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00:01:48.000Do you remember a church that might have been a warm and loving community?
00:01:52.000All of a sudden, it sounds like an MSNBC hour of political commentary mixed with worship music and maybe an altar call here or there.
00:01:59.000Well, it turns out that there are millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, maybe even billions of dollars being spent to try to subvert Christianity, specifically the evangelical community.
00:02:13.000Megan Basham is with us today, and she has done an incredible amount of work researching what she calls Shepherds for Sale.
00:02:22.000It is a book that is now up for pre-sale.
00:03:01.000You know, just to give you a little background on how I came to this subject, I was working for a well-known, well-respected evangelical magazine, World Magazine.
00:03:10.000Loved working there, worked with them for probably 15 years, both as a contractor, as a writer, and then as an editor and podcast host.
00:03:20.000And I do want to preface this by saying they're one of the few organizations that got their house sorted and dealt with the issue.
00:03:26.000And that is extremely unusual, as I demonstrate in my book.
00:03:29.000But while I was there, you know, our editor-in-chief started to do a lot of promoting of David French.
00:03:37.000He started to, you know, argue that we needed to change our coverage to deal with America's history of systemic racism that was ongoing.
00:03:48.000A secret race committee was created to sort of have members of the team, but we didn't know who they were to start reviewing our work to see how racially sensitive it was.
00:03:59.000I found myself harassed by some of my colleagues.
00:04:03.000You know, I did some coverage of, if you'll remember the spa shooting in Atlanta, and I didn't mention the race of the victims, that they were predominantly Asian, but not all Asian.
00:04:15.000And I got an email from a colleague saying that that left her in tears.
00:04:20.000That, you know, in a very brief sort of podcast news hit about those events, I didn't mention race because it was not clear that race was a factor.
00:04:28.000So, so why would I have mentioned it with very limited time?
00:04:31.000So, this was the kind of thing that I was noticing.
00:04:33.000And I was also seeing it with pastors that I admired.
00:04:37.000And I was seeing it in publications that I used to trust, publications like Christianity Today and the Gospel Coalition.
00:04:44.000And so, it just became this big question of what is going on.
00:04:47.000And I became so frustrated that I ultimately left World Magazine and went over to Daily Wire, where I was free to do some reporting that I might not have been free to do elsewhere.
00:04:59.000I, you know, some of the first things that I uncovered was that these pastors, these ministry leaders, they were partnering with Francis Collins of the National Institutes of Health to push particular COVID propaganda.
00:05:13.000And you and I talked about that a couple of years ago when it happened.
00:05:16.000And that was sort of my first, whoa, what's happening here?
00:05:18.000Like, it wasn't like they just invited Francis Collins to some of their podcasts and then offered alternative views.
00:05:26.000And then I discovered that some of these propaganda outlets, like Ed Stetzer's Billy Graham Center, were actually formally partnering with the federal government.
00:05:40.000And there were other programs, one called Christians and the Vaccine that David French heavily promoted that were also partnering with the federal government.
00:05:51.000And then when I started digging in, you found it on all sorts of policy prescriptions.
00:05:56.000And I can give you sort of the big headline one right now, which is illegal immigration.
00:06:02.000There is an organization called the Evangelical Immigration Table, and they became very well known for putting out public letters that ran as full-page ads in like the Washington Post and the New York Times, sort of hammering President Trump for a 90-day moratorium on accepting refugees from seven countries known for harboring terrorists.
00:06:26.000So when that happened, I mean, there was garment rending.
00:06:29.000There were suggestions, you know, that he was racist, that he was Islamophobic.
00:06:35.000And these were coming from people like Russell Moore, who at that time was the head of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which is the policy arm, the lobbying arm of the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., the Southern Baptist Convention.
00:06:49.000So let's be clear, he was doing this work with tithe money.
00:06:52.000I mean, he's being paid with the tithe money of Southern Baptists.
00:06:56.000Well, then when I started digging into it, I discovered that this group, the Evangelical Immigration Table, was nothing more than a front group for the left-wing open borders group, National Immigration, National Immigration Forum.
00:08:28.000And now you flash forward to today, and you have the Evangelical Immigration Table working with World Relief, doing the exact same thing with the backing of, I mean, all number of Southern Baptist leaders, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
00:08:43.000They are still promoting open borders policies.
