Bleak, But Necessary

Billy Graham founded Christianity Today in 1956. For years, the monthly magazine was a living room staple in my parents’ home, pretty much the gold standard of popular evangelical credibility.

Andy Stanley heads a 23,000 person megachurch in Atlanta and is credited with making Christianity relevant and comprehensible to a new generation. I have friends who watch him … er … religiously.

Rick Warren wrote a bestseller that led many to the Lord.

Beth Moore has sold millions of books and is quoted more often than any other Christian woman these days.

Russell Moore? Well, Russell seemed to ooze grift since I first heard his name, so I can’t speak to his purported accomplishments in the evangelical world. Maybe he’s the outlier.

Financial and Doctrinal Compromise

Like them, admire them or question their choices, what do all these public figures and institutions have in common? The answer is financial and doctrinal compromise on a massive scale.

Many of our readers probably know or have suspected these things for years. Sadly, where big money is being generated, scandal often follows. But I must admit to being way behind the curve on the precipitous decline in the character and teaching of today’s more popular Christian public figures. I rarely paid attention to most of them.

I mean, I couldn’t help but notice that recent editions of Christianity Today contain more leftist talking points than a Democrat convention, and Ravi Zacharias left behind an unlikely wave of sex-related revelations when he died that nobody paying a modicum of attention could miss. The rest of it I simply managed to overlook. I have disagreed with some of Stanley’s and Warren’s theological positions, but in the absence of evidence to the contrary, I assumed they were men basically serving the Lord in good conscience even if we didn’t read scripture exactly the same way. I’ve found Stanley helpful at times and said so. And even if Beth Moore’s teaching seemed less nutritious than Diet Coke to me, I had no reason to question her commitment to the truth just because she’s popular.

Trading the Truth

Well, those days of uninformed goodwill about the biggest public faces of modern evangelicalism are history, and I guess I’m not sad to say it. If, like me, you need a wake-up call on the subject, pick up Megan Basham’s Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda, assuming you can stomach it. I don’t usually bother reading exposés, but Basham has a track record of painstakingly detailed investigation that has established her credibility with me beyond question, and has demonstrated a rare willingness to cover both sides of a story in a world of of screechy op-eds pushing one political angle or another. Shepherds for Sale is no exception in the solid documentation department: seventy pages of footnotes and indices follow a relatively short read and make Basham’s case almost undeniable, at least as to the specifics.

That’s about as much as the reader can expect from such a project. Setting every quote in its full context would require a lot more reading and viewing, and doing so between the covers of a single book is an impossible task. It’s only fair to note that in the wake of Shepherds for Sale’s release, several of the public figures identified by name have posted extended clarifications, explanations and outright denials of allegations Basham makes about them. Gavin Ortlund’s reshuffle on climate change seems to have disappeared from the web, but is summarized here. (Basham says very little about Ortlund, so this is really a tempest in a teapot.) You can also find J.D. Greear’s reaction here, about whom Basham says a little more. Greear writes, “If the errors regarding me in this book are any indication of its broader accuracy, then the reader should be cautious about taking her claims at face value.” Greear is not one of Basham’s primary targets, but his name does come up repeatedly in a number of different contexts. Perhaps that is the price of fame in the religious world. By “errors regarding me”, Greear means that Basham failed to contextualize the questionable things he said to his satisfaction, not that she misquoted him at any point.

Pushing Back and Making the Point

What’s interesting is that in the process of defending his name, Greear candidly admits to promoting diversity and inclusion as not just part of his job as SBC President, but his “main task”. Perhaps he doesn’t realize how many SBC members do not share this goal, and that in the process of pushing back against a few specifics in Basham’s allegations, he is inadvertently reinforcing her main point: that the world’s default values have gotten into the church in a big way. While he successfully parries a few of the book’s shots, the tone-deafness of his response is interesting.

In any case, Greear is small potatoes in the big picture. Basham’s main thrust is to ask why so many well-known evangelical institutions and leaders have in recent years started promoting causes that no plain reading of scripture would demand. Her thesis is that “your pulpits and your institutions are being co-opted by political forces with explicitly secular progressive aims”. By funneling millions into evangelical institutions through financial subsidiaries, leftist organizations have bought and paid for some of the biggest names in evangelicalism, and the results are evident in the conveniently shifting theological positions of our so-called thought leaders. I would argue Basham’s research is more than sufficient to make her overall point, though some allegations are more strongly supported than others, and not all the named evangelical leaders are compromised to the same degree.

Follow the Money

Shepherds for Sale has chapters on climate change, illegal immigration, abortion, the leftist trend in Christian media, COVID-19 propaganda, critical race theory, the #MeToo movement in churches and the LGBTQ incursion. In all these areas, evangelicalism’s leaders are moving left. In all these areas, money is being channeled into the evangelical world through proxies to promote secular views and sell them to Christians as arguably biblical. In some cases, this is overt, but in most it is deliberately subversive. Basham follows the money, which invariably leads to interesting places. For example, after Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Christianity Today accepted a total of $2.75 million in donations from an Eli Lilly subsidiary to “Create a Future for Christian Thought” (read: change the thoughts of Christians), and a further $1.6 million between 2019 and 2022. It should come as no surprise that a barrage of leftist-themed articles followed in CT and its anti-Trump bias became overt. Hmm.

There is much more of this. Basham’s level of detail is near-forensic and the number of individuals and institutions exposed or indicted would be seriously depression-inducing, were it not for the fact that the apostles did in fact warn us about this sort of thing, oh, maybe 2,000 years ago. I’m a speed reader, but this book took me a long while to get through simply because the big picture it presents is so relentlessly unpleasant and so well-documented that I kept putting it down just to get away from it to something more encouraging. Shepherds for Sale is not for the faint of heart.

Bashing Basham

As mentioned, Basham has her critics. The Catholic World Report is one of them, alleging the book pushes a particular set of views without adequately making a theological case for them. For example, the writer doesn’t feel Basham makes an iron-clad argument against homosexual Christianity by quoting a mere three verses to condemn it. To be fair to Basham, her goal in publishing was waking up docile evangelicals in thrall to public figures with hidden agendas, not persuading liberal Catholics of the validity of Protestant theological distinctives. Such ambitions are well beyond the scope of the book. Basham’s intended audience largely share her perspective, as I do, and do not require theological rabbit trails to prove truths of which we are already convinced. Moreover, if the writer had read the chapter in question a little more carefully, he may have noticed that Basham quotes or refers to a further eight verses condemning homosexuality. This is the sort of laissez-faire criticism Basham’s detractors have been able to muster: it sounds compelling until you actually examine it.

If there is a positive take-away here, it’s that rank and file evangelicals are not swallowing leftist propaganda at anything like the rate secular donors hoped for when they began to buy influence. Partly this is a product of the decentralization and autonomous nature of many evangelical churches. It turns out you can get more bang for your buck through co-opting one or two influencers in the 16 million-strong Southern Baptist Convention than by trying to purchase the loyalty of tens of thousands of individual pastors or elders in small, independent, local congregations. Even in the SBC, you will get pushback from the cheap seats.

In Summary

I wouldn’t call Shepherds for Sale a must-read for every Christian. I’m already highly suspicious of any evangelical enterprise that generates big bucks, and that instinct has served me well over the years. My hopes in men are not high, and I don’t get too worked up when they are dashed. Basham really just confirmed my instincts with data and quotations I would not bother to dig up for myself. On the other hand, Christians who believe bigger is better in their ministries may find the book a bracing antidote to adopting the world’s metrics for success.

Call it bleak, but necessary.