“How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda”

How evangelical leaders traded the truth for a leftist agenda. Megan Basham joins us today, right here on the Christian Real View Radio Program, where the mission is to sharpen the biblical worldview of Christians and to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ.

I'm David Wheaton, the host. The Christian Real View is a listener-supported radio ministry. Thank you for your notes of encouragement, financial support, and lifting us up in prayer.

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In the world you have tribulation, but take courage. I have overcome the world.'" In 1 John, the same word is used again. 1 John 5, verses 4 and 5, "'For whatever is born of God overcomes the world.'" And this is the victory that has overcome the world, our faith.

Who is He who overcomes the world, but He who believes that Jesus is the Son of God. Another instance of that word overcome being used in a prominent place in Scripture. You maybe notice that every single one of Christ's messages to the churches and revelations concludes the same way with this same word, to Him who overcomes.

So an overcomer is a true born-again Christian who prevails or has victory over the trials and tribulations of life that we all face with the supernatural resources that God provides. So it's saving faith, being born again. It's the Holy Spirit within the believer.

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Even if you can't come into the Twin Cities, you can go to our website to find out more, thechristianworldview.org slash golf, or just give us a call at our toll-free number 1-888-646-2233. All right, now to preview today's topic, how evangelical leaders traded the truth for a leftist agenda. That is the subtitle of our guest Megan Basham's new book, Shepherds for Sale. Jesus warned in the Sermon on the Mount, beware of the false prophets who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. False teachers don't wear red suits and carry pitchforks.

That would be too obvious. Far more effective for undermining the church, diverting believers, and hiding the gospel from unbelievers is for false teachers to hold respected positions at churches and Christian organizations, to be captivating speakers and writers. What's even more effective is when they gain popularity while appearing to hold orthodox positions, only to have those positions shift over time away from orthodoxy, thus leading those who follow them astray.

Now, false teachers are nothing new. The Old Testament recounts the false prophets who led Israel into compromise and sin. The New Testament describes the constant battles of Christ and the apostles as Paul urged Timothy to retain the standard of sound words, which you have heard from me in the faith and love which are in Christ Jesus.

Guard through the Holy Spirit who dwells in us the treasure which has been entrusted to you. From the very beginning, Satan relentlessly attacks the truth of God's word, and he uses men and women to do it. Men and women who likely would never consider themselves to be false teachers, but they are nonetheless. Christ said in Matthew 7 again, you will know them by their fruits, meaning how they misinterpret scripture and how their personal lives there's a practicing of sin. Our guest today in the program is Christian reporter Megan Basham. She is the author of a well-researched, well-documented, and illuminating new book titled Shepherds for Sale, How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda. She describes how those on the political left are insidiously working to draw evangelicals who are the last remaining bulwark standing in the way of their socialist Marxist vision for the world, how they are trying to pull them over to the Democrat side by giving large sums of money, and by reframing issues like climate change, race, immigration, the pro-life cause, and homosexuality in language that appeals to Christian, you know, love your neighbor. None other than John MacArthur has written this about Megan's book, Shepherds for Sale, quote, this may just be the single most important book on modern evangelicalism in recent years, unquote.

That's a pretty big statement. The question is, as evangelicals read this book, will they listen and make amends? Because the courage and biblical model to exercise discernment, to contend earnestly for the faith, to name the names of those leading Christians astray, has been sinfully lacking and shamed out of evangelicals to avoid being pegged as, quote, divisive and, quote, unkind. So we have this book in our online store, and we highly encourage you to get informed yourself and to get a copy to your own shepherd pastor as well. Let's get to the interview with Megan Basham. Megan, thank you for coming on the Christian worldview radio program today to talk about your brand new book, Shepherds for Sale. We just have been really encouraged and informed by this book, and we're going to tell listeners how they can get a copy today, but I want to start out at the end of your book.

We'll get into all of the different issues you address, and they're all really good, but at the end of the book, you give your own personal story in the conclusion. And one of the things you write about in the conclusion is the battle going on that Karl Marx and Charles Spurgeon actually lived at the same time in England, which is a very interesting dynamic. And you write this, you say, at the end of Friedrich Engels' life, and he was a co-author of Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto, that Marx's own daughter interviewed Engels, and when she asked him who he disliked most in the world, Engels answered with a single word, Spurgeon.

