Joel Belz, the founder of World, a pioneering Christian magazine covering politics, culture and other topics through a biblical lens while occasionally drawing wider notice for its reporting on prominent religious figures behaving less than holy, died Feb. 4 at his home in Asheville, N.C. He was 82.
His brother Andrew Belz said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.
Before World, a biweekly, was launched in 1986, religious periodicals were often cheaply mimeographed and filled with church news. Mr. Belz, a preacher’s son who grew up reading Time, wanted to replicate the journalistic ambition and crisp look of Henry Luce’s publication for an evangelical audience.
“For so many people, church and religion are Sunday morning only, and from 11 a.m. to noon only, and then you forget about it for the rest of the week,” Mr. Belz told the newspaper The Gazette, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1989. “There is no engagement of those principles with what happens the rest of the week.”
Operating in the basement of an Asheville mall, World nearly went bankrupt in its early years but eventually stabilized and grew to attract more than 100,000 subscribers in 1999. Today, World News Group, which includes the magazine, website, children’s publications and podcasts, says it has an audience of about 500,000 people.
World set out to cover politics, the arts, science and other subjects from a “God’s-eye” view that was “biblically objective,” as Mr. Belz and others described the magazine’s mission. In contrast to traditional objective journalism, which seeks out multiple viewpoints, World’s “biblical objectivity” begins and ends with what the Bible says.
World News Group says its employees are “committed to a biblical worldview” and “motivated to excel for the glory of God.” On issues such as abortion, adultery and gay marriage, its journalists think the Bible provides definitive instruction, so there is little need to explore opposing views. The magazine’s articles explore multiple angles on issues on which the Bible doesn’t offer clear guidance, such as a global trade agreement or school vouchers.
“Readers should always see World more as a cause than a business,” Mr. Belz wrote in a 1997 column in the magazine. “Cultures, societies, and nations get sick and die when they ignore their Maker.”
For World’s journalists, that means not looking the other way when influential religious figures and organizations commit ungodly behavior.
The magazine has exposed efforts by Mark Driscoll, co-founder of Seattle’s evangelical Mars Hill Church, to inflate his book sales; reported on a sexual abuse scandal at a school in West Africa run by New Tribes Mission, an international Christian organization; and broke a story about conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza, then president of a Christian college, spending a night at a hotel with a woman who was not his wife. Driscoll and D’Souza resigned after the reports.
Those stories and other investigations helped the World’s journalism cross the secular divide. In a 2014 New York Times article headlined “A Muckraking Magazine Creates a Stir Among Evangelical Christians,” Terry Mattingly, a former religion columnist for The Rocky Mountain News in Denver, said in an interview that World was “Rolling Stone for cultural conservative evangelicals.”
The Times recounted World’s reporting on the sexual abuse scandal at the West African school. Some evangelicals had criticized the magazine’s coverage as a not very Christian thing to do. Mindy Belz, then an editor at World and one of Mr. Belz’s sisters-in-law, fiercely defended the magazine.
“People will say it’s not right for Christians to talk this way about other Christians,” she told the Times. “We just think there’s a real truth-telling component to any journalistic enterprise.”
In 2000, World drew the displeasure of Times columnist William Safire. The magazine had just published a tough story on Sen. John McCain, who was in a bitter Republican primary race against former Texas Gov. George W. Bush.
Safire, who hadn’t heard of the magazine until then, was perturbed because Marvin Olasky, World’s editor at the time, was an informal Bush adviser. Safire called the article, which accused the senator of using “liberal, even Marxist, terminology,” a “repugnant anti-McCain campaign document.”
Years later, Mr. Belz had a chance encounter with Safire at a Washington, D.C., deli.
“I doubt if you remember,” Mr. Belz said, as he recalled in a column.
“Of course I do,” Safire replied, adding: “I don’t think what I said was very complimentary. How did you do after that?”
“In a sense,” Mr. Belz said, “you put us on the map.”
Safire said he was still a reader.
Joel Belz was born Aug. 10, 1941, in Marshalltown, Iowa. His father, Max Belz, was a grain elevator operator before becoming a Presbyterian pastor. His mother, Jean (Franzenburg) Belz, was a teacher. The family sang hymns together and recited the Westminster Shorter Catechism every morning at breakfast.
Mr. Belz’s parents ran a small printing press in their basement, and when Joel wasn’t reading Weekly Reader, a popular educational magazine in the 1940s and ’50s, he spent hours tinkering with the family linotype machine. By age 11, he could run the machine himself.
“It was very physical,” his brother Andrew said in a phone interview, “but Joel was very smart, and he had a particular aptitude for it, plus a real wonder of mass communications.”
After graduating from a Christian school his father founded, Mr. Belz enrolled at Covenant College in St. Louis, where he intended to pay his way by running a print shop in a school basement. His plan was thwarted when the linotype machine he bought for $2,000 tumbled down the stairs during installation.
“It may have been worth thousands at the top of the stairs,” he later said, “but by the time it reached the bottom, it was worth $20 in scrap metal.”
After graduating from Covenant College in 1962 with a bachelor’s degree in English literature, Mr. Belz taught at the college and started a Christian school in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He later received a master’s degree in mass communications from the University of Iowa.
In 1977, he became managing editor of The Presbyterian Journal, a struggling publication in Asheville founded in 1942 by L. Nelson Bell (the Rev. Billy Graham’s father-in-law). Mr. Belz later proposed that the organization start a children’s magazine much like the Weekly Reader he had devoured growing up before moving on to Time magazine.
It did, and the magazine, It’s God’s World, was a hit.
When some parents suggested an adult version, Mr. Belz gave it a try with World. The magazine didn’t catch on as fast as the children’s magazine, but it eventually did, and the organization’s board discontinued The Presbyterian Journal to put its resources into World. Mr. Belz served as editor until the early 1990s, when he stepped away to work on the business side and write a column.
His first marriage, in 1967, to Diana Ewing ended in divorce. In 1975, he married Carol Esther Jackson, who survives him.
In addition to her and his brother Andrew, his survivors include two children from his first marriage, Jenny Gienapp and Katrina Costello; three children from his second marriage, Alice Tucker, Elizabeth Odegard and Esther Morrison; his siblings Julie Lutz, Mary Kaufmann, Sara Drexler and Mark and Tim Belz; 16 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Another brother, Nathaniel, died in 2023.
Mr. Belz was a mentor to countless Christian journalists.
In 1999, he helped start the World Journalism Institute to train college students to write “biblically objective” articles. Even as he was ailing, Mr. Belz welcomed journalists to his home for advice and prayer. Andrew Belz recalled a large group of World staff members who dropped by last year.
“I hope you all break a big story,” he said Mr. Belz told them. “I hope it’s as big as Watergate.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.