Shepards for Sale with Megan Basham

Andrew Rappaport's Rapp Report

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:01

Most Christians know the Republican Party message better than the gospel message.

00:07

And it must be true because it upsets people. The other camp is like, well, we should stay out of politics altogether.

00:13

The reality is, is what we're going to talk about here is not religion reaching into the state, but really state reaching into religion.

00:26

Welcome to The Rap Report with your host, Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application.

00:32

This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

00:43

Welcome to another edition of The Rap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rapoport, the Executive Director of Striving for Eternity and the

00:50

Christian Podcast Community of which this podcast is a proud member. Now, typically, we go into a lot of things on this podcast about providing biblical interpretations and applications.

01:04

Well, we're going to talk politics. Yeah, we are. We are going to talk politics. We don't do that often here, but there are times when politics and religion merge.

01:15

And, well, maybe unfortunately, this is one of those times. I am blessed to have someone who

01:21

I've been following on Twitter for some time, Megan Basham, who is from The Daily Wire.

01:26

And so, Megan, welcome to The Rap Report. Thanks for having me, Andrew. It's great to be here. So we're going to talk about your new book that is going to be coming out soon.

01:36

And I've been excited when I first heard about it and was looking forward to it because it's a topic that I have been addressing for a very long time.

01:44

But for folks who are new to who you are and don't know anything about you, would you be able to introduce yourself?

01:51

And I'd like you, if you could, to explain how you got converted to Christ. Yeah, so I am

01:57

Megan Basham. I'm a culture reporter with The Daily Wire. Prior to that, I worked for many years with World Magazine, which is a well -known evangelical news publication, and have also done a lot of freelance writing with outlets like National Review, Wall Street Journal, First Things, Telegraph, some other outlets.

02:18

And, you know, my testimony is a little bit bound up in my early college years.

02:24

So I was raised in a Christian home. So, you know, I have the story of so many prodigals that I don't totally know the moment of conversion for me, though I suspect

02:35

I know it. But God will probably have to tell me when I get to heaven that this was the moment you were sealed. Because I'm not totally sure.

02:41

So if you had asked me when I was in high school, are you a Christian, I would have said yes. But there was no fruit in my life, and I showed no real sustaining influence in spiritual things.

02:51

And then when I got to college, that quickly manifested itself. So I lived a very prodigal life.

02:58

I think the colloquial term is party girl. Just, you know, very worldly. I was taking, in addition to being a heavy drinker, using drugs,

03:09

I was also doing feminist theory courses and kind of having my head turned by things like that.

03:15

And I was an English Lit major. And I had gotten myself into just such a miserable life pattern,

03:22

I think you can call it. You know, at that point, I was dealing with DUIs and broken relationships with roommates, and I had moved back home.

03:31

I was still going to school, but I was back home and living at my parents' house. And I had a professor who, he was, it was a survey course, but he was particularly known for being a

03:42

Bible as literature professor. And he took the view that, you know, the Bible is really more a piece of literature, not something that can be trusted.

03:50

And you would call him maybe the original deconstructionist professor. So in this course, he assigned us to do an interesting paper.

04:01

And it was very uncharacteristic of me to actually read the source material. But in this case, providentially,

04:06

I did. So he assigned us to read Sir Thomas Malory's Death of Arthur.

04:12

And the framing of the assignment was that we were also to read the Vulgate Cycle, also known as the

04:18

Quest of the Holy Grail. And we were to read all of these lectures that hermits in the original

04:24

Grail cycle give the profligate Lancelot. And we were to explain why

04:31

Sir Thomas Malory's version was better because he took all of these little bits of holy lecture out of his version so that he made it a star -crossed romance.

04:42

Well, in the original version, it's not a star -crossed romance. You see all of these hermits sort of confronting

04:48

Lancelot about his lust and his base desires. Now he's just giving himself over to sin.

04:54

And in the state that I was in in that moment, I'm reading these lectures, and I just saw myself in them.

05:01

And it was just the strangest thing to read something from the 13th century and see these hermits describing my own sin and the state of my own soul.

05:09

And in very dramatic fashion, I got up and went to the bedroom and I got down on my knees. And I had the knowledge being raised in a

05:16

Christian home. And I just said, Lord, help. I'm a mess. I don't even know if I belong to you.

05:21

And so I just prayed, Lord, help. And I can't even remember what the specific prayer was beyond that. But I started going back to church after that.

05:28

And I think that is the moment that I was saved because that was when my life really began to change. I met my husband at church.

05:34

I continued going with consistency. My habits changed. My behavior changed. And also during that time, though, in trying to change my habits,

05:42

I was still someone who was coming out of that lifestyle of partying and drug use.

05:49

And I was kind of hearing worldly Christian arguments. Well, you have trauma, and that's why you do the things you do.

05:55

And you have to sort of reorient yourself psychologically from the damage you sustained and all of that sort of thing.

06:01

And I happened to, as I was limping along in those first few months, kind of still in my sin, someone gave me

06:08

John MacArthur's The Vanishing Conscience. A pastor at the church I was attending gave me his book. And that really was like a light switch for me.

06:15

I would say, you know, if the quest of the Holy Grail was the salvation moment, John MacArthur's Vanishing Conscience was, you know, the first major sanctification moment.

06:26

Because I read that book, and I kind of joke in my book that it was a little like the old mad

06:31

TV skit, which if you haven't seen it, a patient comes to a therapist, and the only thing he tells her to do for all of her compulsive behaviors is stop it.

06:42

And that is kind of what John MacArthur's book did for me. It was like, you know what? You don't need to know all the psychological reasons that you're sinning.

06:49

Stop. Stop sinning. You can stop sinning, and here's how you do this. And so anyway, that was really the beginning of my walking with the

06:58

Lord on a consistent basis. Yeah, there was, I forget who it was, years ago did a scene on a television show where someone walks into the psychiatrist's office, and that's basically his thing.

07:09

He's just telling this woman, just stop it. I think it was Bob Newhart, right? Bob Newhart, that's right. It was a Bob Newhart skit, yeah. Yeah, I've played that on my

07:15

Apologetics Live. Yeah, he was my Bob Newhart. Yeah, yeah. You know, I really don't understand, because my salvation testimony was so different.

07:23

I had a friend of mine in college who just, because my salvation, I was, so I went from being someone who was

07:30

Jewish, well, I'm still Jewish, but someone who believed Jesus Christ as Hitler's God, and in three and a half hours of hearing the gospel and going through prophecy,

07:39

I was converted. So I was like, I had a friend in college who was like, I so wish I was you, because you know exactly when you were saved, you know the date, you know, it's clear.

07:50

And it wasn't like I fought it. And I'm sitting there telling them, like, I wish I was you. You grew up in a

07:55

Christian home. And, you know, it was funny, because the grass always looks greener, and I always thought it'd be better, because I had to live for two years in my parents' house as a secret

08:05

Christian, because as soon as, the day they found out, they actually went casket shopping. And I was actually surprised they didn't, bury an empty casket.

08:14

And they told me they were going to tell my siblings that I died. So it's like, to me, it was like, it's like a clear cut thing.

08:20

And so I've never understood that struggle. But so many people like, because most people are like, yeah, I just thought everyone got saved the same way

08:27

I did. Like, just bing, the light bulb went off. I think it's kind of the beauty of the gospel though, right?

08:33

As we all have, you know, some people have that Damascus moment, and some of us, you know, you go, I don't know,

08:39

Lord, but regardless, I know you were so faithful to me that, you held on to me anyway, through all of those wandering years.

08:46

And so, you know, praise God brought me back. Yeah. And so, you know,

08:51

I have discovered, I posted on X that I was going to be interviewing you. Of course, I had to give a dig to someone you follow on X, my friend

08:59

Chris Hanholz, because James White and I abused him, you know, relentlessly about his, the fact he doesn't watch

09:05

Buddy the Elf. And for the record, for my audience knows, I don't, I'm pop culture illiterate pretty much, but I actually watched

09:12

Buddy the Elf just because he didn't. But I discovered you have more haters than me. I thought

09:18

I had the - I have a lot of haters. Yeah. We had, I had, have not had the privilege of blocking so many people, even people that claim they know me personally.

09:27

And I'm going, yeah, I'm looking at this and going, you don't, not sure that, that I know you. Because of course they don't use real names and they don't give enough details to prove it.

09:36

But, but a lot of people were criticizing for, on two issues. One was that John MacArthur had the nerve to endorse your book.

09:45

And everyone seems to hate John MacArthur these days because someone in his church counseled a couple who did abuse.

09:53

Yeah. And it's been interesting to watch. And, you know, I won't digress into this too much, but I have seen this sort of conflation of maybe people not being omniscient and therefore imperfectly handling allegations, assigning them in the same role as actual abusers.

10:10

Yeah. That's an interesting little trick there to suggest, okay, you know, maybe mistakes were made or maybe full information was not had.

10:17

And on that basis, we're going to put that person in a basket with really egregious cases.

10:24

And I remember seeing someone likening John MacArthur to an actual abuser.

10:29

And I went, okay, that's an accuser right there. That is a really easy way to define accuser when you're not making any distinctions there.

10:36

Yeah. And that's what they're doing there. The irony of it is, as you mentioned, the timeline doesn't fit because the whole issue is that their husband and wife abused the children.

