Which Shepherds Are For Sale?

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?

None of the people I spoke with who were mentioned in the book (nearly a dozen for this article) had been contacted either by Basham or by fact checkers from HarperCollins or its imprint Broadside Books, the book’s publisher. Such fact checking is a common practice to avoid legal liability, but it’s particularly puzzling considering several of the people Basham criticizes have themselves published books with HarperCollins or its subsidiaries. I made multiple interview requests to both Basham and HarperCollins for this piece, but I received no response. Now, Basham and her publisher are discovering that the fact-checking work is being done for them online by Ben Marsh, Gavin Ortlund (who posted a video highlighting errors in a section devoted to him), Samuel James (in an excellent review), and others.

Below are a few more examples I’ve found in my own reporting of Basham misleadingly shaping her reporting to support Shepherds for Sale’s true narrative: that Christians who don’t support Donald Trump have lost their way.

Christianity Today and Russell Moore

The evangelical magazine Christianity Today (CT) and its editors are among the most central villains of Basham’s narrative. People associated with CT are mentioned no fewer than 50 times—virtually always in a negative light. Two examples are illustrative. 

In October 2023, Basham did reporting for The Daily Wire that she highlighted again in Shepherds for Sale. From the book:

Five different editors at Christianity Today contributed to Democrats (and only Democrats) between 2015 and 2022, including news editor Daniel Silliman. He gave to five different pro-abortion candidates, among them, Elizabeth Warren, who is so committed to the cause of death that she has pushed to shut down all crisis pregnancy centers across the country.

This is a troubling accusation, and one that could lead readers to have understandable concerns about whether Christianity Today has a hidden bias. When Basham published her findings in The Daily Wire, I publicly commended her for uncovering the details. 

CT President Tim Dalrymple—one of the people singled out by Basham for donating to Democratic candidates—agreed with that assessment in an interview with me at the time. “We should have a clause prohibiting political donations from our journalists,” he said. “We agree. Full stop.” Christianity Today confirmed to me that it has since implemented policies to prohibit such contributions.

But when Basham published her findings about CT, I did a similar public records search and discovered that during that same period, Daily Wire employees made 46 political contributions, with 22 of those contributions going to Democrats. In fairness, most of these contributions were small, and most were made by staffers not on the editorial team. (That is also true of the Christianity Today employee contributions.) But according to the Society of Professional Journalists “almost no political activity is OK.”

This additional context—CT’s commitment to change its policy and the data about Daily Wire staffers’ own contributions—is conspicuously absent from Shepherds for Sale, but not for a lack of awareness on Basham’s part. How do I know? Because after I published this information at MinistryWatch, she blocked me on Twitter. Details that didn’t fit her preconceived narrative about Christianity Today were intentionally omitted.

Nowhere was this more obvious than in her criticism of Russell Moore (now CT’s editor-in-chief), whom she accused of being missing in action following the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. The obvious implication, in Basham’s view, is that Moore had gone soft on the issue.

“For weeks after the most important legal decision pro-life Christians would see in their lifetimes, he published no essays, recorded no episode for his podcast, posted nothing on social media,” Basham writes.

Moore has been one of the nation’s most vigorous pro-life advocates for decades. During his tenure as president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), he led the Evangelicals For Life group. By the time of the Dobbs decision, he had become the director of the Public Theology Project at Christianity Today.

So why was he silent in those fateful weeks during the summer of 2022? Was he secretly disappointed by the court’s decision? Downplaying his beliefs for his new audience? No, he was traveling in Europe and intentionally off the grid with his family, in part to unplug from American politics and social media. His first newsletter for CT upon returning addressed the Dobbs decision and what would come next for pro-lifers. He also addressed the life issue, affirming its centrality to a biblical worldview here and here.

The Trinity Forum

One anecdote early in the book involves the Trinity Forum, a sort of Christian think tank founded by theologian and writer Os Guinness and now led by Cherie Harder. 