It's little to be wondered at, you write. Engels believed that a counterfeit form of Christianity could be used to advance the cause of socialism, as both ostensibly address the interests of what he called the laboring and the burdened. And then you say, a true shepherd like Spurgeon necessarily stood in the way of such efforts, reminding the world that mankind's greatest need, this was Spurgeon, was not a social project, not power over his oppressors, but forgiveness from his sins. True Christianity promotes not grievance, but gratitude. And you said there's little doubt that Marx and Engels knew this. So for Marx and Engels and the worldview they promote, Spurgeon, the great preacher of the Bible, stood in the way.

It was an opposing worldview. And so much of your book really deals with this that we're going to get into today, but talk first, just briefly, Megan, about your personal story, your personal salvation story, how Christ brought you out of your own sin, and where you could have gone in your life, to writing a book like this, where you say in that last chapter, there's an open war upon us Christians, and there has been for a number of years. You know, it's funny, I was just telling someone that Psalm 40, 12 is kind of my personal verse, just that the Lord picked me up out of a pit. When I was in college, I thought I was a Christian growing up, I grew up in a Christian home. And I'm one of those people who can't point to a particular day and time and say, this was the moment I was saved. I don't know, because I think that that's a common story for someone who grew up in a Christian home. But I'm pretty sure that I was not saved until I was in college, because I just had no sustaining interest in spiritual things. There was no fruit in my life to mark me as a follower of Christ, even though if you had asked me at that time, I would have said that I was. And then I got to college and I indulged in just the absolute most prodigal lifestyle.

I kind of have joked that the polite term is party girl, you know, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, all the things that are attendant with that. And it probably looked pretty fun from the outside. But inside, I was absolutely miserable.

At one point, you can imagine was not doing well in my classes, had had some fights with roommates, I was back staying with my parents, and I was an English lit major. And ironically, a very postmodern professor had assigned a paper on the quest for the Holy Grail. And for those who aren't familiar, the original version, which is known as the Vulgate Cycle, which predates the Thomas Mallory version by some centuries, actually includes a lot of material that you don't see in the version that everyone knows. And that includes a lot of religious hermits confronting Lancelot. And they confront him over his wastrel lifestyle and his sin with Guinevere, and there's nothing at all romantic about it. And they just tell him that, you know, the Lord blessed you with so many good gifts of intellect and good parentage, and all of this, you are squandering in sin. And when I read those passages, I was just tremendously convicted. And I saw myself, which is a miraculous thing about literature that I could see myself in a text from the 13th century.

But those rebukes felt like they were going directly at me. So at that point, I got down on my knees, I prayed, just Lord help me because I don't know how to live differently than I have been living. And then I went back to church. And even then, you know, I think any time you come out of a really sinful lifestyle, it can take a few months, a little time to sort of really leave that sin behind.

And I was struggling. And I was kind of falling into Christian therapeutics that were encouraging me to look at my past traumas and to look at some of the sins that had been committed against me that were causing me to desire to sin. And none of that, of course, was helping me change my behavior.

It felt more like it was just a way to excuse my behavior. And then a pastor at that church put John MacArthur's book, The Vanishing Conscience, in my hand. And that book was just an absolute light switch moment for me. John MacArthur writes about the power of Christ to simply turn from sin. And it doesn't matter why you're sinning, just stop sinning. And, you know, he did provide some verses and some strong doctrinal teaching on the means by which we can lay hold of the power of Christ to stop sinning. And I followed those, but it really was the turning point for me. And at that point, I met my husband at that church, got married, and have been walking with the Lord ever since.

Well, thank you for sharing that, Megan, because I just think that that's important and necessary context to what we're going to be talking about today. You know, how God brought you out of the world and into the church and into true salvation, and then to be able to discern this war taking place. And that's really the theme of your book, Shepherds for Sale, how evangelical leaders traded the truth for a leftist agenda. And it's how the left is targeting evangelicals on all of the following issues. And I'm going to list them in a second.

