The Auron MacIntyre Show - Shepherds for Sale ｜ Megan Basham ｜ 8⧸14⧸24

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00:00:30.280 Hey everybody, how's it going?

00:00:32.220 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:33.800 I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.

00:00:37.860 Most people have noticed that, unfortunately, woke ideology has worked its way into every

00:00:42.640 major institution in the United States.

00:00:45.400 And sadly, churches are not really any kind of exception when it comes to this level of

00:00:50.880 infiltration.

00:00:52.180 My guest today has written an excellent book about what has happened, especially inside

00:00:57.560 the evangelical church.

00:00:58.920 It's called Shepherds for Sale, and I believe it has now made the New York Times bestseller

00:01:03.820 list.

00:01:04.480 Megan Bashman, thanks for coming on.

00:01:06.760 Thanks for having me.

00:01:07.580 And yes, it has to my shock.

00:01:10.580 Well, one of the downsides and upsides of having a book that hits a target this wide is it certainly

00:01:16.500 gets a lot of attention.

00:01:17.860 I know you've seen a lot of pushback recently.

00:01:19.720 I have.

00:01:20.680 And so my husband keeps reminding me, you know, that's probably why it made the New York

00:01:23.700 Times list because so many people are angry about it.

00:01:26.940 So maybe I should be glad.

00:01:28.480 I don't know.

00:01:29.780 Well, it's controversial in the sense that obviously it's drawing a lot of attention,

00:01:35.200 but I think it's also critical because this is an area, and you point this out in the book

00:01:39.880 repeatedly, very often the first rule is just or, you know, the 11th commandment, I think

00:01:46.020 you call it, is don't ever challenge church leadership.

00:01:49.640 And obviously when you're under the stewardship spiritually of these leaders, it's incredibly

00:01:54.980 important to listen, pay attention, to know that you're under discipleship.

00:01:59.200 But it's also important to recognize when these institutions go off the rails, when they serve

00:02:03.560 something other than the church.

00:02:05.280 And I think that's really what you've dug into here, which is why it's gotten such the

00:02:09.560 pushback that it has.

00:02:11.520 Yes.

00:02:12.100 And, you know, you're not allowed to just blindly follow your leaders scripturally either.

00:02:16.820 I mean, we do have that Berean model that we're actually supposed to search the scriptures

00:02:20.060 and say, hey, does this align what this guy is saying?

00:02:22.920 Does it align with what I'm finding here in the text?

00:02:25.520 And that was really where the book came from, that it wasn't just me.

00:02:28.760 There was so many of us going, you guys are saying a lot of things that don't align with

00:02:33.480 the text or where the text is not super clear.

00:02:36.660 And we don't have to, as a church, take a position on this.

00:02:39.800 This is something that we can reason through as American citizens and come to a different

00:02:44.720 conclusion about something like, say, what our immigration policy policies should be.

00:02:49.380 It's not entirely clear what the Bible says our remain in Mexico policy should be.

00:02:55.400 All right.

00:02:57.180 Well, we are going to dive deep into all the areas that the book touches, the arguments

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00:04:34.140 So, Megan, the sad truth is that all of our institutions are facing a very similar problem,

00:04:42.400 that woke indoctrination has worked its way into all of these very trusted spheres, the

00:04:47.420 things that make a large society like ours run.

00:04:51.000 Most people have seen this in things like the Catholic Church and the mainline denominations.

00:04:57.100 They're, you know, the Catholics are holding the line on certain areas, but, you know, obviously 0.99

00:05:01.320 have some issues in some others.

00:05:03.480 Mainline denominations seem to have crumbled very rapidly.

00:05:07.000 In fact, in many cases, they're just joke.

00:05:09.100 It's a temple to LGBTQ priorities with a church attached.

00:05:13.660 But evangelicals are often held up as this line, right?

00:05:19.220 This firewall of Christianity that, while it may have issues here and there, is generally 0.93

00:05:25.200 adhering as much as possible, especially on the social issues, to what the Bible actually

00:05:29.540 says.

00:05:30.140 But your book actually focuses on evangelical Christianity, showing that there is, unfortunately,

00:05:35.940 a undermining current running through many of these large evangelical denominations.

00:05:40.880 Yeah, and, you know, it's funny, I just recently listened to your episode on Kuthlu, Always

00:05:46.940 Swims Left, and where you kind of went through conquest law.

00:05:50.640 And I think a lot of this book focuses on that third law, that a bureaucracy, you should assume

00:05:57.900 it is run by a cabal of people who are opposed to its interests.

00:06:02.100 And in a way, that's kind of what this book is about.

00:06:05.200 So, you know, a lot of the flack that I've been getting was over the title, Shepherds for

00:06:09.740 Sale, one, I think a lot of it's been disingenuous.

