Author Megan Basham explains why some Christian leaders back policies that are anything but Christian.
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
175.91072
Summary
America faces a lot of enemies right now, foreign and domestic. But, from the perspective of the people who run the country, there is really only one enemy, and that enemy is you, faithful Christians. Now, nobody ever says that out loud, of course. Nobody ever says anything meaningful out loud in the United States anymore. But if you're interested in who they really hate, well, look at what's happening. Christian churches across the country have been burning, and no one in the government is doing anything about it. Look at how Christian churches were treated during COID. Strip clubs stayed open. Liquor stores stayed open, but Christian churches have been closed because public health and safety are being compromised. And what's going on behind the scenes is that Christians are being told over and over again that you're in danger. You need to fight if you don't want to lose your country. We are in a civil war between good and evil. This is not a movement about Christian values, this is about Christian power. And the thing that keeps me up at night is that we lose democracy, does that seem possible? Yes, that seems possible. Guest: Meghan Basham, a reporter for The Daily Wire. She's written a book about what Christianity really is. She joins us to talk about this. She also joins us now to write a piece on what Christianity is really about, and why it's the greatest threat to the people in charge of the country. She has been writing about this for a long time, and she's got some wisdom to give us some insight into what Christians are really fighting for. She's a smart, smart, wise, and a good friend of mine, and I hope you'll listen to this. -- Thank you for listening, Megan Basham. -- Thank you, Megan. -Tucker Carlson, I really appreciate it, too, too? -- My apologies for the fact that I know it's a little bit more than that, too much of it's not enough, you really do, really does make it so much of a good thing, I think it's really good, really really does, really do it really does really do that, you're a good one, I mean that really does do it, I do it well, I'm not gonna say that, right? -- I mean it, really, really means that I really do... -- And I think that I'm sorry, really?
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Welcome to Tucker Carlson podcast. It's pretty obvious at this point that the corporate media
00:00:15.720
are dying quickly. But why? Because they lie. That's right. They lie. And they died as a result.
00:00:25.860
But at TuckerCarlson.com, we do not lie. We promise to bring you honest interviews and
00:00:30.420
commentary without fear. Here's our latest episode. America faces a lot of enemies right
00:00:35.720
now, foreign and domestic. But from the perspective of the people who run the country, there's really
00:00:40.300
just one enemy, and that's faithful Christians. Now, nobody ever says that out loud, of course.
00:00:46.980
Nobody ever says anything very meaningful out loud in the United States anymore. But if you're
00:00:52.740
interested in who they really hate, well, look at what's happening. So Christian churches across
00:00:56.780
the country have been burning, and no one in the government is doing anything about it. Look at
00:01:01.880
how Christian churches were treated during COVID. Strip clubs stayed open. Weed dispensaries stayed
00:01:06.780
open. Liquor stores stayed open. But Christian churches were closed because public health.
00:01:12.020
We talked the other day to a guy who's facing 11 years in prison, federal felony charges from the
00:01:18.620
Biden administration for praying at an abortion clinic and daring to sing hymns. So if you are a
00:01:25.800
faithful Christian, not a fake Christian, David French Christian, but an actual Christian of the
00:01:31.460
kind this country has always had, of the kind this country was created to harbor, actually, you are seen
00:01:37.680
as an enemy by the people who run it. And of course, nobody hates Christians more than longtime Hollywood
00:01:43.380
actor and producer Rob Reiner. Amazingly. And he's just produced a documentary about how faithful
00:01:50.140
Christians are the enemy, if you can believe it. Here's the trailer from that documentary.
00:01:55.220
We should be blazing forth as a countercultural example. And instead, we're leading the charge of
00:02:00.780
malice and division. Christian nationalism uses Christianity as a means to an end.
00:02:06.960
That end being some form of authoritarianism. Being a Christian is about the values of inclusion.
00:02:17.720
Christian nationalism is certainly not based on the values of the gospel.
00:02:21.620
God wants America to be saved. They're told over and over and over again that you're in danger.
