Shepherds For Sale is both damning and fundamentally inconsistent

After college, I was a member of a small, traditionalist Presbyterian church in my native Northern Virginia. Most everyone was politically conservative, and there were few formally endorsed ministries because, church leadership argued, only ecclesial practices with explicit biblical pedigree were permitted and, therefore, the church should focus on the study of the word and caring for its members. Thus, Bible studies and organized meals for new parents were in, while clothing ministries and food pantries for the broader, secular community were out.

Contrast that with a church several miles up the road in Washington, D.C., affiliated with the same Presbyterian denomination. Its members are more politically diverse, while its mission statement declares its intention to make the District flourish “not only spiritually but also socially, culturally, economically…” Its pastor has co-authored a book on racial reparations—warmly reviewed in flagship evangelical magazine Christianity Today—with a former Presbyterian pastor who was himself glowingly covered in the New York Times for his efforts to, in his words, overcome the “longest standing white supremacist social order in history.”

One of these churches represents the branch of evangelicalism that enjoys the material and rhetorical support of our ruling elites, and the other branch does not, as author and Daily Wire journalist Megan Basham details in Shepherds For Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda. Per Basham’s extensive research, donors with deep pockets—many of whom are not even evangelical or even Christian—have for decades now been pushing political causes typically associated with the Left into evangelical churches and parachurch organizations. It is a fascinating (and alarming) phenomenon, though one whose story is sadly muddied by unproved premises and unnecessary polemics.

Unreligious influence in the realm of the religious

There’s little doubt Basham has identified a worrying trend, one that over the last generation has sought to influence millions of American evangelicals’ opinions on climate change, illegal immigration, the pandemic, race relations, and LGBTQ+. Even more concerning is that many prominent evangelical leaders have been complicit in the project. Basham’s stated objective is to confirm evangelicals’ suspicions that their “pulpits and [their] institutions are being co-opted by political forces with explicitly secular progressive aims are justified.” In this she largely succeeds, if nothing else, for the impressive number of examples.

Basham discusses the role of the Evangelical Environmental Network, an organization founded in 1993 to win evangelicals over to green causes. Among its liberal financial backers are the Clinton Global Initiative, the Hewlett Foundation, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Marisla Foundation, Environmental Defense Fund, and Rockefeller Brothers Fund. The Evangelical Immigration Table, a group that lobbies for amnesty policies, in turn, receives funds from George Soros. The After Party, a Bible study curriculum to “refram[e] Christian political identity from today’s divisive partisan options,” is funded by the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and the Hewlett Foundation, the second largest private donor to Planned Parenthood.

Or consider eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who pumped $400,000 into the evangelical Trinity Forum to research the “role of Christian leaders in political life” and “how their followers engage in politics.” Omidyar has also thrown $150,000 at the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, while Zuckerberg threw $90,000 at it between 2018 and 2021. Jon Stryker, homosexual heir to a one-hundred-billion-dollar surgical supply conglomerate, in turn launched the Arcus Foundation in 2000 to push LGBTQ+ initiatives into churches.

The list of prominent pastors, writers, and public figures involved in these initiatives is a who’s-who of American evangelicalism: It includes Rick Warren, founder of the Saddleback mega-church and author of best-selling book The Purpose-Driven Life, Christianity Today editor-in-chief Russell Moore, as well as (now deceased) church planter Tim Keller, former director of the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins, best-selling author Ann Voskamp, author and minister Max Lucado, and columnist David French. Prominent evangelical churches are also front-and-center in Basham’s narrative, including not only Saddleback (54,000 members), but the deceased pastor Charles Stanley’s First Baptist Church Atlanta (15,000 members), and Keller’s network of Presbyterian churches in New York City (5,000 members).

There’s little doubt these liberal initiatives are having an impact. Evangelical churches now offer studies of Robin DiAngelo’s anti-racist book White Fragility on congregations. Various evangelical seminaries, as well as parachurch organization Campus Crusade for Christ (now called Cru), push critical race theory. Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary pledged to make a percentage of faculty hires and scholarship awards based on race and gender. Of hundreds of donations to political campaigns from employees of Redeemer Churches and City to City—both associated with Keller—not one went to a Republican politician. Between 2015 and 2022, the staff and board members of evangelical magazine Christianity Today made seventy-four political donations, all to Democrats.

It’s not just that outsiders are directing obviously leftist ideology into evangelical churches and organizations, but the obvious manipulation and double standards by which it is imposed on the rank-and-file. Foregrounding for discussion conservative positions on the sexual revolution (i.e. abortion, homosexuality, trans) is “politicizing the church.” But pushing liberal positions on immigration, racial reparations, or the environment is being a faithful witness to Christ and the Gospel. The shaming of those resisting pandemic regulations such as the closure of churches—perhaps most saliently by Collins—is arguably the most egregious example of this behavior, especially given what we now know about the origins and spread of covid-19, or the efficacy (and negative consequences) of pandemic restrictions.

Problems of unstated premises

If cataloging all of this for the public record was the sum of Shepherds for Sale, it would be enough for an important story. Yet Basham’s book, at least implicitly, aims higher. After devoting pages to attacking those evangelicals who are in the pocket of leftist environmentalist organizations, she claims “I’m not here to argue for one side of the climate change debate or the other.” Yet on the very next page she writes: “The fact is, 98 percent fewer people now die in climate-related deaths annually than did one hundred years ago.” She opens her chapter recounting a story of a drunk illegal alien who, while driving a truck, killed a recent American college graduate, the effect of which is obviously intended to present a conservative framing on the immigration debate. Her chapter on #MeToo begins with a long discussion of the illegitimacy of many prominent rape allegations, which often have disastrous effects on the accused.

