AFP via Getty Images
As America prepares for November’s presidential election, the fight for votes will inevitably intensify.
But as conservative commentator Megan Basham explains in her new book, “Shepherds For Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded The Truth For A Leftist Agenda” (Broadside) — and in an interview with The Post — nowhere will the campaign be more fiercely fought than in the battle for the one of the most powerful voting blocs in the country: evangelicals.
A culture reporter for the Daily Wire and former editor at Evangelical publication World Magazine, Basham reveals in “Shepherds For Sale” how “progressive power brokers” are targeting not just churches but Christian media, universities and even entire denominations in a bid to force their hands when it comes to dealing with culture war flash-points like abortion, LGBTQ rights and climate change.
From the billionaire George Soros to eBay founder and long-term Democratic donor Pierre Omidyar, there are, according to Basham, left-leaning billionaires intent on infiltrating the church.
“So if your daughter or granddaughter suddenly starts quoting a pastor who claims the Bible has nothing to say about abortion, you may have George Soros to thank for it,” she writes.
But how and, perhaps more importantly, why are they doing it?
It’s simple, argues Basham.
“Look at nearly any issue that represents a key priority for progressives, and you will find that even when all other major demographics have signed on, Christians, and evangelicals in particular, represent the most formidable roadblock,” she says.
Basham maintains that in return for toeing a more left-wing line on key issues — as well as reinterpreting or even eschewing scripture — many church leaders have received everything from praise to prestige, career progression to significant amounts of cash, selling out Christianity in the process.
“Evangelicals don’t always win at the ballot box, but in most regions of the country, they always present a massive hurdle to leftist power grabs,” writes Basham.
“If the Democratic Party could manage to shave off even 10% of their support for Republicans, it would face little opposition to its agenda.”
A significant aspect of the left’s ability to infiltrate the Church is the existence of what Basham calls the “Eleventh Commandment,” namely: Thou shalt not criticize church leaders.
“What the Eleventh Commandment has meant in practice is that even as prominent pastors and theologians have spent the last few years accommodating every sort of secular, progressive influence, critical or even cautioning voices have been slow to respond [to the challenge],” she says.
Basham cites the example of the Arcus Foundation, a left-leaning charitable organization launched in 2000 by social and environmental activist Jon Struyker, the heir to a $100 billion surgical supply conglomerate.
It has donated tens of millions of dollars to what it said was “challenging the promotion of narrow or hateful interpretations of religious doctrine within every major Christian denomination.”
One of its beneficiaries, writes Basham, was the Reconciling Ministries Network, a group dedicated to the inclusion of people of all sexual orientations and gender identities in all aspects of the United Methodist Church.
It received over $2 million to pursue its aims.
On another occasion, the Reformation Project, ran by 23-year-old Harvard dropout Matthew Vines, received $550,000 in grants to what Arcus described as reforming “church teaching on sexual orientation and gender identity among conservative and evangelical communities.”
The problem, according to Basham,, is that all of these aims not only contravene scripture but that they are made possible by the Eleventh Commandment.
“We have gotten to the point where many church leaders, and a lot of high-profile personalities, are manipulating scripture and we have to speak up,” says Basham, a Christian. Few, however, dare to challenge church leaders.
Basham says that scripture still allows for debate and clarification, but perhaps not to the extent that some of the cases in her book suggests.
“Every aspect of our world is informed by scripture but at the same time, scripture has blessed us with reason so we can look at different situations and go ‘Okay, we can have a debate about what is the best policy’,” she tells The Post.
On climate change, for instance, Basham argues that the Bible says that we all need to be good stewards of creation. ‘The question is what does good stewardship look like?” she adds. “In other words, how we apply scripture to these Biblically debatable issues?”
On other topics, like sexuality, there is less room for interpretation. “All throughout history, there has been no confusion on what scripture means when it says homosexuality is a sin,” she adds.
“But now we’re suddenly demanding consensus with the issues that are not debatable scripturally?”
Just how influential these progressive powerbrokers are will become evident in November at the Presidential election. In the 2020 contest, the Democrats could at least point to Joe Biden’s strict Catholic faith as a way to appeal to faith-focused voters. But now, after his withdrawal, it remains to be seen what they make of Kamala Harris and her commitment to religion.
“That was really important because I think part of the reason Biden was able to eke out that victory over Donald Trump last time was because they were able to sway enough votes from the Evangelical base,” she says.
And how does scripture deal with the deeds and misdeeds of Donald Trump?
“We’ve seen so much abuse of evangelicals for supporting Trump, as though what we’re doing is cheering adultery of his past divorces and that’s ludicrous,” she says. “You just need to see what he intends to do and view him as a set of policies that align much better with Christian ethics.”
Basham was also prompted to write “Shepherds For Sale” by what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic when faith’s place in the United States seemed to be relegated far below other elements of society.
“The government wanted to shutter our churches but, at the same time, the strip clubs and the liquor stores could stay open,” she recalls.
“Something seemed rotten.”
Then there was the pressure to receive the vaccine itself, which Basham likens to spiritual abuse.
“There was a marriage of a Christian mandate to a government mandate,” she says. “It was an abuse of scripture and a legalistic burden on people demanding that they take a vaccine that, for many good reasons, did not want to take.”
The issue divided worshippers, just as it did secular society.
As Basham points out, New York City’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church, for example, segregated its congregation on the basis of vaccine status with fully vaccinated people allowed to worship together on the main floor but others relegated to more distant seating.
“The announcement posted to the church’s website said that unvaccinated kids under sixteen would be allowed to sit with their vax-compliant parents,” writes Basham.
“The unvaccinated, it said, were ‘welcome to sit in the balcony.’ ”
It was, argues Basham, the inevitable outcome of an evangelical leadership and church increasingly unable to stand its ground in the face of polarized views on culture and society.
“Perhaps more than any other issue in the last decade,” she writes, “the pandemic crystallized for average Christians, many of whom had been feeling vague misgivings for years, how compromised the people at the top had become.”