00:02:29.200
You need to fight if you don't want to lose your country. We are in a civil war between good and evil.
00:02:34.700
This is not a movement about Christian values. This is about Christian power.
00:02:38.880
The thing that keeps me up at night is that we lose democracy.
00:02:44.880
Rob Reiner lecturing us on what Jesus really wanted.
00:02:48.980
Now, part of the purpose of this is political, of course. Part of the purpose, maybe the main purpose,
00:02:55.060
is spiritual. There's something about actual Christianity that's the greatest threat of all
00:03:00.880
to the people in charge. And again, you see it all around. MSNBC the other day hosted a Politico
00:03:07.080
reporter, Heidi Prisbala, attacking Christians who somehow got the idea, maybe from our founding
00:03:13.320
documents, that their rights come from God and aren't granted out of the generosity of, say,
00:03:23.140
And the one thing that unites all of them, because there's many different groups orbiting Trump,
00:03:26.940
but the thing that unites them as Christian nationalists, not Christians, by the way,
00:03:32.180
because Christian nationalists is very different, is that they believe that our rights as Americans,
00:03:37.100
as all human beings, don't come from any earthly authority. They don't come from Congress.
00:03:42.080
They don't come from their Supreme Court. They come from God.
00:03:44.180
They think their rights come from God. They're not granted by the U.S. Congress and Politico and Heidi
00:03:51.080
Prisbala, who, by the way, has no idea what she's saying. Just another useful idiot. But what's going
00:03:58.060
on behind the scenes, all the effort that went into getting Heidi Prisbala to carry this message,
00:04:04.740
probably unknowingly, is worth taking a really close look at. In fact, it's really the only
00:04:10.680
conversation that matters at this point in the history of the West. And Megan Basham has been
00:04:16.020
covering this and writing about it from a position of deep knowledge and we think some wisdom. She's
00:04:20.900
a reporter for the Daily Wire. She's written a book about this. She joins us now. Megan, thanks so much
00:04:26.840
for coming on. So this is a much broader conversation, but let's just start with Rob Reiner
00:04:33.320
lecturing the rest of us about what Christianity really is. What is this documentary and what's the
00:04:39.560
purpose of it? Yeah, it's a little hard to get around the irony of that. And thanks for having
00:04:44.040
me, Tucker. You know, to start with, I might disagree with a little bit something you said
00:04:48.840
in your monologue there. Of course. And that is that they're not saying this out loud because
00:04:52.800
they're very much saying it out loud these days. They are calling evangelicals, particularly
00:04:58.220
evangelicals, who engage in the political process a threat to democracy. And I think that's the important
00:05:03.640
thing to know because the context of this, and for people who don't know what evangelicals are or why
00:05:08.660
we should care. If you're not a particularly religious person, here's why you care. So they
00:05:13.380
are 32% of the American electorate. The Atlantic quite rightly called them in 2021 America's most
00:05:21.280
powerful voting bloc. So they're right about that. They are essentially the only obstacle that we still
00:05:27.660
have to the left-wing agenda. If you remove them, you removed all the brakes is essentially what
00:05:33.220
evangelicals are and what they do when it comes to the political process. So there's been a very
00:05:38.620
deliberate effort, and this film is part of it. But it is just a drop in the bucket, to be quite
00:05:43.180
frank. I have an entire cottage industry that is saying, if these people, these evangelicals continue
00:05:49.000
to engage in the public process to try to influence their neighbors through their vote, through free
00:05:56.840
association, through using their free speech, by, you know, get out the vote efforts, anything like
00:06:01.560
that, that's dangerous and scary. And that's very much what you saw with this film. So, I mean,
00:06:06.420
it is over the top. I'm not going to do it the justice of pretending like it presents anything
00:06:11.380
like a coherent intellectual argument. It doesn't. What it essentially does is say,
00:06:17.240
here are bad, scary Christians. And they include in that bucket, by the way, everyone from Billy Graham
00:06:22.620
to Mike Pence to the Unite the Right rally, which was led by Richard Spencer, an atheist. So it's
00:06:30.780
essentially saying all these guys, Jerry Falwell, John MacArthur, all of them, they're the same as
00:06:35.480
Unite the Right, which in itself is bonkers to even try to create a parallel there. So that is
00:06:42.020
the gist of the mouth. I'm sorry to interrupt. They claim, and I haven't seen it, but Richard
00:06:48.300
Spencer is a liberal who hates Christianity. And they're saying that Richard Spencer is a Christian
00:06:53.720
nationalist? Correct. Yes. So, you know, as they sort of trace the arc of Christian nationalism in
00:07:01.000
American history, what they show is that it culminates in the Unite the Right rally and the
00:07:06.380
January 6th riot, neither of which has there ever been any evidence were associated with any religious
00:07:12.220
motives. So really what you could call this is a propaganda smear. That's what it is. It's just one
00:07:18.660
that's being helped along by people who claim to be speaking for the real Christians, the true
00:07:24.620
Christians, which in this film are the Christians who are pro-abortion, pro-LGBTQ agenda, who, you
00:07:30.920
know, demand political action on behalf of abortion in their rainbow-drenched churches.
