Shepherds for Sale ｜ Megan Basham ｜ 8⧸14⧸24
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Summary
Megan Bashman's book, Shepherds for Sale, has made the New York Times bestseller list, and has been getting a lot of media attention. In this episode, we talk about how the book came to be written and why it's so controversial.
Transcript
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Most people have noticed that, unfortunately, woke ideology has worked its way into every
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And sadly, churches are not really any kind of exception when it comes to this level of
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My guest today has written an excellent book about what has happened, especially inside
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It's called Shepherds for Sale, and I believe it has now made the New York Times bestseller
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Well, one of the downsides and upsides of having a book that hits a target this wide is it certainly
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And so my husband keeps reminding me, you know, that's probably why it made the New York
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Times list because so many people are angry about it.
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Well, it's controversial in the sense that obviously it's drawing a lot of attention,
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but I think it's also critical because this is an area, and you point this out in the book
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repeatedly, very often the first rule is just or, you know, the 11th commandment, I think
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you call it, is don't ever challenge church leadership.
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And obviously when you're under the stewardship spiritually of these leaders, it's incredibly
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important to listen, pay attention, to know that you're under discipleship.
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But it's also important to recognize when these institutions go off the rails, when they serve
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And I think that's really what you've dug into here, which is why it's gotten such the
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And, you know, you're not allowed to just blindly follow your leaders scripturally either.
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I mean, we do have that Berean model that we're actually supposed to search the scriptures
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and say, hey, does this align what this guy is saying?
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Does it align with what I'm finding here in the text?
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And that was really where the book came from, that it wasn't just me.
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There was so many of us going, you guys are saying a lot of things that don't align with
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And we don't have to, as a church, take a position on this.
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This is something that we can reason through as American citizens and come to a different
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conclusion about something like, say, what our immigration policy policies should be.
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It's not entirely clear what the Bible says our remain in Mexico policy should be.
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Well, we are going to dive deep into all the areas that the book touches, the arguments
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that you're making, the different areas which you're calling out.
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So, Megan, the sad truth is that all of our institutions are facing a very similar problem,
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that woke indoctrination has worked its way into all of these very trusted spheres, the
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things that make a large society like ours run.
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Most people have seen this in things like the Catholic Church and the mainline denominations.
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They're, you know, the Catholics are holding the line on certain areas, but, you know, obviously
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Mainline denominations seem to have crumbled very rapidly.
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It's a temple to LGBTQ priorities with a church attached.
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But evangelicals are often held up as this line, right?
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This firewall of Christianity that, while it may have issues here and there, is generally
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adhering as much as possible, especially on the social issues, to what the Bible actually
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But your book actually focuses on evangelical Christianity, showing that there is, unfortunately,
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a undermining current running through many of these large evangelical denominations.
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Yeah, and, you know, it's funny, I just recently listened to your episode on Kuthlu, Always
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Swims Left, and where you kind of went through conquest law.
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And I think a lot of this book focuses on that third law, that a bureaucracy, you should assume
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it is run by a cabal of people who are opposed to its interests.
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And in a way, that's kind of what this book is about.
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So, you know, a lot of the flack that I've been getting was over the title, Shepherds for
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Sale, one, I think a lot of it's been disingenuous.
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People are pretending that they don't understand that a title can be both literal and figurative,
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But where it came from was initially, I was researching a post-mortem from a left-wing
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funded think tank, New America, which receives funding from people like George Soros and Bill
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Gates. And they had done this sort of retrospective on why left-wing efforts to infiltrate evangelicals
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on the question of climate change had failed and what they were going to do differently in
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So they kind of showed like from 2010 to 2015, here's the efforts we put in, here's where
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it didn't succeed, and here's how we're going to do it differently.
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And one of the models that they explored, they called the rent and evangelical model, and
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they explicitly said what we want to do is sort of harness the influence of well-known
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high-profile evangelical leaders in the hopes that if we can get them on board with our climate
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change agenda and pushing these policies, that's then going to trickle down to the people
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And so, you know, when I workshopped it with friends, people didn't really like rent and
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And so that was how we ended up with Shepherds for Sale.
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So in part, it does explore, yes, there is some explicitly transactional things happening.
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There are left-wing foundations that are creating evangelical front groups that are then creating
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these astroturf campaigns to convince evangelicals, hey, all of us now agree that to love your neighbor
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means that we have to support the length for Borderville because that's the loving thing
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But then there's also sort of a soft selling in the sense that I do think you have a lot
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of these evangelical leaders who are simply sort of being guided in that direction from
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But wanting that positive notice from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic.
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And so they kind of have learned how to steer these leaders, to borrow a phrase from Joe
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It's like they have steering wheels on their back.
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And the Washington Post knows really well how to get them to go where they want to go.
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And if they don't like something they're doing, they'll wield big sticks in their coverage.
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And if they do like something they're doing, then they give them a lot of attaboys and praise
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for being the new reformer against racism, for example, in the Southern Baptist Convention,
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to get them to take on these new committee appointees that are committed to certain racial
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And so it's really this, over time, transforming these institutions.
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Yeah, it is important for people to understand that from the title, it's very easy for people
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to just say, oh, well, this is just somebody backing up dump trucks full of money to every
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In some cases, there is a very direct flow of funds.
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If not someone getting a giant check deposited in their bank account, it's going through their
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institutions, through their organizations, and that's happening.
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But the larger issue, and it is interesting because there is some overlap with the work
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I've done on bureaucracy here that you're referencing, but a lot of what you're highlighting
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It's this understanding that an evangelical leader, it's not just about leading inside
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And I can say this as an evangelical, so friendly fire here.
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Every pastor is putting together a leadership seminar.
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Every pastor is on a press tour to try to figure out how to kind of grow their influence
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And that's pretty much exactly the opposite of what a church is supposed to be.
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I don't want to say this is just an evangelical problem, because obviously there are, you
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know, the ability to peddle influence exists in all kinds of structures.
