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The Twitter Alts of Internet Famous Christians

September 10th, 2018 | 4 min read

By Susannah Black and Jake Meador

John Piper

Handle: @WokeSpaceChristianHedonist

Primary Use: Asking trollish questions on @go_oat's Curious Cat; attempting to convince Cardinal Dolan to get adult baptized.

Justin Taylor

Handle: @FrostWarning97

Primary Use: Following Nebraska football accounts and various high ranked recruits the program is targeting. Occasionally spams recruits with links to Crossway's Don't Waste Your Life gift edition, has been reported to Twitter.

Karen Swallow Prior

Handle: @AntiNewUrbs123

Primary Use: Tweets out articles about the dangers posed by mass transit, also tweets about the dangers of automated vehicles and pedestrianism, and occasionally trolls Elon Musk by likening him to various characters from the 18th century novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.

James K. A. Smith

Handle: @CityofSyrah

Primary Use: Catty reviews of wine bars, speakeasies with artisanal cocktails, and cheese shops in the greater Grand Rapids area

Tim Keller

Handle: @JesusBelieber316

Primary Use: Anxiously tweeting marriage advice at Justin Bieber

David Bentley Hart

Handle: @FrankRobinsonCrusoe

Primary Use: Trenchant, baroque and sesquipedalian baseball commentary and continuous lamentation for the state of the Baltimore Orioles.

Pater Edmund Waldstein

Handle: @TheOnion, AKA The Onion Trad

Primary Use: During his time at Thomas Aquinas College, young Edmund Waldstein, inspired by the "new evangelization" under John Paul II, developed an evangelistic strategy he summed up to others as “Bishop Sheen, but for Extremely Online people.” It would involve taking current news events and putting an amusing trad Catholic twist on them while writing for an actual fake news website. In this way, Pater Edmund anticipated the advent of 'fake news' as a major meme in online media by over a decade.

After settling in at an abbey, he mentioned the plan to his spiritual director. The director was mostly confused, not being entirely sure what was meant by the phrases ‘Extremely Online’ or ‘fake news.’ However at the mention of the venerable Bishop Sheen he enthusiastically gave his approval to the project. Since that time, Pater Edmund, under the guise of the Onion Trad, has produced a series of evangelistic articles tacitly critiquing liberalism by highlighting the various absurdities inherent in it, such as “Report Finds More Americans Putting Off Having Children Until Companies Are Ready” and other articles of more catechetical intent, explaining basic teachings of the Christian faith to non-religious internet people, such as, “Before You Go See ‘Avengers: Infinity War,’ Here’s Everything You Need To Know About The Endless Love And Compassion Of Our Lord And Savior Jesus Christ.”

Alan Jacobs

Handle: @AudensWunderkammer

Primary Use: Active at times when he publicly claims to have quit Twitter but can’t bring himself to actually totally quit but has also not yet admitted it on his main account; primary content is evangelistic tweets directed at Anne Rice, attempting to make the case that she should not give up on Christianity without having tried Anglicanism.

Pontifex

Handle: @dril

Primary Use: Tweeting obscure, deliberately poorly punctuated Catholic propaganda to a breathless audience

George Weigel

Handle: @GeorgeW_lifts

Primary Use: Tweeting his workout logs.

Joel Osteen

Handle: @JohnMilbank3

Primary Use: Tweeting about his true interests: the essentially neoplatonist nature of early Christian thought, his concerns about Brexit, and the ontological status of the morally ambiguous spiritual beings that appear in European folklore.

Massimo Faggioli

Handle: @TLM4eva1961

Primary Use: Tradbro memes and WCT Traditional Latin Mass appreciation that Faggioli, to his secret shame, can’t get enough of.

Ross Douthat

Handle: @RINOtheocrat

Primary use: Operated entirety in his sleep during parasomniac episodes, Ross uses this handle to express all of the ideas his opponents accuse him of supporting.

We will also make fun of the writers now:

Jake Meador

Handle: @PajamaBoyPCA

Primary use: Making obscure jokes that reference both soccer and theology and that, like, seven people think are funny. (This entry was written by his wife.)

Susannah Black

Handle: @StLouistan

Primary Use: Coordinating the maneuvers of a small fleet of schooners acting with definite though mysterious purpose around the Verrazano Narrows, alerting @Vermeullarmine, Bat-signal-style, every time she identifies a person who has any kind of claim to a previously or currently existing European throne who is showing promising interest in De Koninck, and posting pictures of brunch. Whether this differs significantly from her primary account is debatable.  

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Susannah Black and Jake Meador

usannah Black received her BA from Amherst College and her MA from Boston University. She is an assistant editor at Mere Orthodoxy, editor at Plough, associate editor of Providence Magazine, and an editor of The Davenant Trust’s journal Ad Fontes. She's a founding editor of Solidarity Hall and is on the Board of the Distributist Review. Her writing has appeared in First Things, The Distributist Review, Solidarity Hall, Providence, Amherst Magazine, Front Porch Republic, Ethika Politika, The Human Life Review, The American Conservative, Mere Orthodoxy, and elsewhere. She blogs at Radio Free Thulcandra and tweets at @suzania. A native Manhattanite, she is now living in Queens. Jake Meador is a 2010 graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he studied English and History. He lives in Lincoln, NE with his wife Joie and their three children. He is the editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy as well as a contributing editor with Fare Forward and the Vice President of the Davenant Institute. Jake's writing has appeared in Christianity Today, Fare Forward, the University Bookman, Books & Culture, First Things, Front Porch Republic, and The Run of Play.