The Charlie Kirk Show - Is Your Church's Pastor "For Sale"?

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:00.000 It's in the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:00:01.000 Is your pastor for sale?

00:00:03.000 A remarkable interview with Megan Basham, her new book, Shepherds for Sale.

00:00:08.000 We dive deep into how evangelicalism is for sale.

00:00:12.000 Big Eva is for sale.

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00:01:46.000 Has your pastor gone woke?

00:01:48.000 Do you remember a church that might have been a warm and loving community?

00:01:52.000 All of a sudden, it sounds like an MSNBC hour of political commentary mixed with worship music and maybe an altar call here or there.

00:01:59.000 Well, 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.

00:02:13.000 Megan Basham is with us today, and she has done an incredible amount of work researching what she calls Shepherds for Sale.

00:02:22.000 It is a book that is now up for pre-sale.

00:02:25.000 Everyone should buy it.

00:02:26.000 Shepherds for Sale.

00:02:27.000 It comes out in July.

00:02:28.000 How evangelical leaders traded the truth for a leftist agenda.

00:02:32.000 She's also with the Daily Wire.

00:02:34.000 Megan, welcome back to the program.

00:02:36.000 Hey, thanks for having me back, Charlie.

00:02:37.000 It's always good to be here.

00:02:38.000 So, Megan, so much to unpack here.

00:02:40.000 What is the premise of your book?

00:02:42.000 That is quite a charge.

00:02:45.000 Shepherds for Sale.

00:02:46.000 I agree with it.

00:02:47.000 Tell our audience about it.

00:02:49.000 So, you know, probably you brought up people who are sitting in their churches.

00:02:52.000 They're hearing sort of woke policies, married to love your neighbor arguments, and they're kind of going, where is this coming from?

00:03:00.000 And that was my experience.

00:03:01.000 You 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.

00:03:10.000 Loved working there, worked with them for probably 15 years, both as a contractor, as a writer, and then as an editor and podcast host.

00:03:20.000 And 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.

00:03:26.000 And that is extremely unusual, as I demonstrate in my book.

00:03:29.000 But while I was there, you know, our editor-in-chief started to do a lot of promoting of David French.

00:03:37.000 He started to, you know, argue that we needed to change our coverage to deal with America's history of systemic racism that was ongoing.

00:03:48.000 A 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.

00:03:59.000 I found myself harassed by some of my colleagues.

00:04:03.000 You 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.

00:04:15.000 And I got an email from a colleague saying that that left her in tears.

00:04:20.000 That, 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.

00:04:28.000 So, so why would I have mentioned it with very limited time?

00:04:31.000 So, this was the kind of thing that I was noticing.

00:04:33.000 And I was also seeing it with pastors that I admired.

00:04:37.000 And I was seeing it in publications that I used to trust, publications like Christianity Today and the Gospel Coalition.

00:04:44.000 And so, it just became this big question of what is going on.

00:04:47.000 And 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.

00:04:57.000 So, I dug really deep.

00:04:59.000 I, 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.

00:05:13.000 And you and I talked about that a couple of years ago when it happened.

00:05:16.000 And that was sort of my first, whoa, what's happening here?

00:05:18.000 Like, it wasn't like they just invited Francis Collins to some of their podcasts and then offered alternative views.

00:05:25.000 It was pure propaganda.

00:05:26.000 And then I discovered that some of these propaganda outlets, like Ed Stetzer's Billy Graham Center, were actually formally partnering with the federal government.

00:05:38.000 So we're assuming money's changing hands here.

00:05:40.000 And there were other programs, one called Christians and the Vaccine that David French heavily promoted that were also partnering with the federal government.

00:05:49.000 So that was kind of my first clue.

00:05:51.000 And then when I started digging in, you found it on all sorts of policy prescriptions.

00:05:56.000 And I can give you sort of the big headline one right now, which is illegal immigration.

00:06:02.000 There 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.

00:06:26.000 So when that happened, I mean, there was garment rending.

00:06:29.000 There were suggestions, you know, that he was racist, that he was Islamophobic.

00:06:35.000 And 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.