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But there does seem to be a particular attack vector that is brought in when, like you said,
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when you have kind of these Soros-funded organizations that really offer not just cash or funding,
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but the ability to connect to a wider network of elites.
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It's that desire to be the TED Talk pastor that I think brings a lot of people to this
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I'm going to use that TED Talk pastor, because I think that's a big part of it.
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And in fact, it wasn't that hard when I was going back through a lot of the research to
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pinpoint exactly that prestige appeal that you're referencing, because it was so obvious that
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You had people like Rick Warren, who became huge, writing that book, The Purpose Driven
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Life, and as such a big figure in the seeker-sensitive movement of the previous era, he was clearly
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dazzled by his friends at the WEF, at the Council on Foreign Relations, at the UN, and
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he proudly references their inviting him into their circle.
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So it definitely seemed like some heads were turned.
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In the book, I talk about Russell Moore, who's now the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today,
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apropos of nothing at all, mentioning that he was invited to Obama's White House Christmas
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Party in the first chapter, I think in the first few pages of his most recent book.
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So it was sort of this, they almost can't hide the little bit of glee at being included in
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these circles. And I get it, because we're all human, and there is something sort of thrilling
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about being included and noticed by the world's most powerful, most influential. But there's a cost
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in that to the church, because those people's priorities are then repackaged in some kind of
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churchy language, and it becomes the church's priorities.
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Yeah, it's very strange, because obviously, secularists, atheists, even many liberal Christians
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love to point out that at different times, the church has bent its will to power. You look at
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the popes, or you look at what happened with the National Socialist Movement in Germany, and why some
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leaders were willing to move along with power there. And you constantly hear, oh, well, the church can be
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influenced by the secular priorities, and they can invade everything. And then they pretend like that
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just stopped, I don't know, a couple decades ago, like that tendency of church leaders to conform
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themselves to be acceptable to power just ended. And it has no, there's no application to that with the
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Right, right. And that's what was so strange. Like, when I have, I've done a few talks where I start out,
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and I borrow heavily from Paul Kanger. So I always want to give him credit, because he was the one who did an
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amazing book on this called The Devil and Karl Marx, where he interviewed ex-communist Herbert
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Romerstein, and talked about how in the 1930s, 50s, in that period, they deliberately infiltrated,
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particularly the Episcopalian church, but the mainline churches, and that they targeted pastors,
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and they called them the biggest suckers of all the people that they targeted, because all you had to do
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was sort of use this Christian ease jargon, and put whatever the left wing priority was in some sort
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of, you know, proof texted Bible verse reference, and they would sort of fall for it. And so when I
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take that, and everyone sees it, and they go, Oh, yep. And I mean, we have a historical record of it.
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Congress, you know, held hearings on it. So we all recognize that that happened. And then I go,
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and now look how similar that is to what's happening today. And you get the immediate backlash of,
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oh, well, that's tinfoil hat, or, you know, or that's what I saw someone just yesterday saying,
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it's a hermeneutic of suspicion, to point out that maybe these same left wing funders that we know for
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sure are funneling money, money into the church, I have the IRS 990s, I can show you who this money is
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coming from, and who it's going to, and for what purpose. And by the way, the purpose is never
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something like handing out Bibles, or passing out school lunches, or clothing needy people,
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it's always something politically related. When you show them that, then it becomes this, well,
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this seems like you're getting very close to a ninth commandment violation, that you're speaking
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falsehoods. And I'm like, well, we know the money is going through, we have seen a historical pattern of
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this. And it's just that unwillingness to apply it to our current age.
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So let's get into some of the specifics, because you one of the things that's important about the
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book is I think you had something like 800 plus footnotes, like, like, like an absurd amount. So
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this book is heavily sourced, and it needs to be because obviously, it's coming under a lot of fire.
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So you need the receipts. And luckily, you took the time to invest in some of them, some of them. But
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now that we have kind of the surface level theory out of the way, what are some of the concrete
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things that are being done? You talked about climate change, talked about immigration,
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in fact, I had you on previously to talk about immigration. But what are some of the other areas
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where we can see direct influence from non-Christian actors trying to bring that influence,
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trying to change the ideology, you know, using the veneer of Christianity to push things towards
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a left wing political agenda? Well, in terms of an issue, I mean, one of the biggest is that LGBTQ
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issue. It's the last chapter in my book, because I felt like it would be the one that would be most
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shocking to people. And yes, it's also something that they would recognize that yes, this is the
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point of pain, where so many pastors are vulnerable because of where our culture is versus where the
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church should be, that there's such a stark divide between the two. So, you know, back in 2000, a guy
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named John Stryker, who was the heir to a hundred billion dollar surgical supply company, launched the
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Arcus Foundation. He was gay. He wanted to see gay marriage enacted. This was, of course, before
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Obergefell. So he wanted to see it enacted legislatively and poured all of this money into trying to get it
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across the finish line in a number of states. And it kept failing, even in California. And Stryker
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gave this interview to Philanthropy Magazine, where he said, we realized the problem we kept running
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into were people of religious faith, that they would mobilize, they would defeat it at the ballot
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box. And we realized that the problem was the churches, that if we were going to get serious about
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advancing our policy goals, we had to find a way to get at these people in the churches. And so he
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started funneling money into Catholic groups, to mainline denominations. A lot of millions went into
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just one ministry at the United Methodist Church to reform their doctrine. And of course, they just
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went through a major schism on gay marriage and ordination. So it does seem like that money was
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well spent. But as you look at that, he also started funneling money into evangelical groups.
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And they're very explicit. I mean, I just kind of present what they say, that their effort is to
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reform church doctrine, no matter how conservative the denomination, on matters of sexuality and gender
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to make them fully affirming. So I mean, just to give you one example, they started giving money to a
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group called the Reformation Project. And one of the things it does is it trains activists in what they
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would call is affirming theology, I would call it false teaching. And they basically explain away
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all the clobber verses, which are the verses that tell us that homosexuality is still a sin, yes.
