By Susannah Black, Matt Loftus, and Jake Meador
2017 was the year of the deep state, a year when the inner workings of the American system were exposed to the world and we realized that what we thought was a government of the people, by the people, and for the people is in fact no such thing. Instead of being headed by elected politicians who embody the general will, as James Madison intended, much of the American political system is instead controlled by shadowy elites and their hired officials who engineer the American system with minimal accountability to voters.
Sadly, we must today build on the work of our colleagues in examining the inner workings of evangelicalism. We take no pleasure in this task, but discernment is at the heart of what we are called to do as followers of Christ, and discernment involves, above all, skill in rapid googling, and a manly willingness to tell hard truths. In this post we will expose the rot at the heart of Big Eva: a conspiracy to corrupt the Church of Christ with a crypto-Marxist agenda, and to deliver Evangelical Protestantism into the hands of the Pope. Behind the many different institutions currently assailing the American church stands a single man, who has in this generation been tasked with carrying out the Jesuit/Communist agenda. In this post we will prove beyond all possible debate that Joe Carter is the Evangelical Deep State.
The movement’s origins are in the shadowy world of the early 2000s evangelical blogosphere. Carter, a retired Brigadier General in the Massachusetts National Guard, first began his work in evangelicalism in the early 2000s. He launched a blog called the Evangelical Outpost and also edited a magazine called Culture 11. His early forays appear innocent enough. He ran a popular series called Better Know an Evangelical, which introduced readers to evangelicals of note. Even here Carter’s sinister ties betray themselves if you look closely however. It was only a few years after Carter’s series debuted that the blaspheming papist Stephen Colbert launched his “Better Know a District” series on his Comedy Central show The Colbert Report. Can there be any doubt that he took the name from his secret friend Joe Carter?
We will return to Carter’s ties to papism later, but we should note that there is further evidence of Carter’s status as a double agent even here—during his time at Culture 11, Carter published the left-wing journalist Dara Lind, who now works as an “explainerd” for Vox.com covering immigration. This would not be the last time that Carter sent out an operative into the world, promoting the false promise of a “kingdom of heaven” without God, realized through the so-called “struggle for justice” and “basic human decency” on earth.
Carter’s work at Evangelical Outpost was also in consort with ‘blog growth,’ ‘reader-sensitive’ strategies that have more in common with the degeneracy of Rick Warren than the Word of God. His ‘33 Things’ series made listicles popular before the pagan website Buzzfeed adopted them—whether Carter himself was involved in Buzzfeed’s tactic is as of yet unknown, though if readers have any proof of Carter’s ties to this pagan outpost we would love to hear from them in the comments below. In his ‘9 Things’ series at The (False) Gospel Coalition Carter purports to set his own authority as an ‘explainer’ above the Word of God. This style no doubt has informed Lind and others’ work as trained explainer-ninjas at Vox dot com.
As Carter’s ties to The Gospel Coalition grew stronger, the organization began heavily promoting the work of this woman:
This was no accident. The title of Ann Voskamp’s bestselling book One Thousand Gifts is a clear reference to the political thinker who had been most influential on the development of her analysis of economic realities during her college years.
Notoriously, in 1956, Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party Mao Zedong (Wade-Gilles: Mao Tse-tung) encouraged criticism of the Party’s policies using the phrase “Let a thousand flowers bloom.” After this seeming liberalization elicited honest opinions from intellectuals and artists, the Chairman used the information thus gathered to institute a crackdown on those whose views were outside ChiCom orthodoxy.
Carter’s promotion of Voskamp’s Maoist tract is an indication of strategies that he will be using in the future. Zondervan’s Counterpoints series—which includes such titles as Four Views on Eternal Security and Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy—is, it is likely, an implementation of just such a technique. Carter’s agents at Zondervan have played on the trusting natures of even some Reformed Baptists including TGC founder John Piper to contribute to the series.
