Christianity Today has a Truth Problem When it Comes to Israel

Over the last three years, I’ve watched Christianity Today (CT) repeatedly make claims about Israel and Palestine that later proved false.

CT appears to receive and amplify Israeli government claims and nationalist talking points with no journalistic scrutiny to be seen. Palestinian testimony, meanwhile—including the testimony of Palestinian Christians—is, for the most part, simply left out of the frame.

This apparent failure of journalistic responsibility to verify facts has created a serious credibility problem.

I’ve raised some of these concerns privately in correspondence with CT editors and leadership. My goal was to encourage greater factual rigor and consistent standards of skepticism toward official Israeli statements and national talking points. The silence with which these questions were met confirmed for me that the issue is larger than a few mistakes.

The Pattern

CT has an editorial posture visible across multiple years of commentary and reporting, especially on some of CT’s most visible platforms, including The Bulletin and The Promised Land podcasts.

Again and again, listeners hear Israeli government framing presented as fact, even when there is strong contradictory evidence or testimony.

In recent months alone, CT commentator Mike Cosper (recently departed from CT) repeated claims that Israeli settlers are routinely prosecuted for violence against Palestinians. There is no universe in which that is factually accurate.

According to fifteen years of monitoring by the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din, an eye popping 93 percent of investigations into settler attacks end without an indictment and only three percent result in a conviction. Beyond the numbers, Yesh Din’s research shows that Israeli police routinely fail to conduct even basic investigative steps: they often do not visit the scene, collect evidence, or take witness statements. Palestinians are frequently discouraged or prevented from filing complaints, and many cases are closed on the grounds of “unknown offender” even when attackers are identifiable. Soldiers are often present during settler attacks and do not intervene, and in some cases appear to shield the attackers. These patterns show that the problem is not isolated incidents but a systemic failure of enforcement that effectively protects settler violence from accountability. They point to a virtually universal pattern of impunity. Mike Cosper’s claim was wrong.

Listeners have also heard settler violence described as “complex,” “skirmishes,” or the actions of isolated “troubled teens,” language with dubious factual relationship to the documented realities Palestinians consistently report: armed raids, destroyed crops, burned homes, shootings, forced displacement, and attacks often occurring in the presence — or under the protection — of Israeli soldiers.

Similarly, CT platforms have repeated rhetoric suggesting some settlements are built in places “where nothing was there,” echoing a longstanding Israeli settler narrative that erases Palestinian agricultural presence, village boundaries, grazing lands, and generational ties to the land.

Each of these examples isolated on their own wouldn’t necessarily establish a pattern. But when the errors universally lean in the same direction, it becomes clear these are not simple mistakes.

A Tale of Two Double-Taps

The contrast became especially clear to me while listening to two episodes of The Bulletin side-by-side last year.

One episode discussed a U.S. “double-tap” strike (against a boat in the Caribbean) in which survivors of an initial attack were struck again in a second assault. CT treated the event as a profound moral problem. Mike Cosper and Russell Moore approached the story with clear ethical seriousness. They discussed just war principles, restraint, accountability, and the danger of accepting government labels uncritically. They warned listeners against allowing the label “terrorist” to short-circuit moral reasoning (the Trump administration had been referring to the people on these boats as “narco terrorists”).

They offered a sober moral critique.

But when discussing Israel’s double-tap strike at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis in an episode of the same podcast a few months prior—an attack that killed journalists, medical staff, rescue workers, patients, and bystanders responding to the survivors of the first strike—the posture was fundamentally different.

The segment did not primarily frame the strike as a moral crisis demanding ethical scrutiny. Instead, much of the conversation revolved around Israel’s “communications and PR problem.”

More concerningly, the episode repeated official Israeli government talking points as factual, including allegations that some of those killed were enemy operatives disguising themselves as journalists.

Those claims were unverified at the time..

In the weeks that followed, independent investigations disproved the claims CT had repeated and Israeli authorities themselves later acknowledged procedural failures surrounding the strike.

But by then, the claims had already been presented to CT listeners as credible descriptions of reality.

The contrast between the two episodes was striking.

When the United States carried out a double-tap strike, CT offered moral critique and theological scrutiny.

When Israel carried out a double-tap strike on Palestinians, CT moved toward narrative management, official framing, and the repetition of government claims that proved untrue.

Whose Claims Receive Scrutiny?

There is a deeper question here:

Why does CT appear to accept Israeli claims without fact checking or verification?

CT knows that governments routinely distribute misleading information, especially in wartime. That is not unique to Israel.

Good journalism understands this. Good journalism treats official claims cautiously until independently verified.

But in evangelical media spaces, official Israeli narratives get a pass. And then publications like Christianity Today become party to misinformation.

Palestinian Christians Have Been Saying This for Years

For many Palestinian Christians, none of this is new.

For years, they have told Western evangelicals that their evangelical institutions ignore their testimony in favor of Israeli official narratives. They have watched their experiences questioned, minimized, reframed, or simply ignored while Israeli state claims are granted immediate moral and factual credibility.

As a result many view major evangelical institutions as participants—sometimes knowingly, sometimes unconsciously—in their erasure. And it’s not only Palestinian Christians who see this—increasingly American evangelical youth see the same thing.

That perception emerged from ongoing practices and patterns in the evangelical media landscape like the ones described above.

The Bottom Line

The issue is not whether Christianity Today should criticize Hamas, acknowledge Israeli suffering, or report complexity. Of course it should.

The issue is whether CT is willing to apply the same journalistic skepticism, evidentiary standards, and moral seriousness to Israeli claims that it would apply to any other government.

Right now, it clearly does not.

And until that changes, CT’s credibility on Israel and Palestine will remain deeply compromised—especially among the very Palestinian Christians it claims to care about.