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And that marriage is between a man and a woman and a man cannot become a woman. And those are the verses
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that they call clobber verses. And they do all this kind of torture doctrine to explain that away.
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And it's an intensive program. When you read it, it's hours and hours of reading a week. And then
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they have this, you know, two week long symposium. So it's almost like a master's level course. And then
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they also have this pastors in process program. And it is a confidential program designed to teach
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secretly affirming pastors how to slowly move their congregations in an affirming direction.
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So this kind of curriculum and these kind of activists have been coming in to a number of
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well-known, well-established, and trusted evangelical churches and institutions.
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I want to talk to you a little bit more about why this doesn't raise red flags,
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So as you were saying, some of these efforts cloak themselves a little better. Yeah, they wrap
00:21:00.640
themselves a little more doctrine. They use a shell organization to friend some of the stuff,
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but some of it is very explicit. It really does not pull punches about what it's planning to do.
00:21:10.380
And you would think that when an institution like that starts throwing money around and saying,
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hey, by the way, I'm here to explicitly change church doctrine in a way that it hasn't been
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understood for hundreds, if not thousands of years. I come from this background. These are my goals.
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That would set off a red flag somewhere. Someone would be like, no, that's not what we're doing here.
00:21:33.880
This would at least taint you if you took this money or participate in this program. And instead,
00:21:39.140
participating in those programs and taking those money seems to elevate your position in many of
00:21:44.280
these situations. What's going on with that dynamic? Yeah, no, it does. I think part of it
00:21:50.260
is that it's gone unexamined for so long. There has been reporting in this area, but for whatever
00:21:57.280
reason, and I've kind of been very transparent that I feel like I was pretty late to the game,
00:22:02.000
but the people who were doing that reporting were easily dismissed as discernment bloggers or they
00:22:08.100
just weren't very well known. So I think it was kind of easy to shrug it off. And part of the pushback
00:22:13.940
I'm receiving is it was just maybe for the first time, something at a high profile level that people
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felt exposed. And what I expected was more of an argument over why this is okay. And I'm starting to
00:22:25.280
get a little bit of that, but more what I have gotten is don't read her book. And so,
00:22:31.700
and I think that's part of why is because when it's exposed to the cold light of day,
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it's hard to explain to people why is the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission,
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which is the policy arm of the nation's largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist
00:22:47.900
convention, why is it taking money from an organization like Democracy Fund, which was
00:22:54.980
founded and funded by a Buddhist eBay founder, Pierre Omidyar? Why are they partnering with them
00:23:01.340
on something that is not a clear biblical mandate, like spreading the gospel, which the Democracy Fund
00:23:07.620
wouldn't fund anyway, but it's on something like studying how evangelicals intersect with politics.
00:23:13.860
And when you ask the ERLC that, what they have said so far is, well, it's a very small part of
00:23:20.260
our budget. And I don't think that's a really good answer for why are you partnering with a group that
00:23:25.380
also supports abortion, legal prostitution, transgender treatments on kids. This is not a kind of group that
00:23:34.000
Christians should be partnering with to learn about how to faithfully intersect with the political
00:23:39.240
sphere. That's a little mind blowing when you think about that, that's the kind of person that
00:23:43.040
they're doing that with. But what it does do is I think it is that prestige network is that it's
00:23:49.520
giving them access. And what it does is gets them in the room in a sense with some of these lawmakers
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and it puts them in a position to show the photo op to do the press release. And it looks impressive
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if you don't understand what the purpose of these meetings are. So yeah, you know, the head of the
00:24:09.340
ERLC, Brent Leatherwood is in the room with Mike Johnson. And that makes us look like, look,
00:24:15.400
our tithes are really going to having a big influence, but you're not looking at, but what
00:24:20.400
are these policies that they're pursuing? Because then you talk to the legislators and, you know,
00:24:24.760
for example, I mean, I've had people from Marsha Blackburn's office tell me, we never hear from
00:24:29.480
them. You know, when we were pushing this law in Tennessee in order to protect kids from
00:24:35.460
transgender surgeries and we didn't hear from them. So that's the part that I think people don't ask.
00:24:41.360
They just see the photo op. They assume that this is good and fine. And they're not looking into what
00:24:46.560
are the actual policies being pursued. You know, I have a lot of sympathy for the seeker centered
00:24:54.280
church. I understand the drive to want to reach people who otherwise wouldn't walk into a church,
00:25:00.740
feel jaded from experience. I think largely a lot of this is cultural momentum. Most people haven't
00:25:05.640
even run into a lot of Christians in their life at this point, sadly, due to the way that Christianity
00:25:11.120
is weighing in the United States. But basically they watched a bunch of TV that told them that
00:25:15.980
the church is like this or the Christians are like this. And so, but either way, I get the
00:25:20.880
seeker sensitive movement and what its aim is, but there does seem to be a particular vulnerability
00:25:26.680
to it that it's almost like, you know, you basically you've taught that Christianity is
00:25:32.120
being nice. And so whenever, you know, an issue comes up, whether it's climate change or immigration
00:25:37.460
or LGBTQ or whatever, the default is, well, the Bible probably just wants you to be nice
00:25:42.160
because you've worked, you've worked so hard to move, to kind of smooth all the rough edges
00:25:47.120
off of the doctrine that whenever these more secular incarnations come in, there's basically
00:25:53.100
no friction between them and what the church is ultimately teaching or what many of the leaders
00:25:57.480
in the church would like them to be teaching. Yeah. And what's funny is that biblically, that's not
00:26:02.580
even the model that Jesus gives us. I always like to point to those moments where some person will
00:26:08.620
come up to him in the gospels and ask him a question and seems to really want to be his
00:26:14.000
follower. Like, you know, good teacher, what must I do to be saved? And Jesus says the hardest
00:26:18.420
things like go sell all your possessions and not because everyone needs to sell all their
00:26:23.720
possessions, but because he's testing that person. Like he's continually in a way throwing roadblocks
00:26:28.520
to see how serious are you? How serious are you seeking? Because better for people to count the cost
00:26:34.420
early on and walk away. So we don't really see this seeker sensitive model in the gospels of make
00:26:40.400
everything really comfortable. And maybe over time, they'll keep coming back to this very comforting
00:26:47.240
environment that looks just like the rest of the world. And eventually they'll come to Christ.
