The Formation of the Christian Standard

On April 9, 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee saw no further possibilities for a successful outcome to four long years of war or for the southern dream of seceding from the United States to form their own nation. So, with little more than a remnant of his former Army of Northern Virginia remaining under his command, Lee essentially brought the great crucible to its conclusion by surrendering his starving and defeated army to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. Lee’s surrender secured the northern victory in the Great War that had rent the country apart and assured both the North and South that there would only be one nation. But the events of April 9 failed to heal the pain of the division that had scared the nation.

In the weeks and months that followed Lee’s surrender, the embers that had ignited both the sectional conflict and the war itself did not cool. Less than a week beyond Lee’s concession, John Wilkes Booth, a southern sympathizer, assassinated President Abraham Lincoln on April 14 (Good Friday), 1865. Then the challenges of the Reconstruction era (1865-1877) raised the temperatures even higher as the nation grappled with the issues of assimilating four million former slaves into society and reintegrating the vanquished Confederate States back into the Union.

The animosity of the north-south schism was felt far beyond the political and social issues that defined the era. It was recognized in nearly every cultural institution throughout the country, and the church was certainly no exception. While the Restoration Movement was one of only a few notable American religious groups that did not divide along northern and southern lines immediately before or during the Civil War, historians of the movement can make a compelling case to suggest that the problems that contributed to the war also contributed to the first major division within the Stone-Campbell fellowship of churches.

The Rising Need for a New Voice

Before the outbreak of the Civil War, Alexander Campbell was the most widely recognized advocate for the burgeoning reform movement that he helped initiate some years earlier. Moreover, his monthly magazine, the Millennial Harbinger, had served as the leading voice of the movement for over thirty years (since 1830). By the war’s terminus in 1865, however, Campbell’s influence was waning. Not only had the Harbinger been reduced from sixty to forty-eight pages because of the scarcity of paper during the war, but the veteran preacher, educator, writer, and editor for the magazine elected to relinquish his editorial duties with the Harbinger to his trusted colleague and son-in-law, William K. Pendleton.[1]

Campbell’s final articles in the Harbinger were published in November 1865, and his biographer, Robert Richardson, noted that he had been “quite unwell” at the time of the publication and confined for several weeks to his house.[2] In the months that followed, Campbell’s health continued to decline, and on March 4, 1866, the Sage of Bethany would pass from this life into his eternal reward. And though the Millennial Harbinger continued to produce monthly issues until the close of 1870, its readership declined, and its influence in the movement dwindled with the passing of its founder and longtime editor. Furthermore, J.S. Lamar noted that the content of the Harbinger under Pendleton’s editorship became “deep, learned, [and] weighty,” and was “not well suited to the popular taste” of readership.[3]

The Appearance of the Editor-Bishops

As the Millennial Harbinger’s influence declined, several other noteworthy periodicals began to emerge. Moreover, the editors in many of these new periodicals were forceful personalities with strong opinions that were unilaterally advanced in the pages of their publications. William Thomas Moore, a minister, missionary, and historian who lived long enough to know both Campbell and the second-generation leaders who tried to fill his shoes, wrote, “The editors of these magazines and papers came to be practically general bishops, and exercised nearly as much power as the bishops do in some of the religious denominations.”[4]

Most prominently, perhaps, was Benjamin Franklin, whose weekly magazine was known as the American Christian Review. Franklin, a distant descendant of the more widely known Revolutionary War statesman, was among the more accomplished preachers, debaters, and editors of the movement during the declining years of Alexander Campbell. Following a series of earlier editorial efforts, Franklin introduced the American Christian Review in 1856 as an ultra-conservative publication. In the Review, which his readers described as “The Old Reliable,”[5] Franklin lashed out against anything he deemed to be a modern “innovation,” but specifically the use of musical instruments in worship and the adoption of missionary societies for world evangelism.

Equally as vitriolic as Franklin’s American Christian Review was Moses E. Lard’s quarterly publication, Lard’s Quarterly. Like Franklin, Lard used his publication—which only survived from 1863 to 1868—to attack the use of musical instruments, missionary societies, and other innovations. In Moore’s 1909 centennial history of the movement, he wrote, “Both Mr. Lard and Benjamin Franklin continued to emphasize these infinitesimal matters until it looked at one time as if the whole movement might be wrecked by an undermining of microbes.”[6]

Yet another weekly magazine with both a legalistic and sectional character emerged when Tolbert Fanning, a Nashville-based evangelist, formed the Gospel Advocate in 1855. Though suspended during the Civil War, the Advocate resumed publication in January 1866, shortly before Campbell’s death. David Lipscomb, the young protégé of Tolbert Fanning who would soon become the sole editor of the magazine, wrote, “The fact that we had not a single paper known to us that Southern people could read without having their feelings wounded by political insinuations and slurs had more to do with calling the Advocate into existence than all other circumstances combined.”[7] While distinctly a southern paper, the Gospel Advocate, like the American Christian Review and Lard’s Quarterly, fastidiously opposed the use of musical instruments in worship and missionary societies.

