“Whether Mr. Trump should be removed from office by the Senate or by popular vote next election – that is a matter of prudential judgment. That he should be removed, we believe, is not a matter of partisan loyalties but loyalty to the Creator of the Ten Commandments.”
- Mark Galli in Christianity Today, 12/19/20
As is probably true with most writers, there are times when I find picking a post topic can be difficult. This week, not so much. Very obviously, the biggest story over the past few days has been the House of Representatives vote to impeach Donald Trump. Whatever one’s opinion on the impeachment of the president, it’s a hard story to ignore.
The fact that it’s only the third time in American history that a president has been impeached is enough by itself to warrant commentary.
That the flagship publication of the American Neo-Evangelical movement, Christianity Today, jumped into the fray on the side of removing Trump from office makes an even more compelling case for Protestants to weigh in on this issue.
Seemingly designed to further rub salt in the wound of Trump’s Evangelical supporters, a recent poll by Politico/Morning Consult indicated that 43% of Evangelicals support Donald Trump’s removal from office.
So is it true, as the Christianity Today editorial and the Politico poll would have us believe, that a substantial percentage of Trump’s Evangelical base wants Trump removed from office?
I wouldn’t be so sure.
In “The Church Irrational,” John Robbins wrote, “Christianity Today, the leading publication of the Neo-evangelicals, is a hotbed of feminism, heterodoxy, Arminianism, Pentecostalism, and liberalism.” This surely was true in 2000 when he originally made these remarks, and things have not improved in the years since.
The Christianity Today editorial calling for Trump’s removal titled “Trump Should Be Removed from Office” was penned by now departing editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, Mark Galli. To be as accurate as possible, Mr. Galli’s biography on his blog makes a distinction between Christianity Today, where he is editor-in-chief, and Christianity Today magazine where he claims the title “editor.” It is unclear to his writer what the distinction is between these two organizations.
According to Mr. Galli’s biography on Wikipedia, he was a Presbyterian pastor for 10 years and subsequently changed his denominational affiliation to Anglican. Further, his M.Div. degree is from Fuller Theological Seminary. Mr. Galli has also authored or co-authored 9 books. Among his titles are Francis of Assisi and His World and Karl Barth: An Introductory Biography for Evangelicals.
While I have not read either book, a look at the description of his biography of Barth on Christianbook.com indicates Galli thinks highly of the Swiss-German neo-orthodox theologian. According to the blurb on Christianbook, “Galli shows how Barth’s theology can be read and reshaped by one’s own views to broaden one’s understanding of Christ.” This is nonsense. Barth was a heretic. The more one’s views of Christ are reshaped by his theology, the further one will find himself from the kingdom of heaven. For a more Biblical approach to Barth, I recommend Doug Douma’s Trinity Review “Gordon Clark and Other Reformed Critics of Karl Barth.” If you’d like, there’s also a Trinity Foundation Radio podcast available where Douma talks about his Review. For a more in-depth critique of Barth, see Gordon Clark’s Karl Barth’s Theological Method.
Likewise, the description of Galli’s Francis of Assisi on Amazon indicates that the author takes a positive view of his subject, a stance one would not expect from a writer committed to the Sola’s of the Reformation.
So, is Galli an Evangelical? In the classical sense of the term – one who believes in the Reformation principals of Scripture Alone and Justification by Belief Alone – I don’t know enough about him to judge. That said, his books – one praising Roman Catholic mystic Francis of Assisi and the other casting neo-Orthodox heretic Karl Barth in a positive light – raise red flags.
What about the broader, popular sense of the term in which Evangelical simply means some sort of Protestant? Is Galli an Evangelical in this sense? Yes, he would qualify in this sense, but it would seem fair to say he comes down on the theologically, and probably political, liberal end of the spectrum.
There’s also the possibility of the Deep State’s hand at work here. This may sound a bit conspiratorial to some, but I ask that you at least consider the possibility that Christianity Today may be a tool of the CIA and/or some other globalists in much the same way that the Mainstream Media (MSM) is.
At first blush, this assertion may sound absurd to some, but there has been good reason to be suspicious of anything said or written in any high-profile publication. Since at least the 1950’s, there is very good evidence of the CIA’s involvement in promoting its agendas behind the scenes through manipulation of the press.