00:26:53.020
So, I mean, I do kind of object to the seeker sensitive model. I think that it was destructive
00:26:59.000
in a lot of ways and not least of which is that that's actually not the purpose of the church.
00:27:04.620
The purpose of the church and the gathering body is for the saints to be equipped. We are supposed to be
00:27:10.620
grounded in that deep doctrine. We are supposed to be taught this wisdom that is not just milk,
00:27:16.520
but meat. We're supposed to be growing in that. And if we're always doing the things that are just to
00:27:20.760
attract the seeker, then the saints are being starved. And in the book, I put it as these sheep
00:27:26.580
are being starved in order to attract goats. We want to attract goats. That's great. But the model is
00:27:34.840
you equip the saints and then they go out and they spread the gospel. The church itself is for
00:27:41.220
Christians. And we have forgotten that. And I think that's a big part of where so much of this has come
00:27:46.060
from. Because if you don't, in essence, see the church as being for Christians, then it makes sense,
00:27:53.360
I guess, that you would start letting not just seekers come in, but any old person who wants to have
00:28:01.660
Yeah. And that's pretty difficult, right? We see this over and over again. This is a real problem of,
00:28:07.000
I think, understanding for a lot of Christians. They see Bible passages talking about loving your
00:28:13.620
enemy, talking about loving your neighbor as yourself. They think that these are all verses
00:28:19.600
of radical inclusion at all times. And so it's very difficult to draw any lines, right? It's, well,
00:28:26.820
if I'm supposed to love these people, then something can't just be for me. It can't just be for my family.
00:28:31.620
It can't just be for believers. It has to be for everybody. And we can't draw lines about behavior
00:28:36.100
or inclusion. Because ultimately, the mission is to just be maximally inclusive in every moment.
00:28:43.480
I think if you look at the history of the church, that's obviously not the case. I think that there's
00:28:48.580
pretty good argument to be made across many iterations of this game that that's not how this
00:28:55.680
works. But that does seem to be something that is just very easily foisted upon a lot of evangelicals.
00:29:02.300
In many ways, the laity and the leadership have radically different political leanings. But
00:29:08.860
because the leadership's leaning is always to maximize their inclusivity, which again, I think
00:29:14.740
does link itself to managerialism and the expansion of bureaucracy, that means that there's always a
00:29:20.880
reason to go ahead and disassemble any of the, or excuse away, any of the restrictions that
00:29:26.620
scripture might place on people's actions or inclusion in the church.
00:29:30.140
Yeah. And it's funny when you hear that, love your neighbor as yourself, what we forget is that
00:29:36.720
the actual picture of that, the Good Samaritan, none of us are capable of that. Like the purpose of
00:29:42.780
that story is to show us, you cannot love people like this story. No one loves people like this story.
00:29:49.520
I mean, I once heard John MacArthur sort of break down the expense that this fictional Good Samaritan
00:29:56.360
would have gone to, to take care of this person. And it was astronomical. And that was the point of
00:30:01.440
the story that none of us love like that. Only God loves like that. And that is why we need grace
00:30:09.100
and we need a savior and a sacrifice because by law, we're never going to meet that standard.
00:30:14.440
And that was the point of the story. And I thought that was sort of a mind blowing moment for me to
00:30:18.640
look at the story in a different way, which doesn't mean that we don't love our neighbor. We do.
00:30:22.440
That is the law and we should strive to it, for it, however imperfectly. But part of what we realize
00:30:29.100
is that they have sort of shaped which neighbors were to love too. And that was what I wanted to
00:30:34.480
get at in the book, which is, okay, you're to love this neighbor that you don't know. And it's not
00:30:40.360
really your neighbor in some other country who's traveling across the Darien Gap to come into the
00:30:46.640
United States for some purpose we don't know. And you're to be loving to that person. Your neighbor who
00:30:50.880
lives right next door and maybe a blue collar guy whose wages are going to be depressed by
00:30:55.840
continuing to allow this system to run, you are not to love that guy, even though he is your literal
00:31:01.300
neighbor. And so it's this spiritual manipulation of saying that you're not allowed to count these
00:31:08.540
costs, even though there's always trade-offs, right? We know that if we enact this policy or if we let
00:31:13.300
this go on, there are going to be negative trade-offs that are going to detrimentally impact my
00:31:18.000
neighbor. And so that was a big part of what I wanted to do was just arm people to cross-examine
00:31:25.040
these just cheap applications of scripture that don't even get at how are multiple groups impacted
00:31:33.200
by these arguments. Yeah, there is unfortunately this real problem in many Christian churches where
00:31:41.680
the attempt to love others as means to dissolve the relationship that actually was illustrative
00:31:49.840
of how you should love. So love someone, you know, you love your neighbor as yourself means well destroy
00:31:55.440
yourself. Love, you know, trying to love everyone as your neighbor means destroying your neighbor,
00:32:00.160
right? Go ahead. You know, how would you love your neighbor? Well, make sure to bring in a bunch of
00:32:03.840
people who will take his job, you know, sell his kids fentanyl, you know, you know, commit some violent act
00:32:09.540
against that. That's not how you would love your neighbor, but by making everyone everywhere our
00:32:14.740
neighbor without first caring about the relations closest to us, without having that subsidiarity of
00:32:20.160
actual social spheres that we're supposed to build first, we can excuse terrible behavior to those
00:32:26.260
around us. And that's how you end up with a lot of these pastors who, like you said, you know, would
00:32:31.540
talk about the importance of loving someone at this incredible arm's length, this telescopic
00:32:37.540
philanthropy of someone, you know, in the middle of Central America, but couldn't be bothered to love
00:32:43.100
Joe the plumber because he checked the box for the wrong guy during the election.
