EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK: A Review of Shepherds For Sale
New book about evangelicalism is more propaganda than journalism.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Following is the introduction to a long-form review of Megan Basham’s Shepherds For Sale. The original, complete version was published at The Dispatch. To read it, click here.
OPINION–Today’s evangelical movement is a mess. Although they might disagree on much else, even most evangelicals can agree on that. The question is: Why?
Megan Basham, a writer for The Daily Wire, offers her answer in her new book Shepherds For Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded The Truth for a Leftist Agenda, the tone of which is summarized well right in the title.
Profiling evangelical leaders and institutions she claims have been co-opted or outright bought-off by funders and foundations on the left, Basham’s book asserts that such “evangelical elite” have betrayed Christian positions on issues such as abortion,
immigration, and sexuality in order to curry favor with a more mainstream cultural elite.
Basham is right that many “shepherds” are, in fact, “for sale.” But the unintended irony—and fundamental flaw—of her book is that the corrupting money is not on the evangelical left, as she claims, but on the populist right. The rise of such organizations as Turning Point USA (and its subsidiary Turning Point Faith), the Epoch Times, and The Daily Wire itself—organizations that combined bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue—bear witness to the financial benefits of pandering to populists. Turning Point USA, for example, now hosts pastors conferences that feature evangelical MAGA apologists like Eric Metaxas, Sean Feucht, and Rob McCoy. A recent event in San Diego attracted 1,200 pastors. Turning Point USA’s annual revenue now tops $80 million.
If Basham is right that the evangelical movement is sick, she has misdiagnosed the true cause of the illness: departing from the Gospel to pursue ideology and political activism. The movement has moved well beyond the responsibilities of Christian citizenship in pursuit of realpolitik.
I will admit, my interest in Shepherds for Sale is both personal and professional. As an investigative journalist and the editor of MinistryWatch, I have plenty of my own beefs with “Big Eva,” as some call the “Evangelical Industrial Complex.” These concerns have been outlined in hundreds of articles and two books: Faith-Based Fraud and A Lover’s Quarrel With The Evangelical Church (2009). I share many of the same concerns about the evangelical movement that Basham outlines—including a co-dependent relationship with the federal government by groups such as World Relief, a problem I wrote about for World magazine in 2009. I also share her concerns about climate change catastrophists, and have likewise written about that topic for The Stream and the Cornwall Institute, an organization Basham praises. And in the spirit of full disclosure, I know Megan Basham. I recommended her to World magazine, where she subsequently spent 10 years as a movie reviewer and culture editor.
But I also know most of the people she criticizes in this book. I’ve talked to all but a few of them, and in a few cases—Francis Collins and Kristin Du Mez, in particular—my interviews could be fairly confrontational. But Basham’s descriptions do not match the people I know.
In order to arrive as close to the truth as possible, one of an opinion journalist’s most basic duties is to understand and convey the perspectives of people with whom he or she disagrees. Basham fails to do this in her book—and that leads her to get a whole host of basic facts wrong. It’s worth asking: If we can’t trust her with the basic facts, why should we trust her with the interpretation of these facts?