In a 1977 Washington Post article, journalist Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame wrote an article titled “The CIA And The Media.” Bernstein began, “In 1953, Joseph Alsop, then one of America’s leading syndicated columnists, went to the Philippines to cover an election. He did not go because he was asked to do so by his syndicate. He did not go because he was asked to do so by the newspapers that printed his column. He went at the request of the CIA.”
Although Bernstein doesn’t use the term in his article, the CIA program he describes was known as Operation Mockingbird. Bernstein continues,
THE AGENCY’S DEALINGS WITH THE PRESS BEGAN during the earliest stages of the Cold War. Allen Dulles, who became director of the CIA in 1953, sought to establish a recruiting‑and‑cover capability within America’s most prestigious journalistic institutions. By operating under the guise of accredited news correspondents, Dulles believed, CIA operatives abroad would be accorded a degree of access and freedom of movement unobtainable under almost any other type of cover.
In his piece, Bernstein named the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc. as the three most valuable CIA associations. Perhaps because his article was published in the Washington Post, Bernstein didn’t tell his readers that WaPo is also considered to be a CIA operation. As Paul Craig Roberts, writing about the CIA’s influence on the American press, has noted, “When I received by briefing as a staff associate, House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, which required top secret clearance, I was told by senior members of the staff that the Washington Post was a CIA asset.”
The CIA’s influence is not limited to the MSM either. In the mighty wurlitzer: How The CIA Played America, author Hugh Wilford describes how the CIA infiltrated various groups, effectively using them as front organizations to spread its propaganda. For what it’s worth, the mighty wurlitzer was published by Harvard University Press, an organization not exactly known as a hotbed of wingnut conspiracy theorists.
Dr. Udo Ulfkotte’s 2014 book, originally published in German under the title Gekaufte Journalisten (Journalists for Hire) and recently published in English translation by Progressive Press under the title Presstitutes: Embedded In the Pay of the CIA, was a best seller in Germany. In it, Ulfkotte exposed how the CIA controlled German media.
Dr. Ulfkotte died under mysterious circumstances at the young age of 56 in January 2017, the same week Donald Trump was inaugurated.
Does any of the above prove that Christianity Today is a Deep State asset publishing impeach Trump editorials at the direction of the CIA? Does it prove that Politico is deliberately issuing forth fake polling data showing a large minority of Evangelicals want to see Trump put out of office? No, it does not. But it does, at least in this writer’s opinion, raise the possibility that all is not as it seems on the surface.
In Scripture, the Apostle Paul notes that “we are not ignorant of his [Satan’s] devices.” In like fashion, it is important for Christians not be ignorant of the Deep State/CIA’s devices. The CIA has in the past manipulated the press to suit its agenda, and doubtless it is doing so at this very moment.
From the evidence gathered so far, very clearly the intelligence community – the FBI, the CIA the NSA, etc. – has been at the forefront of a takedown attempt on first candidate, and now president Trump. That this has continued with the impeachment attempt is clear from the fact that Eric Ciaramella, the so-called whistle blower, is himself a CIA analyst. In a comical twist, the first three letters of his last name are CIA, which has led podcaster David Knight to refer to him as Eric CIA-ramella.
What isn’t funny is the creepy way in which his name and face have been scrubbed from the MSM and all social media. I heard a portion of the Tucker Carlson show a couple weeks back in which Carlson specifically told his guest not to mention Ciaramella’s name. To emphasize how secretive the media has been with any discussion of Ciaramella, just look at the grainy, low-quality image provided of him taken from story linked to in the previous paragraph. Apparently, no better image of him exists, or editors at Heavy would have used it. This further suggests the man has been secreted out of the public view.
The absurd hush-hush in the media about this man is one of many facets of the impeachment that reek to high heaven of Deep State involvement. By itself, this cover up, this lack of transparency, is enough to discredit the entire impeachment case. Yet for all its pious preachiness, Galli’s Christianity Today editorial fails to even bring up the suspicious origin of the case against Trump.
There are numerous other irregularities in the handling of Ciaramella’s evidence that I have left out for now.
Lord willing, I hope to write more on the impeachment case as it develops. I doubt this will be a difficult wish to fulfill, seeing that this case likely will be with us in some form or another through the 2020 election, if not beyond.
Innteresting thoughts