10:47

Later, years later, after the fact it was discovered that the husband was sexually abusing the children, but both husband and wife admitted to abuse and problems in the marriage.

10:57

The problem was that the husband was repentant and the wife was not. And so the wife was, well, church discipline, out of the church.

11:07

And so they're holding it against John MacArthur who wasn't the one that was actually counseling. He's just the big name.

11:14

And so you get more money, you know, Julie Royce gets more money by going after John. And yet no one wants to admit that she has admitted to being an abuser and a protector of abusers.

11:26

So it's like, oh, it only works one way. It's amazing. Yeah, it's a very messy topic, in part because I think, you know, we have to recognize that any church that's been in existence for any significant period of time is going to have to have dealt with this issue because we live in a fallen world and because predators will often go to where they can get access to children, things like that.

11:49

And so we have to separate people who are guilty of abuse from people who imperfectly handled it because maybe they didn't know everything at the time.

11:57

Or as you said, the timeline, you know, didn't match up to these allegations that were being made.

12:03

If the allegations of child sexual abuse weren't being made at that time, then you can't fault someone for not acting on information that they didn't have.

12:11

So, yeah, and that's why it's always a very messy topic. And you brought up an important point for people to realize.

12:16

In our ministry, we come in and teach about, you know, how to identify groomers because the reality is, there is a reason that we have so much of this happen within the church.

12:26

And it's because churches are accepting of people and unfortunately, somewhat gullible and predators know that.

12:33

So that's why they go there. Another thing that, man, this came up so often when I mentioned your name is that you're not a real journalist, which

12:42

I just thought kind of funny because one woman was telling me she's a journalist, but she was making accusations about you and I kept saying, well, can you support your claim?

12:51

And she's like, I don't need to. Oh, really? You claim to be a journalist and yet the very first thing you'd learn in journalism would be, you know, kind of backing up and supporting your claims and Megan does that and you're not.

13:04

So which one? I gave her three points. I said, okay, what is a true journalist? Is it someone who has an education?

13:12

They've gone to school for journalism. Second, is it someone who's works in the political establishment, like in the

13:19

Democrat party and then goes to one of the major networks and then they become suddenly a journalist having going from, you know, political to suddenly just going on TV and now you're suddenly a journalist or is it someone that actually does journalism?

13:34

I know you're going to be surprised, Megan, but she never answered that question. She attacked my character instead. Well, it's funny because, you know, by that standard, usually when people say that to me, what they mean is, well, she didn't get her undergrad degree in journalism.

13:48

I did work on my college paper, though. I will say that. So I was actually doing journalism in college, but usually that's what they mean is, well, she did, and they're right.

13:56

I got my degree in English Lit, but I think they might be surprised to know the vast number of people working in journalism who did not get their undergrad degree in that.

14:06

And in fact, there is a pretty strong school of thought that it's better to get your undergrad in something else, whether it be history or politics or English Lit or something else, that journalism is very much the type of job, and in fact, it used to be a blue collar job, that you learn by doing it and you can apply this other background knowledge to it.

14:24

I can tell you Walter Cronkite did not have a degree in journalism. So I can give you a long list of people who don't, but I just kind of laugh that off because, you know, shortly after graduating,

14:36

I quickly began writing for newspapers and all types of media outlets, and I did a journalism fellowship with the

14:45

Robert Novak Fellowship. So, you know, I've been working in journalism for going on 20 years, so I don't know what to say about that other than, you know, you show me your clippings and I'll show you mine and let's compare.

14:58

It's kind of like a friend of mine who says, you know, when we get into studying theology, discussing theology, someone brings up early church fathers and he's always like, well, my early church father can beat up your early church father, because they're just all over the map.

15:10

And so we want to talk about your book, okay, Shepherds for Sale. This is a,

15:15

I'm going to say, a major problem within Christianity. My audience knows that I've been addressing this for decades now, and I do need to say, for the record,

15:26

I received a pre -release copy of the book, so I do have a pre -release copy, but once it comes out,

15:33

I will be buying my own copy so that I can take all of my highlighting and now put it in there.

15:40

So, because I just have the PDF. Thank you. But, well, I have to, for the record, so we all don't,

15:46

I mean, look, my audience knows if you come in, I don't give anyone a pass just because they're on my show.

15:52

But I do, for my audience, have to say, I do have to state for this book, I have not gone through, there's like 50 pages of footnotes and folks who know me know that I do original research.

16:04

So I have not yet gotten to researching all 50 pages of footnotes. That will be forthcoming, but I have gone through the book and there's a lot there that I was familiar with, so a lot

16:15

I wasn't surprised with. And, you know, I think that, look, talking politics, which is, this is going to branch on politics, and I know that when we do this, there's some

16:26

Christians that get upset. I have an article at strivingforeturning .org, if you go search there, on political activism.

16:33

And there is one line that, man, every four years I put the article out and I get heat for, for one line.

16:41

And it is that most Christians know the Republican Party message better than the gospel message.

16:47

And it must be true because it upsets people. No, I think that's absolutely fair, yeah.

16:53

Yeah. And the other camp is like, well, we should stay out of politics altogether. And the reality is, is what we're going to talk about here is, what your book is addressing is not so much the religion reaching into the state, but really state reaching into religion.

17:10

Right. And I mean, and I did get a lot of pushback of people going, well, did you trace the

17:16

Christian Coalition and Ralph Reed's involvement with evangelical institutions? And no, for two reasons.

17:23

Because one, there is a whole cottage industry of books and personalities and articles that are dedicated to suggesting that we are at risk of engaging in a new era of Christian theocracy that will be led by Ralph Reed and people of his sort.

17:41

So that's one reason. It's been pretty well covered. And second is, I would say that a lot of that coverage is extremely disingenuous.

17:48

If you look at, you know, what the Christian Coalition is doing, you may agree or disagree about whether or not that's a good idea, but they're very transparent about it.

17:56

I mean, they kind of wear their political activism on their sleeve. Whereas what I am covering, coming from the left, is very different.

18:04

It is being done through subterfuge. It's being done quietly. And in fact, when you expose some of the associations, you will see quick denials and attempts to claim that it's not happening, even though the records clearly show that it is.

18:17

So that was really, you know, why I focused on that. And I do want to say that what this book covers,

18:24

I did try to pick out the highlights because there is so much. You could not possibly cover all of it.

18:29

So what I've done is give you representative examples, but they are far from exhaustive. Well, yeah.

18:35

And this is a thing. Let me go through just for folks who, to whet your appetite on why to get this book,

18:42

Shepherds for Sale, when it comes out, and also just so you see what's being covered.

18:49

I really think that the way you laid this out, I'm sure that this is purposeful and you could explain if so, but it's kind of like a frog in the water analogy that many people know, right?

19:00

You put a frog in hot water, it's going to jump out. You leave it in cold water and turn up the heat and it cooks itself.

19:06

The way you have laid out kind of goes from bad to worse or really somewhat plausible to outright sin being accepted.

19:14

I mean, starting with climate change and climate change, a lot of Christians, there's Christians who say, hey, we should, of all people, we should be concerned about the climate.

19:21

It's in Genesis 1, 2, this is what God gave to people, so it sounds good.

19:28

Moving from there, you go to illegal immigration, which, again, I've dealt with here saying I'm against the illegal part, but we as Christians should be reaching the immigrants that come in with the gospel.

19:40

So again, it sounds plausible, but then you get into the hijacking of the pro -life movement, which

19:47

I think people were like, wait, what? Then we get into the Christian media, and then you turned up the heat in chapter five is where it really gets into the, really the worse, right?

19:59

We start talking about COVID, how the government was working with COVID into, well,

20:05

CRT that I hope we're going to talk about, the Me Too movement, and then you wrap it up with what is really where all this was heading is to no longer call sin sin, specifically

20:16

LGBT movement. And so as I looked at this, the whole book,

20:21

I mean, first off, you name names and I will admit some names I went, ouch, I mean, Douglas Moo, really?

20:27

Like, I liked him. I like his commentaries. But there were a bunch that I didn't, I totally expected, you know,

20:34

Tim Keller, I've been saying for years, people have been upset with me because he, I'm from New Jersey. I know the church there.

20:41

He has been teaching socialism for years and people get so upset. You know, Andy Stanley, so many of these names we know, but there's a lot we don't.

20:52

So first off, I know that a lot of people say we shouldn't name names. It's bad to name names.

20:58

Just speak about it in generality. Why is it important to name names? And I don't know where they get that from a biblical point of view as far as let's not name names.

21:09

I would actually say it's pretty important to be specific about if these are public sins and they're impacting the church, who is doing it and why?

21:17

And I don't think the model of Paul confronting Peter to his face over legalism that he was engaging in with the

21:25

Judaizers is something, that is the model that we have. And so if we see that, then that is what we also have to engage in because I would say what we're seeing today is very similar.

21:36

All of it kind of falls under that umbrella of legalism in which we're taking scripture and manipulating it and twisting it and adding our own man -made rules to suggest that, for example, since you brought up Douglas Moo and his son

21:51

Jonathan and environmentalism, to suggest that being faithful to the gospel means signing on to advance climate change policies.

22:01

So at that point, I mean, that's really what we're dealing with and we need to talk about how it's being done specifically. One, so that ideally it will be repented of and stopped.