00:07:37.820
I mean, I'm hardly a theologian, have no interest in becoming one, but I think we can say conclusively
00:07:43.180
if you're pro-abortion, you're not a Christian. I mean, I think it's kind of that simple, is it not?
00:07:47.600
I don't know how you could be for child sacrifice and for Christianity. Right. Yeah, it absolutely is
00:07:54.600
for me. And, you know, that's part of what's so insidious is, you know, they say that Roe is the
00:07:59.520
overturning of Roe was the culmination of Christian nationalist political victory. So if you're going to
00:08:06.820
do that, you have now just said that evangelicals participating in the political process over a course
00:08:12.820
of, gosh, 30, 50 years, they put in so much effort that that was nothing more than a political ploy
00:08:19.560
and it's not true Christianity, it's not true religion. In fact, they say that the only reason
00:08:24.600
Christians and evangelicals in particular picked up that issue was because they failed at blocking
00:08:30.020
desegregation in private schools back in the 1960s. So that's how unserious this film is. But what is
00:08:38.220
serious about it is that it's part of a much larger narrative that we're seeing. You know,
00:08:43.820
everybody knows Rob Reiner, so everybody's talking about this particular film. But let's get real. I
00:08:48.040
mean, there's been an entire cottage industry of books from, you know, staff writers at the Atlantic
00:08:52.520
through from Russell Moore, who is in this film himself, claiming to speak for the sober minded,
00:08:59.680
non-politically idolatrous Christians, which, you know, that in itself, given how political someone
00:09:05.380
like Russell Moore, who is the editor of Christianity Today himself is, is hugely ironic.
00:09:11.680
And I think that there's also a little bit of don't look behind the curtain at what the man back
00:09:17.000
there is doing, because Russell Moore is absolutely a political actor in a much more deliberate and
00:09:22.420
well-funded way than, you know, any of the people that this movie is criticizing.
00:09:26.160
Well, let's let's let's talk about that. I mean, so he was a Baptist leader, of course, for years.
00:09:30.420
He didn't like Trump. And from my perspective, it's totally fine. You don't have to like Trump to be a
00:09:34.920
Christian, of course, or any political leader. But Russell Moore is himself a political leader.
00:09:40.600
And he does. It seems from my outsider's perspective, very much like he is paid to subvert
00:09:46.840
American traditional Christianity on behalf of the Democratic Party. He seems like he's
00:09:53.220
betraying his fellow Christians for money. But maybe I'm just being unfair. You tell me who Russell
00:10:01.880
Moore is, if you would, who who's backing him and why, you think?
