Review: "Shepherds for Sale," by Megan Basham

We ought not judge a book by its cover. Judging a book by its title, however, is a little different. A book’s title matters for more than grabbing the would-be reader’s attention or flashing a bit of memorable literary style. A book’s title tells you what the author is really saying. When the illustrations get fuzzy or the line of argument hard to follow, a good title can help you understand.

Megan Basham’s new book has a splendid title. Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda is clear, energetic, and memorable. It evokes intrigue, shock, disgust, and outrage. It suggests betrayal and treason. It promises not just a sermon, but an indictment.

This is the kind of book that will generate much discussion even among people who haven’t read it.  Basham, a veteran reporter of World Magazine now with The Daily Wire, has offered a far-reaching diagnosis of American conservative evangelicalism.

What it Gets Right

Perhaps it would be wise to begin by laying my cards on the table. When Basham talks about evangelical capitulation to progressivism, she regularly mentions people and institutions I recognize. For almost three years I worked directly for one of the most frequently mentioned people in the book, former Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission president Russell Moore. I have friends and colleagues, past and present, who are subjects of this book.

Given that, readers may be surprised at how much of Shepherds for Sale I found true and important. The book is organized thematically, showing how certain evangelical leaders and institutions have promoted secular progressive ideology, either out of errant conviction or (worse) out of greed for the money and approbation of secularists. Basham covers a range of topics (environmentalism, race, abortion, Trump, COVID, and more), but the book usually stays focused on the evangelical landscape from about 2012 onward. This focus is both a weakness and a strength. I’ll address the weakness momentarily, but the strength of this relatively limited time frame is that Basham does capture an unusual moment in American evangelical life: A moment of simultaneous political transformation, social unrest, and theological tension. 

A paragraph in the introduction ably summarizes the weirdness:

[There] are ordinary Christians who feel confused and dismayed to see well-known pastors and ministry leaders letting the culture rather than Scripture dictate the content of their teaching. They see leaders insisting that Jesus requires them to get Covid-19 vaccinations and lobby for immigration bills, but doesn’t require them to speak clearly about sexual morality. They feel, frankly, like sheep without shepherds. What they all want to know: What is going on? Why is this happening everywhere?

These are good questions. Basham is not hallucinating, because I’ve seen the same things. There really has been a warped understanding of biblical love and justice, one bent away from traditionally conservative views and toward what is profiled in American political history as “progressive.”

I’ve seen this in some of the topics Basham addresses. For example, on immigration, she’s right to challenge “neighbor love” as a sufficient framework for determining immigration policy, and she’s right that some rhetoric from prominent evangelical leaders has been sloganeering disguised as biblical insight.

I have seen the complex issues attending immigration policy carelessly conflated with racism. Some Christian institutions have failed to maturely navigate two connected but distinct issues: the biblical mandate to love those not like us, which American evangelicals like myself have frequently failed to do throughout our history, and the challenges facing pastors and churches related to shifting demographics. Some pastors and nonprofit leaders—and their followers, like me—have tried too hard to neatly synchronize the ethical and the political. As long as no one seriously disagrees, this can work relatively OK. But the problems become evident once Christians start disagreeing. Consciences are unjustly bound. Certain groups are talked down to. And believers can become willing to see their faith as merely a means to some pragmatic end.

Shepherds for Sale is strongest when it is not primarily concerned with people’s motivations when this happens, but the practical consequences. The chapter on Southern Baptists’ reckoning with abuse and #ChurchToo is a good example. Basham correctly points out that Christians who hold to a biblical view of sexual ethics must be able to interrogate any notion that a “power imbalance” between two sexually involved people nullifies the agency of the less powerful one. Her rebuke of how some prominent Southern Baptists have spoken about this issue rings true, and I receive it as someone who has used similarly confused categories before.

In my view, Southern Baptists are right to talk earnestly about the sin of sexual abuse in the church, and are right to invest resources in helping victims and churches resist. But Basham is simply correct that the standards of evidence most common in the #MeToo movement create more problems than they solve. And it’s true that many who lean more left on these questions tend to leave behind a trail of damage, in reckless disregard for careful fact finding.