22:11

And two, so that other Christians are wary and on their guard when it's coming in. And since you brought up,

22:16

I started with these issues that are debatable issues. And I very much did. And I tried to carefully say, let's take something like illegal immigration or let's take something like climate change and whether or not it is a systemic existential crisis caused by human activity.

22:35

Are those debatable issues on which we can all still be Christians and disagree? I would say, yes, they are.

22:42

The problem was, if you're continuing with, say, climate change, is that something that is unequivocal.

22:49

We all agree that we have a mandate to be good stewards of creation. And so that became something named creation care.

22:57

That's fine. We all agree with that. Then it was said, though, that creation care is synonymous with being a climate change activist.

23:06

So now you have specifically said that being a climate change activist is necessary in order to be faithful to the gospel.

23:13

Well, now we have a big problem that needs to be addressed. And that is why I go, okay, it is not okay to say, let's just talk about this in generalities.

23:22

Because if you do that, it also sounds like maybe it's not really happening and maybe you're just making it up to score political points.

23:28

Whereas if I show you, no, here's where it's happening and here's specifically what's said, then

23:33

I think that's much more persuasive to people to go, okay, we have a problem here that the church needs to deal with.

23:39

Yeah, and it reminds me very much of, I don't know if you're familiar with Pastor Jim Osmond from Kootenai Community Church.

23:45

He's got a book called God Doesn't Whisper dealing with the whole thing within Christianity of hearing from the voice of God.

23:53

And there's so many on the far extreme that he could use as examples. And instead he chose to use conservative examples from people like Charles Stanley and people like that.

24:05

And he did that specifically because people go, oh yeah, that's just out there. But when you use names that are within Christian, J .D.

24:15

Greer, people within the SBC, all of a sudden, it's not something out there. It's something in my own circles.

24:21

And I think that impacts people differently in how they look at it. Right. And that was kind of a parameter

24:26

I set when I even started out on my research was that I'm not really going to bother with say

24:31

Jim Wallace and sojourners except when Jim Wallace and sojourners came into these trusted, theologically conservative institutions and that maybe you didn't know they were back there in the background moving some levers.

24:45

So at that point, I did deal with them. But it wasn't like I was going to say, hey, here's what Jesse Jackson's doing.

24:51

Isn't that outrageous? Okay, well, we all kind of knew where Jesse Jackson was coming from. So I don't bother with people like that or Al Sharpton or those kinds of people,

24:58

Jim Wallace again. So when I did that, I think that was to show that, yes, your institutions are being targeted by some secular left foundations, powerful billionaires, and that's all happening.

25:14

But also, I think it's a two -prong thing that while that's also happening, you also have people who, you brought up J .D.

25:22

Greer, who are taking on the cultural definition of things, taking on the cultural narrative of particular topics.

25:32

And for whatever reason, I'm not suggesting that they, some are being paid, but they're not being paid. But I think there is maybe that cultural compromise, whether it's coming from fear of man or wanting to be thought well of in the world's eyes, that's also a factor here.

25:48

And so those were the kind of things that I wanted to tease out and go specifically what's happening on all of these fronts.

25:53

And just for people who may want to push back, let me just read what scripture actually, another passage of scripture, because you addressed a lot of pastors and sins and 1

26:03

Timothy 5, 19 and 20 says this. So first we're going to see a protection for pastors and then instruction of what to do with pastors that sin.

26:14

It says, do not receive an accusation against an elder except on the basis of two or three witnesses.

26:20

So that's the protection. But verse 20 says, those who continue in sin rebuke in the presence of all so that the rest also will be fearful of sinning.

26:35

Now, the reality is that verse 20, rebuke there is an imperative.

26:40

That's a command. So if you have a pastor that is continuing to sin, we are commanded by God to rebuke them publicly.

26:49

Why? So we want to smear their name? No, so that others will be fearful of continuing in the same behavior.

26:57

That's why you naming names and giving the examples is so important. And for any that want to criticize it,

27:04

I think that first off, your issue is not with Megan, it's with the Bible because this is what

27:10

God commands us to do. So sorry, go bring it up with God and I wouldn't want to be you when you do that.

27:17

But let's dig into one that really, one issue of the book that I resonated a lot with was the whole way that the government works with COVID.

27:27

And whenever we talk about things with the government, I caveat that there are things that I know and things

27:34

I cannot say. So there is stuff that always comes up when people say, well, how do you know this is going on with the government?

27:40

There's things where I just go, I know, sorry. But the stuff with COVID, what

27:46

I saw going on and stuff that you document in your book, I was not surprised by at all. Yeah. The fact that we see the government working with churches, explain that to folks who may not, they just think, oh, this is, the churches were just shut down because government's trying to just help people stay alive and they have care for people.

28:07

And there wasn't collusion going on at all, no. Well, I mean, look, if you go back and you sort of carefully read through the records of early 2020, it's very clear that it was a deliberate mapped out plan for how are we going to use well -known evangelical figures and ministry leaders in order to get

28:28

Christians who are in the pews every week to submit to these new, what

28:34

I would call authoritarian policies. So what they did was bring in National Institutes of Health director,

28:40

Francis Collins, otherwise known as Anthony Fauci's boss. And they really used him as, here is an evangelical leader that you can trust.

28:49

And one, there was this sort of dazzling of, look at how high in the halls of power, a man who's just like us is.

28:56

And I think we were supposed to be sort of impressed by that. I mean, in fact, people likened him to Daniel in the court of Nebuchadnezzar, this faithful evangelical in the halls of power.

29:05

And so he was then platformed by everyone from Tim Keller to Ed Stetzer, Russell Moore, Christianity Today, NT Wright.

29:14

I could go on and on in a really uncritical way. So it'd be one thing if they were bringing him on to interview him and say, well, we want to ask you some questions, but kind of what you just did with me, hey, let me offer you some pushback.

29:26

What do you say about this? Even that minimal level of, hey, let me cross examine some of what you were saying, that did not happen.

29:35

And then it was said, we need to listen to him because he is a Christian who is giving us the Christian position.

29:41

And so if you remember at that time, it was things like love your neighbor, get the shot.

29:47

So that to me was appalling because you went, this is an issue that should absolutely be a matter of personal conscience, whether I should take this new and experimental vaccine.

29:58

Now you can make your argument saying, here's why I think it's prudent for you to do it. But where they went over the line was saying, you're not loving your neighbor if you don't agree to do it.

30:08

Because look, I mean, let's talk about young women who were of childbearing age who might be trying to get pregnant at that time.

30:15

We had no idea what the long -term impact, and we still don't, what the long -term impact of those vaccinations could be on fertility.

30:22

It was very reasonable for young women in that position to say, I'm going to hang back and wait because I'm trying to have children and I don't know that I want to do this right now.

30:31

And so instead they were subjected to this sort of spiritual gaslighting. And then there was the fact that Francis Collins himself, his full record, as he was being sort of paraded around as the evangelical in leadership that you can trust, his record was not given in its full breadth.

30:50

And if you know it and you understand it, I think you would have great doubts about exactly where he stands.

30:57

To give you an example, he strenuously argued for fetal tissue research as the

31:03

Trump administration was trying to shut those programs down. He was lobbying for it.

31:09

He was lobbying for access to fetal remains of aborted babies in order to continue experimentation on them.

31:17

He was behind some of the such gruesome, they almost sound fictitious, research that was going on at the

31:23

University of Pittsburgh. The NIH was funding it under his watch where human ears, baby ears, and scalps were being grafted onto rats and mice.

31:34

So just really appalling stuff. And if I can continue just a minute so we understand who

31:39

Francis Collins is, also under his watch, he was declaring himself a strong LGBTQ ally and launched departments within the

31:50

NIH that included research onto quote -unquote transgender youth.

31:56

So that's their terminology. That's pretend. There are no transgender youth, but there are gender confused youth.

32:03

And so they were doing research into these kids and experimentation on these kids.

32:08

And he was funding programs that included mastectomies on girls as young as 12, giving cross -sex hormones to children, tracking the gay sex.

32:18

And I hope now if you have children listening, you might take a break here, but tracking gay identifying teenage boys and their sexual behaviors without their parents' knowledge.

32:28

So they were tracking how often they were having gay sex, were they having gay sex with adult men, all of this done without the parents' knowledge.

32:35

So in so many ways, we should really have questioned the Christian witness of Francis Collins in this role that he had in the halls of power.

32:45

And instead, the rank -and -file Christians were told, no, you're the ones who are damaging our

32:50

Christian witness if you do not immediately submit to what Francis Collins and other members of the government that he's speaking for are telling you to get in line with, like closing down your churches and in some cases, wearing the cloth masks that we now know were useless or shutting down your businesses.

33:07

Or I could go on and on. I mean, we all remember it. Well, but it's interesting because from where we started, here we have things that Francis Collins, now that we're past this, we know they did know these things back then.

33:20

They just covered it up. Now we see, oh yeah, they did know cloth masks don't work and all this stuff, all the stuff they were pushing.

33:28

We're talking with John MacArthur and they blame John for what he couldn't have known because he can't know the future. But we can blame these guys for knowing it and then covering it up.

33:36

And folks, I always want my audience to pick up on things people say that are very important for educational purposes.

33:43

And if you heard what Megan said, I'm pointing this out because so many people are gonna pass over it. Did you hear when she said, there are no trans people, right?

33:53

This is important because one of the things, look, this book is to show how the left has, their billionaires have influenced the church, but a lot of it is with language.