00:10:09.000
So if you're not familiar with Russell Moore, he was formerly until the last few years, the head of
00:10:15.380
the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. And that is the political lobbying arm of the Southern
00:10:20.260
Baptist Convention. That is the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S. It represents some 47,000
00:10:27.000
churches, maybe 15 million evangelicals in the country. So if your purpose is to suppress or sway
00:10:34.040
their vote, you're not going to get more bang for your buck than trying to infiltrate the Southern
00:10:38.920
Baptist Convention. And I think that's very much what we have seen with Russell Moore when he was in
00:10:43.560
leadership. You know, part of the thing that he did was getting the ERLC involved with a group called the
00:10:49.240
Evangelical Immigration Table, which is essentially just the faith front of the National Immigration Forum,
00:10:55.560
which is a left wing NGO that advocates for open border policies, amnesty policies. They are George
00:11:03.160
Soros funded. They don't like people to talk about that, but they absolutely are. And so these are the
00:11:08.280
kind of things that Russell Moore was involved in when he was with the ERLC. You know, he did a lot of
00:11:15.320
publicity with Obama trying to convince all kinds of conservative legislators at the time that
00:11:22.600
evangelicals backed amnesty policies and that that's what they wanted. And he's still doing that
00:11:28.040
kind of thing today. But eventually, it was sort of like the jig was up with Southern Baptists. You
00:11:32.680
had the rank and file who did not feel represented by him really dissatisfied with the kind of political
00:11:38.280
lobbying that he was doing. So he said he was psychologically terrorized. Now, he has never
00:11:43.320
defined what he meant by he was psychologically terrorized.
00:11:46.200
He said that he said that he was psychologically terrorized by the Southern Baptists who were not
00:11:55.000
fans of his. And again, and this was repeated in Atlantic writer Tim Alberta's book, but nobody ever
00:12:00.680
defines what he meant by that. Everybody just sort of takes him at his word. So I don't know what he
00:12:05.160
meant by that. But what we do know is the rank and file did not really like his political views.
00:12:10.120
So he left and he went and became the editor in chief at Christianity Today. And what they're doing
00:12:15.240
in this cycle right now, for example, is they have launched a curriculum that is a political Bible
00:12:22.440
study to help Christians reframe their political identity. And it's funded by people like the
00:12:30.040
Rockefellers, the Rockefeller philanthropy advisors. If you're not familiar with them, they fund a lot of
00:12:36.040
left wing things like abortion and quote unquote gender affirming care for minors and youth. So
00:12:42.760
puberty blockers, mastectomies for young girls, hormones, all of that. So things that rob children
00:12:50.520
of their sexual function. So he's involved with a group that's taking money from them and also from
00:12:56.760
the Hewlett Foundation, which is the largest fund, second largest funder, excuse me, of Planned Parenthood.
00:13:03.400
So they have created this Bible study to go into churches, to go into Christian colleges, universities.
00:13:11.240
The Council for Christian Colleges and Universities has been pushing it onto all of their 185 campuses.
00:13:17.960
And essentially what it does is say that issues are complex. And at the beginning of this,
00:13:23.000
you brought up abortion, Tucker. And one of the things that this curriculum stresses is that
00:13:27.880
if anybody tells you they think they know the answer on how you should vote for when it comes to
00:13:33.560
abortion and protecting innocent lives, you should run from that person because you shouldn't buy into
00:13:39.720
package deal ethics. And it's insidious, but it is somewhat overt in this curriculum.
00:13:46.360
At one point, David French, who was also involved in this curriculum,
00:13:49.480
is talking about how complex the issue of abortion is. And we don't always know
00:13:53.400
how we should vote regarding it. They show on the screen, a woman holding up a pro-life sign at a
00:13:59.160
march. So, you know, the visual messaging there is very clear. So when you look at this, you go,
00:14:04.680
here you have guys like Russell Moore, David French, who are taking money from hard left secular
00:14:11.080
foundations to push their political curriculum into churches, onto Christian campuses. This is
00:14:17.960
explicitly political lobbying. And yet at the same time, they're in this movie of Rob Reiner's
00:14:24.120
warning. Oh gosh, look at all the idolatrous Trump voters, all of the idolatrous evangelicals who are
00:14:31.000
trying to oppose Roe, who are happy about the Dobbs decision, who made political choices to bring that
00:14:37.080
day about. So, you know, there's just a huge irony there, or we might call it hypocrisy and Phariseeism.