I have seen this play out in real time. An allegation is made. The person alleging misconduct will set up the rules of pastoral care so that anything short of immediate side-taking is considered cruel and abusive. As I have written before, the current emphasis in left-of-center evangelicalism on therapeutic strategies for abuse prevention and care too often punts on crucial questions of accuracy and truth.

I believe some of the people Basham names in her chapter on church abuse would go back in time and do things differently if they could. An eagerness to look compassionate, to not enable wicked people, and to avoid situations like the Roman Catholic investigations in the early 2000s added up to shortsighted and harmful compromises.

Likewise with regard to COVID. The most convincing chapter in the book might be here, where Basham clearly has a lot of evidence in her case that evangelicals swallowed, uncritically, a politically convenient but ultimately false narrative on the pandemic. Once again, I was convicted by many things she points out, wishing I too could go back and do things differently. We all need the humility to recognize that it’s hard to know what we don’t know, particularly when an unprecedented situation occurs in a digital age like ours.

When Shepherds for Sale is right, it’s right.

What it Gets Wrong

Somewhere in the process of development, this book had something that would have been genuinely persuasive and effective. There’s a version of it that would have focused on evangelical consequences rather than evangelical motivations, and would have provided a perch for truth-conscious Christians, regardless of what presidential candidate they like, to reflect on lessons learned in a truly incredible decade.

Unfortunately, the book readers have is not that book. Instead, too often it’s a speculative jeremiad that substitutes insistence for proof and score-settling for reflection. The title expresses this: Shepherds for Sale. What the book wants to be is a devastating exposure of evangelical corruption and fraud. But there are too many factual errors, logical inconsistencies, unwarranted assumptions, and bad-faith interpretations for it to be that. Its usefulness is buried underneath a basic failure to be worthy of its own title.

Factual Errors

In chapter 1, on environmentalism, Basham’s main interlocutor is E. Calvin Beisner, a Christian theologian who advocates (as part of a fellowship called the Cornwall Alliance) for an emphasis on stewardship rather than “creation care.” Beisner is Basham’s main example of a truly conservative Christian voice on climate. After criticizing Southeastern Seminary for hosting a different Christian presenter on environmental science, Basham suggests that Southeastern would never ask someone like Beisner to come to campus. “When I asked Beisner if seminaries like SEBTS ever invite Cornwall Alliance climate scientists or theologians to present an argument . . . he was blunt. ‘No, they don’t.’” But according to this SEBTS program page, Beisner did indeed participate (or was scheduled to) in a symposium at Southeastern in 2017. As of 2016, the Cornwall Alliance lists Daniel Heimbach as one of their fellows. Heimbach is a professor at Southeastern Seminary.

Elsewhere, Basham claims that then-SBC president J. D. Greear “made a heavy push to change the SBC’s name to ‘Great Commission Baptists’ as part of what the media called as a ‘racial reckoning.’” This is misleading at best. In fact, the SBC had itself decided several years prior to approve “Great Commission Baptists” as an optional alternate descriptor for those who would prefer to use it. In February 2012, a task force appointed by then-president Bryant Wright and chaired by former LifeWay president Jimmy Draper, made a recommendation that the SBC keep its legal name but adopt an informal name that churches could use if they so choose. The task force was made up of 20 individuals, including Albert Mohler.

In the chapter on immigration, Basham highlights a viral Breitbart report that purported to expose billionaire progressive George Soros as the decisive shadow money figure behind the Evangelical Immigration Table, a non-profit network that Richard Land led the ERLC to join in the early 2010s. Her money trail is complicated and sometimes difficult to follow, but Basham suggests plainly that the ERLC is being influenced by money coming from Soros. She writes:

[The EIT] made a particular target of the Southern Baptist Convention, highlighting how many Southern Baptist leaders had become involved with its work, including then-president J. D. Greear, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary president Danny Akin, North American Mission Board head Kevin Ezell, and “many others.” That’s to say nothing of the new leaders it recruited from the denomination, giving them plum jobs. However, questions from ordinary Southern Baptists (the people whose tithes support the denomination’s entities) about Soros funding continued to dog the EIT’s steps.

