For months I’ve been eager to read Megan Basham’s Shepherds for Sale – How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda. I’ve oft wished that it had been released before this summer of politics and of church conventions and assemblies. So when the local Barnes and Nobles let it slip onto their shelves before this week’s release date in what Basham has called a “small snafu,” I snapped up a copy. I’d rather call it a felix culpa!
Having become familiar with her online work, I expected a well researched, no nonsense work. Megan Basham keeps receipts and knows how to use them! And the book is indeed that, reflected by the footnotes and index taking up 72 pages.
What I did not expect is that Shepherds for Sale would be so well written. I knew Basham is an excellent communicator, but such skills do not always translate well to a book format. I expected a needed, well documented book; I did not expect one which would not only be easy to read but even hard to put down at times.
This is quite the accomplishment given the difficult and complex subject of evangelical leaders being too eager to heed and please the woke globalist culture of powerful elites, too sloppy in applying the Bible to today’s political and social issues, and too willing to take money from Leftist entities such as Soros. The predictable result is somewhat orthodox leaders and churches pushing toxic ideologies and politics.
Basham organizes the chapters of Shepherds for Sale mainly into how evangelical leaders have done so in the areas of climate change, illegal immigration, watering down and diverting what “pro-life” means, COVID propaganda and suppression, Critical Race Theory, #MeToo and #ChurchToo, and drift on LGBTQ issues. In addition, a chapter focuses on how Christianity Today and the Trinity Forum have departed from their original missions to become influencers for the Left with the help of money from the Rockefellers, E-bay founder Pierre Omidyar, the Lilly Endowment and more.
Yes, not pleasant topics to say the least. Yet Basham’s writing on these is assessable and engaging. And she makes Shepherds for Sale personal and relevant by telling real life stories, including narratives of how families have been affected by evangelical drift.
She begins her book with the Anderson family. Moving from California back to Georgia and to their seeker sensitive megachurch in “the Bible Belt,” they thought they had left behind churches in which Leftist politics were pushed. They found the hard way that was not so, particularly after James Anderson was asked to join a “racial reconciliation” study, “Be the Bridge,” in which white participants were not allowed to speak for the first six months. They stuck it out for a while, but then moved to a PCA (Presbyterian Church in America, an orthodox denomination) church, only to find Critical Race Theory pushed from that pulpit and a service turned into something akin to a “struggle session.” The Andersons found out through difficult experience that “this is a bigger problem . . . not just California craziness.”
Basham tells such stories well, letting readers know that more than politics are at stake but also the spiritual health of churches and people. And she relieves the unpleasantness of her subject with positive stories, such as a mother being led out of COVID lockdown darkness and drug addiction with the lifesaving help of a Bible Church that refused to stay closed. In the hopeful and rousing concluding chapter, Basham tells her own difficult story of how God delivered her.
It is a moment of courage from Megan Basham. But then the whole book is an exercise in courage. More than one of the bad actors she exposes has influence and a reputation for using it vindictively. And in the months leading up to the release of Shepherds for Sale, the publisher was pressured to kill the book, including with cease and desist letters.
Yes, there are people who most definitely do not want you reading Shepherds for Sale . . . which makes it that much more of a must read for those who want to understand how and why many evangelical church leaders are sounding too much like globalist and woke leaders.
A note for my fellow Anglicans: Basham, by her own admission, emphasizes activities in the Southern Baptist Convention and “Big Eva” institutions because that is what she is most familiar with. However, much — should I say too much? — of Shepherds for Sale might be familiar anyway. We in the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) had bishops who have pushed Jemar Tisby’s books and other Critical Race Theory propaganda. We had Russell Moore as a keynote speaker at a Provincial Assembly. We had churches who were closed for months because they were too obedient for too long to COVID dictates. We had clerics who support Revoice and had controversy over “Side B”. And we can one-up #ChurchToo; we have #ACNAtoo! Now we in ACNA have dealt with this and more well overall, but we have been harmed and have lost good faithful people. We need to be careful to do better in the future.
So if you come across a book that manages to analyze all this mess well, buy it. But in 2024, I’ve seen no one that documents this drift in too many evangelical and orthodox churches better than Megan Basham. Again, her Shepherds for Sale is a must read, including for us in ACNA.
Image: courtesy of Truthscript, which also has a book review up.