34:05

And this is why we never give up the language. You know that I never refer to someone as an atheist.

34:11

They're a professing atheist. Why? Because we can't give up the language. We can't say someone is homosexual.

34:18

They practice homosexuality. You heard what she just said. People are not trans.

34:24

They're trans confused maybe, or gender confused, but they're not trans. It's a pretend.

34:31

I know, that's gonna get me in a lot of trouble. No, no. For highlighting it. That's important. That's an important point. And in fact, as you were saying that, it reminded me of something else as far as Francis Collins.

34:39

I also think it's important to know that he used these evangelical platforms to cover up the government's tracks in some cases.

34:49

What we now know is that he and Dr. Fauci were very well aware that this virus could have leaked from a

34:56

Wuhan lab. And in fact, he directly said in a podcast episode with Christianity Today, no, no, no, the nature made this one.

35:05

This did not come out of a lab. And in fact, said it was a class among conspiracy theories to suggest that.

35:11

So that was the other thing that was done is that Francis Collins was brought out on these platforms to then say, you are a conspiracy theorist if you're questioning the government's narratives on things like where this virus came from.

35:23

When in fact, it was eminently reasonable to go, okay, are you really telling us that this virus that happened to come out of the city where there is a lab that researches novel coronaviruses, that that's just a huge coincidence?

35:37

And they called that a conspiracy theory. And we now have the records to show that they knew at the time that that was actually a very likely explanation of what happened.

35:47

Yeah, and COVID, see, I was following this long before most Americans for a totally different reason.

35:53

My bride is from Hong Kong. And most people think, oh, the Democrats released this.

35:59

I don't think so because people forget what was going on at the time. Pre -2020, 2019, what was happening?

36:06

You had China who was looking to take over Hong Kong. They had a 50 -year agreement.

36:11

They're halfway through and they want to take over. What happens? People are protesting.

36:18

Under Donald Trump, the Chinese regime was on the brink of bankruptcy and they needed the money from Hong Kong.

36:26

And all of a sudden, oh, this virus that was being developed here back when Barack Obama was president and he outlawed it and they moved it to China.

36:36

And so what you end up seeing is there, this work continues in China. And when China needed it, it suddenly gets released.

36:43

And where is it that everyone said, oh, it was for Chinese New Year? Where? Oh, Hong Kong, which got everyone in Hong Kong to go in their homes.

36:53

Protesting stopped and China just quietly took over. And everyone was so focused on their own country, no one even paid attention.

37:01

And we have people who are working on it going, oh yeah, no, this totally happens from a bat.

37:07

It's always a bat. It's always some bat in a wet market with them. But the thing we end up seeing is that it is so hard for people,

37:16

Megan, to believe that their government could be doing this, that their government could be behind it.

37:21

Some other government, yes. Growing up a generation after Holocaust, listening to what you're saying with the experiments,

37:27

I'm thinking of Hitler and the experiments he did on the Jewish people. I grew up learning about the

37:32

Holocaust because we were always told it's going to repeat. There'll be another time that people come against God's chosen people, the

37:40

Jewish people, and we'll have another Holocaust. And I've said for now going on close to 30 years that we're going to have another

37:46

Holocaust. It won't be in Germany. It's going to be here in America and it won't be the Jewish people. It will be

37:52

Christians. And people are now starting to see it. And so when we look at this, though, this is not unusual.

37:58

In fact, even before you started the book, you start mentioning about some of the things that went on under how even in 1941 what went on to try to lobby to get the church doing the bidding of government and how people even testified before Congress saying, well, you know,

38:20

Christians will be the biggest suckers. People find it hard to believe that the government could be doing things against their own people, even though history is just filled with it.

38:31

So why is it you think that even when we see, as you document things that are there, why is it so hard for people to see that, well, my government could be doing this?

38:41

Well, as you said, I think it has to be that people don't know their history very well, even our own history very well.

38:48

And that was part of why I opened the book that way, because I was very aware that, one, there would be an attempt to discredit the reporting in the book.

38:56

And then second of all, I think for laudable reasons, there is a desire to, we want to believe the best of our

39:03

Christian institutions. And our default should be trusting and believing the best of our fellow

39:09

Christians. And yet when you look through history, you see, okay, just within the church that this happened in the 1930s to 1950s in the

39:19

US, that a very strong effort was made by the Communist Party USA to infiltrate churches and co -opt pastors, and it was a very successful gambit.

39:31

And so that's part of why I talk about that. One is it takes it out of the realm of, it doesn't feel so personal as you're opening the book that way, to go, okay, this has happened before, and this was the playbook.

39:41

And so then when you see it too, you also recognize, okay, this is somewhat familiar. And look, in some cases it's deliberate infiltration, but I also open with a

39:49

Schaeffer quote showing that it's also sometimes just cultural capitulation where we get consumed with the preoccupations of our modern era.

40:01

And Machen wrote about that as well, that suddenly we want to have a social program instead of spread the gospel, because social programs tend to be a lot more popular with the culture than the gospel, especially when they sort of trend progressive at that point.

40:15

And then you've got a culture that's like, well, that's a Christianity that is not asking me to believe in a crucified Christ or to die to my sins or anything like that.

40:24

So I think I can get on board with that. And so that was really why I started out that way was because I wanted people to see, look, this is not tinfoil hat stuff.

40:33

We have been here before. So let's have that as the backdrop. Governments have done this before.

40:38

Hostile nations have done this before. A lot of people throughout history are always going to want to take advantage of the church.

40:47

One, because I believe in the demonic realm and the church is always going to be a target for that reason.

40:53

But also, you know, for more pedestrian reasons, it's a captive audience. Where else do people go every week to hear how might

41:02

I better live my life in following the Lord? And so just by virtue of that reason, you got a lot of nefarious actors who are going to go, hey, could you tell them that following the

41:13

Lord means that they got to do what we say? That's just naturally going to happen. Yeah. So again, folks, the book is

41:20

Shepherds for Sale. The subtitle, How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a

41:25

Leftist Agenda. That actually, for regular listeners of The Wrap Report, you're going, that sounds familiar. That's right.

41:31

It sounds an awful lot like what I always say here. Truth, unfortunately, in our culture, truth doesn't matter. Narrative matters.

41:37

And that's what they did. They traded the truth for the narrative. And so this is something

41:43

I want to get into discussing. Well, let's talk 11th commandment. Yikes. Because people are familiar with 10 commandments.

41:50

What's the 11th that we always hear from? The thing, though, with this book is, I mean, you start off slow, get into more and more important details that affect

42:02

Christianity. And I think this is a thing where a lot of people go, oh, can't we just get along? Let's just sit down, have a cup of coffee.

42:09

And over a cup of coffee, we could just talk these things out. Well, I'll say this. There are issues in this book that you can't just sit down over a cup of coffee and talk about.

42:17

But if you were to get a good cup of coffee, may I encourage you to go to Squirrelly Joe's and get yourself a great cup of, well, maybe you want to get a cup of kindness or compassion.

42:27

Just, we don't get the honesty. He's got great names for all of his coffees there at Squirrelly Joe. But honesty?

42:33

Because he calls his honesty decaf. Hello? That's not honest. But if you want a good cup of real coffee, something that's going to keep you awake, go get the wisdom or the compassion.

42:44

A lot of different types of fresh -brewed beans that he's got where he roasts them. But this is a

42:50

Christian -owned company. So not only are you getting a great cup of coffee, but you also get the support of a

42:56

Christian who is training his children to run a business. So you can go to strivingforeternity .org

43:02

slash coffee, strivingforeternity .org slash coffee to get yourself a great cup of coffee.

43:08

And I'm enjoying wisdom this week. That's my bag this week. And you can go there.

43:14

Just remember the first order you get, you can get 20 % off using the promo code

43:19

SFE. It stands for Striving For Eternity. So if you're anything like me, you make sure that first order has got everything under the sun.

43:27

Because if you're getting 20 % off, you've got to save as much as you can. They also have five -pound bags if you want for your churches.

43:34

So, Megan, let's talk about the 11th commandment. It seems to be in Christianity.

43:41

What is that? How is it that people will push back against a book like yours by your violating the 11th commandment?

43:49

The 11th commandment, folks, it depends. In the SBC, you don't criticize someone else in the

43:54

SBC. But outside of the SBC, it's thou shalt be nice. Yes, thou shalt be nice, particularly to evangelical leaders.

44:02

Thou shalt not publicly criticize your evangelical leaders. And, you know, it's funny because I do write about the fact that it tends to go one way.

44:11

So you have people like J .D. Greer and Russell Moore, for that matter, who made very broad blanket accusations about the people under their authority, both in the

44:23

SBC specifically, and the accusations were made that they were white supremacists, that there were,

44:29

I mean, some really eye -popping accusations that I could never in any way quantify, that there were neoconfederates sitting in SBC churches.

44:38

And so these broad brush accusations were made. And I remember going, where is the 11th commandment when it comes to the leadership kind of doing these wide smears against the people under their authority?

44:50

And if this is going on, and you're the president of the SBC, don't you have a responsibility to, first, why don't you go ahead and go to the pastors of these churches where this is supposedly going on?

45:02

And if it's not being dealt with, then yes, that does need to be made public because we should not have neoconfederates and white supremacist groups at work in the

45:09

SBC. And no evidence was ever brought forward for that. So that was my first thing, is that I feel like nice is not avoiding conflict because we are to contend for the gospel.