00:08:46.000They heavily backed Senator Lankford's bill that the base didn't like.
00:08:51.000And so these are the things that are going on.
00:08:53.000So these are the bought shepherds, and they're pushing these policy prescriptions that are very debatable.
00:08:59.000I mean, we may be able to disagree on what is the best policy for Christians to back when it comes to immigration, but it is certainly not clear that, hey, love your neighbor.
00:09:08.000Let in any amount of illegal immigrants at the border because they claim to be asylees.
00:09:14.000That's not loving your neighbor because, look, some other things happen to your neighbor when that happens.
00:09:18.000And you can ask Lake and Riley's family about that.
00:09:21.000You can ask blue-collar workers who are seeing their wages driven down.
00:09:25.000You can see the people who are out of jobs because they're being replaced with illegal immigrants.
00:09:30.000So anyway, that was kind of how I got into the subject.
00:09:33.000And that was how I started writing the book.
00:09:34.000Can you just spend a minute of explaining further who is Russell Moore in the influence that he has?
00:09:42.000He was formerly head of the Southern Baptist Convention.
00:09:45.000For some of our audience that are not as, you know, part of the Southern Baptist Convention, which they are the biggest, but they're not the only, really quickly, Ed Stetzer Russell Moore in particular.
00:09:54.000So Russell Moore, as I said, you know, he was a very influential Southern Baptist leader.
00:10:02.000I mean, if you sort of trace his history, he held various positions.
00:10:06.000He, I believe, was a professor at Southern Seminary and then rose through the ranks to eventually run the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
00:10:14.000And in fact, there was something of a revolt because what people need to know is that the Southern Baptist Convention is overwhelmingly conservative in the pews.
00:10:22.000It's their leadership that's the issue.
00:10:24.000So you have a lot of conservatives who are sitting in the pews.
00:10:27.000They're not really paying that much attention to what their leadership is doing, to what their tithes are going to.
00:10:34.000So at that point, Russell Moore was really using his office to push what you might call Washington Post, New York Times, Atlantic style priorities.
00:10:44.000And he was appearing in all of those outlets frequently.
00:10:50.000So he was really using that position to sort of build up his national public profile.
00:10:56.000And as I said, in the background, he's also working very closely with groups like the Evangelical Immigration Table to do things like push these bills.
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00:12:15.000So essentially, the point was that Russell Moore was very much using his position at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission to push what you might call progressive leaning policies in the name of Southern Baptists who didn't want those policies.
00:12:30.000I mean, overwhelmingly, you know, they support the First Amendment, free speech.
00:12:36.000They support things like closed borders.
00:12:39.000They support having strong national security.
00:12:42.000They support things like the right to bear arms.
00:12:46.000And so you've seen the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, you know, very much working against those policies.
00:12:51.000And so that created a lot of frustration.
00:13:04.000He routinely sort of hammered the former president.
00:13:08.000And, you know, as someone who sat back and watched it at the time, it was really hard to process because even I was like, I thought we respected this guy.
00:13:18.000And, you know, on the one hand, you go, I wasn't particularly in any camp as far as on the right when we were in the primaries, but I knew for sure I wasn't going to vote Hillary Clinton.
00:13:30.000And so all this man did was repeatedly sort of attack President Trump.
00:13:34.000And, you know, he's sort of very famously good friends with David French, and they took the same arc.
00:13:40.000You kind of saw them both evolve in the same direction.
00:13:44.000And, you know, I want to break really quick and say for your listeners, for your viewers who don't really understand this world and they don't really understand why they care, the reason you care is because about 35% of the U.S. electorate identifies as evangelical.
00:14:00.000So there has been this all-out effort to capture those votes or even just sort of blunt the impact of those votes.
00:14:07.000I mean, the Atlantic has called evangelicals America's most powerful voting bloc, and they're a captive audience in churches every weekend.
00:14:16.000So there's a very good reason that the left has been so interested in infiltrating their ministries, their seminaries, their churches.
00:14:26.000So Russell Moore has very much been an instrument of that.
00:14:29.000You see him pop up on just about every sort of progressive policy that the left feels like it can conceivably push into churches.