But by allowing their heads to be turned by the glamor, perks, and high paychecks attendant on their essays appearing in the Counterpoints series, these men have revealed their poor judgement and unfitness to have positions of leadership among the faithful, however sound their doctrine. Their names will, by now, be on Voskamp’s list, marked for liquidation when Carter’s plan is taken to its next step.
As our colleagues have detailed elsewhere, TGC’s and Carter’s ties to hard-line Marxism run deeper still. Carter is to this day senior editor at The Acton Institute, which itself is without any concealment a vehicle for the thought of socialist operative Friedrich Hayek.
Hayek’s thought is, from what we have been able to piece together, a key to understanding the hatred of liberty that drives Carter, and so it’s worth looking a little more closely at this important figure.
Chesterton was a rabid enemy of human freedom, advocating so-called “distributism;” the link to Shaw’s Fabianism cannot be doubted. How, after all, can a man be friends with someone with whom he disagrees? (Tellingly, Carter has long been a devotee of the British journalist, to the point of coming close to threatening violence to Austin Bramwell when the commentator criticized him; that same piece reveals both Carter’s Fabian commitments and those of his allies Matthew Lee Anderson and Michael Brendan Dougherty, whom he enlists against Bramwell in the damning final paragraph of the piece, which is now stored as a screenshot in the Mere Orthodoxy Database, as it seems likely that Carter will direct his agent at First Things to remove the page when he realizes that a document this incriminating is still publicly available.) The Jesuit-Marxist axis of Carter, Anderson, and Dougherty is highlighted here with jewel-like clarity: the piece comes close to the rotten heart of the Evangelical Deep State.
We must now turn to Carter crony Robert Sirico, the head of the Acton Institute. Sirico has made a concerted effort to appear friendly to capitalism, going so far as to appear in debates where he purports to represent the capitalist position as against the radicalism of characters such as Russell Ronald Reno (a figure who also goes by the aliases “R.R.” and “Rusty,”) editor of the progressive-left journal First Things—of which Carter was formerly the web editor. On the face of it, this makes no sense: how could Carter expect us to believe that the heads of two separate organizations which he has worked for would be at odds over such a basic Gospel issue as the absolute right to private property? But a viewing of that debate and a measured consideration of “Father” Sirico’s performance in it can leave the unbiased and regenerate observer in no doubt that the debate was a propaganda operation, orchestrated by Carter, designed to make the arguments of Reno appear as strong as possible.
In general, we can only regard Sirico, and Acton, as controlled opposition; their repeated use of such concepts as “the common good” and their reference to proto-Marxist philosophers such as the Papist Thomas Aquinas cannot be squared with their claims to support American democracy and the freedom of contract that is at the core of all other freedoms and the heart of the gospel message. Their veil of patriotism can’t obscure the sinister outlines of their own deeper commitments. Sirico, methinks thou doth protest too much.
And indeed Sirico is perpetually tipping his hand: a recent post on the Acton Institute’s “PowerBlog” uses the unmistakable phrases “social justice” and “common good” along with historical materialist buzzwords like “heart” and “virtue.” Indeed, the word “social” appears over 34 times in that one post alone. In fact, it appears 35 times. Unsurprisingly, given his Actonite-Jesuit ties, during his tenure at First Things, Carter published his own SJW screed—a hard-left piece which makes use of the telltale word “common” in its title. In “common,” Mr. Carter? Is that how you want us to hold our wives?
It’s now our painful duty to take a long, hard look at a Carter operative who has for years, sadly, passed for a conservative committed to Biblical Christianity: one of American Evangelicalism’s most trusted leaders: Richard Albert (“Al”) Mohler. Let’s lay this out carefully.