45:20

And sometimes contending means a little bit of conflict. And so that was really what

45:27

I tried to do was the opposite of what I felt like a J .D. Greer or a Russell Moore were doing, which was making broad brush accusations rather than saying, elite evangelicals do this.

45:38

I said, no, here is specifically what J .D. Greer said. Here is the documentation for that.

45:44

Here is why I don't believe that that's biblical. Here is how he treated specific people in specific instances.

45:52

And so to me, that is very different than just sort of throwing out broad brush allegations that can never be investigated or proven.

46:02

So let me ask you, a lot of the issues that you have raised in the book, Shepherds for Sale, some will say, well, that's politics.

46:11

We shouldn't be involved in politics. Others are gonna say, hey, we shouldn't, you know, this is just a matter of Christian liberty.

46:21

We shouldn't, you know, as a church, we shouldn't get involved. Should Christians be politically active in your mind?

46:28

Yes. Yes, unequivocally, Christians should be politically active because politics is policy.

46:34

And to quote my friend Allie Beth Stuckey, policy impacts people. So yes, we should be political, but it's also important to understand that so many of what is termed now political issues are in fact biblical issues, whether it's the sanctity of marriage, the sanctity of life, what is sexually, not just allowable by God's standard, but beneficial to a society.

47:00

These are all deemed political issues now. Even the role of husband and wife in the family, all of these things would be deemed political when in fact they're also biblical issues.

47:11

So I would say that that has been a way to sort of discourage Christians from using their voices in the public sphere in ways that very much do impact their neighbors for good and for the good of the cities and the towns and the nation that they live in.

47:27

So yes, we cannot avoid being political because we're blessed to live in a representative republic and we have to steward our citizenship well, and that's a part of it.

47:37

And then the other thing I would say about that is that when you say, well, let's not be political,

47:43

I think it's the famous Rod Dreher line, and hopefully I don't butcher it, but you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.

47:51

And that was my point in this book is, look, on so many of these issues that,

47:57

I don't really want to make a big issue in the church about where you stand on climate change.

48:03

Unfortunately, foundations that want to get policy passed have seen churches as a way to help them in that effort.

48:13

So they have created these front groups that are now coming in, they're given names like the

48:18

Evangelical Immigration Table or the Evangelical Environmental Network. They're funded by secular left organizations and they're being burnished with the credentials of respected and trusted evangelical institutions like Christianity Today or the

48:36

Council for Christian Colleges and Universities or the National Association of Evangelicals.

48:42

And through their credibility, they are coming into churches and now requiring churches to be political in a way that they weren't before on issues that aren't clearly biblical.

48:52

So it's kind of a swap. What they've done is said, well, the issues, the Bible is extremely clear and there's really not room for debate whether a child in the womb is a life or not that you're allowed to kill.

49:04

That's not a debate. Whether God made them male and female, not a debate. Those things, that's political.

49:11

We don't really want to stray into that. Whereas the things that are very much political and debatable like climate change and what our immigration policy should be, suddenly those are being framed as biblical issues.

49:23

So you might think of it as a great swap. Yeah, and I want folks to recognize, Son, that you had said, because again, so many people might just skip over things you're saying and not pick up on the importance of it and in framing the language, it's important.

49:38

The fact is that people will say, well, let me give examples. In New Jersey, when they were going to decide to vote on same -sex marriage, by the way, folks, notice

49:47

I didn't say homosexual marriage because those who practice homosexuality have been getting married for years. They just haven't been getting married to people of the same sex.

49:56

So when they wanted it, I remember standing before our legislature when they had open discussions and I asked every one of them, do you believe in a separation of church and state?

50:07

Every one of them said yes, to which I asked, then why are you getting involved in a church issue?

50:15

As state, you should not be voting on this because it's not your issue if you believe in a separation of church and state, right?

50:22

It's the framing of the issue. They try to frame this, and that's what Megan just said, so I don't want you missing that.

50:29

They frame it in a way of saying, oh, well, this is outside of the realm of what you should be doing as church, and then we'll focus over here.

50:37

And for folks who have long forgotten, when the climate change stuff, folks may not even know that where all the climate change research was being done in the

50:45

UK got hacked many years ago, and all the emails were released, and when they were released, we discovered, oh, they were ignoring data that didn't fit what they wanted, and they were making up data to fit what they wanted, and their argument,

50:59

I still remember this, the quote from the director who said, the politicians weren't moving fast enough, so we have to do this to force the politicians.

51:08

And then when he got caught, he goes, I'm a scientist, I'm not a politician. No, dude, you gave up science when you wanted to push politicians to do your bidding.

51:19

And this is a thing that I think people don't recognize. They don't recognize how involved the government and those that want to influence government are trying to be in the church.

51:32

Can I give you one quick example of how successful that has been, even among the pastorate? This just blew my mind when

51:38

I was kind of working on the Andy Stanley story and his evolution, let's say, on homosexuality and whether it's permissible, and I was covering a young pastor who was in a meeting where Andy Stanley openly admitted that he had shifted his position on it privately but he wasn't going to do so publicly.

51:58

And the young pastor wrote this fairly explosive thread revealing what was said in this.

52:04

And a couple of other pastors came in and I appreciated that they came in and said, we were also at this meeting, yes, this happened.

52:11

So several witnesses there saying, yes, this happened. But as I wanted to delve into a little more detail,

52:17

I spoke to the pastor who originally posted the thread, this guy named Ryan Visconti, and I got the numbers from the other two guys, the other two pastors who had backed him up.

52:27

And neither one of them, I'm going to credit him for at least saying, hey, yeah, we were in the meeting and it happened, but I was trying to delve for more detail.

52:34

And when I called them, neither one of them were willing to speak on the record about it or say anything more.

52:40

And it was fascinating to me, why? Because they said, we don't want to get political. So the issue of Andy Stanley, who has tremendous influence over other pastors in the

52:51

United States, puts out all of this material, does these conferences specifically for pastors, that they weren't willing to confront him to them over teaching heresy was a political issue to them.

53:05

And that was just, it was demoralizing, but it also kind of threw into stark relief for me, just where we were at, that you had even pastors saying, yeah, well, to talk about Andy Stanley's teaching on homosexuality, that's a political issue.

53:19

Okay, so then let me ask you, is it really that they think it's political or more?

53:24

What I think underlying a lot of this issue is a lot of people have given up ministry for platform building.

53:30

So is it more that, oh, we don't want to get political or is it by me speaking out against Andy Stanley, it might hurt my platform and I might lose followers and money and all that.

53:43

I think that's often a big part of the calculation there. I do think that there are pastors who have sort of, which you said, the narrative, they have absorbed this narrative, that for me to touch on any of these issues that are biblical, that's culture warring, that's the realm of politics.

53:59

And we don't want a culture war, we just want to tell people about Jesus, even though the word, the truth, the life, his entire presence, his entire existence through all of eternity before and all of eternity into the future has been as the one true word to say that there is some aspect of that that we shouldn't teach on because it will discredit

54:22

Christ is like saying Christ didn't know what would discredit himself when he put it in his book.

54:28

It's very bizarre. I can't really wrap my head around that kind of thinking, but I think that that's what's happened is that they've sort of absorbed the narrative.

54:36

They have this very narrow vision of what we talk about when we talk about the gospel and what we talk about when we talk about Jesus.

54:44

Even when things are completely antithetical and at odds with the gospel, let's talk about CRT and social justice because, look, there were about 75 of us who got together, wrote a letter to John MacArthur requesting he put his weight behind a statement we were working on on a statement of social justice in the gospel because we saw it after the, you know,

55:04

Martin Luther King 50 conference that the Southern Baptist did. We saw that this was working its way into the church and a danger to the gospel, right?

55:13

Right. Now, you have a whole chapter on it. By the way, I think you misdefined what CRT is.

55:18

I don't know. You called it something called critical racism theory, but really what it is is cultural racism training.

55:27

See? Because that's what they're actually doing is they're taking the culture, trying to train them to be racist.

55:33

So that's what I think CRT really stands for is cultural racism training. But when we talk about social justice and, you know, critical race theory, how is that working its way in the church?

55:44

And, I mean, how did we see the George Floyd incident, Black Lives Matter, radically change the way church views social justice?

55:54

Well, you know, I think it started, obviously, as you mentioned, well before George Floyd because that's what you saw at that, was it the 2018

56:03

MLK 50? Is that when that was? Which, by the way, that was in part funded by one of these secular foundations that I mentioned, the

56:12

Democracy Fund, which was founded by Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, who is

56:17

Buddhist. So, you know, here he is funding these events for Christians like MLK 50 when in fact, you know, why does he have an interest in that given that he's definitely not a

56:29

Christian and he only promotes left -wing things and now he's promoting this?

56:35

So when I looked at that, it was really this reordering of what was sin.

56:42

It went from individual, I have sinful hatred in my heart towards someone else because of the color of their skin or their ethnic or religious identity.

56:53

I hate them for that. And then it became the oppressor -oppressed class. So that's what we saw with critical race theory, which was

57:00

I, just by virtue of being a white person, am oppressing and sinning against, say, a black person because I have some unearned privilege that they don't possess and that is something that I need to repent from even though I have not knowingly committed any sin against that person and I hold no hatred against that person.