00:06:49.000 So let's be clear, he was doing this work with tithe money.

00:06:52.000 I mean, he's being paid with the tithe money of Southern Baptists. 0.80

00:06:56.000 Well, 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.

00:07:10.000 Sorry, there's so many acronyms.

00:07:12.000 Sometimes you got to keep them all on your head.

00:07:14.000 But so essentially, they were a front group.

00:07:16.000 They were created as a front group.

00:07:18.000 There's no legal separation between the two of the National Immigration Forum.

00:07:23.000 And that's an acknowledged left-wing group.

00:07:24.000 So if you go back to 2012, 2013, that's when this group was formed, the Evangelical Immigration Table.

00:07:31.000 And Russell Moore took a leading role in that.

00:07:34.000 He was very high profile.

00:07:35.000 He was meeting with Obama at that time, pushing for open borders legislation.

00:07:40.000 At that time, the Gang of Eight bill.

00:07:41.000 Well, it turns out that this is all being funded, not all, not exclusively, but overwhelmingly funded at that time by George Soros.

00:07:50.000 So this comes out.

00:07:52.000 They tried to deny, oh, gosh, the Evangelical Immigration Table, we don't have any connection to George Soros.

00:07:59.000 A lot of evangelical outlets went ahead and published that without really checking their facts on it.

00:08:04.000 They slammed Breitbart at the time, calling it fake news.

00:08:08.000 It wasn't fake news.

00:08:09.000 It turned out after a lot of investigation that yet George Soros' own internal records show that they had access to Southern Baptists.

00:08:18.000 They brag about it in their own board books for the Open Society Foundation, which is George Soros' foundation.

00:08:24.000 So we are still here.

00:08:26.000 So that's how this started in 2012.

00:08:28.000 And 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.

00:08:43.000 They are still promoting open borders policies.

00:08:46.000 They heavily backed Senator Lankford's bill that the base didn't like.

00:08:51.000 And so these are the things that are going on.

00:08:53.000 So these are the bought shepherds, and they're pushing these policy prescriptions that are very debatable.

00:08:59.000 I 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.

00:09:08.000 Let in any amount of illegal immigrants at the border because they claim to be asylees. 1.00

00:09:14.000 That's not loving your neighbor because, look, some other things happen to your neighbor when that happens.

00:09:18.000 And you can ask Lake and Riley's family about that.

00:09:21.000 You can ask blue-collar workers who are seeing their wages driven down.

00:09:25.000 You can see the people who are out of jobs because they're being replaced with illegal immigrants. 1.00

00:09:30.000 So anyway, that was kind of how I got into the subject.

00:09:33.000 And that was how I started writing the book.

00:09:34.000 Can you just spend a minute of explaining further who is Russell Moore in the influence that he has?

00:09:42.000 He was formerly head of the Southern Baptist Convention.

00:09:45.000 For 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.

00:09:54.000 So Russell Moore, as I said, you know, he was a very influential Southern Baptist leader.

00:09:54.000 Right.

00:10:00.000 He came up through Southern Seminary.

00:10:02.000 I mean, if you sort of trace his history, he held various positions.

00:10:06.000 He, I believe, was a professor at Southern Seminary and then rose through the ranks to eventually run the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

00:10:14.000 And 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.

00:10:22.000 It's their leadership that's the issue.

00:10:24.000 So you have a lot of conservatives who are sitting in the pews.

00:10:27.000 They're not really paying that much attention to what their leadership is doing, to what their tithes are going to.

00:10:34.000 So at that point, Russell Moore was really using his office to push what you might call Washington Post, New York Times, Atlantic style priorities.

00:10:44.000 And he was appearing in all of those outlets frequently.

00:10:47.000 He was going on MSNBC.

00:10:48.000 He was being lauded.

00:10:50.000 So he was really using that position to sort of build up his national public profile.

00:10:56.000 And 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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00:12:09.000 The book is Shepherds for Sale.

00:12:12.000 Pre-order it, Shepherds for Sale.

00:12:13.000 Megan, you were making a point.

00:12:14.000 Please complete it.

00:12:15.000 Right.