00:06:13.340 People are pretending that they don't understand that a title can be both literal and figurative,

00:06:17.440 and the title is both.

00:06:19.420 But where it came from was initially, I was researching a post-mortem from a left-wing

00:06:27.480 funded think tank, New America, which receives funding from people like George Soros and Bill

00:06:32.540 Gates. And they had done this sort of retrospective on why left-wing efforts to infiltrate evangelicals

00:06:40.860 on the question of climate change had failed and what they were going to do differently in

00:06:44.940 the future to do better.

00:06:46.320 So they kind of showed like from 2010 to 2015, here's the efforts we put in, here's where

00:06:51.420 it didn't succeed, and here's how we're going to do it differently.

00:06:53.860 And one of the models that they explored, they called the rent and evangelical model, and

00:06:59.220 they explicitly said what we want to do is sort of harness the influence of well-known

00:07:05.020 high-profile evangelical leaders in the hopes that if we can get them on board with our climate

00:07:11.180 change agenda and pushing these policies, that's then going to trickle down to the people

00:07:16.000 in the pews.

00:07:17.360 And so, you know, when I workshopped it with friends, people didn't really like rent and

00:07:20.520 evangelical as a title.

00:07:22.200 It just sounded kind of clunky.

00:07:23.960 And so that was how we ended up with Shepherds for Sale.

00:07:26.360 So in part, it does explore, yes, there is some explicitly transactional things happening.

00:07:32.380 There are left-wing foundations that are creating evangelical front groups that are then creating

00:07:38.540 these astroturf campaigns to convince evangelicals, hey, all of us now agree that to love your neighbor

00:07:45.540 means that we have to support the length for Borderville because that's the loving thing

00:07:50.880 that Jesus would want us to do.

00:07:52.880 So that is part of it.

00:07:53.940 But then there's also sort of a soft selling in the sense that I do think you have a lot

00:07:58.500 of these evangelical leaders who are simply sort of being guided in that direction from

00:08:04.320 the prevailing culture.

00:08:05.380 And we see that scripturally.

00:08:06.820 That's just basic fear of man stuff.

00:08:08.820 But wanting that positive notice from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic.

00:08:14.460 And so they kind of have learned how to steer these leaders, to borrow a phrase from Joe

00:08:19.340 Rigney.

00:08:19.960 It's like they have steering wheels on their back.

00:08:21.840 And the Washington Post knows really well how to get them to go where they want to go.

00:08:26.500 And if they don't like something they're doing, they'll wield big sticks in their coverage.

00:08:30.780 And if they do like something they're doing, then they give them a lot of attaboys and praise

00:08:34.720 for being the new reformer against racism, for example, in the Southern Baptist Convention,

00:08:40.020 to get them to take on these new committee appointees that are committed to certain racial

00:08:47.740 hiring quotas and things like that.

00:08:49.880 And so it's really this, over time, transforming these institutions.

00:08:54.620 Yeah, it is important for people to understand that from the title, it's very easy for people

00:08:59.640 to just say, oh, well, this is just somebody backing up dump trucks full of money to every

00:09:04.120 one of these pastors, right?

00:09:05.160 That's what she's talking about.

00:09:06.860 In some cases, it is.

00:09:08.080 In some cases, there is a very direct flow of funds.

00:09:11.020 If not someone getting a giant check deposited in their bank account, it's going through their

00:09:16.900 institutions, through their organizations, and that's happening.

00:09:20.680 But the larger issue, and it is interesting because there is some overlap with the work

00:09:24.760 I've done on bureaucracy here that you're referencing, but a lot of what you're highlighting

00:09:29.420 is really this prestige network.

00:09:31.460 It's this understanding that an evangelical leader, it's not just about leading inside

00:09:37.580 the church.

00:09:38.840 And I can say this as an evangelical, so friendly fire here.

00:09:44.600 But every pastor is writing a book.

00:09:47.080 Every pastor is putting together a leadership seminar.

00:09:50.440 Every pastor is on a press tour to try to figure out how to kind of grow their influence

00:09:56.740 outside of their church.

00:09:58.160 And that's pretty much exactly the opposite of what a church is supposed to be.

00:10:03.560 I don't want to say this is just an evangelical problem, because obviously there are, you 0.98

00:10:08.100 know, the ability to peddle influence exists in all kinds of structures.

00:10:11.440 But there does seem to be a particular attack vector that is brought in when, like you said,

00:10:17.200 when you have kind of these Soros-funded organizations that really offer not just cash or funding,

00:10:23.440 but the ability to connect to a wider network of elites.

00:10:27.500 It's that desire to be the TED Talk pastor that I think brings a lot of people to this

00:10:32.700 game.

00:10:33.680 Yeah, TED Talk.

00:10:34.280 I like that.

00:10:34.860 I'm going to use that TED Talk pastor, because I think that's a big part of it.

