The Michael Knowles Show - August 04, 2024


How Soros Infiltrated & Is Killing The Church ｜ Megan Basham


Episode Stats

Length

16 minutes

Words per Minute

169.24852

Word Count

2,786

Sentence Count

175

Misogynist Sentences

2

Hate Speech Sentences

4


Summary

For years, conservative evangelicals have been rock solid in their support for conservative causes. But in recent years, they ve ve veered to the left on social issues, immigration, and gay issues. Why is this happening? And why is it happening in the evangelical church?


Transcript

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00:00:30.440 I now have my friend Megan Basham on the show.
00:00:35.160 Megan has a great new book out called Shepherds for Sale,
00:00:39.500 How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda.
00:00:43.280 I actually don't have a copy of this yet,
00:00:45.480 though I've been looking forward to this book coming out for a while,
00:00:47.820 and I'm scandalized and furious that I don't have a nice inscribed personal copy of it,
00:00:52.160 but I'm sure I will get one soon enough.
00:00:54.640 The topic interests me greatly because, you know, as a mackerel snapper myself,
00:00:59.440 I focus on a lot of the problems and the, you know, the difficulties that the Catholic Church has faced,
00:01:06.080 but seemingly out of the blue for the past four to six or seven years,
00:01:12.300 it seems as though the evangelicals who had been rock-solid right-wingers in America have been rocked.
00:01:19.380 I don't know, doctrinally, politically, socially.
00:01:23.060 So I turned to my friend Meg.
00:01:24.280 What is going on?
00:01:26.340 Well, that trailer that you just played of Matt Walsh,
00:01:30.660 let me explain that there are a lot of pastors who look and sound exactly like that right now in the evangelical church.
00:01:37.660 And I am not kidding.
00:01:38.580 They will talk about their bag of white privilege and how we need to be anti-racist.
00:01:44.320 So that's really what's going on.
00:01:46.080 And what I went into was, why is this happening?
00:01:49.300 Where is it coming from?
00:01:50.400 Why are these evangelical ministries suddenly sounding like Robin DiAngelo?
00:01:55.660 And the reason for that is that there has been a lot of left-wing infiltration into the church,
00:02:00.220 secular left-wing infiltration, in fact, from billionaires whose names you know,
00:02:05.400 like George Soros, Bill Gates, even Mark Zuckerberg,
00:02:09.460 pouring money into these evangelical front groups to get evangelicals to support things like cap-and-trade,
00:02:17.720 climate change policy, open borders,
00:02:21.460 all manner of things that normally you would not expect evangelical Christians to support.
00:02:26.580 So I noticed this just personally.
00:02:29.220 Some of my evangelical friends who had been rock solid after George Floyd,
00:02:35.340 they started to sound left-wing.
00:02:38.440 And it's not just that they moved left-wing on, you know, anti-racism or some of those issues,
00:02:43.060 but they moved left on LGBT issues even.
00:02:47.280 Correct.
00:02:47.780 On all manner of issues.
00:02:49.500 So this is unfortunate because the American conservative movement has been Catholics and evangelicals.
00:02:58.040 And to some degree, conservative Jews.
00:03:00.420 There just aren't that many Jews, so it's a relatively small number.
00:03:03.220 But those groups have had outsized influence.
00:03:07.920 So you have a lot of conservatives,
00:03:11.540 really in the leadership of the conservative movement,
00:03:14.100 you think of like Bill Buckley, Phyllis Schlafly, Russell Kirk, all these kinds of guys.
00:03:17.640 And then the reliable, you know, coalition had all these right-wing evangelicals.
00:03:24.440 When you look down at the polling tabs,
00:03:27.120 the most reliably right-wing religious group in America, it's the evangelicals.
00:03:31.820 So if we lose the evangelicals, it seems to me that the Republicans are sunk.
00:03:37.320 No, that is exactly correct.
00:03:40.600 And, you know, for my Catholic friends, my Jewish friends who are politically conservative,
00:03:45.360 I always like to tell them, here's why you care about the evangelicals,
00:03:48.920 because they're roughly 30 percent of the electorate.
00:03:51.700 And the legacy media has rightly called them America's most powerful voting bloc,