There are multiple claims in this chapter, one of which is true, one of which is false, and one of which is sheer speculation. The first claim is true: George Soros’s foundation does donate to the the National Immigration Foundation, which the EIT and ERLC both freely acknowledge. The second claim is that “rank and file” Southern Baptists are being misrepresented by their leaders on this issue. This is simply not true; the resolution that Basham mentions was passed overwhelmingly from the floor of the convention. The final claim is speculation; there is no reason to believe that Southern Baptist leaders are letting Soros or the NIF “set the agenda” for them, as Basham claims. The mere presence of the ERLC in the EIT is not proof, any more than the mere existence of Zip Recruiter on The Daily Wire’s corporate sponsors list implicates Basham in Ian Siegel’s politics.

In Chapter 4, Basham mischaracterizes an interview that Tim Keller gave Peter Wehner for The Atlantic.

An archived version of the interview can be found here. Here is Basham’s description:

Yet, while 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. Being a Christian Trump supporter, he told The Atlantic, meant that you were focused on “power and saying, How are we going to use power to live life the way we want?”

She also writes:

Somehow, Keller found support for Donald Trump uniquely discrediting in a way that voting for Joe Biden—who had plenty of evangelical Democrats in his corner even though Biden had also been accused of sexual assault—was not.

The full context of Keller’s comments, though, do not come close to supporting this characterization. I should emphasize that Basham is careful to document her sources. The interview linked above is the interview she characterizes in the book. Below, I’ve reprinted the relevant excerpt, including its immediate surrounding context, which paints a very different picture:

I [Wehner] asked Keller about the relationship of the Church, and in particular evangelicalism, to politics. The upshot of Keller’s position is that whereas individual Christians should be engaged in the political realm, the Bible makes it impossible as a Church to hitch your wagon to one political party, especially in these times. “For Christians just to completely hook up with one party or another is really idolatry,” Keller said. “It’s also reducing the Gospel to a political agenda.” . . .

When I pressed the point further, Keller admitted he believes that “most Christians are just nowhere nearly as deeply immersed in the scripture and in theology as they are in their respective social-media bubbles and News Feed bubbles. To be honest, I think the ‘woke’ evangelicals are just much more influenced by MSNBC and liberal Twitter. The conservative Christians are much more influenced by Fox News and their particular loops. And they’re [both] living in those things eight to 10 hours a day. They go to church once a week, and they’re just not immersed in the kind of biblical theological study that would nuance that stuff.”

On Donald Trump, Keller said that unlike a generation ago, many evangelicals are not looking to put Christians into power in order to turn the culture back to God; now they are looking for a protector, a champion.

“Both those evangelical strategies are wrong,” Keller told me. “Both of them are about power and saying, How are we going to use power to live life the way we want? They’re not enough about service; they’re not enough about serving the common good.

“The proper cultural strategy is faithful presence within,” he added, “not pulling away from the culture, and not trying to take it over. ‘Faithful presence within’ means being faithful; it means we’re not going to assimilate, [but] we’re going to be distinctively Christian. It’s about an attitude of service, uncompromising in our beliefs, but not withdrawing and not trying to dominate.”

Nowhere in this interview does Keller say that voting for Trump is “discrediting,” and nowhere does he imply that voting for a Democrat is better.

Basham further claims in the section that she could find “no public comments from Keller chiding Christians who supported Biden or rebuking groups like ‘evangelicals for Biden’ for politicizing the Church.’” This is a strange comment, since in the very interview she references, Keller clearly speaks negatively of “MSNBC and liberal Twitter.”