00:14:37.000So that's really where Russell Moore's evolution went.
00:14:43.000It got so bad that really people in the pews did start to notice.
00:14:46.000And so, you know, at the annual Southern Baptist Convention, which is their annual gathering to do the business of the association, you started to hear a lot of complaints, motions to abolish the ERLC.
00:14:58.000So at that point, Russell Moore, and I go into this in deep detail in the book, but I can tell you that he sort of engineered a media narrative that there was an abuse apocalypse in the Southern Baptist Convention.
00:15:11.000And I'm here to tell you there wasn't.
00:15:14.000You know, there are individual cases of abuse, of course, because we live in a fallen world and any institution is going to deal with it.
00:15:21.000But as far as rate of incidents, it was very low.
00:15:25.000And the cases that they made very high profile were, in fact, extremely murky allegations between adults.
00:15:32.000A lot of questions should have been asked.
00:15:34.000It was very sort of me-too stuff, adult women saying, Oh gosh, I was in this 12-year adulterous relationship, but the whole time from the age of 26 to 38, it was never consensual.
00:15:47.000And those were the kind of allegations that Russell Moore was going out with to say the Southern Baptist Convention has a massive abuse problem.
00:15:59.000He had help from people like J.D. Greer.
00:16:02.000And you could say at that moment, he sort of blew up the Southern Baptist Convention, announced he was leaving, and took a position at Christianity Today.
00:16:12.000So he is now their public theologian and their editor-in-chief.
00:16:17.000And side note on Christianity Today, a little research on them shows that they are heavily Democratic now.
00:16:23.000I looked into their political donations.
00:16:25.000You know, from 2015 to 2022, they had about 72 political donations, including editorial staff, which is a journalistic malpractice.
00:16:35.000And they all went to Democrats, every single one, including Elizabeth Warren.
00:16:40.000So that was sort of the backdrop of going, why is this happening?
00:16:45.000And Russell Moore may very well be the best known player in this world.
00:16:50.000So, Megan, I want to get into detail the amount of money and who's actually financing this.
00:16:57.000And this is very depressing for a lot of Christians to hear that their faith leaders are for sale.
00:17:03.000And I mean, the Francis Collins example is the most glaring one: that the federal government came and quote unquote partnered with evangelical churches in a moment of crisis to push the vaccine, to push non-science.
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00:18:28.000And, you know, you'd have to break this down by a particular policy issue, because if you look at an issue like climate change, you have the Clinton Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, which is the largest funder of Planned Parenthood, by the way, sort of funneling money into the Evangelical Environmental Network, which is climate justice kind of thing.
00:18:52.000So, but if we go back to our example of immigration, we know that when the National Immigration Forum was first founded, they were taking millions from George Soros.
00:19:02.000So, I think we're talking about 3 million when they first launched.
00:19:06.000And the issue with the Evangelical Immigration Table is it's really hard to know how much of that went to funding that particular initiative because it's just an initiative of the National Immigration Forum.
00:19:18.000You know, they would, because they tried to say, oh, hey, we cordoned off the George Soros money.
00:19:22.000So, unless you can get a look at their internal books, it's hard to know.
00:19:25.000But what we do know is that when the DC leaks happened and some of those internal board books from George Soros was listed, he had several sort of notations in these books saying, okay, $200,000 on this date went to the Bibles, Badges, and Business Program, which was part of what the Evangelical Immigration Table was doing.
00:19:50.000So what we know is that there were at least 3 million that first couple of years going to the National Immigration Forum, which is also the evangelical immigration table.
00:20:02.000So you look at other groups like, say, the Arcus Foundation, which is the largest LGBTQ foundation in the world.
00:20:12.000They've been funneling millions, as they are very clear, to a variety of denominations and churches that are Protestant.
00:20:20.000I would say they very directly spent maybe two, three million directly funding the schism in the United Methodist Church to convince it to start embracing trans ideology, to start teaching that homosexuality is not a sin anymore.
00:20:37.000And we know the slippery slope that that leads to.
00:20:39.000You're not going to get one part of that package without getting the entire package of, you know, the whole rainbow panoply.
00:20:45.000So that's what's been going on as far as who is funneling the money.
