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 about 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 former Marine blogs primarily from his Manassas, Va., home after his wife goes to sleep.
“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 last week in a post, “What Evangelicals Owe Catholics: An Appreciation.” He typically posts once a day, a medium-length essay on serious subjects. Socially conservative enough to work as the blogger for the Family Research Council, a Christian advocacy group, Carter is not an exuberant partisan.
Glenn McGee, director of the Alden March Bioethics Institute in Albany, N.Y., and editor of the mainstream American Journal of Bioethics, said he checks Carter’s blog not for scholarly reasons – “most people in this field don’t read blogs and are incredibly Luddite” – but more as cultural research.
“I’ll go to his site to see, ‘What are evangelicals saying?’ … I think he’s a good mirror of what people are saying; he’s plugged in,” McGee said.
The Catholic Church’s position – as opposed to that of many Catholic laypeople – aligns with conservative evangelicals on many bioethics issues. Most prominent religious Christian bioethicists are Catholic, as are key religious research institutions, experts say.
Among those watching the landscape is Joe Gigante, a Catholic political strategist who praises Carter for “reaching across the aisle.” “As time goes on, those barriers from the non-Catholic world are wearing down,” Gigante said.
