THE WORLD TURNS.

• Author: Gray, Tim

A Christian magazine heeds the call of both prophets and profit.

Lord you established peace for us all that we have accomplished you have done for us your name alone do we honor -- Isaiah 26:12-13

The prophet's words, embroidered with blue thread on white cloth, hang in a frame just above the roll-top desk in Joel Belz's windowless office. At first glance, they're the only obvious sign Belz is anything other than just another rumpled journalist, maybe editor of a small-town newspaper. He's got the usual trappings: a globe, shelves of books, piles of paper covering much of the desktop. An original ink drawing for an editorial cartoon hangs on the wall. But look closer. The shelves hold some things you don't find in many editors' offices. Tucked near a biography of Time magazine founder Henry Luce are half a dozen Bibles, the Trinity Hymnal and a couple dozen books on theology.

Belz is CEO of the Asheville nonprofit that publishes World, which he calls "a weekly news magazine done by Christians." It's no Time or Newsweek, but after a decade and a half of being little-known except by conservative evangelicals, who make up most of its readers, World is stepping out. It gets ink in The New York Times and The Washington Post, thanks to Editor Marvin Olasky, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin. It was even excoriated on the Times op-ed page for its Feb. 19 cover story blasting John McCain.

If you don't know World, you may have heard of Olasky, 50, who gave Texas Gov. George W. Bush the term "compassionate conservatism" and acts as an informal adviser to the Republican presidential nominee. He's been interviewed by CNN and NBC and is a likely appointee if there's a Bush administration. Born a Jew, he became an atheist and a communist. But in his mid-20s, he converted to Christianity. His work ethic is as Protestant as his theology. He churns out regular columns in World and his hometown newspaper, oped pieces for The Wall Street Journal and USA Today and has written more than a dozen books. Newt Gingrich held aloft his text on the failings of the welfare system -- The Tragedy -- of American Compassion -- on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, exhorting colleagues to read it.

World is Belz and Olasky's answer to what they see as anti-religious bias in the mainstream media and bad writing and lazy reporting in much of the religious press. Though Belz stresses that "we're totally nondenominational," his magazine has a clear point of view. It's conservative religiously, socially and politically. Very conservative. Like most magazines, it's a reflection of the people who run it. Belz, for his part, finds "stuff in Time magazine that borders on pornographic." CFO Eric Zetterholm detects a recent "leftward drift" in the Journal. And Bob Case, who heads World's summer school for aspiring Christian scribes, volunteers that "my daughter married a lawyer who was a virgin, and my wife and I just rejoiced." In this World, people are proudly outside the mainstream of American life, much of which they consider a road to damnation. They see their magazine as a mission to save sinners from being burgers in an eternal barbecue.

They've even inspired an apostle. Warren Smith, former marketing director for PricewaterhouseCooper's Southeastern middle-market practice, started The Charlotte Christian News seven years ago. This year, he changed the name of the weekly newspaper to The Charlotte World and launched The Triad World, based in Greensboro. (The only formal affiliation, besides a shared belief in the depravity of much of mainstream society and journalism, is World's permission for Smith to use its name.) Smith says his goal is to create a chain of Christian papers on the model of Charlotte-based American City Business Journals Inc.

With a circulation of around 100,000, including 3,590 in North Carolina, World magazine isn't the only product of the nonprofit Belz runs -- Asheville-based God's World Publications Inc. Historically, it has not even been the most profitable. Over the last 15 years, God's World News, a series of weekly newsletters for kids that Belz calls a "frank take-off of the Weekly Reader," has...