Raising a New Standard

As Campbell’s demise drew nigh, many in the movement saw the need for a paper that was not as legalistic as the American Christian Review or the Gospel Advocate. Those magazines “were regarded as being narrow in their views on Scriptural truth,” wrote Lamar, “and, in many respects, hurtful rather than helpful to the cause which they assumed to represent.” [8] Within the movement, Lamar suggests, there grew a “great interest” among some of its leading figures for a new weekly periodical that would “exhibit the apostolic spirit as well as the apostolic letter.”[9]

With the formation of such a periodical in mind, a group of 14 men gathered at the lavish residence of Thomas W. Phillips, a wealthy pioneer in the early oil industry, in New Castle, Pennsylvania, on December 22, 1865.[10] The meeting began by electing Dr. John P. Robison, a physician and successful businessman from Cleveland (and close friend to Congressman and future U.S. President James A. Garfield), as the chairman of the group. As the meeting unfolded, T.W. Phillips offered two resolutions:

Resolved, First, that the present aspect of affairs, in connection with the religious interests of the “current Reformation,” requires the aid of a new religious weekly newspaper.

Resolved, Second, that to more surely and successfully affect the establishment and support of such a weekly, a joint stock company should be formed to raise the means necessary, and to direct the conduct of the same.[11]

Following an affirmative vote on the resolutions and the handling of a few additional business matters, the assembly adjourned with the agreement to recruit auxiliary participants into the venture and to meet again on December 26 in Cleveland. At this December gathering, the group formed “The Christian Publishing Association” to sell stock and raise the necessary funding for their forthcoming publication. In addition, the group unanimously elected Isaac Errett as the paper’s founding editor after John H. Jones, a prominent minister in the Cleveland area, offered the motion to do so.[12]

The charter date for The Christian Publishing Association was January 2, 1866, with the “Cleveland Group”—though they were not all from Cleveland—as the initial investors of $20,000 toward the venture. The eight members of the “Cleveland Group” who made up the corporation’s Directors were T.W. Phillips, Dr. J.P. Robison, Gen. J.A. Garfield, Dr. W.S. Streator (Cleveland businessman and physician), G.W.N. Yost (inventor of the typewriter and industrialist), Wallace J. Ford (a close associate to Garfield), Charles M. Phillips (younger brother and business partner with T.W. Phillips), and Isaac Errett. At the first meeting of the Directors, on February 14, 1866, Isaac Errett was formally identified as editor-in-chief of the new paper, and the committee elected to identify the magazine as “The Christian Standard.”[13]

To give the new periodical a foundational readership, The Christian Publishing Association purchased the Christian Record, an Indianapolis-based paper edited by Elijah Goodwin, with a subscription list of about 2,000 readers. In the Record’s final edition, Goodwin both endorsed the forthcoming periodical and published its Prospectus, which claimed, among other things, that the Christian Standard would be …

Scriptural in aim, catholic in spirit, bold and uncompromising, but courteous in tone, the “Standard” will seek to rally the hosts of spiritual Israel around the Bible for the defense of truly Christian interests against the assumption of popery, the mischiefs of sectarianism, the sophistries of infidelity, and the pride and corruptions of the world.[14]

The initial issue of the Christian Standard emerged from the press in Cleveland on April 7, 1866. Its masthead motto read, “Set up a Standard; Publish and Conceal Not,” and its lead story was a memorial to the life of Alexander Campbell, who had died on March 4.[15]

On April 7, 2026, the Christian Standard celebrates its 160th continuous year of publication, making it the fifth-oldest religious periodical in the United States and the oldest periodical currently published in the Restoration Movement. Moreover, Restoration Movement historians W.E. Garrison and A.T. DeGroot in The Disciples of Christ: A History, wrote, “More than to any other journal and person, it was to the Christian Standard and Isaac Errett that the Disciples were indebted for being saved from becoming a fissiparous sect of jangling legalists.”[16]