Mohler was groomed at Southern Seminary, which sponsors the so-called “Commonweal Project.” The website of this organization declares, to those who know how to read the signs of the times, the nature of this project: it is dedicated to the “gospel transformation of work and economies for human flourishing,” and to the idea that “where the gospel is received and lived, it transforms every aspect of life. This means not only the personal lives of individuals, but also our work, businesses, and even economics.” The materialist/Jesuit premises are obvious: indeed, if the logic of projects such as this were followed out to its end, the result would be the preposterous and unbiblical assertion that the “gospel” should even impact the state and political life. To him we say, Mankind does not live by bread alone, Mr. Mohler! You are clearly a shill for a neo-integralism of the most oppressive kind; one that is utterly incompatible with the principles of Thomas Jefferson’s Letter to the Danbury Baptists.
One assumes that Mohler has at least a passing familiarity with that crucial Christian text, but perhaps he should refresh himself by reading the letter to which it was a response. Can Mohler really claim that his faith is the same as those apostles of righteousness, those Baptists of Danbury, whose immortal words to President Jefferson should be written on the heart of every American Christian? “Religion,” they remind us, “is at all times and places a Matter between God and Individuals…[and] the legetimate Power of civil Goverment extends no further than to punish the man who works ill to his neighbour.” Where does Mohler find in this the right of government to steal the hard-earned fruit of a man’s labor and redistribute it? Where in this is the idea that government should promote “human flourishing?”
Lest any doubt that this is in fact the upshot of the Commonweal Project (as it is of so many other such contemporary organizations supported by Evangelicals,) the name itself should of course be a giveaway. “Weal” is a word that the elites (trained as so many of them are in Old English) will recognize as sharing a root with the American word “wealth.” The name signals that the goal of the project is to appropriate all privately-held wealth into a centralized “common” purse, most probably to be controlled from abroad. Switzerland is the likely candidate for the country where the wealth of American Baptists will go once Carter’s “mole” Mohler confiscates it: a shadowy organization called L’Abri was established in 1955 on Swiss soil for what we can only assume is precisely this purpose.
“Commonweal” is, as many know, also the name of an explicitly Marxist and Jesuit magazine; Mohler is known to have read several articles from this magazine. It is even probable that at one point he had a subscription to it: this magazine, like many produced by the Jesuits and those they have trained, has a system whereby those on the outside have access to a limited number of articles, carefully chosen by the magazine’s shadowy “associate editor” Matthew Sitman. (1) These are the magazine’s exoteric face, and are deemed suitable for consumption by the general public. But others can, under certain circumstances, become “subscribers.” It is unknown whether there are rituals associated with this status, but we have confirmation from those who broke free of their Commonweal “subscription” to embrace Biblical Christianity that such a subscription gives an initiate access to “archives” of material deemed unsuitable for the most Americans. (The New York Times also uses a similar “subscription” system.)
As is often the case with the operations of the deep state, there is in fact very little that is hidden about Carter’s agenda. In 1928, Fabian founder H.G. Wells published what would become a crucial text for the Society and the movement throughout the 20th Century. Titled The Open Conspiracy, this book has as its subtitle Blue Prints for a World Revolution. The book is an instructive read, or at least its title and subtitle are, and the quotes I’ve found from it on Wikipedia. Wells tells us that the society’s aims are “a world revolution aiming at universal peace, welfare and happy activity” that can result in the establishment of a “world commonweal”. It is that goal to which Mohler’s Commonweal Project is aimed, obviously. Wells goes on explain that the essence of religion is the subordination of the individual to the collective, and that the modern religion to which Christianity must give way is the use of this religious tendency in human beings to realize “better order in human affairs” in the present world. A clearer statement of Carter’s program could not be conceived. Tellingly, in a 2004 post expressing his admiration for the Papist fantasy writer J.R.R. Tolkien, Mohler refers to H.G. Wells.
