Early in Megan Basham’s new book, Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda (Broadside Books, 2024), we are introduced to a Christian in-joke concerning an Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not criticize church leaders.” The joke is that naming this additional commandment achieves the very thing it ironically circumscribes, calling out church leaders who use their positions to secure their own authority rather than promote the welfare of the church and its members.
Shepherds for Sale is an extended exercise in breaking the Eleventh Commandment. Basham is a reporter for the Daily Wire and is a conservative evangelical herself. Her first book, Beside Every Successful Man: Getting the Life You Want by Helping Your Husband Get Ahead (2009), makes the case to “highly educated and highly credentialed” wives—the kind of women who would normally maintain careers of their own—that they can fulfill multiple ambitions at once by staying at home and devoting themselves not only to homemaking but to ensuring the success of their husbands’ careers. This new book is similarly political, even polemical, but Basham has turned away from the self-help genre. As the title and front matter all suggest, Shepherds for Sale aims to do something more traditionally journalistic: to speak truth to power, by leveraging the author’s reporting on the evangelical world.
“Along with not being especially biblical,” she writes, “the Eleventh Commandment is far from journalistic.” And so Basham calls out particular Christian leaders by name, not, she says, to punish or single them out, but to understand “what is taking place in the Church so we can put it right …. Let us learn from what is happening now so that we can elevate the right leaders, those like King Hezekiah, who will tear down the false idols, eject the false prophets, and restore the temple.”
“What is happening now,” in Basham’s view, is something that many evangelical churchgoers have noticed with alarm but are reluctant to criticize or even speak about openly: a series of political and ideological shifts within American evangelicalism, from traditional, conservative values and toward more progressive, social justice–oriented ones. The book makes the case that these shifts do not reflect organic changes in individual Christians’ politics, nor do they reflect simple demographic shifts from older, more conservative generations to younger, more liberal ones. Instead, Basham argues, they are the result of concerted efforts by liberal organizations and billionaires to exert influence over evangelicals—to persuade them either to moderate their views or to refrain from voting on them altogether. Basham describes this in the scariest terms possible: as invasion, infiltration, and imposture of church leadership. Which is why Basham deems a book like hers so necessary. “My ultimate purpose,” she writes, “is to confirm for average Evangelicals in the pews that the uneasy feelings many of you have been having … that your pulpits and your institutions are being co-opted by political forces with explicitly secular aims are justified.”
Environmentalism, “wokeness,” Black Lives Matter, DEI programs, and critical race theory have all been labeled new “religions” by Christians on the right.
But the book doesn’t bear this out. Instead, it reveals a preoccupation on both the left and right with the role of religion, especially evangelical Christianity, in public life. Basham takes us through eight of the most controversial issues in the American church today: climate change, immigration, abortion, COVID-19 measures, #ChurchToo (a church and religious organization version of Hollywood’s #MeToo movement), critical race theory, and LGBTQ inclusion. In each chapter, Basham provides what she sees as a biblical and orthodox stance on the given issue, measures just how far certain evangelical leaders have strayed from it, and reports on the hundreds of thousands or, in some cases, millions of dollars spent by liberal organizations to sway conservative denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention.
Most of Basham’s positions on these issues are predictable: Climate change policy is bad, harming our “neighbors” in still-developing nations rather than caring for them. The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is a victory evangelicals should unreservedly celebrate, instead of wringing their hands about the need for expanded social services (which are bad for women and children anyway). The church should not capitulate on anything to do with homosexuality or gender identities beyond the categories of male and female assigned at birth. Et cetera, et cetera. Her conservative arguments from “biblical orthodoxy” are deliberately predictable and familiar, a dose of that “old time religion” (and Grand Ol’ Party politics) that she thinks the church must recover. “I am not here to persuade the reader that homosexuality is a sin,” she writes. “I presume there are enough readers still orthodox enough in their thinking that I do not have to start at square one by outlining God’s intent in designing humanity as male and female and who are sensible enough to know that no nation can long remain a nation that does not police its borders.”