57:22

And it became pretty clear to the people who were paying attention, I think, early on that these are

57:27

Marxist categories, that we have just taken out the laboring classes versus the bourgeoisie and we have swapped it out for racial categories now.

57:36

So that was what we were seeing, is it was just sort of a way to repackage Marxist theory.

57:41

And it was something that, you know, the original founders of critical theory, which you will know this better than I do, openly admitted that that was their project and that's what they were doing.

57:50

So how we saw it come into the churches was, one, I think, ignorance on a lot of levels.

57:56

I think there are some people who didn't know what it was when it was coming in, but their instinct was those who rang the alarm bell was to assume that those guys were just being big meanies instead of hearing the counsel.

58:10

And so when you had in the SBC them bringing in that resolution that said, well, it's a way that we can use it as an analytical tool and something that we can just add on to the gospel to better understand racial...

58:29

Well, they would say racial sin, I would say racial grievance. They didn't recognize that, no, in fact, what it is is a politics of envy.

58:36

It is teaching people to be resentful and envious and, in fact, just constantly violate one of its

58:42

Ten Commandments in assuming that me being born as not a white person, I have therefore been deprived of some privilege that I should have.

58:51

In which case, you might go, okay, then you need to take it up with God, your creator, who created you as something different.

58:58

You don't envy someone because of the color of their skin and that skin color is giving them some privilege,

59:04

I guess. But what it did was just create enmity within the church. And I documented in extensive ways some personal stories about how it played out in churches.

59:14

So what you suddenly had, for example, were women's Bible study groups where everyone got along well, there was no sense of grievance between groups.

59:23

Well, suddenly you had speakers coming in with this Be the Bridge Bible study.

59:28

And it was teaching these white women that through no intention of their own, through no meaningful way of oppressing anyone, that they were actually harming their black sisters.

59:42

And it was creating just this unnatural sense of shame when they couldn't even articulate what they were doing wrong.

59:50

And it really broke your heart to interview some of these women who, to this day, seem to me extremely confused and beaten down, going,

59:58

I didn't know that I was harming them. I didn't mean to. And, of course, they weren't harming them. And so I just saw it creating the very sort of division that the cross of Christ is meant to erase within the church.

01:00:13

And you had people walking on eggshells. You had other people who I think leveraged the situation to sort of abuse their fellow

01:00:21

Christians. So that's kind of a long -winded answer to say how it was working itself out in churches.

01:00:26

And I think a lot of well -meaning people went, well, I'm going to do the work. I'm going to sign on to the project.

01:00:32

I'm going to give you just one example. You had some of these Bible study classes where white people were told, you're to come and just listen, and you don't get to speak for the first six months of this group.

01:00:43

You're just supposed to sit there and listen to how you have oppressed minority groups, which was sort of stunning, right?

01:00:52

I mean, this is a struggle session. This is not Christianity. And when people started sounding the alarm bell, you finally saw a backpedaling from, say, some of the seminaries saying, well, we don't teach that.

01:01:05

We're not teaching critical race theory, which I don't know how to be any more blunt, but they were lying. When you go back and you look at the websites and you look at the material that they were distributing, it was explicitly promoting critical race theory.

01:01:19

Southeastern Southern Baptist Seminary, for example, explicitly had on its kingdom diversity page, which was it's sort of, well,

01:01:29

I think the name is self -explanatory, but it was sort of the way they were saying that we're going to do a better job attracting black students and minority students.

01:01:37

On its kingdom diversity page, it openly had material that was saying, again, critical race theory can be a really good thing.

01:01:45

It can be really helpful for Christians. Now, once the rank and file caught wise to what this actually was and it fell out of favor, they made all of that disappear, but it's still there on the way back machine if you know where to look, and that's what you'll find in those 50 pages of notes, by the way.

01:02:00

Yeah. Well, I will be getting to all the footnotes because that's what I ended up doing. My audience knows that when

01:02:06

I do stuff, I try to go and do original source because, well, I've discovered that sometimes people well -meaning can be wrong, even me.

01:02:17

So, but, you know, it's interesting because so many people think your book, one of the comments that, or things

01:02:23

I saw in what the publisher had sent me referring to is how deeply the leftist billionaires infiltrated

01:02:30

America's churches. And I know this firsthand. Do you remember this event that's occurred on a

01:02:37

Thursday afternoon Facebook post called Occupy Wall Street? Remember that? Well, remind me.

01:02:44

Well, supposedly when they did in Zagati Park, New York City, there was a

01:02:50

Facebook post that, I think it was four o 'clock on Thursday, it was like, let's protest it.

01:02:55

Let's go march to Occupy Wall Street and we're going to take over and we're going to show the one percenters are all wrong.

01:03:03

And here's the thing, because I did, at that time I was about 20 years doing open air evangelism in New York City.

01:03:10

I had a lot of hecklers who knew me personally from going to Union Square week after week and Washington Square.

01:03:16

And so I was actually invited to the Occupy movement three months before that post went out.

01:03:26

And I was already three months late. They invited me because, and they told me, they were inviting me because they wanted to get a religious or what they referred to as a spiritual voice.

01:03:38

And they figured since I worked with so many of the people there in New York sharing the gospel that I might be the voice for spiritual side to speak to the mean, evil people that are taking over the one percenters who have so much.

01:03:53

And it was very interesting because they, their whole thing was there's the rich and we're the underprivileged and we don't have all the privilege that the one percenters have.

01:04:03

But what I noticed so interesting in Zagati Park is when all the rich kids had their iPads and MacBooks stolen from the people who just, they were just there to, hey, we need drug money.

01:04:15

All of a sudden, all the rich kids took all of their tents and moved them to what

01:04:20

I call the upper class Zagati Park. And they moved the other people away so they could patrol themselves.

01:04:26

So they keep an eye on each other and they wanted to have this, you know, all for show. We have a 10 o 'clock meeting that's open to everybody, but there were a bunch of people there that didn't care about the movement.

01:04:36

So they were in the way. And so the upper class guys were having 9 a .m. meetings to talk about how to force people to do what they wanted in the 10 o 'clock meetings.

01:04:45

I was thrown out when I brought out the fact that they had the 9 a .m. meetings because that was supposed to be secret.

01:04:51

They weren't supposed to know about it. But that's what you end up seeing. It's, people think, oh, this is, you know, this has nothing to do.

01:04:59

No, they are looking to use the church to push their agenda. What's so troubling about it too, about the whole

01:05:07

CRT element of that? I mean, they're using it on any number of fronts, but in that particular one that you go, nothing could be more antithetical to scripture and to the

01:05:16

Jesus who tells us, if you have food and covering, be content. As to tell them, no, no, no, what you are supposed to do is make sure that you have your share of privilege.

01:05:26

And if you don't think you have enough privilege, you should focus on that. There's just nothing of Christ in that.

01:05:32

And you go, where is the gratitude that we are to hold for our creator, for all of the blessings that he has given us?

01:05:39

Instead, it's just teaching a politics of grievance and it's teaching a spirituality of grievance.

01:05:44

And then it's suggesting that this is the work that God wants us to be focused on is, I'm so angry that these 1 % have what

01:05:53

I don't have. I don't know, did the 1 % get it legally and morally?

01:05:58

In that case, it's none of my business. I've been blessed in these ways. And you know what? I have my food and covering and I have a family that I love and I may not be the 1%, but I'm not starving.

01:06:07

And by the way, if you're an American, you are the world's 1%. So maybe sit down.

01:06:14

Yeah. No, I mean, look, the gospel message is that every one of us, myself included, rightly deserves eternity in the lake of fire because we are criminals in God's sight.

01:06:24

We break his law. So the fact that anything I have, any kind of blessing is more than I deserve.

01:06:31

But the gospel message is, as you said, we should be content and give to others from what we have, where the message of the social justice gospel is, you somewhere have wronged me.

01:06:43

You have more than me. I want to take from you. That's a completely opposite message. And it's bad for everyone, yeah.

01:06:50

Correct, correct. You know, look, they talk about the difference of equity and equality, okay?

01:06:56

Equality is we start a race at the same starting line, where equity, we finish at the finish line the same.

01:07:03

And the reason that's impossible to do is because if Joe Biden wants to talk about equity, then

01:07:09

Joe Biden has to accept that every one of us has to be president of the United States to have equity. If he's president, we should,

01:07:15

I mean, well, okay. He does prove that if he could be president, anyone could be president, but they just have to have their wife remind them that they're president every day.

01:07:25

But for folks who don't know that, he said she does that. But the reality is that we would all have to be president for equity to be, and you can't all be president, right?

01:07:37

It's a system that is not workable, and it's a system that never ends. There's always another grievance.

01:07:43

This gets into the whole issue of LGBT, right? This is a thing where it started with just, hey, let us have, you know, the way

01:07:52

I explain it is you had people who were saying, well, this was just a curse. I was just born this way. And then it became, well, it's a cross

01:07:59

I have to bear. But now they want to be celebrated, and it's a shift that has changed. And it's this idea that once they got the popularity with it, they have to keep going to keep it going.

01:08:11

So it just went from, they just keep adding the alphabet to it, right? You had to add queer and transgender, and soon they're going to add maps.

01:08:18

For folks that don't know what maps is, it's minor attracted people. We used to call them pedophiles. With this,

01:08:24

I mean, that to me seems like such a clear -cut thing that, as you said with the abortion issue in life, should be very clear.