00:32:47.580
Well, it's killing me because I need to look up which Dickens character this is. I've mentioned
00:32:52.320
it before, but there is a character in one of Dickens novels. I want to say it was like Dombey and
00:32:57.400
Sons or something, but she is a mother who is, she lives on this reputation of being so devoted to
00:33:05.400
missions and loving people on the mission field. She sends money, she does all these things. Her
00:33:10.900
kids are in rags and totally neglected. And that was that sharp, satirical Charles Dickens point
00:33:17.100
that this woman is totally neglecting her children in order to puff up her reputation as somebody who
00:33:24.460
loves the foreigners on the mission field. And I went, that's so much of what we see in the church
00:33:30.900
today. We're neglecting the people of the church. We're neglecting the people in our country in order
00:33:35.960
to puff ourselves up and show that, well, we love these people in, uh, on the border who are coming
00:33:42.040
here, or we love, um, because you'll see this by the way, even on climate change, it, and I, I disagree
00:33:47.880
with this, but the argument will be, we have to enact these climate change policies to show that we love
00:33:52.640
the least of these in the emerging world where they are more impacted by the weather than we are.
00:33:58.600
So we therefore have to enact these policies that are incredibly detrimental to again, my blue collar
00:34:04.420
neighbor who maybe can't afford to have his gas cost a couple more bucks per gallon, uh, because of
00:34:10.560
carbon emission regulations and taxes. So those are the kinds of things that it feels like if you bring
00:34:16.760
it up, then you're accused of being political. And I'm like, okay, wait a minute, you introduced policy
00:34:22.960
here and now I'm going to cross-examine this. And then it's a while you're bringing politics into the
00:34:26.800
church. Yeah. Speaking of that, that's really important. The, the, the, the idea of politics
00:34:32.440
in the church at all is, is its own issue. You know, I'm not going to make you denounce democracy
00:34:39.220
live on my show today, but, but one of my many arguments against it is that the, the need for
00:34:46.420
every individual to have a voice in politics necessarily means that politics, politics must
00:34:53.420
penetrate every social sphere, every family, every education, every religious, uh, institution is
00:34:59.840
actually an opportunity to battle over politics inside the state. And so we ended up in this
00:35:04.760
scenario where ideally, right. The, the way that things should flow is that you and I are Christians.
00:35:10.060
We live in a Christian society. The church has specific doctrines. The Bible has things that we
00:35:15.320
should understand about how we live our life. And because those are the organic faith traditions of our
00:35:21.060
civilization, they reflect themselves then in the legislation and politics that exists inside the
00:35:27.500
nation. But instead, because we have this ideological civil war driving itself through the middle of our
00:35:34.840
nation, every one of our interactions instead is an opportunity for politics to manifest itself and be
00:35:40.620
read in as a doctrine for say the church. And so we have the scenario where it feels like the Bible is
00:35:47.000
being read under this hermeneutic of the civil rights movement, right? Like that's, that's, that's the
00:35:52.400
actual doc. That's the actual way we should understand all doctrine has to be filtered through kind of
00:35:57.400
this political understanding. And at that point it becomes very difficult. I think even as people who would
00:36:03.720
prefer to put the Bible first would prefer for that to be the source than a political understanding,
00:36:09.320
uh, to, to be in any scenario in which the, the politics is not entering the church because anytime
00:36:15.400
right-wing politics enters the church, that's politics in the church. Anytime the left-wing politics enters
00:36:20.760
the church, well, that's just, that's just the Bible. That's just being nice to people.
00:36:24.720
Well, and it's, it's weird to me when you say that because part of the way that has manifested itself and
00:36:31.440
part of the pushback I've gotten is because I critiqued, um, like for example, this YouTube apologist had a
00:36:39.480
climate change video in which he said, the church cannot not talk about this. And my initial reaction
00:36:45.400
the first time I watched the video was why not? Why can the church not talk about this? I don't want
00:36:49.480
to talk about climate change and I'm a church and I'm not, here's me not talking about it. So I don't
00:36:54.660
understand why that's not acceptable, but the way he brought it in and I don't mind, you know, if some
00:36:59.720
apologist wants to have a position on climate change, that's fine. But the issue was that it had to be
00:37:05.960
brought in under this Christian mandate where yes, politics is infecting everything. And so it
00:37:11.960
wasn't presented as, Hey, here's what I think is going on with the weather. And here's what I think
00:37:15.980
the policy should be. It was, we as Christians have to care about this issue. We as Christians,
00:37:22.020
more than anyone should be known for caring about climate change. And, you know, I'll be honest.
00:37:28.780
I don't know if that's necessarily always, um, just the phenomenon that you're talking about,
00:37:34.640
the overarching umbrella of democracy and how that impacts us because some of it, and maybe it's
00:37:39.860
because I'm the cynical journalist. I do think they know that they're doing that because I'm
00:37:44.240
going, okay, come on, really? We can't not talk about climate change. It just seems a little
00:37:49.040
ridiculous to me in the church to say that, that it's not an issue that we can just agree to disagree
00:37:53.920
on. And let's get back to, you know, reading the texts that we're exploring this week in our, um,
00:37:59.900
sermon. So there's a little part of me that's like, I don't know that they're that, um, clueless
00:38:05.860
about how their political atmosphere is impacting them. But I also think when they do this, part of
00:38:15.400
what they're doing is seeking a submission from those of us in the church. So it's not just, um,
00:38:23.140
Hey, we all get to have a voice about all of these things. It's a,
00:38:26.120
you need to submit on what we have now collectively decided our voice is going to be.
00:38:32.080
Yeah. Well, there, there's a real part of the leftist, uh, I think ritual of faith, you know,
00:38:38.620
that, uh, is really bringing, uh, Christians to heal. Right. I think that's like an important
00:38:45.280
part of any struggle for them is that moment in which they get the church to bend the knee when they
00:38:50.720
finally get, because, because they recognized Christianity as a real opposing cultural force.
