Pastors for Sale

Inside American evangelicalism is a paradox: many of the most respected leaders use their influence to steer denominations and institutions in a direction that is significantly more liberal than the people those leaders ostensibly represent.

There is no shortage of examples of this. Congregations who would reject critical race theory have CRT spoon-fed to them by their leaders. While those in the pew eschew the LGBTQ+ movement, some of the most influential evangelical pastors in the country are exposing their congregations to “affirming” curricula. 

The ERLC provides a great illustration of this paradox. While the government closed churches and banned singing during COVID, the “religious liberty commission” of the Southern Baptist Convention commended court rulings siding with the government, which directly opposed the ERLC’s supposed mission and the will of many Southern Baptists.

The Daily Wire’s Megan Basham wants us to know that it is not a coincidence that church leaders use their positions to pull Christians left. Her new book, Shepherds for Sale, has a simple goal described by the subtitle: to explain “how evangelical leaders traded the truth for a leftist agenda.”

Her book is structured around seven political issues that have been important to the political left: global warming, illegal immigration, abortion, COVID lockdowns (including vaccines/masking), critical race theory, the #MeToo movement, and LGBTQ identity. Shepherds for Sale argues that politically left groups have made a concerted financial effort to influence churches to embrace liberal language and terminology in order to advance the leftist political agenda.

The exact details of each issue are different; thus, the book can be read in random order. Basham does not allege that the same donors who are funding CRT are the ones trying to shape evangelical beliefs on global warming, for example. Yet Basham observes that, for me, was the most helpful part of the book—in each of these issues, the liberal groups have structured their messaging around the same tagline: “Love your neighbour.” 

Why should Christians support a refugee cap of 80,000 instead of 50,000? “Love your neighbour.” Why should evangelicals embrace a cap-and-trade approach to mitigating global warming? “Love your neighbour.” Why should we affirm LGBTQ identity? You guessed it: “Love your neighbour.”

When I was in college, I had a physics professor who told the class, “Whenever you hear someone say, ‘Scientists all agree,’ check your wallet because you are about to be scammed.” Basham would rework the statement this way: “Whenever you hear, ‘You need to adopt this political position because of the command to love your neighbour,’ check your wallet because you are being misled.”

Shepherds for Sale is an impressive book because of its scope. Each chapter starts with a specific example; an advent calendar featuring confessions for global warming, a man killed by an illegal immigrant fearing deportation, a couple visiting a mega-church only to have their kids exposed to a leader advocating for affirming gay identity, etc. Then Basham backs up and shows how politically affiliated groups started funding outreach to evangelicals and how those funds have made their way into real-world influence on everyday evangelicals.

Basham makes it clear she is not writing a book of political theory, yet she is open to interacting with political theory to make her points. She deftly shows how carbon caps hurt the poor—thus, adopting the caps in the name of loving your neighbour is ironic. In the chapter on immigration, she bitingly points out that leftist groups “pepper their speeches with Bible verses about the fatherless and the widow but fail to acknowledge how the positions they’ve staked out have created plenty of both” (46).

Again, all chapters are different. Based on this misconception, I’ve read some unfair criticisms of her book. She does not argue that every pastor in the book has taken payouts from Soros-backed groups to sell carbon offsets. 

The details of each chapter vary. In the case of COVID, for example, evangelical leaders platformed a guy (Francis Collins) who was literally paid by the government to message their political agenda. Then those same leaders turned around and called evangelicals ‘conspiracy theorists’ if they didn’t accept what Collins (and, by extension, the government) was saying. That is the most direct case of evangelical leaders misled by political money. In other examples, the money trail is more strenuous and involves leaked emails, IRS records, and literal receipts.

Sometimes, the connection has to be deduced. For example, in the chapter on the #MeToo movement, Basham points out that the SBC’s Guidepost report on sexual abuse ignored sexual misconduct accusations relating to people supportive of the report while spilling a lot of ink on a few allegations that may not even constitute abuse, to begin with. Why is that? 

Basham uncovers that the attorney for one of those victims was also paid by the SBC to help craft the report and then won a settlement from the SBC based on the report she helped craft. Obviously, it is a gross case of ethical conflict and poor judgment all around, but does it count as leftist money influencing a denomination to adopt #MeToo talking points while the Kavanagh hearings are in the background? Basham reports and lets the readers decide.

A fair objection to Shepherds for Sale is that it could make people sceptical about the church. The church I pastor carries the book in our bookstore, and I want people to read it. Nevertheless, I hesitated to recommend we have it because I don’t want people to be angry at the evangelical church—even justifiably so. 

But Basham’s conclusion mitigates my concern. She closes her book by describing how, despite massive sums of money spent trying to influence Christians to adopt leftist language regarding global warming and carbon emissions, “millions of dollars and years of effort had availed these groups nothing” (238). Why not?

A report from the New American Foundation (one of the groups that spent millions of dollars on this effort) credited “a single guy named Cal Beisner” with stymieing their progress. Basham points out that Beisner didn’t even make opposing the climate alarmists his full-time job. 

The Koch Brothers (the right-wing equivalent of Soros) didn't fund him. He was “just a Christian who, armed with his Bible and common sense, started studying the issue.” He then started a group that instructed believers how to think biblically and critically about climate change, and his effort has been enough to blunt the force of Soros's influence.

Basham concludes her book with Beisner because he reveals, “Like everything in life, there’s a verse for this: Beisner destroyed the arguments raised against the knowledge of God by clinging to the Word no matter who might accuse him of being foolish (2 Corinthians 10:5).”

So, let the billionaires spend their millions. 

Megachurch pastors can endorse mushy LGBTQ books, and seminaries can sell their carbon offset credits. Despite it all, God will give his church true shepherds that are not for sale. The media and the democrats (I repeat myself) can view evangelicals as a political entity and spend money trying to move them for political purposes. But at the end of the week (let the reader understand), Marx’s religion will not supplant Christianity, no matter how many times church leaders tell evangelicals that love for neighbours requires adopting a leftist agenda.