01:08:33

I think the LGBT should be clear in the church as well. And yet you've documented how we're seeing these, you know, wealthy people who are just pouring money in to start changing the agenda of the church on an issue that's so clear -cut.

01:08:49

Right. So you mentioned that, yeah, a lot of people kind of knew what was happening with Andy Stanley. It was discussed, and that is true.

01:08:56

Part of the reason I spent time on it, though, is because he is so influential to so many other pastors.

01:09:02

And you do still have people who, they're still denying it, even though he has said things that are obviously problematic from a biblical perspective, but also the fact that his church is welcoming conferences with openly same -sex, quote -unquote, married couples to come speak to, like what faithful shepherd opens up wolves to come speak to their church and get the wolf perspective?

01:09:27

That's what you have when you have these same -sex married, they claim to be

01:09:32

Christian, speakers coming to talk to your audience about how the church is harming them. That is a little mind -blowing to try to sell the idea that that is faithful shepherding.

01:09:43

But what I started with there is that Andy Stanley's influence has now reached into other churches that you may not have known that these groups are operating there as well, like Saddleback Church, Rick Warren's church.

01:09:58

So one of the groups that Andy Stanley launched, Embracing the Journey, they have explicitly

01:10:05

LGBTQ -affirming curriculum. Northpointe supported it, both in giving them a lot of advice for how they launched.

01:10:13

The couple who started it are members of Northpointe Church and Northpointe supports it financially.

01:10:19

So it was important to have that background to know that that curriculum is now going into churches like Saddleback, which also has a huge amount of influence.

01:10:28

And so what you need to know is that it was really just one example, but the Arcus Foundation, which is the largest

01:10:35

LGBTQ grantmaker in the country, has been funneling money into ministries that state their explicit intention to move conservative evangelical churches and institutions into the affirming category.

01:10:53

And I mean, they openly say, no matter how conservative their theology, we want to move them on this point to be fully accepting of homosexuality, same -sex marriage, transgenderism.

01:11:05

So this is their goal. And to that end, they include programs, something called, for example, the

01:11:12

Reformation Project, which is a grantee of the Arcus Foundation. They have a program called

01:11:18

Pastors in Process. And it states that its purpose is, if you are a pastor who has privately come to be

01:11:27

LGBTQ affirming, you no longer believe what the Bible says anymore, but you have a congregation who doesn't know this and who still believe what the

01:11:36

Bible says, well, you come to our confidential program and we will teach you how to slowly and quietly move your congregation toward LGBTQ affirmation.

01:11:49

So they're training pastors to do that. They are training people to come into churches. I mean, really, we're talking master's level training, hours and hours of sophisticated arguments to try to erase what they call the six clobber passages and reinterpret them to do things like say,

01:12:07

Oh, well, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah isn't about widespread mass homosexual perversion.

01:12:15

It's about a lack of hospitality. And so you see them doing these sort of tortured interpretations of scripture, and they're bringing this into your youth groups and they're bringing this in to all of these programs.

01:12:27

So if you're an unwary pastor, you may not know it. If you're an unwary parishioner, you may not know that your pastor is in this

01:12:35

Pastors in Process program and is quietly trying to teach you, hey, you know what, maybe this is something that the church has just gotten wrong and we need to admit that we could be wrong.

01:12:46

We could have gotten it wrong up to this point, to quote Christianity Today CEO, Timothy Dalrymple.

01:12:53

So these are the kinds of things that I think people have to be aware of that this is happening, and that these tentacles reach very far, they reach very deep, and don't assume that your people aren't being impacted by it because very likely they are.

01:13:08

And we've got all of this effort going on on one side, whereas the faithful church is somewhat bashful to talk about it.

01:13:16

And certainly if we do talk about it, it's maybe one Sunday, once a year, we hit it really quick and then we get out.

01:13:24

Well, what do you think is going to happen when you have master's level training for weeks and weeks and weeks, training an army of activists to come into churches on one side, and on the other side, we have just the very bare minimum that we can get away with, and then let's drop this subject again for another year.

01:13:40

Yeah, and you know, the importance of your book, Shepherds for Sale, is not only the documentation that you provide of the examples, it's also you follow the money.

01:13:50

How much do you think it is that, I mean, look, all ministries, they need to raise funds, and once they get some money that they, they don't go and do their homework and know, oh, look,

01:13:59

George Soros is behind that. They don't go and figure out who's behind it. They're just grateful to have the money, but once that money starts coming in, they don't want to stop that money coming in.

01:14:08

So how much do you think that money coming in starts to influence where, well, now that we're giving you the money, this is what we want you to do, and well, we started spending that money in these projects, we got to keep that going.

01:14:20

How much do you think that influences the decisions that so many of these ministries and organizations are making? Well, you know what's funny is

01:14:27

I can't read their hearts and say, you know, this is the percentage basis on which they decided we're going to shift our emphasis.

01:14:35

At the very least, we're just not going to talk about the sinfulness of homosexuality or transgenderism anymore.

01:14:42

I can't know that, but what I can know is that the foundations directly say, this is why we're giving them money, because we want them to do this.

01:14:50

So, I mean, if you write down your motives, then I can read that that's your motive. And I don't always know either.

01:14:56

You know, sometimes it's funny when you see someone like J .D. Greer who, you know, made that sort of infamous statement about the

01:15:03

Bible only whispering about sexual sin. Was that the influence of groups like this?

01:15:09

Or is that simply cultural influence? I can't know. I can only go based on what

01:15:15

Greer himself said, or, you know, should we adopt pronoun hospitality in order to show ourselves hospitable to people who identify as transgender?

01:15:26

We will go ahead and use their pronouns. Did he do that because he's hearing that from these groups that are taking money from the

01:15:36

Arcus Foundation? Or did he do that himself because he just wanted to take the more culturally palatable position?

01:15:44

I don't really know, but I know what the impact is. Well, it could be option number three, and that is he's just lazy.

01:15:51

And since Ed Litton borrowed all of J .D. Greer's sermons, and J .D.

01:15:56

Greer was getting that from Tim Keller. So, you know, J .D. Greer got it from Tim Keller. So, you know, it's just being lazy and taking other people's sermons.

01:16:04

That could be an option too for that. But I'll ask you this is, you know, a concern that I have is where conservatives, you know, not just Christians, but conservatives in general in this country are looking for leadership.

01:16:19

Okay, first off, if anyone saw the debate against Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and if they're claiming they're going to do another, let me first give a great advice.

01:16:27

If they do have another debate, may I encourage you go to mypillow .com

01:16:34

and get yourself a really good pillow because you're going to need it if they debate again, because it's going to put you to sleep again.

01:16:40

So go to mypillow .com, use promo code SFE, get yourself a great pillow, prepare for that debate because Joe, well, if he's not sleeping, he'll put you to sleep for sure.

01:16:51

But right now they're having their extravaganza $25 for their pillows.

01:16:56

You can get their two -dollar pillows. I think it's buy one, get one free. You can get, we just got the dish towels.

01:17:02

We just purchased those because we needed to get replacement. I just bought, we bought some, some towels for folks as a gift.

01:17:09

But if you haven't tried their mattress topper, oh, that changes your sleep altogether. If you're debating, do

01:17:15

I get a new mattress? Just get the MyPillow three -inch mattress topper. It'll be like getting a brand new bed, much cheaper.

01:17:22

So go to mypillow .com, use promo code SFE. But Megan, here's the thing. When we look at conservatives, we're looking at,

01:17:29

I mean, the Democrats seem to have absolutely nobody that is providing any kind of leadership at all.

01:17:36

But within the conservative circles, we almost don't see it either. I mean, we're looking at toward libertarians like Donald Trump and Elon Musk as the champions of conservatism and they're not really conservatives.

01:17:50

I mean, do you see a, this is more a political question as you're a political commentator, but do you see a concern with the fact that we don't see conservative leaders rising up?

01:18:00

I mean, in the sense that I think it tells us that how far down the road we are in the US as a nation under judgment.

01:18:07

I mean, I think the level of moral insanity that we see in our country, I don't think we can come to any other conclusion, but that the leaders that are rising up indicate that we are under judgment.

01:18:20

And when I see that, I think what the church has to do is be all the more distinctive.

01:18:28

And I think part of the reason that you're seeing leadership even on the right that is so morally blinkered is because we have failed in that aim.

01:18:37

So if you have a church that is unwilling to be unapologetically clear about what biblical standards are and what therefore should be our standards, any nation that wants to be blessed, that wants a strong social fabric, cannot do anything but align with the biblical standards in scripture.

01:18:59

And so when we depart from that, this is going to be the natural result. And so what I would have loved to seen is a discussion less about, hey, this is how

01:19:10

Donald Trump indicates that evangelicals have compromised, but more a desire to say, where did we as the church drop the ball in being a clear voice in our culture that we got to Donald Trump in the first place?

01:19:26

I mean, I don't fault anyone by going, these are the choices that we have and you have to make the best choice that you believe you can.

01:19:34

And I give people freedom of conscience to go, I can understand if you think I got to sit this out, I have to vote third party.

01:19:40

I totally get that. What I can't countenance is saying we're going to vote for a platform that is unapologetically pro -death and pro -perversion.

01:19:47

I can make no excuse for that. But when I look at it, I think part of the problem is the church became libertarian first in so many ways in the sense that we didn't really want to talk about these things publicly.