And the method by which Carter goes about his work is likewise undisguised. We must now turn to his published books. The key to his thought, and the tool by which he has risen with such grim and single-minded determination to the position of power that he now holds, is to be found in his 2009 book How To Argue Like Jesus: Learning Persuasion from History’s Greatest Communicator. (The origins and subsequent work of purported co-author, “John Coleman,” are mysterious: it seems likely that the man never existed, and that the name is just an alternate for Carter’s own. A clue is to be found in the fact that they share initials.) Carter has admitted in public interviews that this is a book that has to do with “rhetoric.” This is a word that would go right over the heads of most people, but for those who have been trained, this is a dogwhistle referring to an ancient GREEK art of persuasion, taught today in many of the academies and “prep schools” to which the elites send their children, as described in the work of John Taylor Gatto. He’s telling those who have ears to hear that he’s using PAGAN MIND CONTROL TECHNIQUES. Is this something that a real follower of Jesus would do? To look a little more closely at this “rhetoric,” Christians would do well to familarize themselves with the work of Tolkien associate Dorothy L. Sayers.
In a brief address called “The Lost Tools of Learning,” which was originally delivered in private at the British organization Oxford University, but which has subsequently been leaked to the public, Sayers describes the educational techniques that the elites have used to train their children, and admits that these techniques are largely “lost” to the masses who have been subjected to public schooling. Those trained in these arts, which she identifies as “grammar,” “logic,” and “rhetoric,” are able to exert nondemocratic and covert influence on others. This essay has been extraordinarily influential in the modern “Classical Christian Education” movement, a movement of which Carter has, largely, been the driving force. In a recent post on the Acton Institute’s PowerBlog, he admits the connection between Sayers’ blueprint for the training of modern philosopher kings and this contemporary trend in Christian schooling. Parents, are you tempted to send your children to a so-called Christian school? Do not be fooled: the “Christian” nature of such education is ambiguous at best. What has Athens to do with Jerusalem, as someone said? (Athens was a city in Greece which was the location of many pagan temples and was the heart of the pagan cult known as “philosophy.” It still exists, to this day, and has many inhabitants. Pray for the missionaries who have been sent to this unreached people group! To donate to our efforts to translate the Bible into the native language of the Athenians, click here.)
Here we need to explore Carter’s disturbing ties to Gospel Coalition co-founder Tim Keller and his False Gospel of Urbanism. (Carter, as has already been mentioned, is employed by TGC.) Keller, from a perch earned through years of preaching a false, judgment-free gospel to the youthful heathens of New York City, has long been an admirer of Jane Jacobs. Though not well known today, Jacobs’ work on the city is essential to understanding urbanism’s sinister Marxist ties.
In her later years, Jacobs moved to Toronto, a Canadian city, where Keller’s “Redeemer City to City” network has planted three times as many churches as they have planted in the American city of Houston (They have planted one church in Houston, and three in Toronto.) This despite the fact that Keller claims that he is an American citizen. One of these three churches is called New City Church, a nod to the fact that Toronto was Jacobs’ “New City,” and a reference too to New City Press, a Papist media organization in Keller’s home base of New York. Keller’s work within TGC, supported (initiated?) by Carter, has also linked up closely with the work of other (false) evangelical luminaries.
Carter is now even trying to penetrate the Word of God with his subversive claims. As everyone knows, the “Lifehacks” phenomenon is an entirely secular movement based in rank materialism. People believe that one’s life, a gift of God that begins at conception, can be “hacked” like a computer. This is meant to open vulnerable minds to uncritically accept the idea of genetic engineering and then eventually to receive the ultimate “Lifehack”, the Mark of the Beast.
Indeed, Carter’s dubiously titled book is filled with countless examples of twisting Scripture into conveniently packaged simple life lessons which actually indoctrinate the reader in Carter’s brand of Marxist “Christianity.” In one article Carter suggests that Ecclesiastes 11 teaches us how to be “antifragile.” This is plainly a covert mention to the book Antifragile, published in 2012 by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Taleb’s influences include the aforementioned Hayek as well as the godless German Friedrich Nietzsche who famously said that God is dead. (God, of course, is very much alive. But Nietzsche has been dead for over a hundred years.) Taleb’s book is about how sometimes things benefit from being shocked because they are resilient. No doubt this is referring to the surprising resilience of Marxism, which has endured in the world despite its many failures.