Basham describes the preparations for a 2008 debate Trinity Forum Europe wanted to host with atheist Christopher Hitchens, but according to Harder, her retelling is wrong in almost every particular. Basham writes that the Trinity Forum rejected a recommendation made by apologist Larry Taunton—who has since become an avid supporter of Donald Trump—for who should serve as an interlocutor for Hitchens, because Taunton’s recommendation was “‘too evangelical’—which for the new Trinity meant ‘unsophisticated.’”

Not so, says Harder. The organization’s original choice, apologist John Lennox, “was also a Trinity Forum Senior Fellow—so there was no need to solicit Taunton’s help in securing Lennox as a speaker.” Did Basham reach out to Harder to double-check her reporting? “I’ve never met or talked with Megan Basham,” Harder told me. “She did not interview me or attempt to do so before writing about me and Trinity Forum.”

But beyond basic factual problems—which Basham uses to imply the Trinity Forum really wanted the praise of certain “social elites” instead of conducting a serious debate with Hitchens—Shepherds for Sale suggests that under Harder’s leadership, the organization departed from the original vision of Os Guinness:

Since he stepped down [from The Trinity Forum], Guinness, for his part, has carved out a very different position from that of Trinity Forum. During a recent podcast interview, he said that Christians who buy the line, oft peddled by Christianity Today and current Trinity Forum fellows, that to be faithful believers means “keeping their heads down” as the early Christians did under Rome are “dead wrong.” 

“The early church were faithful, yes,” he said, “but they were under an imperial dictatorship. … [We] are in a Republic, where every citizen is responsible for the health and vitality of the Republic.” Guinness added that not to contend for God’s laws in the political sphere would be a “failure of citizenship.”

Here’s the problem: In an interview for this review, Guinness told me the precise words Basham quoted from him are indeed accurate, but taken out of context; he was not referring to either Christianity Today or the Trinity Forum. “That’s absolutely wrong,” he told me. “I was talking about evangelicals who were not voting. I was not talking about the Trinity Forum.” 

Marvin Olasky and World Magazine

Another recurring villain in Shepherds For Sale is Marvin Olasky, the former editor-in-chief of World magazine. At one point, Basham references a 2019 editorial meeting involving her former boss, whom she describes as someone who “had always discussed abortion as our nation’s greatest moral evil. He’d always been clear that he felt it was among the most important factors (if not the most important) when weighing one’s choice in political representatives.”

Yet, there he was, in late 2019, telling his team of reporters that there might be more important ways for voters to promote pro-life policies than simply electing politicians who promised to restrict or end abortion. One might decide that the best way to vote for life would be to select a candidate whose official platform was pro-abortion but who supported subsidizing day care or paid family leave, making children more appealing. 

This was a man who’d previously championed [Thomas] Sowell and advocated for personal responsibility and free markets. In more ways than one, I could not believe what I was hearing. Olasky finished this soliloquy with a little snicker about the lack of political sophistication in theologian R. C. Sproul’s famous pronouncement that he would “never vote for a candidate for any office, including dogcatcher, who is pro-abortion.” 

Apparently, at some point after the election of Trump, Olasky had decided this sentiment was worthy of light mockery.

I’ve known Olasky for 30 years and—while a reporter for World—I participated in at least 100 bi-weekly editorial calls and several leadership and editorial staff retreats. Basham’s account immediately jumped out to me as grossly misrepresenting Olasky’s position on the life issue, his approach to journalism, and his approach to editorial meetings, which, in addition to being off-the-record (a fact Basham ignored), he often viewed as teaching opportunities. Olasky would regularly articulate hypothetical or even contrary positions in these meetings, encouraging reporters to look at all sides of an issue while working on their stories. 

It’s worth noting that none of Olasky’s words in this section are in quotation marks, meaning this story is, at best, a paraphrase from Basham’s memory. If she had quoted what he actually said, in context, her argument would likely evaporate.

Unlike Basham and HarperCollins, I did reach out to Olasky and asked him if this account was accurate. He said: 

For 40 years I’ve been saying and writing that politics is important, but culture is more important. I’ve never thought that “simply electing politicians” is enough. Compassionate pregnancy resource centers are important: my wife started one in 1984 and I chaired it for a while. Adoption is important. Showing ultrasound images is important. Megan is inaccurate if she’s saying I wanted to turn away from a prolife position.

