Every review we publish is rated on four axes before it goes live. Since 2020, that score has sat beneath every headline — so readers can see exactly how a piece of criticism was constructed, and why.
Origin Story
In the spring of 2020, the Christian Critic editorial board was approached by two seminary professors and one denominational press officer — independently — with the same complaint. They had been reading our reviews for years, and they respected the criticism. But they had no honest way to weigh our judgments against anyone else's, because the rules we used to write those judgments were never written down. We had a house style for prose, a house style for citations, and a house style for tone. We did not have a house style for thinking. That, they said, was the problem.
Our founding editor, Marcus Delaney, took the question to the editorial board that summer. The result, after four drafts and one contentious retreat at a Methodist retreat center outside Georgetown, was the Editorial Transparency Index — a four-axis rating framework applied to every reviewed work before publication. We adopted it in October 2020 and have not missed a single review since. In five years, we have rated over 1,400 works across books, sermons, films, music, and conferences, and have logged every disclosure, dispute, and revision in a public ledger.
The Index is not a marketing instrument. It is, instead, an answer to a question we kept being asked: by what standard? If you disagree with a Christian Critic review — and reasonable readers often do — the disagreement is now specific. You can disagree with the rating on Framing. You can disagree with the rating on Sources. You can produce a counter-rating. What you cannot do is accuse us of having no standard at all. That is the entire purpose of the Index, and we publish it on every review for that reason.
The Four Axes
Each reviewed work is rated by the assigned critic and a second reader from the editorial board. Disagreements are arbitrated by the editor-in-chief before publication. Every axis is scored on a five-point scale and accompanied by a one-paragraph justification that is published with the review.
How the reviewed work positions its argument before the reader arrives. We log the ideological lens the work claims for itself, the lens it actually performs, and the gap between them. A book that bills itself as a neutral history but argues like a polemic scores low. A book that openly declares its commitments and follows through scores high.
The proportion of claims in the work that are sourced, the proportion of those sources that are primary rather than secondary, and the proportion of sources that are disclosed by name rather than gestured at. We do not require footnotes for memoirs. We do require them for theology.
Whether the work engages its strongest objections and represents its opponents in the form they would recognize as themselves. A sermon that dismisses a theological tradition in a paragraph scores low; a sermon that names that tradition, summarizes its best argument, and answers it scores high. Charity is the axis our critics most often lose points on.
Whether the work discloses its funding, its institutional affiliations, its prior disputes with the people or traditions it critiques, and any commercial relationships the author holds in the subject of the book. We log this so the reader — not the critic — can weigh the disclosed interests against the judgment.
Five Years of Practice
Every rating, dispute, and revision since the Index's launch is recorded in our public ledger. The ledger is updated quarterly and is available to any credentialed journalist on request.
The Index in Practice
The following three scorecards are excerpted verbatim from reviews currently in our archive. They are reproduced here to show how the four axes translate into the published record — and how a high score in one axis can sit beside a low score in another.
Book Review · February 2024
Reviewer: Dr. Helena Vásquez, ThM (Fuller). Dispute raised by author on Charity axis; upheld by editor-in-chief, score revised down from 3.8 to 3.5.
Sermon Review · August 2024
Reviewer: Rev. Dr. Samuel Okafor, STM (Cambridge). Sources score reflects a 32-minute sermon with no Scripture citations beyond three proof-texts; Disclosure reflects an unannounced book plug in the final eight minutes.
Film Review · October 2023
Reviewer: Maren Whitfield, MA (Columbia). Framing score reflects a marketing campaign billed as "historically grounded" that the film itself does not attempt to be; Disclosure reflects the production team's published historiographical notes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. Our critics receive a flat per-review fee, not a per-word fee and not a success fee. There is no bonus for a high rating, no penalty for a low one, and no advance access to the reviewed work before it is published. Critics are also barred from reviewing authors with whom they have a personal, financial, or institutional relationship within the past five years — a list maintained by the editor-in-chief and reviewed quarterly. The 4,200 reader members who fund this outlet do not see drafts of any review. The Index is the part of our process that is most deliberately resistant to internal pressure, because it is the part most likely to be compromised.
Every review is scored twice. The assigned critic produces the first scorecard; a second reader from the editorial board, matched to neither the topic nor the original reviewer, produces the second. Where the two diverge by more than one point on any axis, the editor-in-chief reads the work in full and produces a binding third score, which is published. Where all three readers disagree, the review is held. It does not run.
The author is invited to submit a written response within fourteen days of publication. The editorial board reads it, and where a dispute is upheld, the score is revised and the response is published as a footnote. About one in fourteen reviews receives a formal dispute; about one in twenty-eight results in a revised score. The full dispute log is available on request to credentialed journalists.
Yes. The assigned critic sees the final scorecard and writes the one-paragraph justification that runs beside it. Critics who disagree with the assigned score on a given axis may decline to write the justification; in that case the second reader writes it. We do this so that the published reasoning on each axis reflects the writer who was actually arguing for it, not an editor's gloss.
It does, on a rotating annual cycle. Every July we publish a self-review applying the four axes to the previous year's archive — what we got wrong, what we framed badly, what we failed to disclose, and which scorecards the board revised internally without a formal dispute. The most recent self-review, covering 2024, ran in July 2025 and identified fourteen reviews requiring post-publication amendment.
Direct questions about the Index to [email protected]. For the full 2020 framework document and the 2024 update, request the white paper from the same address.
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