You have a chapter for each one. In order to weaken evangelical political resistance to the left's quest for political power, because that's what it's about for them. That's their heaven on earth to gain political power and make their utopia here. And the eight chapters that you write about, and you show this targeting, this undermining, is on climate change, illegal immigration, chapter three in the pro-life movement, chapter four in the leftist funding of Christian media, five during the COVID pandemic that the propaganda taking place during that, using Christians to get to take the vax and do all the things the government wanted us to do, chapter six on critical race theory, chapter seven on sexual abuse within evangelical institutions, and finally chapter eight on the LGBTQ movement.

And this book is an expose. And the question is, before we get into some of those specific issues, why are so few Christian pastors so willing to look the other way on what's taking place, or not speak out about it? All this compromising going on, and instead just quote unquote, kind of keep it positive? I mean, do they not discern the takeover that is taking place? In other words, why did it take you to write this book when Christian pastors are really tasked with being shepherds and keeping the wolves away from the sheep? You know, that's a really good question.

I can only speculate on what I have seen based on a lot of the research that I did for this book. Part of it, as I talk about, is deliberately orchestrated that there have been secular left-wing foundations funded by some major billionaires whose names you probably know, names like George Soros, and then some other billionaires whose names you might not know, like Pierre Omidyar, who was the Buddhist founder of eBay. And so that's part of it, is that it's been incentivized. And evangelical front groups have been created, and you may be named to the board or to the leadership of these organizations. It gives you access to a new class of elite individuals.

Suddenly you're now on the world stage. You're not just in our little evangelical subculture. So I think that's one. I also think that, as I talk about, that there is something of an 11th commandment at work that for a long time it's been assumed that being loving means overlooking these things. Being kind means overlooking these things, even though it's not the model that we see in scripture.

When Peter had begun to compromise on very significant legalistic grounds when it came to the Judaizers bringing in Jewish law into grace as a means of our salvation, Paul tells us that he opposed him to his face. So we know that that is the model. When it gets serious, we may have to confront brothers, but I think we had just gotten into this period where it was assumed that to do that is to be combative and culture warring. You know, the third thing is I think there's been a lot of friendship network working in the sense of a lot of these organizations will do something like create a general statement of principles. And it would be something that you or I would read and go, I agree with that. I believe, for example, that we should take care of the earth, that we are tasked with being responsible stewards to ensure that our children have beautiful forests and beautiful landscapes to enjoy and fruitfulness from the earth in what our crops supply and all of those things. And you read that and you go, I agree with that.

And so you might sign your name to it because your friend asks you to, and you don't know that that statement of principles is being used in your name to then turn around and say, well, these evangelical leaders are demanding a specific policy that is very different from the general statement of principle policies like cap and trade carbon emission limits that would give the government amazing intrusive power into your life and raise the cost of your gas and your groceries. So I think those are probably the three factors that are most primarily at work. And then of course, scripture tells us that we have to take care lest we drift away. So there's really nothing more common to man than wanting to flow away on the cultural tides. Yeah, you mentioned that early in the book, I think, something to the effect that this is nothing new where you have leaders compromising. You look back in the time of the Old Testament, I think Jeremiah was constantly calling out the prophets of the day who are compromising and leading the people astray. So this is nothing new, but each generation is called to be discerning and to call this out and to return to the truth. I think that's what you do very well in this book. Megan Basham is our guest today here on the Christian Real View. The book is Shepherds for Sale, subtitle, How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda. And you can order the book right now in our store for 20% off. Just go to thechristianrealview.org or call us toll free or write to us. Our contact information will be given during this break. Also keep in mind that we have our late summer sale going on where there's a minimum of 20% off, even more on all of our products. So a good time to shop on thechristianrealview.org.

We have much more with Megan Basham coming up, so stay tuned. I'm David Wheaton, and you are listening to the Christian Real View Radio Program. Theo is a 15-episode animated cartoon series that features high-quality production and sound biblical teaching. Here's an excerpt from the episode on salvation. Salvation is based on what Jesus Christ accomplished on the cross, not something that can be earned. How can we be saved?

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I'm David Wheaton. Be sure to visit our website, thechristianrealview.org, where you can subscribe to our free weekly email and annual print letter. Order resources for adults and children and support the ministry. Our topic today is how evangelical leaders traded the truth for a leftist agenda. That is the subtitle of Daily Wire reporter Megan Basham's new book, Shepherds for Sale.

