How Are We Doing?

“How is First Things doing?” The question is regularly asked wherever I go, and I am glad to answer that, all in all, we’re doing reasonably well. Of course, I think not only of the journal but of the various activities of the Institute on Religion and Public Life that surround, support, and inform what appears in these pages. This is written at the end of a week of back-to-back meetings. First the annual gathering of the editorial boards, then a day with Francis Cardinal Arinze and forty-five Christian and Jewish theologians in our Dulles Colloquium (named of course, for Avery Cardinal Dulles), and, finally, another working session of Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT).

A Nigerian, Cardinal Arinze is head of the Vatican’s congregation for worship, and he formerly led the pontifical council for relations with world religions. It was a day of scintillating exchanges, ranging from Christian unity to liturgical reform, and with a particular concentration on the future of Christian-Muslim relations. Cardinal Arinze is a thoughtful, personable, devout, and utterly persuasive man, and I expect that everyone there was thinking that when the time comes, as it inevitably will come, for a new pope, it would be a great thing for the Church and the world were the choice to fall on Francis Cardinal Arinze. Of course none of us has a vote, which is probably just as well.

ECT continues its work on a new statement with the working title “The Universal Call to Holiness.” It is not easy; not only because of differences between Catholics and Evangelicals but also because of differences among Evangelical and Pentecostal traditions on questions such as baptism, election, perfectionism, and other matters entangled in generations of controversy. But we are confident that, as we have been able to produce statements of uncompromising honesty on long-aggravated questions such as justification and scriptural authority, we will be led to success on this one as well. The pioneers of this project—Cardinal Dulles, Chuck Colson, J. I. Packer, and your writer—know that we may not be around for many more years, and so we are pleased that a number of younger scholars have joined us, assuring, we hope, the future of ECT’s mission for generations to come.

While First Things involves many things, when people ask how First Things is doing, they are usually referring to the journal and, more specifically, to circulation. While modest outside funding can be obtained for other projects, FT struggles to pull its own weight. But the news is good. By the end of this year, it appears we will have an average monthly circulation of over 31,000. One might think that very small in a country of almost three hundred million people, but it has always been a relative handful of people who are serious readers. When it comes to circulation, we never quite know to what FT should be compared. There are the more political magazines, such as the Nation, which has surged this year to 160,000, no doubt reflecting anti-Bush sentiment on the left. National Review is fairly close behind with 127,000, while the Weekly Standard and the New Republic, both very influential within the beltway, are somewhat over 40,000. In terms of intellectual challenge and breadth of interest, FT is in some ways more similar to the New York Review of Books and Commentary. The former remains fairly steady at 82,000, while the latter is down to a little under 18,000.

Among somewhat comparable religious publications, we’re well behind America, the Jesuit weekly, which has a circulation of 45,000, and a thousand or two behind Christian Century, the voice of oldline liberal Protestantism. The first was founded in 1909 and the second in 1884, so they have a century’s lead over FT, especially in institutional subscriptions. They got into thousands of libraries many years ago, and libraries tend to be reliable renewals. Our subscribers are almost all individuals, which makes this a good occasion to again urge readers, and academics in particular, to get libraries to subscribe. After FT, and in order from 28,000 to 11,000, are Crisis, Commonweal, Catholic World Report, New Oxford Review, and the fine Evangelical literary-intellectual publication, Books & Culture.

Readers of First Things (ROFTERS) are extraordinarily loyal. The rate of “first renewals” is over 80 percent and the “renewals of renewals” over 95 percent. Veterans in the publishing industry tell me the latter figure is astonishing, perhaps unprecedented. It almost defies the mortality rate, which holds steady at 100 percent. Of all the current circulation data, the long-term renewal rates are the most important and the most gratifying. I am frequently asked whether FT is self-supporting, and the answer is in the negative. Ours is a very lean operation and we rely on more than a little help from our friends. In that connection, the annual appeal, sent out shortly before Christmas, is critically important. Last year, the response to the appeal was the largest ever, and we’re hoping to do better this year. It is still a relatively small percentage of readers who respond to the appeal. If you have responded in the past, please think about increasing your contribution. If you haven’t, please do so this year.

So how are we doing? Reasonably well, thank you. And I do mean thank you. At the editorial board meeting this year, we went back to look at the statement of purpose in the premier issue of March 1990, and asked ourselves whether it still represents what we have been doing, are doing, and intend to do in the future. We concluded that, while we might fiddle with a phrase or two, the answer is definitely in the affirmative. (You might want to check out that editorial statement, “Putting First Things First,” on the website, old.firstthings.com) After stating our goals in some detail, we acknowledged the difficulty in fulfilling them and invoked a familiar story. Once in Chelm, the mystical village of East European Jews, a man was appointed to stand at the village gate watching out for the coming of the Messiah. After some time, he complained to the village elders that his pay was too low. “You are right,” they said. “The pay is low. But consider: the work is steady.”