What has sparked interest in (and in some cases, controversy over) Basham’s book is her reporting and the way she uses it to critique evangelical leaders and thinkers. Two such leaders—Gavin Ortlund, whom Basham claims is “as hyperbolic as anything coming from United Nations climate star Great Thunberg,” and J. D. Greear, whom she accuses of “wield[ing] the Eleventh Commandment like a rocket launcher”—have come out with long responses, in which they fact-check Basham and accuse her of taking quotes out of context.
Maybe they’re right about this, although it’s also a standard way powerful people respond to journalism that is critical of them. But there are certainly instances in the book of Basham transparently (and perhaps deliberately) misreading or mischaracterizing liberal evangelicals. In the climate change chapter, for instance, she quibbles with Christian environmentalists’ use of Romans 8:22 (in which Paul writes that all creation “has been groaning as if in the pains of childbirth”), accusing them of misreading it as a literal description of “creation ‘groaning’ not just under the weight of sin but of CO2 emissions.” It’s simply not difficult to understand that these Christians are using Scripture to put a moral gloss on global warming, to link the greed that has in part fueled the climate crisis with the “bondage to decay” from which, according to the Scripture, nature and human beings alike must be delivered. Basham either genuinely cannot understand biblical support for Christian environmentalism, or, as I suspect, simply decides to represent other liberal Christians as bad readers of the Bible. Moments like this (and they come often) make the book an occasionally tedious read.
But not all of Basham’s critiques can be dismissed this way. That’s because Basham does observe a real phenomenon in our recent political life. Since 2016, organizations devoted to liberal issues like reforming immigration policy or advancing decarbonization in the economy have sought to identify “nontraditional allies” (to quote a report from the Open Society Foundations that Basham finds nefarious), including evangelical Christians. There are various strategies for doing so. In some cases, foundations like Open Society have messaged through sympathetic evangelical leaders or funded activist organizations with evangelical identities, like the Evangelical Environmental Network and evangelical media outlets like Christianity Today. In other cases, they have resorted to clunky influence campaigns that do, as Basham claims, border on astroturfing. She calls out leaders like Russell Moore, director of the Public Theology Project, for mischaracterizing the views of evangelical Christians as more liberal on immigration than they actually are: “At the time that Moore and other EIT [Evangelical Immigration Table] leaders were claiming to speak for them, a Pew Forum poll found that evangelicals ranked by a ratio of nearly three to one ‘better border security’ as more important than ‘creating a path to citizenship.’”
Still, the evidence Basham presents does not add up to a scheme by left-wing ideologues to “infiltrate[e] churches and [buy] influence among church leaders.” The book itself tips us off to this. Some of the money Basham follows is just political donations made by people in evangelical organizations to liberals or liberal causes. And the fact that “between 2015 and 2022” staff and board members at Christianity Today “made seventy-four political donations” and “every single one went to Democrats” is evidence that there are real, evangelical liberals already working in these organizations, not that they have been coopted by outside money. Innocuous plans by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to host climate roundtables at churches—a plan that Basham is quick to label astroturfing by “the largest foundation in the world, the U.S. federal government”— read more like sincere attempts to invite religious communities into conversations about how to address urgent political issues.
Elsewhere, Basham tacitly acknowledges that she can’t actually establish a clearcut case in which liberal foundation money was the major influence on a church leaders’ politics or preaching. Instead, she stipulates that these “leaders’ motives … may be complex and sometimes unclear.” Rather than exposing corrupted pastors, as she promises, Basham ultimately leaves her readers to do the work themselves. “Some are, yes, wolves—unfaithful pastors and teachers deliberately leading the sheep astray,” she writes. “I believe that you’ll have little trouble pin-pointing in these pages who they are.”
Maybe I am not the kind of reader Basham refers to here, but I did have trouble. What I saw, as I read, was what Basham describes in the very next sentence: “But there are different degrees of error. Passivity, fear of reprisal, and plain old lack of discernment are also reasons pastors may compromise with the culture.” This is not a novel challenge facing American evangelicals; it’s one that goes all the way back to Jesus’ injunction to his followers to be in the world but not of it. And it’s one that does not require nefarious liberal billionaires or government agencies, but merely the difficulty of holding unpopular beliefs.