01:20:01

We talked about life. I think we've always been really good on the subject of life, but I don't think that these moral issues are as easily isolated as we want to pretend.

01:20:12

Because when you talk about the pro -life issue, you're not going to get away from sexual permissiveness.

01:20:18

And if you have a sort of free love sex culture, which we do, you're going to eventually have even the right that is going to go, well, we can't hold that strong on abortion because that means acknowledging where this desire for abortion is coming from.

01:20:35

And that is because we all want to have sex without strings. So the church needed to talk a lot more openly about things like no -fault divorce and premarital sex in ways that we don't.

01:20:47

So, you know, I hate to say it, but we kind of have to look at our own house and think about, you know,

01:20:52

I guess to bring it full circle, how do we become those hermits that spoke to me, you know, in an era when courtly love was all the rage and it was so fashionable so that, you know, the adulterous relationship between Lancelot and Guinevere was framed as star -crossed romance.

01:21:11

We need some hermits to come in and go, no, it's based lust and it's sin and it needs to stop.

01:21:18

And so we need a little more of that kind of prophetic voice, I think. Well, let me ask you one last topic is the issue of talking with politics,

01:21:29

Christian nationalism, a term that the left kind of created and Christians are trying to adopt.

01:21:34

I've been talking to a lot of folks about this. I'm more curious since you're in the political commentary realm, what is your view of Christian nationalism?

01:21:42

Is it something Christians should adopt and embrace or should we run away from the term? What are your thoughts?

01:21:48

I get that question so much and I will be totally honest with you that I kind of sit back and I'm withholding judgment myself.

01:21:55

My instinct is it's not a great idea to lean into it and to give your enemy a cudgel to wield against you, which is what it seems like to me.

01:22:04

So, I mean, essentially we have seen what the left means when they say Christian nationalism. We saw

01:22:10

Heidi Prisballa, the Politico writer, say on MSNBC, it means people who think their rights come from God and not the government.

01:22:19

So that's who she thinks Christian nationalists are. We have seen in the Rob Reiner documentary, they very explicitly say that the

01:22:27

Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade was a product of Christian nationalism. Well, why did it happen?

01:22:34

Because Christians made use of the same levers of constitutional power that their secular neighbors do.

01:22:41

And over time, they eventually managed to score an electoral win by getting Donald Trump into the

01:22:47

White House that resulted in judicial wins in his SCOTUS appointments that ended in the overturning of Roe v.

01:22:56

Wade. So it was a perfectly constitutional process and yet it was dubbed, this is Christian nationalism.

01:23:01

So it seems to me that what they mean is just Christians exercising their constitutional rights in any way that reflects their own values and preferences.

01:23:10

As to whether we should adopt it though, I'm just not convinced. I get the argument for it. I have seen people say, well, it's a better name than fascist or racist.

01:23:22

And so this is at least something I can agree with because I am a Christian and I don't want to be ruled by globalists.

01:23:29

I believe in national sovereignty. Therefore, I can adopt the name Christian nationalists.

01:23:34

And I do find that a really compelling argument. So I don't mean to be wishy -washy on it other than I just haven't made up my mind myself.

01:23:41

It's almost like, I don't know. I don't know that there's, my concern is this.

01:23:47

I also see some of the people glomming on to the name Christian nationalist that means something very different.

01:23:53

And I think there is truly a Nick Fuentes ugly streak of antisemitism, real antisemitism on the extreme right.

01:24:03

And they want to claim the mantle Christian nationalists too. And I don't know that there's a way to cordon the terminology off from those guys.

01:24:13

So I think you will end up having to do so many disclaimers of, hey, we're not with those guys that it might be wiser just to let it be.

01:24:21

But, you know, I don't know. People I respect feel differently. And so I'm still open to hearing them out.

01:24:27

Yeah, I mean, I think the danger of it is since the left wants to use it to beat Christians up just the same way

01:24:33

Nazi Germany did with the Jewish people to kind of put them in a camp and blame them for everything. I mean, for folks who, you gave a quote and if folks hadn't heard it, that Christian nationalists are those that think that their rights come from God.

01:24:45

Like, you mean exactly like our founding documents say? Wow. So Christians are those who follow the founding documents.

01:24:51

Like some people may have heard you say that and be like, that's crazy, but that's actually what was said. That is what was said.

01:24:58

It is. And I think adopting the term gives the left, they're going to look to the extreme.

01:25:05

And so they're going to say that's everybody. So that's why I would say I stay away from the term because I just think it's going to be problematic.

01:25:12

So what we've been talking about is the book, Shepherds for Sale. So who should buy this?

01:25:18

Let me be really clear. If everything we've said today, if you've heard Megan talking and you're like, yeah,

01:25:23

I got it. I know that. I know that. Yep, I'm all on board. Then you should get the book. You know why?

01:25:28

Not because you have to be convinced, but because you need all the documentation and all of the things to show those others who need convincing and don't know these things.

01:25:39

So if you already know this, everything Megan has said, you're like, yep, I'm right on board. Then get this book right now.

01:25:46

Second, you say, well, what if I'm not convinced? What if this is the first time I'm hearing it? Or what,

01:25:52

I don't even believe. Then definitely get the book because it's definitely for you so that you can see all the evidence.

01:25:59

Because in a short period of time, we can't cover everything that this book documents because a real journalist supports her claims.

01:26:06

For those who want to say Megan's not, 50 pages of footnotes just saying that, you know, let's see if some of those other so -called journalists do that.

01:26:14

But that's who you should get, needs to get this book. So if you believe you're ready on board or you're not, you need to get this book.

01:26:21

In fact, may I encourage you, maybe you can go out and buy like this book, buy the cases for your church so that your church would be strengthened so that your church wouldn't be the one of these ones that get named in our next book, maybe, right?

01:26:37

We need to have strong churches. And if your church is turning a blind eye to this, look, folks, so many pastors are just so busy trying to get their sermon done for Sunday, do the visitation, go do hospital calls.

01:26:50

Not talking the big church pastors, but the little guys that the majority of churches have pastors that are just, they're not in tune with what's going on out there.

01:26:58

They don't have the time for it. Get this book for your pastor so that he recognizes what is going on and where the attack is coming from.

01:27:07

So you need to get the book, Shepherds for Sale by Megan Basham. Megan, let me ask you this, a question

01:27:13

I like to ask guests. If there's one thing you could change in Christianity, in American Christianity, what would you love to change?

01:27:21

I mean, I think we kind of covered it in that I would just like us to be, embrace our distinctiveness instead of thinking that the way to win the culture is to look more like the culture.

01:27:30

I would like us to embrace the idea that in fact, what tends to draw people is seeing something that looks so alien and unlike the world that they know that they almost feel like,

01:27:42

I don't even know how to make sense of that. So that I think like I was in that moment,

01:27:47

I went, that is what I want to be a part of. Something that just looks like nothing else in my culture.

01:27:53

So that would be the big thing that I want to change is just this idea that the way to win the church, a seeker sensitive can't die fast enough for me.

01:28:02

I just, I don't believe that that's a real thing. I don't believe it ever should have been a thing and whatever winsomeness or whatever the name is for it now,

01:28:08

I absolutely, I want the church to recover its distinctiveness. Now, I've heard a little rumor that your family has a little bit of a historical house.

01:28:18

In Portsmouth, Virginia. Is that what you're referring to? I am. Yeah, that is correct.

01:28:23

Give a little bit of history there. It was really neat to hear that. Oh, well, so, which they're actually selling it.

01:28:30

But my parents are leaving Portsmouth and they're moving to Charlotte where my sister and I and my brother's nearby.

01:28:36

So we're all here. So they'll be close to us. So we're happy about that. But this home was built in 1880.

01:28:41

It's on the Elizabeth River. So it faces the river, which is really more like a great big bay is what it looks like.

01:28:47

And it was the site of the great bridge battle. And in 1774, a great

01:28:53

Patriot battle was won there. And so every 4th of July, we go and we watch the fireworks fired off in the bay from my parents' porch.

01:29:03

And it's just a wonderful site and wonderful memories. So even though we won't have the house, we'll still have the memories.

01:29:09

That's the important thing. So I'm going to ask a final question. I'm taking a page out of your book because a good interviewer learns from other better interviewers.

01:29:16

Your interview with Votie Bauckham, you closed with this question that I'll give to you. Tell us one thing that you want the readers to walk away with from your book.

01:29:27

The biggest thing I want them to walk away with is you are not nuts. This is happening. That disease you felt, it's real.

01:29:35

There was good reason for it. And now let's all together as the church go out and address it and let's get the train back on the tracks.

01:29:44

Amen. Folks, I encourage you again, go get Shepherds for Sale, Megan Basham.

01:29:50

It is an important book for our culture today. This is a must -read and a must -purchase.

01:29:58

Even if you're on board with everything that she is saying and everything that she, if you're even familiar with what she's written, you need to get it because I got news for every one of us.

01:30:09

We are going to need to defend against these things. So please go and get that today.

01:30:16

We encourage you to get multiple copies. Buy them by the case. Give them out to your church.

01:30:23

Just saying, be really helpful. Bunch of your people in your church that are clueless about this will thank you for it.

01:30:29

So go and do that today. And folks, with that, that is a wrap. We'll see you next week.

01:30:35

This podcast is part of the Striving for Eternity ministry. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, visit us at www .strivingforeternity