Father Sirico and Acton Institute have also had a very strong connection to the U.S. State Department, the Intelligence Community and the Vatican. On the Acton Institute Advisory Board was Jesuit Cardinal Avery Dulles, a member of a prominent New York Presbyterian family whose father was John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State under President Eisenhower and whose uncle was Allen Dulles, director of the CIA. It seems far-fetched indeed to imagine that the Catholic convert Dulles could have genuinely gone against the interests and plans of his powerful family: that is the mainstream narrative that Dulles biographers such as Marquette’s Patrick Carey would like to push. (2) Rather, Cardinal Dulles was almost certainly playing out the role for which he had been trained at Choate and Harvard. Indeed, the CIA connection runs deep: Carter has written for Providence magazine, a publication with its own shadowy ties to the world of intelligence.
Carter’s arguments against these more openly Marxist Christians might make it seem like he is a god-fearing American capitalist. But Carter is a true Straussian. Choosing every letter from the 66th in Carter’s monologue according to the Fibonacci sequence, one sees he was spelling out his secret, esoteric message: “ROMERO AND BERNIE NOW PLZ.”
There are many other lines of enquiry we are planning to pursue. We will be covering Carter’s use of the audio recordings of husband-and-wife team of Keith and Kristyn Getty to implant covert postmillenialism in their listeners. “Speak, O Lord,” they have many singing, “till your church is built and the earth is filled with your glory,” a clear denial of the literal second coming and a breathtaking concession to liberation theology. We’ll be examining leaked emails between Carter and known Stalinist operative Joni Eareckson Tada. And we will, of course, be taking a careful look at photographic evidence of the books that Carter has in his personal library: pictures have recently surfaced that seem to show him reading the work of Federal Visionist heresiarch N.T. Wright.
How do these many Carter-led organizations think we should respond to their efforts to transform our faith and family into crypto-Marxist social blocs? Are we really willing to sell the mission of the church for progressive social engineering and anti-freedom market regulations? Do they expect us to blindly ignore the challenges facing real Americans even as they continue to suck at the teat of Soros-funded organizations? No, Mr. Carter. We will not bow to your clay-footed statue of Lenin! We will not be crucified on a cross of gold!
(1) This name may or may not be an alias for another person associated with this organization, Matthew Boudway, who also apparently goes under the name “Matthew Schmitz.” There are those who argue that these three figures are in fact separate people, but that is an excessively naive reading of the evidence. The idea that the magazine industry as it currently exists could simultaneously support Manhattan-level salaries for three mid-career men named Matthew is highly questionable—let alone that all three should be employed at “Christian” magazines. It may be that all three are entirely mythological, or that, as is the case with Odin and Arthur, myths have grown up around a core of historical reality, so that these three so-called “magazine editors” are traceable back to a single social media manager with a Patheos blog. Those who subscribe to this so-called “Matthew Mythicist” position are gaining more and more credibility in mainstream academia.
(2) It is likely that this figure is part of the powerful Carey clan, which also includes such figures as Wilson Carey McWilliams, whose influence on the Marxist-Jesuit organ Front Porch Republic is frankly admitted in the piece linked above by key operative Patrick Deneen, whose work Carter is known to have been influenced by. This key forum has as of today openly announced its plans for the further corruption of American public life; under the leadership of a so-called “agrarian” scholar who goes by the obvious pseudonym of Jeffrey Bilbro, FPR seems to be moving into position as a crucial player in the subversion of American Evangelical trust in free enterprise and congregational church government. Such an endeavor cannot come cheaply; Bilbro is known in these circles for his extravagant tastes. Is FPR funded by George Soros? We can only speculate.