00:03:56.500 which is why there has been this all-out effort to co-opt that vote,
00:04:00.880 to infiltrate their ranks.
00:04:02.640 And so as this is happening, this has actually happened in the Catholic Church before,
00:04:07.800 and now we're starting to see it in these evangelical ministries.
00:04:11.560 And it's a very deliberate effort.
00:04:13.600 You will see them creating front groups with the name evangelical in them.
00:04:18.280 It's a little bit like that Steve Buscemi meme where he shows up,
00:04:21.980 how do you do fellow kids?
00:04:23.460 It's how do you do fellow evangelicals with names like the Evangelical Environmental Network,
00:04:28.940 the Evangelical Immigration Table.
00:04:31.220 And so these organizations are funded by secular left foundations,
00:04:36.020 but they're astroturf campaigns to create the illusion that evangelicals want these particular policies
00:04:43.340 so that GOP lawmakers will go, oh, gosh, well, evangelicals are my most important constituency.
00:04:49.700 That's how I get reelected.
00:04:51.340 I better appease them and, say, pass Senator Lankford's border bill.
00:04:56.120 So that's what's been going on.
00:04:57.820 And that was kind of a big part of the money trail that I trace.
00:05:02.160 But, of course, there's also the fear of man.
00:05:04.420 I mean, Scripture tells us that that is always going to be with us and that nothing is more natural to a man
00:05:11.180 than to drift away and compromise based on worldly influences.
00:05:16.040 And so we're seeing a lot of that, too.
00:05:17.500 And what I did was basically trace, one, how there has been an organic drifting away,
00:05:24.840 but also an orchestrated drifting away.
00:05:28.020 So, you know, you do see these intentional efforts frequently.
00:05:32.740 I guess my question for the effect of it is with Catholics,
00:05:39.340 if you look at the polling on Catholics, it's 50-50 just about, conservative and liberal.
00:05:44.460 But the reason for that is that Catholicism is a sticky identity.
00:05:49.180 So because someone will say, oh, I was raised Catholic, or I went to 12 years of Catholic school.
00:05:54.100 You know, when someone starts out that way, you're about to hear the most heretical, left-wing, apostate.
00:05:59.760 Listen here, I went to 12 years of Catholic school, so I'm pretty much Thomas Aquinas.
00:06:03.080 You know, I haven't gone to church ever since, and I don't believe in a thing the church believes.
00:06:07.360 But you can clearly point and say, okay, look, Joe Biden, maybe you call yourself a Catholic,
00:06:12.800 but you contradict the church on non-negotiable aspects of, you know, a doctrine that has been laid out now for 2,000 years.
00:06:20.380 And so you're just kind of an apostate, you know, even if you call yourself Catholic.
00:06:25.260 But what's odd about what's going on with the evangelicals is, what you're saying is, no, these are people who do go to church.
00:06:33.200 These are pastors who will get up there at the pulpit, and they seem to be in good standing with the broader evangelical coalition.
00:06:42.380 And they're peddling this left-wing garbage.
00:06:46.180 Yeah, and that was a very deliberate effort.
00:06:48.420 If you actually look at some of the documentation from some of these Soros-funded think tanks,
00:06:54.080 they openly talk about the fact that what we want to do is harness the power of these high-profile, well-known evangelical pastors
00:07:02.320 in the hopes that their influence will trickle down to the rank and file.
00:07:07.220 So they have made strong effort to, you could say, woo and charm and bring those people into the fold.
00:07:14.920 And some of them, who are the shepherds for sale, have willingly done that.
00:07:19.620 And so when you see some of these pastors doing this, you will see them use the language of CRT, just like Matt right there.
00:07:27.280 Or you will see them sort of smuggle in some of these policies under different names like, quote-unquote, creation care,
00:07:34.780 which really just means climate change policy.
00:07:37.520 And what they're doing, it's so insidious, Michael, because they're not arguing like, hey,
00:07:42.060 I really think that human activity is having an impact on our climate.
00:07:47.240 And so let's debate the science and what the best policy would be.
00:07:50.040 That's not what they're doing.