She's our guest today. Megan, you quote Josh Abbottoy, executive director of the Protestant politics and cultural journal American Reformer. He says evangelicals need to learn to be more careful readers of their leaders' actions and rhetoric, and much more thoughtful about who they elevate. There are discernible patterns that should be studied and addressed so they can be solved. We aren't judging the state of a church's leader's soul, but rather his fitness for leadership. So Megan, tell us about the pattern that takes place here.

I mentioned those eight different issues. The left targets an issue. They may form an organization or they'll make a direct appeal to a Christian leader, a well-known respected Christian leader, or an organization like Christianity Today or CREW or a college or a seminary. Through funding, they may try to gain influence. Through promising elite approval or company, if you kind of join with us on this issue, then they reframe the issue using Christian sounding language, and then they disparage the opposition as well.

So explain the pattern or the process for how this undermining takes place. It's a little different depending on the issue, but we could start with something like immigration. And you have a left-wing foundation that realizes it has a problem advancing its political goals because of evangelicals. So they will recognize that the evangelical vote has become something of a firewall and they're not able to get whatever piece of legislation across the finish line because of that evangelical vote. And so they will think, okay, what we need to do is find some mechanism by which we can change evangelical minds or failing that, what we need to do is convince conservative lawmakers that we have changed evangelical minds.

Because for those who may not be aware, and I would suspect that most of your audience is, evangelicals are roughly 30% of the electorate. They are America's most powerful voting block. So there's always a very vested interest in trying to move that vote. So what the left-wing foundations will then do is create a sort of front group. So I will give you the example of the evangelical immigration table. That is under the umbrella of a secular left-wing non-governmental organization, an NGO, named the National Immigration Forum.

So it comes under their work. And that National Immigration Forum receives massive funding from many, many left-wing foundations and wealthy people like George Soros, like the Tides Foundation, like the Hewlett Foundation, second largest funder of Planned Parenthood, by the way. And what they will do is they will start this evangelical immigration table. They will then recruit well-known organizations like the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents some 45,000 churches throughout the country. They will recruit the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, which represents 185 member schools, including very well-known and well-respected schools like Biola and Assouza Pacific, and denominational organizations like the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. And of course, Southern Baptists are the largest Protestant denomination, and that's their political lobbying arm.

So they recruit these institutionally respected organizations to partner with them in this particular political front group. And at that point, they will, one, work to influence churches by creating that general statement of principles that I just mentioned. People will sign that really well-known evangelical influencers, well-known pastors, authors, ministry leaders will sign that general statement of principle. And the new front organization will then circulate that statement of principles to say, evangelicals want you to back you, Mr. Conservative lawmaker, this particular piece of not conservative legislation to say, do things like give 11 million illegal aliens legal status based on the very low fine of up to $1,000. Well, and then of course, you see the backlash when evangelicals and conservatives generally go, wait a minute, we don't like this policy.

We don't want this. And I think you just saw this pattern play out a little bit a few months ago with Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma, who tried to get a border bill across the finish line. And this exact pattern played out. The evangelical immigration table, the ERLC, all the associated organizations said, evangelicals love this. They released a poll saying, look, evangelicals back this kind of policy. And then James Lankford found out, oh gosh, no, they don't.

They got very angry. And it really cost him, I think, a lot politically when that bill failed. But that's the pattern that you see. And sometimes it's more successful. So again and again, it's what you call astroturf.

So they're creating the appearance of a grassroots movement, but really what it is, it's entirely engineered. Megan Basham with us today here on the Christian worldview, talking about her excellent new book, Shepherds for Sale. Just highly recommended you read this. You will be very informed about what's going on within the evangelical movement with leaders and institutions today. One thing I really appreciate about the book, Megan, is your naming of names, not in a vindictive, spiteful, hateful way at all, but just let's be clear who we're talking about. That's very helpful for people to know names so they can recognize, oh, that person's for this. And you mentioned very well-known names who are professing evangelicals. Russell Moore, the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, and Beth Moore, the vaunted Bible teacher, Danny Aiken of Southeastern Seminary, and J.D. Greer, the pastor in Summit Church, and Andy Stanley down in Atlanta, Karen Swallow Prior, David French, quote-unquote Christian, writes for the New York Times, Tim Keller, Ed Stetzer, Francis Collins of the NIH, Rick Warren, Matt Chandler, organizations like Christianity Today, CREW, Gospel Coalition, the National Association of Evangelicals. So I really appreciate it about the book, because then you're not left kind of wondering, well, who's that she is talking about here?

