Joe Carter of Manassas, Va., a retired Marine, said he began blogging to become an influential voice for Christian values despite not having Ivy League credentials.
(Rich Lipski/Washington Post)
Evangelical blogger debates bioethics
His views match many Catholics'
WASHINGTON -- When Joe Carter was little, the preacher at his "small, backwoods fundamentalist congregation" in East Texas knew who the antichrist was, and named names: New England senators, Chinese communists, secular humanists.
But no one was worse, the preacher warned, than the pope.
Three decades later, the chasm between evangelical Protestants and Catholics has narrowed as conservatives from both denominations have teamed up on issues from religious school vouchers (pro) to gay marriage (con). And perhaps nowhere has that relationship change been more apparent than in the realm of bioethics.
Carter, now 37, is a good example of the shift, having become something of a name in the blogosphere as author of evangelicaloutpost.com . On the blog, which is made up of one-third bioethics issues, Carter rails against embryonic stem cell research, human cloning, and in vitro fertilization -- causes commonly taken up by Catholic bioethicists and the Vatican.
The retired Marine blogs primarily from his Manassas, Va., home once his wife goes to sleep. Launched in 2003, his blog is racking up kudos: best religious blog in the 2005 Weblog Awards (one of the most prestigious prizes in Web land ), and one of the "coolest, most interesting" spiritual blogs, according to spirituality website beliefnet.com .
"For nearly 30 years, evangelicals have been working to catch up to our Catholic brothers and sisters on issues of the sanctity of life," Carter wrote this week in a post, "What Evangelicals Owe Catholics: An Appreciation."
Carter's persona on his blog is similar to his in person: mild-mannered, wholesome, mostly polite. He typically posts once a day, a medium-length essay on serious subjects. Carter, socially conservative enough to work as the blogger for the Family Research Council, a Christian advocacy group, is not an exuberant partisan.
"When you read it, you get the sense that this is someone who has thought this out," said Matthew Eppinette, assistant director of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, an evangelical bioethics think tank in Illinois that hired Carter in 2005. At the time, Carter was based in Fort Worth, Texas, repairing computer systems on fighter jets by day and blogging by night. Eppinette read the blog and called Carter in for an interview.
Glenn McGee, director of the Alden March
"I'll go to his site to see, 'What are evangelicals saying about [the sexually transmitted human papilloma virus]?' I think he's a good mirror of what people are saying; he's plugged in," McGee said.
Just before retiring in 2003 as a gunnery sergeant after 15 years in the Marines, Carter was feeling an expanding sense of purpose, but sensed a wall. His mother had just died, a general-interest local newspaper that he and his brother started had folded, and he was wondering whether it was possible to become a voice for what he sees as Christian values without storybook credentials: the Ivy League degree, the big-name connections.
One day he stumbled across a book called "In, But Not Of: A Guide to Christian Ambition" by popular conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt. The book lays out practical things Christians can do to become influential, including keeping a blog.
"I wasn't going to get a Harvard PhD, but I thought: This blogging thing might be something I could do," he said.
In 2005, he went to work for the Center for Bioethics, and one year later to the Family Research Council.
Joining the council has increased his visibility, at least at inside-Washington places such as the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank where he attends a weekly briefing for bloggers.
By some measures, the change among evangelicals has been dramatic. A generation ago, leaders rarely spoke out against abortion; even the Southern Baptist Convention voted in 1971 to support making it legal under conditions including rape and "severe fetal deformity."
Today, Americans who identify themselves as evangelical are the most opposed to abortion of any faith group -- far more than those who identify themselves as Catholic -- even in cases of rape or danger to the mother's health, according to a Baylor University survey.
The Catholic Church's position -- as opposed to that of its laypeople -- aligns with conservative evangelicals on many bioethics issues.
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