00:10:38.520 And in fact, it wasn't that hard when I was going back through a lot of the research to

00:10:43.700 pinpoint exactly that prestige appeal that you're referencing, because it was so obvious that

00:10:50.260 they were dazzled.

00:10:51.140 You had people like Rick Warren, who became huge, writing that book, The Purpose Driven

00:10:57.000 Life, and as such a big figure in the seeker-sensitive movement of the previous era, he was clearly 0.98

00:11:04.540 dazzled by his friends at the WEF, at the Council on Foreign Relations, at the UN, and

00:11:10.920 he proudly references their inviting him into their circle.

00:11:15.520 So it definitely seemed like some heads were turned.

00:11:18.860 In the book, I talk about Russell Moore, who's now the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today,

00:11:25.220 apropos of nothing at all, mentioning that he was invited to Obama's White House Christmas

00:11:31.020 Party in the first chapter, I think in the first few pages of his most recent book.

00:11:36.580 So it was sort of this, they almost can't hide the little bit of glee at being included in

00:11:42.180 these circles. And I get it, because we're all human, and there is something sort of thrilling

00:11:46.840 about being included and noticed by the world's most powerful, most influential. But there's a cost

00:11:53.960 in that to the church, because those people's priorities are then repackaged in some kind of

00:11:59.660 churchy language, and it becomes the church's priorities.

00:12:02.200 Yeah, it's very strange, because obviously, secularists, atheists, even many liberal Christians

00:12:10.240 love to point out that at different times, the church has bent its will to power. You look at

00:12:16.440 the popes, or you look at what happened with the National Socialist Movement in Germany, and why some

00:12:22.220 leaders were willing to move along with power there. And you constantly hear, oh, well, the church can be

00:12:27.700 influenced by the secular priorities, and they can invade everything. And then they pretend like that

00:12:33.820 just stopped, I don't know, a couple decades ago, like that tendency of church leaders to conform

00:12:39.140 themselves to be acceptable to power just ended. And it has no, there's no application to that with the

00:12:44.640 kind of the spear of the age today.

00:12:46.880 Right, right. And that's what was so strange. Like, when I have, I've done a few talks where I start out,

00:12:52.060 and I borrow heavily from Paul Kanger. So I always want to give him credit, because he was the one who did an

00:12:56.880 amazing book on this called The Devil and Karl Marx, where he interviewed ex-communist Herbert

00:13:03.220 Romerstein, and talked about how in the 1930s, 50s, in that period, they deliberately infiltrated,

00:13:12.440 particularly the Episcopalian church, but the mainline churches, and that they targeted pastors,

00:13:17.100 and they called them the biggest suckers of all the people that they targeted, because all you had to do

00:13:22.620 was sort of use this Christian ease jargon, and put whatever the left wing priority was in some sort 0.81

00:13:30.660 of, you know, proof texted Bible verse reference, and they would sort of fall for it. And so when I

00:13:38.080 take that, and everyone sees it, and they go, Oh, yep. And I mean, we have a historical record of it.

00:13:42.840 Congress, you know, held hearings on it. So we all recognize that that happened. And then I go,

00:13:48.880 and now look how similar that is to what's happening today. And you get the immediate backlash of,

00:13:54.940 oh, well, that's tinfoil hat, or, you know, or that's what I saw someone just yesterday saying,

00:14:02.600 it's a hermeneutic of suspicion, to point out that maybe these same left wing funders that we know for

00:14:09.320 sure are funneling money, money into the church, I have the IRS 990s, I can show you who this money is

00:14:16.180 coming from, and who it's going to, and for what purpose. And by the way, the purpose is never

00:14:21.300 something like handing out Bibles, or passing out school lunches, or clothing needy people,

00:14:28.400 it's always something politically related. When you show them that, then it becomes this, well,

00:14:35.620 this seems like you're getting very close to a ninth commandment violation, that you're speaking

00:14:41.100 falsehoods. And I'm like, well, we know the money is going through, we have seen a historical pattern of

00:14:45.820 this. And it's just that unwillingness to apply it to our current age.

00:14:50.320 So let's get into some of the specifics, because you one of the things that's important about the

00:14:55.060 book is I think you had something like 800 plus footnotes, like, like, like an absurd amount. So

00:15:01.020 this book is heavily sourced, and it needs to be because obviously, it's coming under a lot of fire.