00:12:15.000 So 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.

00:12:30.000 I mean, overwhelmingly, you know, they support the First Amendment, free speech.

00:12:36.000 They support things like closed borders.

00:12:39.000 They support having strong national security.

00:12:42.000 They support things like the right to bear arms.

00:12:46.000 And so you've seen the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, you know, very much working against those policies.

00:12:51.000 And so that created a lot of frustration.

00:12:53.000 And then came the big kicker.

00:12:55.000 He sort of really branded himself in the media publicly as the, you know, never Trump Christian.

00:13:02.000 You saw this coverage everywhere.

00:13:04.000 He routinely sort of hammered the former president.

00:13:08.000 And, 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.

00:13:16.000 What's happening here?

00:13:18.000 And, 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.

00:13:28.000 I wasn't going to vote Joe Biden.

00:13:30.000 And so all this man did was repeatedly sort of attack President Trump.

00:13:34.000 And, you know, he's sort of very famously good friends with David French, and they took the same arc.

00:13:40.000 You kind of saw them both evolve in the same direction.

00:13:44.000 And, 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.

00:14:00.000 So there has been this all-out effort to capture those votes or even just sort of blunt the impact of those votes.

00:14:07.000 I mean, the Atlantic has called evangelicals America's most powerful voting bloc, and they're a captive audience in churches every weekend.

00:14:16.000 So there's a very good reason that the left has been so interested in infiltrating their ministries, their seminaries, their churches.

00:14:26.000 So Russell Moore has very much been an instrument of that.

00:14:29.000 You see him pop up on just about every sort of progressive policy that the left feels like it can conceivably push into churches.

00:14:37.000 So that's really where Russell Moore's evolution went.

00:14:41.000 And after that, there was a revolt.

00:14:43.000 It got so bad that really people in the pews did start to notice.

00:14:46.000 And 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.

00:14:58.000 So 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.

00:15:11.000 And I'm here to tell you there wasn't.

00:15:14.000 You 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.

00:15:21.000 But as far as rate of incidents, it was very low.

00:15:25.000 And the cases that they made very high profile were, in fact, extremely murky allegations between adults.

00:15:32.000 A lot of questions should have been asked.

00:15:34.000 It 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.

00:15:46.000 I was abused the whole time.

00:15:47.000 And those were the kind of allegations that Russell Moore was going out with to say the Southern Baptist Convention has a massive abuse problem.

00:15:56.000 And it became a media storm.

00:15:58.000 He was very successful at it.

00:15:59.000 He had help from people like J.D. Greer.

00:16:02.000 And 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.

00:16:12.000 So he is now their public theologian and their editor-in-chief.

00:16:17.000 And side note on Christianity Today, a little research on them shows that they are heavily Democratic now.

00:16:23.000 I looked into their political donations.

00:16:25.000 You know, from 2015 to 2022, they had about 72 political donations, including editorial staff, which is a journalistic malpractice.

00:16:35.000 And they all went to Democrats, every single one, including Elizabeth Warren.

00:16:40.000 So that was sort of the backdrop of going, why is this happening?

00:16:44.000 Who are the major players?

00:16:45.000 And Russell Moore may very well be the best known player in this world.

00:16:50.000 So, Megan, I want to get into detail the amount of money and who's actually financing this.

00:16:57.000 And this is very depressing for a lot of Christians to hear that their faith leaders are for sale.

00:17:03.000 And 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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00:18:14.000 So, Megan, how much money has been funneled into these churches and who is receiving it?

00:18:22.000 Who is financing it?

00:18:23.000 Give us the specifics and the particulars that your research has discovered.

00:18:28.000 Right.

00:18:28.000 And, 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.

00:18:52.000 So, 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.

00:19:02.000 So, I think we're talking about 3 million when they first launched.

00:19:06.000 And 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.

00:19:18.000 You know, they would, because they tried to say, oh, hey, we cordoned off the George Soros money.

00:19:22.000 So, unless you can get a look at their internal books, it's hard to know.

00:19:25.000 But 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.

00:19:47.000 So that was just a part of it.