00:38:56.820
One of the few, you know, leftist ideology is artificial. It has to be, it is the inversion
00:39:03.380
in many ways of the hierarchy that, that God has laid out. And so it's, it's, it's highly separated
00:39:09.620
from any organic understanding of the world around us. And because Christianity itself is grounded in
00:39:15.180
truth, it really is one of the few things that's capable of pushing back. So every time they get
00:39:21.500
one of these wins, every times they subvert a doctrine, it's not just, you know, defeating,
00:39:26.320
it's not just a political win. It's almost, it's almost like they themselves are going through a
00:39:30.880
political sacrament that is involved in any, any given struggle they have over the new civil rights
00:39:37.140
issue of the day. Yeah. And I do think that that's why you see the parallels and it was impossible
00:39:43.540
to get away from amusement. As I was writing suddenly, as the Me Too movement was hitting in
00:39:49.640
2018, about six months later, you see it manifest itself in the church. And I'm like, are you telling
00:39:54.820
me that it's just a big coincidence that we now have church too, as a movement following Me Too?
00:40:01.080
And all of these guys are acting like it's entirely organic that we now believe we have an abuse crisis
00:40:06.740
in the church. Which if you read my book, I don't believe that there was a crisis. Abuse is bad.
00:40:12.140
Let's clear that up. Abuse is always bad. Don't abuse people. But, but it seemed to me, one, it was
00:40:19.620
personally advantageous for some people to whip up this notion of an abuse crisis. But I think so many
00:40:27.460
went along with it because it was this flashpoint in the culture. And so because Me Too had happened,
00:40:32.840
we had to find a way to say the church too is involved in this issue that was, you know, a huge
00:40:38.680
cultural moment. And the same thing with Black Lives Matter. Suddenly when that happened and it
00:40:43.120
became the dominant interest of corporate America and Hollywood, the church had to find a way to say,
00:40:50.380
we also are involved in this movement. So rather than being distinct and saying, actually what sets
00:40:55.480
us apart is how we don't take part in these political movements. One, I think that's a good
00:41:00.800
witness because it shows that we are about something eternal and separate from the culture.
00:41:05.180
And there is something otherworldly about Christianity and it should look a little
00:41:09.820
otherworldly. So I think that would have been a good thing. But instead what we see is just this
00:41:14.760
constant rush to catch up and be involved in it. Speaking of BLM, and I do love that, the idea of
00:41:21.620
kind of the TED Talk pastor chasing whatever the social trend is on the left. Oh no, I have that
00:41:27.380
problem too. Me, I'm one of these guys that needs to go through this struggle session.
00:41:30.940
Please include me. But speaking of BLM specifically, I think a very obvious thing that has
00:41:37.520
happened, and of course this is true of our wider culture, but interesting because it's happened so
00:41:43.120
powerfully in the church, is this focus on racism as the ultimate sin, right? The deepest sin that one
00:41:49.780
could have. Now, I don't think you should treat people badly in general, and I certainly don't think
00:41:54.700
you should hate them because of their ethnicity or the color of their skin. But that is not the worst
00:42:01.080
sin you could commit. In fact, I can and would argue that a racist who is like a good family man and
00:42:08.360
cares deeply about his family, takes care of his kids, otherwise serves his church, is probably doing
00:42:13.820
a lot better than somebody who, say, is an abusive father or has abandoned his children, not cared for
00:42:20.340
them, but is really accepting of the guy down the street who happens to have a different skin color.
00:42:24.960
Like this idea that racism is the most important sin, and you go through talking about the need to
00:42:31.320
remove Southern from Southern Baptists because we know that the South is just nothing but racist down
00:42:37.680
here, and you've got to purge that from even the name because it might have negative connotations,
00:42:43.460
really speaks to the way in which that zeitgeist has gripped anything coming close to actual
00:42:48.520
spiritual truth on the topic. Yeah, and part of what kind of blew up on Twitter this week was
00:42:54.980
my talking about the president, the then president of the SVC and a megachurch pastor, a guy named J.D.
00:43:02.640
Greer. At the moment this stuff was happening in the culture, that there was this effort to bring
00:43:07.960
down Confederate statues, and not just Confederate statues, but any founding father connected to
00:43:13.660
slavery in any way, instead of seeing church leadership go, hang on a minute, actually, here's
00:43:19.540
what we need to know doctrinally. We are all fallible in many ways, and the complexity of the human heart
00:43:26.440
is such that, yes, these could be great men who yet were willing to overlook a great evil, and by the
00:43:33.240
way, we see the same thing in our society today, and we could talk about that this is the fallen flesh.
00:43:39.040
There are so many possibilities. Instead, what they did was run out and say, we are going to change the
00:43:44.620
name of the Southern Baptist Convention, and we prefer it to be the Great Commission Baptists,
00:43:50.500
because we don't want Southern in there anymore, or they retired the gavel of Robert E. Lee's chaplain,
00:43:58.860
a guy named John Broaddus, because of his association with slavery. What they could have done,
00:44:04.540
actually, is teach about how John Broaddus himself repented of ever supporting slavery, and in fact,
00:44:12.200
he challenged the Southerners of his day, and think about this, in his own culture. So he wasn't up in
00:44:18.320
the North doing this, telling the Northerners, look at these racist Southerners. He wasn't doing that.