00:15:05.580 So you need the receipts. And luckily, you took the time to invest in some of them, some of them. But

00:15:10.440 now that we have kind of the surface level theory out of the way, what are some of the concrete

00:15:15.100 things that are being done? You talked about climate change, talked about immigration,

00:15:19.740 in fact, I had you on previously to talk about immigration. But what are some of the other areas

00:15:24.080 where we can see direct influence from non-Christian actors trying to bring that influence,

00:15:30.360 trying to change the ideology, you know, using the veneer of Christianity to push things towards

00:15:36.440 a left wing political agenda? Well, in terms of an issue, I mean, one of the biggest is that LGBTQ 1.00

00:15:42.560 issue. It's the last chapter in my book, because I felt like it would be the one that would be most

00:15:49.160 shocking to people. And yes, it's also something that they would recognize that yes, this is the

00:15:54.040 point of pain, where so many pastors are vulnerable because of where our culture is versus where the

00:16:00.720 church should be, that there's such a stark divide between the two. So, you know, back in 2000, a guy

00:16:08.500 named John Stryker, who was the heir to a hundred billion dollar surgical supply company, launched the

00:16:15.840 Arcus Foundation. He was gay. He wanted to see gay marriage enacted. This was, of course, before 0.97

00:16:20.440 Obergefell. So he wanted to see it enacted legislatively and poured all of this money into trying to get it

00:16:27.620 across the finish line in a number of states. And it kept failing, even in California. And Stryker

00:16:33.640 gave this interview to Philanthropy Magazine, where he said, we realized the problem we kept running

00:16:38.700 into were people of religious faith, that they would mobilize, they would defeat it at the ballot

00:16:44.640 box. And we realized that the problem was the churches, that if we were going to get serious about

00:16:49.160 advancing our policy goals, we had to find a way to get at these people in the churches. And so he

00:16:54.920 started funneling money into Catholic groups, to mainline denominations. A lot of millions went into

00:17:04.400 just one ministry at the United Methodist Church to reform their doctrine. And of course, they just

00:17:10.460 went through a major schism on gay marriage and ordination. So it does seem like that money was

00:17:15.760 well spent. But as you look at that, he also started funneling money into evangelical groups.

00:17:20.880 And they're very explicit. I mean, I just kind of present what they say, that their effort is to

00:17:26.780 reform church doctrine, no matter how conservative the denomination, on matters of sexuality and gender

00:17:34.120 to make them fully affirming. So I mean, just to give you one example, they started giving money to a

00:17:39.780 group called the Reformation Project. And one of the things it does is it trains activists in what they

00:17:47.680 would call is affirming theology, I would call it false teaching. And they basically explain away

00:17:54.500 all the clobber verses, which are the verses that tell us that homosexuality is still a sin, yes. 0.96

00:18:00.340 And that marriage is between a man and a woman and a man cannot become a woman. And those are the verses 0.98

00:18:05.200 that they call clobber verses. And they do all this kind of torture doctrine to explain that away.

00:18:10.120 And it's an intensive program. When you read it, it's hours and hours of reading a week. And then

00:18:16.800 they have this, you know, two week long symposium. So it's almost like a master's level course. And then

00:18:22.580 they also have this pastors in process program. And it is a confidential program designed to teach

00:18:29.960 secretly affirming pastors how to slowly move their congregations in an affirming direction.

00:18:38.960 So this kind of curriculum and these kind of activists have been coming in to a number of

00:18:45.580 well-known, well-established, and trusted evangelical churches and institutions.

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00:19:20.940 I want to talk to you a little bit more about why this doesn't raise red flags,

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00:20:55.640 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,

00:21:04.300 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,

00:21:15.840 hey, by the way, I'm here to explicitly change church doctrine in a way that it hasn't been

00:21:20.820 understood for hundreds, if not thousands of years. I come from this background. These are my goals.

00:21:27.160 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

00:22:18.780 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,

00:22:36.560 it's hard to explain to people why is the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission,

00:22:43.000 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 0.85

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

00:23:57.580 and it puts them in a position to show the photo op to do the press release. And it looks impressive

00:24:04.380 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 1.00

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 1.00

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 1.00

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 0.84

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 1.00

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 1.00

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 0.62

00:27:59.080 access to it for some reason.

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 1.00

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 0.93

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, 0.84

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 0.56

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 1.00

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. 0.66

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 0.98

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 0.99

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.

00:49:21.540 Right.

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 0.98

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

00:50:46.680 work, that kind of thing?

00:50:47.700 Yes. So Shepherds for Sale, How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda. You can 0.59

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.

00:51:04.140 It's Twitter. It's okay.

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

00:51:44.840 really fit in this book.

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

00:52:37.260 that they kind of abandoned it.

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, 0.93

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 0.89

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 0.99

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 channel, make sure you go ahead and subscribe, click the bell notification so you can catch these

00:56:39.720 streams when they go live. And if you'd like to get these broadcasts as podcasts, make sure that

00:56:43.960 you subscribe to The Oren McIntyre Show on your favorite podcast platform. If you'd like to pick up my book,

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.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - August 14, 2024

Shepherds for Sale ｜ Megan Basham ｜ 8⧸14⧸24

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