00:19:50.000 So 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.

00:20:02.000 So you look at other groups like, say, the Arcus Foundation, which is the largest LGBTQ foundation in the world.

00:20:12.000 They've been funneling millions, as they are very clear, to a variety of denominations and churches that are Protestant.

00:20:20.000 I 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.

00:20:37.000 And we know the slippery slope that that leads to.

00:20:39.000 You're not going to get one part of that package without getting the entire package of, you know, the whole rainbow panoply.

00:20:45.000 So that's what's been going on as far as who is funneling the money.

00:20:48.000 You'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.

00:20:59.000 And by the way, Pierre Omedar, also, who is well known as the founder of eBay.

00:21:05.000 He's not a Christian. 1.00

00:21:06.000 He's a Buddhist.

00:21:07.000 None of these people are.

00:21:08.000 So help me understand.

00:21:10.000 So are they funding individual churches at times?

00:21:12.000 Are they also paying one-off deals?

00:21:15.000 Or is it more through these NGOs?

00:21:18.000 It's through the NGOs.

00:21:20.000 So essentially what they do is these NGOs will have pastor partners.

00:21:26.000 So let's take the evangelical immigration table slash National Immigration Forum.

00:21:32.000 They will have pastors come work for them, right?

00:21:35.000 So there's a Southern Baptist pastor.

00:21:38.000 His name's escaping me right at this second, but he's an example of they will hire this guy.

00:21:42.000 He will show up at the convention, set up a table, start pushing these policies.

00:21:46.000 And the argument is, I work for the evangelical immigration table.

00:21:51.000 That will be his claim.

00:21:52.000 But when you go and look at the job posting for what he does, it says he works for the National Immigration Forum.

00:21:58.000 They're really no different.

00:22:00.000 So he's drawing a paycheck from them.

00:22:02.000 And, 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.

00:22:16.000 So that is how it works.

00:22:18.000 They will pay the NGO, the NGO will hire pastors.

00:22:23.000 So, you know, technically, it's like, hey, I have a job working for the evangelical immigration table slash national immigration forum.

00:22:31.000 And that all looks above board.

00:22:32.000 So they're not, you know, drawing a direct paycheck.

00:22:35.000 They 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.

00:22:45.000 So that's how it works.

00:22:47.000 So let's go deeper into this.

00:22:49.000 But 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.

00:23:07.000 And so why are Christians, why are any Christian leaders partnering with secular left-wing Marxists and taking their money?

00:23:18.000 Why are these shepherds selling themselves? 0.99

00:23:20.000 They sound more like prostitutes than shepherds. 0.99

00:23:23.000 That is a really good observation. 0.97

00:23:25.000 And, you know, the question of why, you know, sometimes, as you pointed out, I think it can be sort of explicitly transactional.

00:23:32.000 We're going to hire you for a role in our organization.

00:23:35.000 You're going to be a mobilizer.

00:23:37.000 And 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.

00:23:49.000 So, you know, that's explicitly transactional, but they're not all like that.

00:23:52.000 I 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.

00:24:03.000 Now, it doesn't say why he's a grantee.

00:24:05.000 My assumption is that it is related to his work with the evangelical immigration table.

00:24:10.000 But you don't call someone your grantee if they've never received money from you.

00:24:14.000 So I think that Russell Moore is a grantee of which organization?

00:24:18.000 George Soros's Open Society Foundation.

00:24:20.000 So that's in the Open Society document.

00:24:24.000 That's in Soros's, yeah, his own internal documents.

00:24:27.000 You know, the difficulty is it doesn't know why.

00:24:29.000 Why was he a grantee?

00:24:31.000 We don't know.

00:24:32.000 But I mean, do we think George Soros made a mistake?

00:24:34.000 Because 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.

00:24:47.000 Well, this conspiracy theory was black and white in George Soros' own documentation.

00:24:52.000 So there's a lot to answer for there.

00:24:54.000 And 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.

00:25:03.000 I hope people understand Russell Moore is one of the top leading, quote-unquote, thought-leading intellectuals in American Christianity.

00:25:10.000 Megan, you are going to finish a point.