00:44:23.740
He was a pastor in the South, by the way, a guy that Charles Spurgeon called one of the greatest
00:44:29.920
living preachers. And in the South, he rebuked them for their continued racism and basically said,
00:44:36.440
I don't remember the exact quote, but if you are not taking joy in the worship of Black Christians,
00:44:43.500
then that is a problem for you, and you need to repent of this. And that is a really, you know,
00:44:48.800
broad paraphrase. But that was essentially what John Broaddus did. So rather than confronting our
00:44:54.160
current culture and saying, look, these issues are more complex, we went, let's retire our gavel
00:45:00.800
too, because everyone's getting rid of all this Confederate memorabilia and these statues and
00:45:07.000
anything connected with that period in history. And one, it also seems to suggest in a really
00:45:13.300
dishonest way that we are their moral superiors when we should not feel that way, when we have a much
00:45:20.220
greater evil in abortion happening in our culture right now. And so anyway, that was part of what
00:45:28.480
was so frustrating to me when I was working on the book and frustrating to me now. And the pushback
00:45:32.260
is that there's been this effort to go, well, that's not why we wanted to change. I didn't push to
00:45:38.560
want to change the name. I'm like, yes, you did. Well, that wasn't why I wanted to retire the gavel.
00:45:44.360
I'm like, come on, man. It was right as the George Floyd riots were going on. And by the way,
00:45:49.620
when the Washington Post cheered you for retiring that gavel, you took the cheers. You didn't correct
00:45:55.100
them then and say, that's not why I did it. Right. Yeah. So wait, hold on. There's a much
00:46:00.080
deeper issue. I was convicted, you know, for an entirely separate reason. No, you just took the
00:46:04.240
praise, right, and walked away. So one thing more before we get to the questions from the audience,
00:46:10.420
I wanted to ask you, Christian nationalism is obviously, I think, more a focus of the left
00:46:18.020
than anything else. It's really important for them to have their handmaid's tale
00:46:22.720
kind of narrative, right? It's only a matter of time before, you know, all of Christianity rises
00:46:29.520
up and turns every woman into a slave and all these things. This is kind of their, it's important
00:46:35.240
to rile up their base this way. But obviously, Christian nationalism is a real movement. It is
00:46:40.960
gaining traction. I think in many ways, people see this as the counter to a lot of the left-wing
00:46:47.600
infiltration that has entered into the church. But it also comes with its own issues because,
00:46:54.160
I mean, it has to be explicitly political. That is the intention there. What do you think about the
00:47:01.660
tension between these forces and the way that the left is using this momentum, kind of this
00:47:07.800
counter, I wouldn't say counter-revolution, but this counterforce inside kind of the current
00:47:15.100
Christian church as a way for them to spin out their most, you know, histrionic objections to
00:47:21.580
Christian doctrine? Yeah. And it's, I listen to the arguments and I like to listen to them.
00:47:28.120
When I hear someone like Doug Wilson sort of go, okay, look, here are our choices. We can have
00:47:33.360
globalism, tribalism, or nationalism. That makes sense to me. Yes, I pick, you know, B. I want
00:47:40.720
nationalism. I don't want tribalism or globalism. And then it can be a pagan nationalism, or it can be
00:47:48.620
an Islamic nationalism, or it can be a Christian nationalism. That too makes sense to me. Yes,
00:47:53.920
I want that. And so I understand those arguments. I think what is hard is when you continually try to
00:48:01.040
explain to people, nobody here is talking about theocracy. Nobody's talking about that. Because,
00:48:05.840
you know, no matter how many times you say it, it's like that friends clip that people always
00:48:11.260
play with Joey and Phoebe, where she says a French word, he repeats it. But every time,
00:48:17.860
the third time, he's just going to once again say theocracy. So you're like, Christian, here's what
00:48:22.300
we want. Yes, yes, yes. No, theocracy. So I have questioned whether it is ever going to work
00:48:28.780
to lean into that term. And I get it. I get people like Wilson, and I think you who have said,
00:48:35.040
this is a term we can work with. It's something that means something, and we can rally around it.
00:48:39.640
But then I look at the success that the left has had, sort of whipping up a fear around it,
00:48:46.180
when I know that the people who are using it in a positive way don't mean it the way they're saying
00:48:50.700
they mean it. And I just, I don't know if it's ever going to be effective, or if that specter of,
00:48:57.500
you know, Spanish Inquisition theocracy is always going to be there.
00:49:03.700
Yeah, I've actually made the argument that while I agree with many of the aims, I too take issue
00:49:08.360
with the moniker, because I do think it's largely one manufactured for left wing manipulation.
00:49:14.780
It's very clear that the left started pushing that term, and they wanted that term adopted,
00:49:19.100
because what they wanted to say was white Christian nationalism.
00:49:21.760
That's what they actually wanted to imply. And ultimately, I think also there's some issues,
00:49:27.640
and this is a much wider discussion, but I think it also cuts off some critical discussion about
00:49:32.400
what a nation actually is. You know, Ethiopia is a Christian nation. Armenia is a Christian nation.
00:49:38.020
So what does it mean for America to be a Christian nation? It's necessary. We are a Christian nation.
00:49:43.980
We have to be a Christian nation, but I don't think it's sufficient. And so I think that in many ways
00:49:48.680
it gives some people the ability, it has the messy properties of being stolen by your enemies in the
00:49:54.240
worst case scenario, and not sufficiently particular enough to help your friends guide themselves in
00:50:00.640
the direction that they might need to go. But I am largely sympathetic to these guys. You know,
00:50:05.120
they're going to call anything theocracy, because the way we've framed government today is,
00:50:11.200
if it's not wildly secular, which we now know just means progressively humanist, then it's a
00:50:17.100
theocracy. But what we have now is actually a theocracy. We are actually ruled by a progressive
00:50:22.680
ideology in every way that defines every absolute moment of our lives. So I don't think we're in
00:50:28.820
danger of being in a theocracy. At worst, we'd move from one to another. It wouldn't have anything
00:50:34.220
to do with falling into this. Right. That's a good point.
00:50:37.820
All right. Well, if you have a few minutes, I'd like to switch over to the questions of
00:50:41.960
the people. But before we do, can you let people know where to pick up the book, find your other
00:50:47.700
Yes. So Shepherds for Sale, How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda. You can
00:50:54.300
obviously get it at all the book retailers, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Target, Walmart, what have you.