Let's know. Let's get it on the table. Yeah, no, I mean, and that's the journalistic practice. And I not only tell you who, I show, OK, here's how they're involved. Here's what they said. Here's the actions they've taken. Because we talked about why did this pattern play out? And I also think part of it has been, you know, maybe there has been criticism, but no one was willing to be specific about, well, who's doing this? Who are the players involved?

How does this game work? And so I think that also allowed it to flourish. And I would also say that, again, it's not biblical. When Paul had some issues with specific people, he mentioned the specific people. He says, I opposed Peter to his face.

He said that Alexander the coppersmith is causing problems. You know, he was just very clear on what was going on. And I think that's an important model for us to look at. So what's more troubling to you? The fact that these professing Christian leaders are either deceived or intentionally buying into this leftist undermining and don't have the discernment to see it or don't want to see it or have the wrong motives, or that regular evangelicals are buying into what they're saying? I don't know that regular evangelicals are buying into what they're saying as much as they would hope now. So I think probably the fact that they're doing it is more troubling to me.

I mean, I do think for a long time it flew under the radar. But you did see rank and file evangelicals have been more and more pushing back. And I think that reached what you might think of as hyperdrive there during the pandemic, because I think in a strange way, COVID has come to be a blessing for the church in that it revealed to us in very sharp relief what the problems were and the things that we sensed before and that we felt some disquiet about before suddenly became very loud and clanging alarms because it could no longer be denied. When you saw so many of these organizations basically taking up the government's faulty and false COVID narratives and insisting that all Christians needed to align with that in order to be faithful to the gospel, I think we realized then just how serious the problem had become. And at that point, you saw so many just average ordinary evangelicals, understandably, starting to push back against their leaders in a way that I don't know that they would have before. So that gives me a lot of encouragement. Megan Basham again with us today here on the Christian Real View.

There's the expression follow the money. And you have a whole chapter on the leftist funding of Christian media. And by that, we're talking Christianity Today, other places like that. You give the example in the book—I won't take the time to read it now—but the Lilly Endowment Fund, which is just a huge endowment fund, has given millions of dollars—and this is a very left-wing group—has given millions of dollars to Christianity Today, the foremost Christian publication, at least according to what they say. You state that from the people that were donating to political campaigns from Christianity Today, every single donation went to Democrats. Right, which is pretty astonishing, isn't it?

Very much. Then you also get into, a little later in the same chapter, about how the funding's going toward creating what's called the after-party Bible study. You know, so it gets out and they have left this funding of these Christian organizations here to do these Bible studies in your home. It's all meant to change evangelicals' minds about these particular issues you cover in the book, again, so to gain political power for the left. Talk about the funding element of this and just what came across as most shocking to you.

Well, because you just brought it up, let's go to the after-party because it's so illustrative of what's been happening. It is this political curriculum that is supposed to teach Christians how to confront political polarization within the church. And it was created by David French of the New York Times, who is a very well-known evangelical critic and never-Trumper, and Russell Moore, the editor in chief of Christianity Today, which as you just said, has now turned into a largely democratic staff, and a Duke Divinity professor, Curtis Chang, himself a Democrat, who asked Christians not to oppose Governor Gavin Newsom's recall campaign. If you remember that, that there was a chance to pull Governor Gavin Newsom, the most pro-abortion governor in the country, out of office, and he was urging Christians not to do that. So I think we can say, at the very least, it does not have a spectrum of Christian political views. It is quite clearly on the political left within the range of Christian orthodoxy.

I mean, all of those guys would say, oh, I'm pro-life, but they have a lot of progressive views. So what happened with that is, understandably, no Christians wanted to fund this curriculum, and they didn't want to help get it into churches. And so Chang, French, and Moore turned to left-wing secular foundations to do it. Specifically, they turned to the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, which funds things like the Collaborative for Gender Justice, which is something that argues for transgender treatments on children.