00:25:12.000 Please continue.

00:25:13.000 Well, 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.

00:25:27.000 But they are also taking millions.

00:25:30.000 You want to talk about specific dollars.

00:25:32.000 They'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.

00:25:52.000 Why is the Lilly Endowment doing that?

00:25:54.000 And 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?

00:26:03.000 They were privately invited.

00:26:04.000 They didn't just go solicit this money.

00:26:06.000 They were invited to apply for this grant.

00:26:10.000 So this is the kind of thing that you see happening all over.

00:26:13.000 And when you look at, yeah, why are they doing it?

00:26:16.000 It'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.

00:26:34.000 They are the ones who are holding it up.

00:26:35.000 And that is why there has been a cottage industry, a massive explosion of books.

00:26:40.000 By the way, you feature heavily in a lot of those books from people like the Atlantic's Tim Alberta.

00:26:46.000 I'm in all of them.

00:26:47.000 Yeah.

00:26:48.000 Right.

00:26:49.000 And 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.

00:27:03.000 And yet I just heard you do something that I don't hear those guys do.

00:27:06.000 And that is read a disclosure of, hey, we're supported by this foundation.

00:27:11.000 And you were very clear about that.

00:27:12.000 They don't do that.

00:27:14.000 You don't know who's supporting them.

00:27:15.000 They 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.

00:27:32.000 And that's another thing that Russell Moore is involved in.

00:27:34.000 So let me just pause really quick.

00:27:36.000 And Megan, your research is profound and important.

00:27:38.000 It is Shepherds for Sale.

00:27:41.000 So I'm going to ask you a personal opinion.

00:27:46.000 Through all of your research, do you think these people are actually Christian?

00:27:50.000 Man, I don't like to read the state of people's soul, but the fruit is really bad, isn't it?

00:27:55.000 I look at Russell Moore and I go, every sort of pernicious influence is there.

00:28:01.000 People 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.

00:28:12.000 And, you know, we just want everybody to have a voice, and yet they don't actually support conservative voices.

00:28:20.000 I would say no.

00:28:21.000 You know, if the Clinton Foundation came to me and said, we're going to offer you money to do these things, I would say no.

00:28:27.000 So at the very least, I can say, these are some bot men. 0.95

00:28:31.000 Why do they do these things?

00:28:32.000 And I cannot come up with any sort of charitable answer, to be honest with you.

00:28:37.000 And so, Megan, the book is Shepherds for Sale.

00:28:40.000 It's coming out in July.

00:28:43.000 Have any of these people responded to the comment for you as you reach out to them?

00:28:47.000 Have you asked Russell Moore, is George Soros paying you?

00:28:50.000 So I have reached out to Russell Moore on numerous stories that I've written that have touched on these things.

00:28:56.000 I ran into him in an airport.

00:28:58.000 And by the way, always he was too busy.

00:29:01.000 He had COVID.

00:29:02.000 He was traveling.

00:29:03.000 He always had a reason from his assistant why he could not respond to me.

00:29:08.000 And 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.

00:29:15.000 And I just said, you know, I said, your assistant tells me you're too busy.

00:29:19.000 And I said it very politely, very sweetly, very winsomely.

00:29:22.000 And I said, could we talk about it right now?

00:29:24.000 We're both standing here in a line.

00:29:25.000 We got nothing to do for the next, you know, 30 minutes.

00:29:28.000 Let's talk.

00:29:28.000 And he said, no, no, no, I can't do that.

00:29:30.000 You have to call my assistant.

00:29:31.000 Something has to be set up.

00:29:33.000 So, and of course, I never heard back after that when I went out.

00:29:38.000 Maybe he is on George Soros' payroll.

00:29:40.000 We deserve an answer.

00:29:44.000 So, Megan, I do want to get your comments on this Mark Driscoll story.

00:29:49.000 It is rather remarkable.

00:29:51.000 So, 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.

00:30:04.000 And he takes his shirt off at the males conference and swallows a sword and goes up on the poll.

00:30:09.000 Mark Driscoll then shows up, I believe, the next day and calls it out.