Despite Basham’s protestations, Shepherds for Sale is quite obviously a political book written by someone with easily identifiable political opinions, visible in every chapter. Moreover, though it is never explicitly stated, a central premise of this book is that these various left-driven initiatives to change evangelical thinking on a host of political topics are bad because they are liberal. One wonders, would Basham be complaining about external organizations seeking to influence evangelicals to hold more conservative positions on abortion or sexuality?

The reason to support this unstated premise, it seems, is that Basham believes the Bible supports her political positions. Indeed, the book is peppered with biblical references Basham perceives as germane to various political debates. She leverages her definition of the Gospel—following an exegesis of about a dozen New Testament verses—to critique certain environmentalist evangelicals. She claims that Acts 17:26 is a proof-text in favor of national borders. She cites Proverbs 29:2 as teaching “common grace,” a peculiarly Reformed doctrine, in a broader discussion of Christians’ role in the public square. She argues that James 1:13, Genesis 19, and 1 Timothy 1:10 “make plain” that Scripture rejects homosexuality.

Thus do we find the foundational premise underlying Basham’s entire protest against evangelical leaders embracing a “leftist agenda”: they’re repudiating what Scripture “clearly teaches,” otherwise known as the Protestant doctrine of perspicuity. It is for this reason that Basham rises up to refute those in “doctrinal error” in defense of “sound doctrine” and “Orthodox American Protestantism,” terms she never defines. Basham writes to help and strengthen those “conservative churches that are clear on what the Bible teaches.”

Yet, one may ask, does “Orthodox American Protestantism” take a uniform stance on the nature and meaning of baptism or the Eucharist, rituals that, at least as far as the historical testimony of the early Church goes, are central to Christianity? What about church polity—meaning how churches are supposed to be organized—and what hierarchical structure, if any, exists? Or how about if women should or shouldn’t be ordained, say, as deaconesses, or even as priests? Or—to get closer to Basham’s book—on sexuality, race, the environment, or immigration?

To these questions, one will find no consensus among Protestants, nor among evangelicals, nor even those who identify as “conservative” or “traditionalist” evangelicals. What Basham’s faux consensus amounts to, ultimately, is a group of people she chooses to identify as “orthodox,” or “biblically faithful,” based on her own arbitrary criteria. It is, to be precise, the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, in that Basham decides who is “in” and who is “out,” as far as Christian orthodoxy goes. (It is then not a little ironic that she approvingly cites John Calvin’s quote that “the heretics are here,” given Calvin would likely have viewed Basham, a Baptist, as a heretic.)

A political and theological book that claims to be neither

The consequences of Basham’s error here are difficult to overstate. “This is not a book of political or theological argument,” she writes multiple times in the book. Who can take that claim seriously? Of course Basham’s book is making political and theological arguments, based on premises she is hoping her readers already accept. Indeed, she explicitly says that her intended audience consists of people already inclined to agree with her—a quite bizarre admission. Isn’t the main point of an argument to persuade one’s interlocutors, including, as is often the case, those with opposing views?

Moreover, if the doctrine of perspicuity underlies one’s entire argument, then, by extension, one’s opponents are not simply people with whom one charitably disagrees, people who might be wrong on biblical interpretation despite their good faith attempts to divine Scripture’s meaning. No, those people are in some sense morally deficient, perhaps even evil. They are people who sinfully refuse to acknowledge what the Bible clearly teaches, whether on immigration, racism, sexuality, or anything else. This, even if Basham never explicitly says it, is why she thinks her readers are supposed to be incensed by these stories: these evangelicals are wolves in sheep’s clothing, acting in willful sin, to direct their Protestant churches to destruction for the sake of their own personal glory or aggrandizement.

Shepherds for Sale would have remained on much firmer ground if Basham, rather than descending into digressions on the biblical, theological, or logical legitimacy of these topics, had tirelessly held on, like an angry terrier, to the fact that evangelical leaders have permitted outside, secular influences into their churches and organizations. In this, these persons, who often benefited financially and in reputation, violated the trust of their own congregations and followers, the very people to whom they are accountable according to their own religious creeds and mission statements.

It is one thing if evangelical pastors, theologians, or writers had believed various liberal dictums and sought to persuade other evangelicals of them; it’s quite another to discreetly accept cash and influence from external, secular organizations with mission statements directly opposed to their churches in order to push that messaging.

We Catholics, of course, know a thing or two about the kinds of ideological influence often impressed upon the faithful. Many institutions that bear the name “Catholic” push ideas and practices regarding sexuality or racial identitarianism that are in demonstrable violation of Catholic magisterial teaching on those subjects, often egged on by wealthy donors. And, in contrast to Protestants, we have less of an excuse for permitting such nonsense for, as our Creed teaches, there is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, with one identifiable magisterial authority that has delivered doctrinal pronouncements on many of the issues Basham discusses in this book.

As far as she has shone a light on this often unspoken insidious type of external influence on Christian communities, she is deserving of thanks, regardless of religious affiliation.

Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda
By Megan Basham
Broadside Books/HarperCollins, 2024
Hardcover, 352 pagers