00:14:47.960
The swamp in Washington has closed in on the Supreme Court to muddy its future with plans for
00:14:54.680
court packing and term limits to purge the court's conservatives, shifting the balance to churn out
00:15:01.160
radical decisions. But you can keep the swamp at bay by insisting candidates for president or
00:15:07.880
Congress come clean on whether they plan to restructure the court. Learn more ways to help the
00:15:12.840
court rise above the mire of politics at SupremeCoup.com. Tucker says it best. The credit card
00:15:20.040
companies are ripping Americans off and enough is enough. This is Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas.
00:15:26.520
Our legislation, the Credit Card Competition Act, would help in the grip Visa and MasterCard have on us.
00:15:33.800
Every time you use your credit card, they charge you a hidden fee called a swipe fee,
00:15:38.440
and they've been raising it without even telling you. This hurts consumers and every small business
00:15:43.960
owner. In fact, American families are paying $1,100 in hidden swipe fees each year. The fees Visa and
00:15:51.720
MasterCard charge Americans are the highest in the world, double candidates and eight times more than
00:15:57.640
Europe's. That's why I've taken action, but I need your help to help get this passed. I'm asking you to call
00:16:04.200
your senator today and demand they pass the Credit Card Competition Act. Paid for by the Merchants
00:16:10.840
Payments Coalition. Not authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. www.merchantspaymentscoalition.com.
00:16:19.960
Well, I do think that there's a different standard for leaders. I mean, they have the privilege of
00:16:25.000
leadership and all of its many benefits, but they also have deeper obligations to the people they lead.
00:16:30.520
And I wonder of the people you've mentioned, David French and Russell Moore, there have been a lot of
00:16:35.720
killing of Christians around the world. There's killing of Christians in Gaza right now, killing
00:16:39.800
Christians in Armenia, the Christians of Iraq were genocided under George W. Bush. And then there are
00:16:45.720
Christians in the United States going to prison for practicing their religion. Have they said anything
00:16:50.200
about any of that? No. And you know, that's part of what this is, is that they push forward a message of
00:16:57.800
here is what faithful Christian witness in the public square looks like, but it's only on specific
00:17:02.520
issues, right? It's only on things like welcoming the stranger when it comes to illegal immigration.
00:17:08.280
So, you know, that's a big messaging push that Russell Moore, David French have been involved in.
00:17:14.440
It includes things like not idolizing Trump, but when it comes to these complex issues that we should be
00:17:21.640
talking about from a biblical worldview, they don't delve into that at all, because that is not part
00:17:27.240
of the messaging that, let's say, the mainstream media, let's say, the secular progressive foundations
00:17:33.240
who are funding their ventures. These are not the political ideas that they're interested in. It's not
00:17:38.600
the political debate that they're interested in. And, you know, therefore, they don't talk about that,
00:17:42.840
and you're not going to hear them talk about that. And look, I think these are issues on which
00:17:46.680
Christians of good faith can have different views, and it's something that we can wrestle with and
00:17:51.800
discuss. But what you notice is they don't wrestle with it and discuss it. They say, you know, there is
00:17:57.320
one legitimate Christian outlook to take. And if you express or even ask in any way about it in any
00:18:05.800
curious or you present something else that may go, hey, what about this? I just read about these,
00:18:10.360
you know, Ukrainian churches that are being shut down. I have a concern about that.
00:18:14.680
The immediate thing is to tag you as somebody who is a Christian nationalist, who's a conspiracy
00:18:20.040
theorist. And, you know, one thing that made me laugh in this film when they were tying January 6th
00:18:26.280
to Christian nationalism is they said, one of the dangers we may see coming out of this is that
00:18:31.960
Christians may begin to second guess what happened on January 6th, and that would be a threat to our
00:18:37.840
democracy. So the things that should be the foundations of our democracy, open debate about these issues,
00:18:44.280
about like what's happening in Ukraine, or, you know, what's happening in Gaza, or any of these
00:18:48.600
subjects where we should have free and open debate. Instead, they're saying it's a threat to democracy
00:18:54.280
to have free and open debate as Christians about these issues.