00:30:15.000 So, Megan, what do you make of this now very, very viral story in Christianity?

00:30:20.000 Man, so many feelings about this viral moment, trying to make sense of what happened there.

00:30:27.000 I 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.

00:30:32.000 You know, it was a stunt.

00:30:34.000 And I have asked a few people who were there.

00:30:37.000 They tell me it was not pre-planned.

00:30:40.000 But I don't really get what the big controversy was for this particular event.

00:30:45.000 I mean, I think the whole event looks a little chaotic.

00:30:48.000 I don't see a lot of substance there.

00:30:50.000 But when you look back through other clips of this event, they've had shirtless men doing various shirtless things.

00:30:56.000 And I watched the video with the sword swallower.

00:31:00.000 And I would not have known that that guy was a string.

00:31:03.000 It didn't appear sexual to me at all.

00:31:05.000 And 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.

00:31:15.000 And 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.

00:31:29.000 So I'll be honest with you.

00:31:31.000 I thought the whole moment was sort of goofy and opportunistic.

00:31:36.000 And I don't really get what the Jezebel spirit is.

00:31:39.000 To me, what I looked at was, okay, this seems very performative as far as what masculinity is and what men do.

00:31:47.000 And the condemnation didn't really, I don't know what a Jezebel spirit is.

00:31:52.000 I mean, that doesn't point me to a specific scripture.

00:31:55.000 So I didn't really buy into all of that.

00:31:57.000 But the one thing I will say when I watched it is I went, men need to be served by the church.

00:32:03.000 And 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.

00:32:13.000 And they need their masculinity affirmed and praised in healthy ways.

00:32:18.000 And 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.

00:32:28.000 So to me, this is all symptomatic of a much larger problem.

00:32:32.000 In closing here, let's go back to the book, Megan.

00:32:34.000 Anything about the book that you want to mention that we did not cover here, Shepherds for Sale?

00:32:38.000 Oh, gosh.

00:32:39.000 I mean, there's so much.

00:32:40.000 Probably 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.

00:32:50.000 And that is just, you know, the tip of the iceberg of what is happening.

00:32:54.000 So, I mean, I'm very clear that these are simply representative examples of what's going on, but by no means is it exhaustive.

00:33:04.000 And 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.

00:33:22.000 So 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.

00:33:36.000 I agree.

00:33:37.000 And so, so let me just kind of summarize this.

00:33:40.000 This is deeper than people realize and kind of a wider breath.

00:33:46.000 How do we solve it?

00:33:47.000 Well, I think the biggest issue is first know it's happening because I think there's been a lot of confusion.

00:33:52.000 A lot of people haven't realized why is this going on.

00:33:55.000 And so, you know, when they're shamed by their pastors for racial injustice and they're like, I'm not racist.

00:34:01.000 I don't understand this.

00:34:02.000 So the first thing is to know that it's happening, why it's happening.

00:34:05.000 And then the second thing is get out of those churches.

00:34:07.000 Go find solid churches where they're not doing that.

00:34:10.000 Don't give your attention and your money and your tithes to the guys who are pushing this.

00:34:14.000 So that would be, you know, my biggest thing: find solid churches, find good pastors.

00:34:18.000 And when you see it happening, you know, be respectful, be gracious, but don't ignore it.

00:34:24.000 Call out what's happening.

00:34:25.000 And if you see your pastor falling prey to it, I would very respectfully push back and say, hey, why are we doing this?

00:34:31.000 Why are we preaching this instead of the word?

00:34:34.000 Megan, thank you so much.

00:34:35.000 God bless.

00:34:35.000 Talk to you soon.

00:34:36.000 Thanks.

00:34:36.000 Thanks for having me.

00:34:38.000 For the record, I thought that the entire display was outrageous.

00:34:41.000 Having homer erotic male strippers at a church event is a desecration of the holy.

00:34:49.000 Thanks so much for listening. 0.66

00:34:50.000 Everybody, email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:34:53.000 Thanks so much for listening and God bless.

00:34:57.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk dot com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - April 18, 2024

Is Your Church's Pastor "For Sale"?

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