Trying to think the best of her, maybe she’s recalling a discussion of whether a Christian could ever vote for a Democrat. (One of our board members told me a Christian could never do that). If the discussion occurred at the editorial retreat, we were probably discussing our news coverage of the 2020 election, which meant taking seriously the views of evangelicals on both sides of the political divide.

Olasky added: “I had (and have) great respect for R. C. Sproul and have no recollection of ever mocking him or having ‘a little snicker’ at his expense.”

Francis Collins and COVID-19

Former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins is—by my count—mentioned in Shepherds for Sale more than any other person. One grievance in particular is both factually inaccurate and—more to the point—reveals the book’s true agenda.

Referring to a podcast in late 2020 hosted by theologian Ed Stetzer and featuring Collins, Basham writes about an effort the two were leading to engage evangelical churches in fighting COVID-19:

Stetzer’s efforts to help further the NIH’s preferred coronavirus narratives went well beyond giving Collins a softball venue to rally pastors to his cause. He ended the podcast by announcing that the Billy Graham Center [which Stetzer led at the time] would be officially partnering with the Biden administration. Together, with the NIH and the CDC, it would launch a website, Coronavirus and the Church, to provide clergy with resources they should then convey to their congregations.

The insinuation is that Stetzer and Collins sold out to President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party. Indeed, many of her criticisms—of Stetzer, Collins, and others—seem to have political gamesmanship at their core. 

But in this case, too, the facts tell a different story. As Basham could have discovered with a simple Google search, the Coronavirus and the Church website launched in March 2020, while Trump was still president. The first of two podcasts Stetzer did with Collins also took place before Biden became president. This detail—that the website was actually a Trump administration initiative—did not fit the narrative Basham wanted to tell in her book, so it was simply omitted.

The Real Sins of These Shepherds

So why did Basham undertake this flawed effort to malign these particular Christians and portray them as villains?

Religion News Service wrote this about Moore when he resigned from the ERLC, and what is true for Moore is true for virtually all the “villains” in Shepherds for Sale:

Conservative, pro-life, anti-same-sex marriage, Moore was hardly a theological outlier among his fellow Southern Baptist leaders, yet his opposition to the candidacy of Donald Trump, whom Moore had once called “an arrogant huckster,” as well as his sympathy for immigrants and concern for the SBC’s sexual abuse victims, put him out of step with the SBC’s political culture.

Shepherds For Sale has many villains, but it has only one true hero: Donald J. Trump. He is mentioned more than 30 times in the book, all positively or defensively. “Thanks to the single-issue voters who cast ballots for Donald Trump, tens of thousands of babies are alive today who otherwise would have been fed to the abortion machine,” reads one explicit example. But, as I have written elsewhere, both funding for abortion and the number of abortions actually went up during Trump’s presidency.* Overturning Roe was a significant achievement of the Trump administration, but in 2023, a year after the Dobbs decision, the number of abortions topped 1 million—the most in a decade.

The real sin of those demonized by Basham is their public opposition to Trump. Her book purports to fight for the Gospel against heretics, but Basham is waging a proxy war, defending Trump against his evangelical critics, whom she labels the “elite evangelical figures who had proudly worn the ‘Never Trump’ moniker.”

Basham is correct when she writes that journalism can be part of the solution to problems in the church and the culture generally. Courageous, fact-based journalism could move the needle on some of the vexing problems of our time, including immigration and climate change, two issues Basham tackles in Shepherds for Sale. She is also right that the large institutions of the Evangelical Industrial Complex do not have the ability or the willingness to police themselves. As I have written elsewhere, “journalism can save the evangelical movement.”

But Shepherds For Sale is not journalism—it is propaganda. It is not part of the solution, but part of the problem.

Correction, August 3, 2024: The article has been corrected to remove a phrase that said Megan Basham’s book ignores data on abortions that took place during the Trump administration. A paragraph in her book does address that issue.