00:18:58.120
You must obey and not question people who hate Christianity and want to kill Christians. Otherwise,
00:19:03.560
you're not a Christian. That's what they're saying. One of the things that bothers me most
00:19:08.040
about all of this and shocks me a little bit is if you live in a pluralistic society like ours,
00:19:12.760
which is great, one of the rules is you can't attack other people's religions. And you may disagree
00:19:20.120
with them. I disagree with a lot of different religions. But if you want to all live together,
00:19:24.040
you can't just attack the theological precepts of other people's religions, or else people really
00:19:29.640
start to hate each other. And it's impossible to live together. And yet these attacks on Christian
00:19:35.160
nationalism are exactly that. Does anyone see that as unwise? Like, let's not do this.
00:19:42.760
I mean, you know, certainly you're seeing rank and file people saying this is unwise,
00:19:46.760
and you are starting to see something of a, okay, and we can debate whether or not this is wise,
00:19:51.560
but you're seeing some people going, we are getting tagged with this Christian nationalism label
00:19:55.800
anyway. So maybe what we should do is just accept it and, you know, give it a definition that is
00:20:00.120
different from the definition that they're going to give it since they're going to push this agenda
00:20:04.040
anyway. And here's the situation is that we see where this spins out. We see what happens in societies
00:20:11.880
where we've made it okay for the government to start investigating churches, starting to question
00:20:17.080
people's doctrine and theology. And that actually is a dangerous road to go down. And that's not something
00:20:22.280
that they grapple with at all in this film. It's certainly not something that, you know,
00:20:26.280
the public theologian of Christianity today, which is the flagship magazine of evangelicalism,
00:20:32.680
and should be grappling with this issue. That's not something that they discuss at all. And, you know,
00:20:38.840
you don't want to scare monger, but at the same time you go, I can see very clearly the direction
00:20:44.600
it goes in when we have our DOJ investigating Catholic churches as hotbeds of domestic terrorism.
00:20:51.880
That is not a good place for us to head down. And so this entire narrative is setting something
00:20:56.280
like that up. And if we're going to do that, you do get to the place where you go,
00:21:00.440
these are legitimate religions and these are not legitimate religions. And that actually
00:21:04.920
is something that foundationally our founding father said, no, that's not what this country is
00:21:10.040
about. You have freedom to practice your religion and the state is not going to tell you
00:21:13.560
whether you have a legitimate interpretation of, you know, biblical writings or not.
00:21:17.880
Well, that's exactly right. And if we're already there, I mean, they're sending Biden DOJ sending
00:21:23.560
a man to prison for 11 years for praying in an abortion clinic. So, you know, if that doesn't
00:21:29.000
bother you as a defender of democracy and freedom of religion, I mean, you're obviously on the side
00:21:34.440
of totalitarianism and they are. So last question, is it working? I mean, the whole idea is to take
00:21:40.120
sincere, faithful Christians and make them abandon sincere, faithful Christianity and turn to the
00:21:48.040
left. That's that's the point of this. Is that working?
00:21:53.160
Yeah, I think it has been a very effective gambit. So, you know, when you look at it as this two-pronged
00:21:57.800
approach, you have one where people who genuinely sincere Christians might hear, oh, gosh, I'm not
00:22:03.480
loving my neighbor if I am very clear about my views in the public square and that the way of Jesus is to
00:22:10.120
be somewhat ashamed and quiet of what our biblical convictions are and we shouldn't exercise our
00:22:15.480
constitutional rights in the same way that all of our neighbors do. I think that absolutely is having
00:22:20.600
an effect, particularly with, you might say, younger evangelicals. They might feel a little embarrassed,
00:22:25.720
like maybe, you know, it's not such a good thing to be so bold and so outspoken about what we think
00:22:31.080
about the cause of life. And then on the other hand, I do think you absolutely have people who
00:22:35.800
are a little bit nervous of where this is heading as far as, you know, how our government is talking
00:22:40.920
about Christians now. How you see some very powerful actors saying, I don't want to be viewed as a threat
00:22:46.120
to democracy, so I'm just not going to, you know, participate in this, you know, voter mobilization effort.