In her description, conservative evangelicals are merely participating in democracy according to their biblical values. They are, in a way, not political at all, but adherents to timeless truths and the unerring, unchanging word of God.
What Basham does actually document is something more complex. Genuine cultural, political, and even theological changes are happening in evangelical churches. Perhaps those changes can be understood as a compromise or acquiescence to a more secular American mainstream, but the interest from organizations like the Open Society and Gates Foundations seems downstream rather than upstream of those changes. This interpretation looks even more likely once one considers the actual amounts of money Basham follows and the quality of these influence campaigns which, in Basham’s own telling, are slightly bumbling and ineffective.
So why does Basham insist that the reality is otherwise? I don’t think it’s just an embellishment to sell books. One of the compensatory features of Shepherds for Sale is Basham’s utter sincerity and conviction. It’s clear that this is not only political but also personal for her. In the chapter on #ChurchToo, she reveals that she was a victim of rape. In the conclusion, she details her own, quite idiosyncratic conversion moment—not at a church altar call but while reading the thirteenth-century Lancelot-Grail cycle alone in her parents’ living room. Basham wrestled with what she describes as a serious drug and alcohol addiction in college, and she worries that evangelical churches like her own Southern Baptist Convention may offer “temporal preoccupations with social issues” to “weary, wounded sinners” who are instead coming to the church “in need of the transcendent power of the eternal.”
Basham is in earnest about wanting to warn, caution, even accuse the eponymous shepherds in her book, because the stakes are high. “I know the power of faithful preaching and shepherding,” she writes. “They are both so powerful that they can reach across a millennium and pierce the heart of a hopeless sinner in a world the preacher couldn’t have imagined, so that other, nearer preachers can help those newly planted seeds to grow…. [I]t’s helped me move toward every good thing in my life…. It is what drove me to write this book.”
One of the compensatory features of Shepherds for Sale is Basham’s utter sincerity and conviction. It’s clear that this is not only political but also personal for her.
Shepherds for Sale seems to be written as a response to books like Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, which argues that, rather than being motivated by biblical or bedrock Christian principles, the religious right represents the ideological capture of Christians by conservative political interests. This is the claim one saw frequently after the 2016 presidential election (and one critiqued in the pages of this magazine’s predecessor, Religion & Politics), the claim that “evangelical” has become not so much a religious identity as a political one. Basham argues that it’s just the opposite, citing surveys that show evangelicals are actually less political than the average American and far less so than agnostics, atheists, Jews, and mainline Protestants. In her description, conservative evangelicals are merely participating in democracy according to their biblical values. They are, in a way, not political at all, but adherents to timeless truths and the unerring, unchanging word of God. Other political positions, by contrast, are merely political; they are temporal—and thus temporary, makeshift, or trendy—responses to ever shifting problems. They are politically wrong precisely because they are focused on the political present and not on more ultimate realities.
This sleight of hand is crucial to Basham’s worldview. She goes on to argue that in order to make evangelicals vote, donate, or act more like progressive liberals, one of two things must happen: either they must be politicized and convinced to vote on political, rather than religious, grounds, or they must be persuaded that, say, affirming LGBTQ identities or receiving a COVID-19 vaccine “isn’t a political or even a scientific matter, but a matter of Christian witness and biblical obedience.” In either case, she believes, they’d be wrong.
You might see already what this actually amounts to: a real evangelical will always vote along traditionally conservative lines. If an evangelical supports liberal causes, it’s because she has caved to secular and merely political pressure campaigns. This is precisely what Basham accuses bad church leaders of doing: “Again and again in these pages, you will note the manipulation of Church leaders who claim that to stand where the Bible stands is ‘political,’ yet not accepting their view on some issue where biblical application is disputable is somehow—even when they’re pressing you to lobby for legislative remedies—paradoxically not political.”