00:20:48.000You're looking at George Soros, you're looking at the Hewlett Foundation, the Clinton Foundation, the Tides Foundation, really all of the really big major left-wing foundations.
00:20:59.000And by the way, Pierre Omedar, also, who is well known as the founder of eBay.
00:22:02.000And, you know, the job description is to recruit pastors to meet with legislators to convince them that evangelicals want these particular open borders bills, these amnesty bills.
00:22:32.000So they're not, you know, drawing a direct paycheck.
00:22:35.000They might be able to say, I'm doing a job here, or I sit on the board of something in a way that, you know, I draw a paycheck for being an officer of this particular NGO.
00:22:49.000But first, I just want to reiterate that these are leftists that are pumping tons of money into Christianity, not because they care a sliver about Jesus or about the Bible or the word or saving souls, but because they care about leftism.
00:23:07.000And so why are Christians, why are any Christian leaders partnering with secular left-wing Marxists and taking their money?
00:23:18.000Why are these shepherds selling themselves?
00:23:20.000They sound more like prostitutes than shepherds.
00:23:37.000And then you go to, you know, say some event like the Southern Baptist Convention and you push these policies or you publish articles saying that evangelicals want these policies or you lobby legislators.
00:23:49.000So, you know, that's explicitly transactional, but they're not all like that.
00:23:52.000I mean, I think you have to look at people like Russell Moore, who, by the way, just side note, he's listed as a grantee in George Soros' own documents.
00:24:03.000Now, it doesn't say why he's a grantee.
00:24:05.000My assumption is that it is related to his work with the evangelical immigration table.
00:24:10.000But you don't call someone your grantee if they've never received money from you.
00:24:14.000So I think that Russell Moore is a grantee of which organization?
00:24:18.000George Soros's Open Society Foundation.
00:24:20.000So that's in the Open Society document.
00:24:24.000That's in Soros's, yeah, his own internal documents.
00:24:27.000You know, the difficulty is it doesn't know why.
00:24:32.000But I mean, do we think George Soros made a mistake?
00:24:34.000Because when you asked the Southern Baptist Convention leadership about this when it came out a few years ago, their argument was, ah, no, no, no, that's just, you know, people are peddling conspiracy theories.
00:24:47.000Well, this conspiracy theory was black and white in George Soros' own documentation.
00:24:54.000And Russell Moore has never explained why George Soros seems to be under the impression that he is a grantee, that Russell Moore is a grantee of his organization.
00:25:03.000I hope people understand Russell Moore is one of the top leading, quote-unquote, thought-leading intellectuals in American Christianity.
00:25:10.000Megan, you are going to finish a point.
00:25:13.000Well, and I also wanted to really quick hit because he is now at Christianity Today and discussing, you know, how just far left leaning, and it's very obvious now if you look at Christianity today's coverage and who they promote.
00:25:30.000You want to talk about specific dollars.
00:25:32.000They're taking, I think it was something, I have to look at my notes, but something like 1.25 million or something from the Lilly Endowment, which is the foundation established by the Eli Lilly Pharmaceutical Company to do some sort of pastoral training, to put together curriculum, to help pastors learn how to preach better.
00:25:52.000Why is the Lilly Endowment doing that?
00:25:54.000And why is Christianity today getting into the business of taking millions from the Lilly Endowment to do this, you know, sort of special project that they were specifically invited?
00:26:04.000They didn't just go solicit this money.
00:26:06.000They were invited to apply for this grant.
00:26:10.000So this is the kind of thing that you see happening all over.
00:26:13.000And when you look at, yeah, why are they doing it?
00:26:16.000It's because, as some people have pointed out, in a very real way, evangelicals are the sort of last bastion of sanity as far as keeping back all of the negative policies, all of the destructive policies that we see in the U.S.
00:26:34.000They are the ones who are holding it up.
00:26:35.000And that is why there has been a cottage industry, a massive explosion of books.
00:26:40.000By the way, you feature heavily in a lot of those books from people like the Atlantic's Tim Alberta.
00:26:49.000And what makes me laugh is you've got Tim Alberta saying, oh, gosh, isn't it so terrible that Charlie Kirk is getting involved in the faith arena and discussing how our politics, how our faith should inform our politics.
00:27:03.000And yet I just heard you do something that I don't hear those guys do.
