the year prior, due to his political disagreements with SBC leadership regarding Trump.

Basham noted at the Daily Wire:

Since Hewlett’s backing began [in 2022], Christianity Today has published several articles challenging the traditional definition of pro-life as a commitment to protect the lives of babies in the womb, instead suggesting it should be expanded to include racial injustice and new federal entitlements like paid family leave.

Many pro-life activists have warned that expanding the definition of “pro-life” in this way minimizes the unique horror of killing preborn babies.

Targeting the Church

In 2024, Megan Basham exposed at First Things the fact that a small group curriculum, The After Party, created by Moore, David French, and Curtis Chang — who have all vocally opposed Trump — was funded by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (a group funded by Packard). Basham wrote (emphasis added):

The After Party would be one of the thirty-two beneficiaries of their New Pluralists project, which is investing $10 million to “address divisive forces.” If that money were divided evenly, it would more than cover the entire $250,000 budget of Chang’s umbrella organization, Redeeming Babel, which is behind The After Party. While Chang and company claim their program isn’t focused on parties or policies, the Rockefeller announcement noted it would launch in the “battleground” of Ohio, though none of The After Party founders call that state home....

Rockefeller’s isn’t the only progressive purse with strings attached to The After Party....

The Hewlett Foundation, which also directly funds The After Party, is the second largest private donor to Planned Parenthood. 

In other words, the Hewlett Foundation's money seems to follow Moore; the Foundation began supporting CT the same year Moore came on board, and it followed him to The After Party, where its money funded a theological curriculum targeting church small groups.

This should raise alarm bells.

Basham summed up at First Things (emphasis added):

Does anyone really believe these secular progressive grant-makers are interested in developing a church curriculum about politics without an eye toward affecting policy? Or that this curriculum will strengthen evangelicals’ commitment to the very causes progressives despise?...

Creating a Bible study curriculum to teach churches how to engage politics is by nature a political act. That’s even truer if you’ve turned for financial support to unbelievers committed to advancing left-wing policies....

Basham added that The After Party co-creator Curtis Chang even "leveraged his Christian platform to argue against religious exemptions from vaccine mandates, running the website Christians and the Vaccine, and distributing videos that described the jab as a 'redemption' of aborted cell lines—all while acting as a paid consultant for federal health agencies. French and Moore have been no less outspoken on political matters" (emphasis added).

Why It Matters:

Support for abortion is fundamentally at odds with Christianity, despite efforts from abortion supporters to claim otherwise.

The Bible is incredibly clear about the sanctity of human life, including the preborn; Scripture reveals that God became human in the person of Jesus Christ at the moment of fertilization (conception) — before He was born, before He started His ministry, and before He was crucified on a Roman cross.

Furthermore, Rev. Billy Graham — the founder of Christianity Today — was ardently pro-life, calling abortion a “sin" and once telling a young woman considering abortion, “Your child isn’t simply a mass of tissue; he or she is a human being in God’s eyes.”  On the so-called "right" to abortion, he said:

The spiritual condition of man is at the root of the abortion issue. Until man’s spiritual condition is changed by the power of Jesus Christ, we will not find a full solution to this problem. It is sin that produces the problem of most unwanted pregnancies, as well as all the other disorders which plague the human race.

It is also sin that produces the misbelief that women have a ‘right’ to take the lives of unborn babies. The apostle Paul writes, ‘The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like’ (Galatians 5:19-21a).

Life is sacred, and we must seek to protect all human life: the unborn, the child, the adult, and the aged.

It is a travesty that the publication founded by a pro-life Christian like Billy Graham would be so willing to partner with one of the nation's most devout funders and supporters of abortion.

What Does the Bible Say About Abortion?

The Bottom Line:

An organization like Christianity Today cannot claim to follow Christ while also accepting money from a foundation dedicated to the intentional, targeted killing of the most vulnerable human beings among us.