00:07:51.240 They're skipping all of the debate and saying, to follow Jesus faithfully means that you must support climate change initiatives.
00:08:00.380 You must support cap and trade.
00:08:01.940 And there's a name for that, which is legalism.
00:08:04.080 And Jesus had a lot to say about legalism.
00:08:06.320 So this is the kind of activity that they've been getting up to, to move evangelicals.
00:08:13.000 And it's been a slow process, but it has been effective.
00:08:16.640 You brought up, for instance, the LGBTQ movement.
00:08:20.180 There has been a very large foundation, the Arcus Foundation, the largest gay transgender grantmaker in the world.
00:08:28.500 It has funneled, for example, millions of dollars into the United Methodist Church, as it says, to transform their doctrine on marriage and sexuality.
00:08:39.080 Well, what we just saw.
00:08:40.260 Job well done, I guess.
00:08:41.760 Exactly.
00:08:42.540 We just saw a schism in the United Methodist Church over those issues.
00:08:46.420 So you can say that money was very well spent.
00:08:49.260 Wow.
00:08:50.100 Wow.
00:08:50.640 Because, look, I've seen it with the Methodists, obviously.
00:08:54.500 I drive past a Methodist church sometimes, and it'll say, you know, Reverend Sally so-and-so.
00:09:00.920 You know, it's some reverendess.
00:09:02.280 And, you know, diversity is our strength.
00:09:04.960 And, you know, love is love or whatever.
00:09:06.740 You know, it's just left-wing slogans rather than a verse of scripture or some wisdom from a church father.
00:09:14.560 But it's obviously deeply troubling because these are high-profile people.
00:09:22.320 So I don't want to, you know, I don't want to get too much tea spilt here.
00:09:26.740 But, Meg, let's name some names.
00:09:28.580 I'm happy to name names in many times.
00:09:29.040 Who are the pastors?
00:09:29.900 Let's go.
00:09:30.520 Yeah.
00:09:31.180 Yeah, no.
00:09:32.020 Some of them are really well-known people, like Rick Warren, who is the very well-known pastor of Saddleback Church.
00:09:39.640 He wrote the best-selling book, The Purpose Driven Life, one of the best-selling books in U.S. history.
00:09:45.160 And he signed this climate change initiative, promoted it, promised to try to get evangelicals to pass it.
00:09:52.720 He boasts of being wined and dined by the World Economic Forum and being invited to Davos to advise on how the church can partner with the World Economic Forum to harness the people in the pews for the World Economic Forum's policy goals.
00:10:08.880 So these are open conversations that they were having a few years ago when I think maybe they didn't realize that that would become controversial eventually and people would go, hold up, wait a minute, what are you guys doing?
00:10:19.040 I can give you the example of the Southern Baptist Convention's recent president, J.D. Greer, who is a very well-known megachurch pastor.
00:10:28.000 And he openly peddled CRT, promised that in his extremely influential position as the president of the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., that he was instituting a racial quota hiring policy so that he promised that 30 percent of all of the hires within the Southern Baptist Convention and all of the appointees to those committees would be racial minorities or women.
00:10:56.920 So you can imagine how that is transforming the nation's largest Protestant denomination, and it has been traditionally the most conservative as well.
00:11:07.020 And there's such a huge divide between what the rank and file support and what the leadership supports.
00:11:14.640 But over time, you do manage to influence those people because they're going to church every week to say, Pastor, how should I live my life?
00:11:22.040 How does Jesus expect me to apply scripture to the voting booth and those type of things?
00:11:29.020 So it's inevitable that a secular left is going to want access to that captive audience, and they're getting it.
00:11:36.680 And I can tell you that the Southern Baptist Convention is ground zero for this.
00:11:41.140 They represent about 5 percent of the U.S. population.
00:11:44.840 And they have done things like openly advocated CRT as a positive analytical tool for Christians to use in considering how to view racial issues in the United States.
00:11:59.060 And, I mean, I can tell you just this week we saw some of this going on.