00:27:06.000And that is read a disclosure of, hey, we're supported by this foundation.
00:27:15.000They don't come out and say, Hey, by the way, we're taking money from the Rockefeller Foundation, from the Hewlett Foundation, from the largest funders of Planned Parenthood, the second largest funders of Planned Parenthood also give us money to push curriculum to tell you how your churches should approach politics.
00:27:32.000And that's another thing that Russell Moore is involved in.
00:27:41.000So I'm going to ask you a personal opinion.
00:27:46.000Through all of your research, do you think these people are actually Christian?
00:27:50.000Man, I don't like to read the state of people's soul, but the fruit is really bad, isn't it?
00:27:55.000I look at Russell Moore and I go, every sort of pernicious influence is there.
00:28:01.000People that I would never want to accept money from, even if they told me, hey, we're just giving this to you, because they will often say, we just believe in pluralism.
00:28:12.000And, you know, we just want everybody to have a voice, and yet they don't actually support conservative voices.
00:29:03.000He always had a reason from his assistant why he could not respond to me.
00:29:08.000And so then once I ran into him in an airport, and this was, you know, sort of when the COVID propaganda thing was going on, we were on the same flight.
00:29:15.000And I just said, you know, I said, your assistant tells me you're too busy.
00:29:19.000And I said it very politely, very sweetly, very winsomely.
00:29:22.000And I said, could we talk about it right now?
00:29:51.000So, essentially, there was this guy who calls himself a pastor, who I don't think is a pastor, who had some sort of a male strip, let's just say, exercise at a males conference.
00:30:04.000And he takes his shirt off at the males conference and swallows a sword and goes up on the poll.
00:30:09.000Mark Driscoll then shows up, I believe, the next day and calls it out.
00:30:15.000So, Megan, what do you make of this now very, very viral story in Christianity?
00:30:20.000Man, so many feelings about this viral moment, trying to make sense of what happened there.
00:30:27.000I can tell you that I asked a few people because there's obviously a lot of people who are now saying, like, oh, it was pre-planned.
00:31:05.000And I wouldn't have known that the guy was a former stripper based on the performance if that hadn't been sort of the big claim on social media immediately after.
00:31:15.000And apparently he is, but I couldn't get any really hard facts on what exactly his background is, other than he's been on America's Got Talent and Great Britain has talent, swallowing swords exactly like he did.
00:31:31.000I thought the whole moment was sort of goofy and opportunistic.
00:31:36.000And I don't really get what the Jezebel spirit is.
00:31:39.000To me, what I looked at was, okay, this seems very performative as far as what masculinity is and what men do.
00:31:47.000And the condemnation didn't really, I don't know what a Jezebel spirit is.
00:31:52.000I mean, that doesn't point me to a specific scripture.
00:31:55.000So I didn't really buy into all of that.
00:31:57.000But the one thing I will say when I watched it is I went, men need to be served by the church.
00:32:03.000And this event and what happened there tells me that they're not, that they are so hungry to not be sort of dismissed and to be shamed for being men.
00:32:13.000And they need their masculinity affirmed and praised in healthy ways.
00:32:18.000And that's why we're getting sort of these, you know, I might say sort of fringy events where quirky, bizarre things are happening because men aren't being fed in their churches.
00:32:28.000So to me, this is all symptomatic of a much larger problem.
00:32:32.000In closing here, let's go back to the book, Megan.
00:32:34.000Anything about the book that you want to mention that we did not cover here, Shepherds for Sale?
00:32:40.000Probably the biggest thing I want to cover is, you know, the things that we've touched on today, one, are just, you know, the very tippity top of the iceberg of what I cover in this book.
00:32:50.000And that is just, you know, the tip of the iceberg of what is happening.
00:32:54.000So, I mean, I'm very clear that these are simply representative examples of what's going on, but by no means is it exhaustive.
00:33:04.000And people need to know what's happening in their churches because, one, it is a spiritual sickness that this is being allowed to happen and that so many pastors are turning over their pulpits to left-wing propaganda.
00:33:22.000So that's an issue, but it's also bad for our nation because if the evangelicals fall and buy into this sort of thing, it's going to, you know, Christianity is going to be fine, but it will be the death of our nation.