00:22:53.240
I'm not going to do things like question January 6th because I don't want to be lumped in with
00:22:57.640
the people who are viewed as a threat to democracy. And that becomes a problem because there's a
00:23:03.480
tacit threat there that if you question anything outside of the, you know, official narrative,
00:23:08.520
you're now a threat to democracy. Yeah, no, that's totally right. I mean,
00:23:13.640
I said that was my last question, but I do have one more, which is if we accept, you've made a very
00:23:19.080
powerful case, and I believe it, that the leadership of a lot of these Christian institutions is totally,
00:23:25.320
totally corrupt and actually working against their flocks, their members. But who, I mean,
00:23:31.160
who are the leaders that you, that you listen to? You know, maybe the, and I'm not even asking
00:23:35.880
this in political terms, who they vote for is, you know, not as relevant as whether they're clear
00:23:41.720
thinking and honest about the religion. Who, who is resisting these attempts at subversion, do you think?
00:23:49.240
Well, look, and that's a really good part of this conversation is that you're seeing, I would say,
00:23:56.120
a new generation of young pastors, young theologians, young thinkers. You know, look, guys who are a lot
00:24:02.920
more educated and intelligent about the theological debate around these issues than I am, but I read
00:24:08.600
them and I love them. You know, guys like Doug Wilson are doing, Pastor Doug Wilson doing really
00:24:13.720
fascinating work. You're seeing old guard guys like Pastor John MacArthur out of California who
00:24:22.360
fought the COVID closure mandates and guys like that who never wavered and they never got sucked
00:24:29.880
into all of this. And, you know, in all of my research for this book, these are the guys that I
00:24:33.960
went, I never saw any money being funneled to them. And so it's sure funny how they never picked up any of
00:24:38.440
this messaging. So I am seeing that. I'm also seeing young guys within the Southern Baptist
00:24:43.720
Convention. I mean, look, there, there's a, people won't know this. This is very granular,
00:24:47.480
but there is a soul for that massive battle for the soul of that massive Southern Baptist
00:24:52.640
Convention right now that is happening. And that's actually very good news to me because what that
00:24:56.640
means is that, you know, it is not beyond saving and it matters because it's seminaries educate
00:25:02.920
the majority of pastors of all denominations in this country. So it's really important what happens
00:25:10.580
with the Southern Baptist Convention and what happens with its seminaries. And you are seeing
00:25:14.860
a group of, I would say, aggressive, unashamed Christian young guys who are now challenging the
00:25:21.100
old guard leadership saying, we do not want to see our convention go in that direction. So that's the
00:25:26.840
good news is that, you know, they, they are mounting a resistance, I would say, but there needs to be more
00:25:32.600
of that. And there needs to be more people who are, I guess I would say, willing to take on the mantle
00:25:37.080
of leadership that you cannot just sit in the pews and be upset about what you see happening in some
00:25:42.640
of these ministries. We need some guys who are going to step up and take the reins.
00:25:48.620
Amen. Megan, thank you so much for joining us. It's absolutely fascinating. And before we go,
00:25:53.620
what's it, tell us the name of your book once more.
00:25:55.340
Yes. So it's Shepherds for Sale, how evangelical leaders traded the truth for a leftist agenda.
00:26:03.060
And, you know, I just barely touched on a little bit of the information about the Soros funding,
00:26:07.680
the Rockefeller funding, the Clinton funding, and all of it going to create these faith front
00:26:13.120
groups that create AstroTurf campaigns to try to convince Christians that the biblical thing to do
00:26:19.080
is support the party of abortion and the LGBTQ agenda. So try to wrap your head around that.
00:26:27.160
Yeah. Well, there's a lot at stake. You can't overstate that. So Megan Basham,