It works to ensure that you can provide puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and transgender surgeries to children. And it took money from the Hewlett Foundation, again, the second largest funder of Planned Parenthood in the country. So you have to ask yourself, well, why are groups like that so interested in funding this political Bible study? And they actually told you, they said in their announcement about this funding round, that it would be unrolling in the battleground of Ohio.

So they told you, we're very interested in this, that it is rolling out in the battleground of Ohio. And I watched through all the curriculum myself. And most of it is very light, very empty rhetoric, not much of substance. But at the end, the upshot of the curriculum is that politics are extremely complex, and it's not clear how Christians should vote. And if anyone tells you how you should vote on issues like abortion, that you should run from that person. Except there is one issue, which they devoted an entire episode to, that they feel that Christians must vote on. And that was the issue of supposed racial injustice. So, you know, it's subtle, but it was very clear what the purpose of this curriculum was. That's right.

Compromise is always subtle, isn't it? And that's why we recommend you get a copy of Megan Basham's book, Shepherds for Sale, How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda. We have it available right now through the Christian Real View for 20% off. Just get in contact with us the usual ways on our website by calling or by writing to us all of that information. It will be given during this upcoming break. Again, a reminder, everything on our site, our store right now is 20% or more off in our late summer sale. So be sure to take advantage of that. Stay tuned.

We have much more coming up with Megan Basham. I'm David Wheaton, and you are listening to the Christian Real View radio program. This kind of worldview about identity has exploded where people come along and say, if it's all about you, you need to actually work out who you are. It's actually immunizing a generation against the gospel because the gospel comes into the picture and says, well, who are you? You're actually a sinner.

It's a negative answer to the question. You need a savior. Look, the cross of Jesus Christ. Who did he die for? If you're so good, if you're so worthy, if you have to pursue yourself as a good foundation for how to live. That was recent guest Martin Iles, executive CEO of Answers in Genesis and author of Who Am I?

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Again, the date is Monday, September 16th at Hazeltine in Chaska, Minnesota. To find out more and to register, go to thechristianrealview.org or call 1-888-646-2233. Welcome back to the Christian Real View, I'm David Wheaton. Be sure to visit our website, thechristianrealview.org, where you can subscribe to our free weekly email and annual print letter, order resources for adults and children, and support the ministry. Our topic today is how evangelical leaders traded the truth for a leftist agenda. That is the subtitle of Daily Wire reporter Megan Basham's new book, Shepherds for Sale.

She's our guest today. Megan, you write, While Keller, Tim Keller, argued that the Bible does not tell Christians how to oppose abortion, there was one way he clearly felt was wrong by voting for Donald Trump. I think Keller had written an article or a column in the New York Times basically saying that really Christians can vote either way. As a Christian, a Bible-believing Christian, you're not compelled just to vote for a Republican because of the Democrats' pro-abortion stance they have. Being a Christian Trump supporter, Keller told the Atlantic, a very elitist leftist publication, he said that voting for Trump meant that you were focusing as a Christian on power, and that you were saying, how are we going to use power to live life the way we want? In other words, there was a kind of a shaming of those Christians who would vote for Donald Trump. And so much of this in your book, Megan, is really about politics, because for the left, everything is politics.

That's their objective in this. For Christians, it's not. It's not about political power.

It's about preaching the gospel and the kingdom of God, and that's what we're about. You write on the next page that there are only a handful of staffers at Keller's church network and preacher training ministry that have donated to political campaigns since 2015, but those who did donated frequently, and according to Federal Election Commission records, they give exclusively to Democrats. So you have someone who's well known like Tim Keller saying, well, you know, to be a Christian, a faithful Christian, you can really vote either way. Even the policy differences are huge on issues the Bible is clear about, but you're kind of a bad person if you vote for Trump.

You're just seeking power. But oh, by the way, all the people kind of within my staff, we all vote for Democrats. I guess why isn't that duplicitousness maybe better known? Or how would you explain that? One of the things that made me laugh a little bit about the immediate outrage I've received about critiquing Keller in this way, and it wasn't like I was saying Keller is not saved, and we could go back to that great Josh Avatoi quote at the beginning that it was a question of how he was using his pastoral voice on the national stage. And you look at those political donations because some people dismissed, well, they lived in a blue state, they lived in a blue city.