In the same chapter, Basham again misrepresents a Keller statement, this time a piece authored by him in The New Yorker. She accuses Keller of “slighting” and “denigrating” Christians who voted for Trump. She quotes Keller as saying that “‘evangelical’ used to denote people who claimed the moral high ground; now, in popular usage, the word nearly synonymous with ‘hypocrite.’”

Yet the piece she cites does not say anything about Christians who voted for Trump. Instead, Keller is writing about the definition of the word “evangelical,” and the difference between how theologically-minded Christians identify themselves with how political pollsters identify them. In the essay to which Basham refers, Keller refers readers to David Bebbington’s classic criteria of historic evangelical Christianity, with no reference to Trump or the Democratic Party. Keller writes:

Do the self-identified white “big-E Evangelicals” of the pollsters hold to these [Bebbington-defined] beliefs? Recent studies indicate that many do not. In many parts of the country, Evangelicalism serves as the civil or folk religion accepted by default as part of one’s social and political identity. So, in many cases, it means that the political is more defining than theological beliefs, which has not been the case historically. And, because of the enormous amount of attention the media pays to the Evangelical vote, the term now has a decisively political meaning in popular usage.

Yet there exists a far larger evangelicalism, both here and around the world, which is not politically aligned. In the U.S., there are millions of evangelicals spread throughout mainline Protestant congregations, as well as in more theologically conservative denominations like the Assemblies of God, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod. But, most significantly, the vast majority of the fast-growing Protestant churches in Asia, Latin America, and Africa all share these same beliefs. And in the U.S., while white Evangelicalism is aging and declining, evangelicalism over all is not.

I am sorry to post a tiresome series of blockquotes. My point in doing so is twofold. First, as a journalist like Basham can appreciate, I am simply offering a fact check to some, at best, highly questionable “facts.” But second, I want to point out that, of the many names criticized in Basham’s book, Keller seems to be the one depicted most inaccurately.

This doesn’t make Keller’s political views or his evangelistic method infallible. Many people who love and are grateful for Keller’s ministry will nevertheless express disagreement at his political opinions and advice. But there’s a difference between criticizing Keller (or anyone else) on the basis of what he said and believed, and criticizing him based on inaccurate summaries of his statements and unnecessary inferences.

My impression is that Basham has read her own political motivations back onto Keller, and it has led her to hear things he didn’t say and see things he didn’t write. This is a serious issue. It compromises the book’s claim to actuality and trustworthiness. It opens the question of what other evangelical figures may be inaccurately represented in Shepherds for Sale. And it comes dangerously close to a violation of the Ninth Commandment.

Selective Outrage

The problems go beyond factual discrepancies. Shepherds for Sale frequently reads into the hidden motivations of Christians with whom Basham disagrees. Again, the title captures the main allegation. Basham is trying to convince her readers not just that their teachers and leaders have different views, but that these views have been bought and paid for in a terribly cynical way. But this is predominantly something Basham insists upon rather than proves.

This raises a crucial point: How do we know what Basham is describing is a matter of evangelical betrayal, rather than simply honest convictions of some versus honest convictions of others? In her introduction, Basham opens the door to the possibility that Christians can genuinely disagree politically:

This is not to say that Christians can’t have disagreements on whether science proves climate change is a serious problem or what gun regulations might be prudent. Even where Christians agree on principle, reason and conviction can lead to different views regarding solutions.

The problem is that Basham doesn’t at all demonstrate what this might look like. She categorically rules out almost every political position to the left of Donald Trump as liberal progressivism, which “rank and file” Christians are having hoisted on them by corrupt leaders.

This narrative struggles to hold when history is taken into fuller account. For example, one of Basham’s clearest allegations that Russell Moore, in his tenure at the ERLC, was responsible for teaching and advocacy on issues like immigration and environmentalism that contradicted the conservative convictions of the “rank and file” SBC. She depicts this transformation of Southern Baptists’ public policy agency as occurring relatively quickly under Moore, aided by friends such as J. D. Greear.