00:51:00.700
You can find me on Twitter at X, I guess. I still can't say that.
00:51:04.860
It's Twitter at Meg Basham. I'm on Instagram at journalist Megan Basham. And you can find me at
00:51:13.240
The Daily Wire and on Morning Wire, usually several times a week.
00:51:16.740
Excellent. All right. So let's see here. We've got glow in the dark. He says,
00:51:20.100
30 pieces of silver is an old story in the Bible. Yep. Very sad, but very true. Let's see here.
00:51:27.340
Creeper Weirdo says, does the book have any thoughts on Christian nationalism? We kind of touched on this,
00:51:31.640
but is there any additional addressing of that in the book? I know that's not really the focus.
00:51:35.080
Yeah. At one point I sort of thought about maybe I would do a chapter called Who's Afraid
00:51:40.020
of Christian Nationalism? But when I started sketching it out, it just felt like it didn't
00:51:46.500
Yeah. I think that's right. Glow in the Dark here says, the desire to be seen as the high priest has
00:51:51.380
been the downfall of many priests and clergy. How many times has the bureaucracy of the temple failed?
00:51:57.340
And, you know, this is an interesting, this is a bit of an interesting problem because one of the
00:52:02.620
advantages in theory of Protestantism and specifically many evangelical strains is it is supposed to be
00:52:10.760
decentralized, right? You don't, you can't really rot from the head down in the way that sometimes the
00:52:15.240
Catholic Church has because you're not beholden to a particular structure. But at the same time,
00:52:20.700
that means you also don't have the ability to enforce kind of doctrinal compliance across all of these
00:52:26.560
different churches. And yet still, we see that these Protestant churches have assembled for
00:52:32.240
themselves in many ways, this bureaucratic centralization, despite the entire point being
00:52:39.420
Yeah. And I don't know if there's a way to get out of this cycle. It's nothing new. We go back to
00:52:44.640
the 1920s, look at Machen, look at, you know, splitting off founding Westminster. And I don't know if that
00:52:51.060
isn't just the inevitable cycle that these, we found, and again, this goes back to Kutlu swimming
00:52:57.620
left. We found these strong institutions. They're very on mission. And because of that, they're effective
00:53:03.900
and they grow. And then eventually they become sporadic. People who want to harness the power of
00:53:08.960
that institution come in and then it starts to wither. And then we break off and found new institutions.
00:53:14.320
And it's just this ongoing cycle that you see. And I don't know if there's a way out of that.
00:53:18.180
Yeah. Obviously, I agree with that quite a bit. I think that this, what we're looking at is a
00:53:22.860
perpetual problem of human organization. One that is tied into the human condition. And so this
00:53:30.300
constant cycle of building up, centralizing, creating these institutions, recognizing the
00:53:38.180
problems that have infiltrated them, breaking away, building up. This is just part of life. This is part
00:53:44.880
of being vigilant. And there's no ultimate answer. There can only be the eternal vigilance and the
00:53:50.080
willingness to take action. Once you recognize things have kind of gotten to this point, I think.
00:53:55.180
All right. Let's see. Glow in the dark here with lots of questions. Arrogance and prideful saying,
00:54:00.440
we are better than our forefathers. We are beyond Judas. With that mindset, you guarantee that you will
00:54:05.600
be Judas. How many times will the rooster crow before you realize? Yeah, I think plenty. Again,
00:54:10.660
that cycle is constant and you never quite escape it. Creeper weirdo who says, Jesus just said, be
00:54:16.780
nice, cringe. Just pure cringe. Listen, I went over so much cringe while researching this book. My life
00:54:24.300
was just cringe for months. Absolutely. Oh, I think that was supposed to be gospel. The gospel isn't
00:54:31.360
for everyone. It's for his people. Gospel is meant to divide the wheat from the... Sorry,
00:54:37.940
I can't read at the moment. The gospel should help everyone who can't take... But can't be... Can't take
00:54:43.980
root in everyone. Then we have a creeper reader here. This is Doug Wilson. Really resonates with me
00:54:50.320
personally. Yeah, I think Doug Wilson is a very interesting guy. Has a lot of important things to
00:54:56.000
say. And was very kind in endorsing my book. So, you know, I appreciate that as well from Pastor Doug.
00:55:02.100
And then we have finally here, Fred Dillon, who says, spreading the word and social activism
00:55:07.040
have quite literally been conflated in the reform dogma as the intentional expense of ordo amoris.
00:55:16.380
Church leaders find their start in progressive institutions not right and the money follows.
00:55:23.380
Yeah, that is an interesting thing to think about. You know, the number of kind of these influential
00:55:28.440
leaders who start attached more to, I guess, progressive institutions than perhaps,
00:55:34.280
you know, directly in the spreading of the word. Yeah. And I think that's why there's such a targeting
00:55:40.200
of the seminaries. And maybe that's how there becomes this split between the laity and the clergy and
00:55:47.240
the people in the pews and the people, you know, in the pulpits is that even looking at what would be
00:55:53.840
considered conservative seminaries. So many, I mean, you would have been shocked to find so much
00:56:00.400
of this progressive, whether it was CRT or the climate change stuff coming into what are considered
00:56:06.220
very conservative seminaries. So they're putting people into the pulpits who are coming out of them.
00:56:12.000
Whereas, you know, your uncle armed with his Bible knows his Bible really well, but he's not being
00:56:17.520
inculcated in all of these things that are in the seminary. And there's, you know, a big part of the
00:56:22.000
perpetual divide. Yeah, absolutely. All right, guys, well, we're going to go ahead and wrap this
00:56:26.560
up. I want to thank Megan so much for coming on. I think it was a great talk. Make sure that you
00:56:30.800
check out her book and every all of her social media. Also, if this is your first time on the
00:56:35.860
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00:56:39.720
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00:56:43.960
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00:56:49.400
The Total State, along with Megan's, you can do that on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million,
00:56:54.100
all those great places. Thank you for watching, guys. And as always, we'll talk to you next time.