That's true, but we're also talking about on the national level, and it's rather surprising to see all of those staffers that nobody ever donated to a Republican. So I think we can ask why in that case, Tim Keller wasn't more outspoken on the excesses of the political left, given that those were the people that were by and large directly under his authority. When I look at Keller, it's impossible to not notice how reticent he was to speak very clearly on culturally unpopular topics like homosexuality, especially in later years. There's sort of this famous interview that has circulated of him with a British journalist where he just very clearly doesn't want to name homosexuality a sin, and so he dances around it. Now, I believe that Tim Keller thought homosexuality was a sin. When he was speaking within just Christian circles, he would be clear about that. But it was when he was speaking to the world that he was less clear.

And I think that that is a model we cannot have as the church anymore. We need to recover our distinctiveness, and we need to recover our clarity because we live in a world that is very much looking for answers right now. And I have been somewhat cheered to see people looking at the excesses of the LGBTQ movement and actually recoiling and starting to realize, oh, things like Obergefell have led to this surrogacy trade in naturally unfertile, same-sex couples buying babies.

So all of that, I just look at Keller and I go, he was not above criticism, not even above a lot of criticism. And when he said things like, that's grasping for power, it was so strange because of course, politics is about leveraging power by nature. It is about using the power of your vote to see the policies that you prefer enacted.

So very strange to indict someone for that. All of us should be using our power that we have as citizens in ways that uphold the moral good and God's moral law in our culture. You make a great point in the book that there's a perception out there made by the media that, oh, evangelicals just wed their allegiance to Donald Trump because they want to have this power and so forth. But you make the point that evangelicals are no more wedded to Trump than they were to other Republican presidents in the past. They vote for him in basically kind of the same number.

So that's actually a false statement. But there are a lot of Christians who are just vexed. And again, this isn't meant to be, oh, you should vote for Donald Trump.

I'm just asking the question here. There's lots of Christians who are vexed about voting for Donald Trump, whether it's to do with his personality, his braggadocio, his history of marriages. And now, more recently, the fact that he sort of affirms the LGBTQ movement, at least the homosexual aspect of it. And certainly on the abortion issue now, he's come out clearly that he's in favor of women being able to get abortions, I think, up to like 15 weeks into their pregnancies. So what would you say to a Christian who's conflicted about voting for Trump?

I very much understand those feelings. I can't tell you how grieved I am to see the GOP remove the clear pro-life plank out of the platform. Same goes for the clear language on marriage. It's a little devastating, to be honest, as somebody who has been a political conservative all my adult life. But I also understand that politics is by nature a transactional business and that we have been here before as Christians in America trying to get recognition from our political parties. There was a time before Ronald Reagan when the GOP did not want to recognize its pro-life face. It wished that the social conservatives would go away.

And I think we're there again. I think there was a moment when we were all very celebratory for the overturning of Roe v. Wade and we should be celebratory, but I think we weren't quite ready for it. And I don't think we were quite ready to culturally respond. And not just that, some of the cultural responses that we had had leading into that suggested that we ourselves were a little apologetic for our pro-life stance in things like throwing everything that you could think of into the pro-life basket. You saw a very large evangelical institutional voice suddenly saying that pro-life also meant racial justice, pro-life also meant immigration reform and all of these other things. And so we ourselves sort of neutered the power of the pro-life movement. And it's not entirely surprising now that we're here. So what we're going to have to do is learn to fight for that political recognition again, just as Christians had to do in the late 70s, early 80s.

We saw it before. And as I said, I understand those who don't want to vote for Donald Trump. What I cannot understand is those who would vote for the most pro-abortion and the most pro-proversion political party that this nation has ever known.

And whatever your objections, and I can certainly understand them, to Donald Trump personally, it does not make sense to me to say, because I object to that, I am going to go vote for something that's even more wicked. Final question for you, Meghan. How has uncovering what's going on behind the scenes within evangelical leaders and institutions changed you personally and your perception of the evangelical church? And then what do you want the regular church-going Christian listening today after they read your book or hearing this interview, what do you want them to do about this? The main thing I want them to do is to stop giving their time and attention, first of all, to those who are proven wolves, but second of all, start talking to your pastors when you have concerns, your ministry leaders. I think a big part of the problem, as I said, was just this cone of silence where we all agreed to not acknowledge what was going on, and that grew into a very big problem.