Basham’s book gets ugly here, claiming, for instance, that the evangelicals who are concerned about global warming or other environmental issues are “a more malleable brand of Christian” or “easy marks for shallow spiritualism.” In a later chapter about campaigns to promote the COVID-19 vaccine in churches, she frequently and overtly questions the sincerity of Francis Collins’s faith because he “has espoused nearly no public positions that would mark him out as any different from any extreme left-wing bureaucrat.” This is because, ultimately, Christian and leftist are incompatible positions for Basham. Or perhaps this understates her actual position. In a way, Christian and almost any political position is incompatible for Basham. This is a writer for whom Mike Pence is too liberal. “The Bible instructs us to proclaim truth, not to hold centers,” she writes. “And anyway, the center is far too liberal a place for biblical orthodoxy. So is most of the right these days.”
Ultimately, the political per se is corrupting for Basham. She wants a virtuous world ordered by God’s word, not democracy or compromise. Basham’s view of the political as corrupting puts evangelical Christians in a very awkward position, as Basham consistently tries to imagine ways for churches to respond to social and political problems without acting politically, without succumbing to the adulteration that results from the messy work of rallying support, forming coalitions, or trying to persuade others in one’s community. Environmental groups are bad when they “press for political action” instead of simply “fund-raising for planting nurseries or cleaning up marine ecosystems.” The National Immigration Forum is bad because it “focused not on encouraging Christians to meet the material and spiritual needs of immigrants in their own communities … but on pushing them to lobby lawmakers for specific legislation.”
This awkwardness is familiar to most Christians. A friend of mine who attends a large evangelical church in San Francisco described the church’s attempt to turn part of their facility into a drop-in center for homeless mothers and children. Was this an act of Christian charity, or the church responding to a pressing political problem for the city? According to my friend, the church wanted to have it both ways. The drop-in center was missional and charitable for those who wanted the church to stay out of politics; at the same time, it was a local grassroots political movement for those who felt that an apolitical church merely capitulates to the evil of the status quo.
In the fourth century, Augustine of Hippo argued that politics were a result of the fall and man’s sinfulness. He posited the existence of two cities, an earthly and a heavenly one, “which are mingled together from the beginning to the end of their history.” While Christians’ citizenship is in the heavenly city, this mingling—history itself, our attempts to live together justly when faced with new conditions and problems—can get confusing. Worldly things, those “affairs of the cities,” constantly overlap with more transcendent ones.
A confusion about the political, and the feeling that it corrupts or corrodes higher-order motives for acting in the world, is not specific to Basham. Criticism of American evangelicalism’s adventures in politics typically takes two forms. One is a political accusation: it’s not faith that informs these Christians’ conservative politics but rather that their politics are political all the way down; they are not a “moral majority” but just like any other political constituency, devoted to protecting their own interests as a class, race, or social group. The other is a religious critique: these Christians are motivated by a religious impulse, but it’s the wrong one, a form of idolatry; conservative politics has usurped the authority that God or scripture should have. According to the first critique, religion is a cover for the merely political; according to the second, the political has dressed itself up in religious clothing.
But it’s not just the political sphere that threatens to contaminate the religious one. A strange symmetry inheres in this confusion. Like “political,” “religion” has become an accusation or slur used both against conservative evangelicals and by them. Environmentalism, “wokeness,” Black Lives Matter, DEI programs, and critical race theory have all been labeled new “religions” by Christians on the right. (Chapter 6 of Basham’s book, “Critical Race Prophets,” does just this.) Those on the left have similarly labeled MAGA a religious movement. At the same time, people of all political persuasions have worried that politics itself has become quasi-religious, something that elicits a fanatical (from Latin fanaticus, of a temple or inspired by a God) or enthusiastic (from Greek enthousiasmos, inspiration or possession by a God) participation, rather than a rational one.
Given this propensity for the political to transmute into the religious and vice versa, it’s no wonder that Basham wants to isolate the two, even to police a supposed border between them, and to call out those who, in her view, have become lax in their diligence and discernment. But in doing so, Shepherds for Sale only worsens the perplexity it seeks to ameliorate. What, after all, is more inherently political (in the sense that Basham often means it) than criticizing one’s own leadership?