00:12:02.780 And I don't want to go too deep in the weeds, but really quick, they have a policy arm, this largest Protestant denomination, that is supposed to lobby the government on behalf of Southern Baptist interests.
00:12:14.580 But instead, what it's been doing is lobbying Southern Baptists on behalf of issues like gun control, open borders policies.
00:12:23.620 And when the rank and file got very upset about this and the head of that entity was removed, a guy named Brent Leatherwood, just two days ago, you saw the entire left wing media lose their minds that this guy was removed.
00:12:39.840 The New York Times editorial board, CNN, had it as a main story on their main page.
00:12:45.760 A lot of their reporters, their foreign analysts, reacted in mass outrage that this guy, Brent Leatherwood, was fired.
00:12:53.020 And the next thing you know, spooked Southern Baptist leaders went, never mind, he's not fired, he's reinstated.
00:12:58.100 So that's kind of how this sort of thing is playing out.
00:13:01.080 That is, you know.
00:13:03.860 That's a lot of information to absorb right now.
00:13:06.320 I was feeling kind of good about, you know, President Trump survived the assassination attempt and our poll numbers are looking pretty good.
00:13:13.840 And I don't know, but you've left me in a, once again, in a state of worry and distress.
00:13:22.460 Although, you know, I don't know, our Lord uses history to play out his goals.
00:13:27.240 And so even when groups that had been once quite reliable, you know, if they're going to be infiltrated and they're going to be attacks on them, and maybe they're going to break up.
00:13:35.000 And maybe the Methodists have just, I don't know, maybe there go the Methodists.
00:13:39.660 So people need to read the book.
00:13:41.280 They need to know what's going on.
00:13:42.680 What advice do you have for evangelicals?
00:13:45.780 If they don't want to take the Knowles advice of swimming the Tiber, they're not quite there.
00:13:49.820 What do you do?
00:13:50.700 You've got some pastor who's preaching CRT and environmentalism or whatever from the pulpit.
00:13:56.680 What is the person in the middle of the country supposed to do?
00:14:00.160 Well, the first thing you do is you graciously and respectfully have a conversation with your pastor.
00:14:05.940 Because let's be fair, maybe his buddies are pushing this stuff.
00:14:09.720 He hasn't thought the issue through deeply.
00:14:12.280 And we are all fallible in many ways.
00:14:14.540 So I would encourage you to maybe shoot your pastor a note and say, hey, can we go to coffee and talk about my concerns?
00:14:19.800 So that's one.
00:14:21.020 And then two, when you have open wolves doing things like pushing the doctrinal transformation of what the scripture says about marriage or sexuality, at that point you need to get out of that church.
00:14:34.000 And you need to stop giving your tithes and offerings to those church leaders.
00:14:38.600 So those are the first two things.
00:14:40.120 And the second thing is, buy my book, Be Forewarned, so that when you hear some of these disguised sneaky terms like racial reconciliation and creation care, you know what they really mean.
00:14:52.760 And your spidey senses should tingle when you hear them.
00:14:55.600 That is very good, all very good advice, especially, you know, if they're shepherds for sale, maybe voting with your pocket is an important thing to do.
00:15:02.120 But the first thing you should do, speaking of your pocket, is go shell out the money for Megan Basham's book, Shepherds for Sale.
00:15:10.000 Really wild, and I can't wait to read it myself.
00:15:11.920 Meg, thank you for coming on the show.
00:15:12.960 I can't believe I didn't bring you a copy to the RNC.
00:15:15.020 I am furious.
00:15:16.720 I'm working through my anger day by day, and I will be consoled by the book that I'm sure is extremely excellent.
00:15:25.060 I've really been, this is not flattery at all, I've been looking forward to this book for a while.
00:15:29.020 I've been hearing about it for a while, and it's an under-discussed political time bomb that is about to go off for conservatives, if it hasn't gone off already.
00:15:38.660 Meg, thank you for coming on the show.
00:15:40.640 Absolutely, thanks for having me.
00:15:42.100 I'm Michael Knowles.
00:15:42.920 This is The Michael Knowles Show.
00:15:43.660 I will see all of you tomorrow.
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