As for how it's affected me personally, one, I think it's made me a lot more reliant on the Lord. I have been surprised at the vehemence of the pushback, and I would say, frankly, the deceitfulness of some of the pushback. I've seen things in the last few days where people will claim that I wrote something in this book that I did not write, and then they will refute that and pretend that I was much more strident or much more extreme than I was. It's shocking to see organizations that I knew and respected doing that because they came in for critique.

That's one. Do you think you're infallible? Do you think you're above any sort of critique that this has been the reaction? That's been a little disenchanting, but at the same time, it's really taught me to rely on the Lord and just lean on him because I can tell you that every step of the way through this book, it has just been providence. An editor came to me initially and said, I think some of this reporting you've been doing should be a book. From there, we just saw tremendous opposition from some of these evangelical institutions, including legal threats and back channel letters urging them to drop this book and all kinds of things that I could go on and on about. But through all of it, God has just been incredibly faithful to me to get me to the finish line. This will be one of those little monuments that I will build and remind myself in future years, look how faithful the Lord was to get me here. I'm glad that's your reaction because as I've been reading the book, you're just taking on some of the most well-known names and institutions out there. These folks won't take this probably sitting down. I can imagine the type of pushback, but I thank the Lord for the courage he gave you and the work ethic he gave you to dig into all the details.

You're a reporter. I mean, this is not just kind of your opinions here. These are all reference and facts and so forth, and I just encourage readers to get this book. This is an important book, Megan, and I just want to thank you for writing it. Thank you for coming on The Christian Real View today and all of God's best and grace to you. Thank you so much, David.

I appreciate you having me. All right, again, really important to get this book, Shepherds for Sale. You'll get familiar with the names and the organizations inside and outside evangelicalism who are engaged in the undermining of the church. You'll also see how they frame the issues so you'll instantly recognize it when they try to do their undermining. As we've been saying, we have it for 20% off in our store at thechristianrealview.org, along with 20% and more for all of our resources this month during our end of summer sale.

You can also call or write to order the book, and our information is given immediately following the program. Let's remember to pray for Megan Basham. She has gone behind the curtain here and is exposing some of the most well-known names and organizations in the evangelical sphere. It will be interesting to see how they respond, whether it will be silence until the news cycle changes, misrepresent what she says, who knows?

But I can imagine they're talking behind the scenes in their network. Those who are deceiving don't like to be exposed. The Apostle Paul, in his final letter to Timothy, warns him and names false teachers in all four chapters of that letter.

Read it sometime and just notice that. I just wish more pastors and Sunday services would do the same, directly modeled in Scripture. Shepherds warn and protect the sheep from the wolves. You know, true believers aren't easily deceived, and that's why understanding the Gospel and trusting in Christ as Savior and Lord is of foremost importance. If you have never been born again, as Jesus stated in John chapter 3, give us a call or visit our website, thechristianrealview.org, and click on the page, What Must I Do to Be Saved?

And finally today, as we mentioned earlier, consider coming to participate in the Overcomer Foundation Cup on Monday, September 16th here in Chaska, Minnesota at Hazeltine National Golf Club, or just supporting the event as a non-golfer. You can find out how you can do that at thechristianrealview.org slash golf. Thank you for joining us today on The Christian Real View and for supporting this non-profit radio ministry. Until next time, think biblically, live accordingly, and stand firm. The mission of The Christian Real View is to sharpen the biblical worldview of Christians and to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. We hope today's broadcast encouraged you toward that end. To hear a replay of today's program, order a transcript, or find out What Must I Do to Be Saved?, go to thechristianrealview.org or call toll-free 1-888-646-2233. The Christian Real View is a listener-supported non-profit radio ministry furnished by the Overcomer Foundation. To make a donation, become a Christian Real View partner, order resources, subscribe to our free newsletter, or contact us, visit thechristianrealview.org, call 1-888-646-2233, or write to Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota 55331. That's Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota 55331. Thanks for listening to The Christian Real View.