However, one figure that does not receive any criticism whatsoever in Shepherds for Sale is Russell Moore’s predecessor at the ERLC, Richard Land. It was Land who pioneered SBC efforts through the ERLC to advocate for these issues. Basham only once names Land, passingly, even though it was Land  leading Southern Baptists in “creation care” efforts, or testifying before Congress that Southern Baptists favor a “pathway to citizenship” for illegal aliens. Basham portrays both positions as extreme, anti-Baptist ideologies that people like Russell Moore bear responsibility for pushing. But the broad support that Land’s ERLC enjoyed among Southern Baptists paints a very different picture, as does his ongoing reputation as a conservative elder statesman in the denomination.

Similarly, Basham applies a strict standard that cannot be applied to herself. She blisteringly criticizes both the Evangelical Immigration Table and the National Immigration Forum as left-wing entities that are using money to seduce evangelical communities into progressive error. But in 2019, while Basham was employed at World Magazine, the publication ran an article that positively characterized both the EIT and NIF. Of course, it’s entirely possible that Basham objected to her employer running such an article. The point is that by the standards she holds others to, she was part of an effort to deceive Christians. Using Basham’s own logic, we could justly say that in 2019 Basham was personally profiting from progressive-aligned work. There is no apology from her in the book for not protesting publicly.

Meanwhile, Basham currently works for The Daily Wire. One of their top leaders is Andrew Klavan, a conservative writer who nonetheless supports same-sex marriage and attended the wedding of his gay son. Again, if we apply the standard that Basham employs throughout Shepherds for Sale, we would be forced to conclude that Basham herself has been compromised by error and is aligning with enemies of Christianity.

All of these examples demonstrate a selectivity to Basham’s thesis that undermines it. The book claims that “rank and file” evangelicals are uniformly offended by policies that it turns out they often support. The book claims that a handful of evangelical leaders are subversive operatives trying to liberalize American churches, but these motives don’t apply to other conservatives with the same views but different affiliations. The book claims that Christian leaders have a positive duty not to partner or take money from groups that oppose conservative policy, but this burden fails to land on the author.

Conclusion

Megan Basham knows her way around the evangelical world. She’s a gifted narrator. She lands some real broadsides. At its best, Shepherds for Sale is a spirited rebuke to a kind of high-minded self-delusion in certain parts of evangelicalism. It vividly revisits evangelical culture c. 2018-2020 and tours some genuine failures of nerve and conviction. If this book were titled When Shepherds Fail, it would get closer to the truth.

But titles are important. According to the book’s actual title, the situation is worse than self-delusion or failure. According to the title, shepherds are for sale. According to the title, Christian leaders around the world are being bought off by the enemies of Jesus. This is not what the book actually delivers.

Basham has written instead a  sometimes convicting, frequently speculative, and ultimately unremarkable book about evangelical disagreement.  In the end, the title Shepherds for Sale describes not so much facts that Basham has discovered, but a standard against which she evaluates Christians outside of her own political tribe. And it’s a standard that her own work does not hold up well against.

Should we conclude that the errors, mischaracterizations, and inconsistencies in Shepherds for Sale are intentional lies in order to sway readers and enrich the author? Or, could they be honest errors due to carelessness, or a difference of interpretation, or perhaps even something Basham would do differently given the chance?

It seems to me that the weight of the New Testament’s teaching would have Christians regularly (thought not exclusively) assuming the latter. This doesn’t rule out the possibility of heresy, or bribery, or capitulation. These things are real, and evangelicals have to reckon with them in every generation. But the question that remains is what kind of standard can be consistently applied to everyone in a way that most gets at the truth and honors God. The standard at work in Shepherds for Sale will not work, because it cannot even apply consistently to itself.

There is much in evangelicalism that needs course correction. There is much repentance and discipleship needed. There is much political literacy yet to be attained. As we see in a mirror dimly, we should be quick to admit when we get it wrong, quick to forgive when others wrong us, and slow to assume the best of ourselves. Shepherds for Sale contains good, hard questions, but not enough reliable answers.