Morning Wire - Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda | 7.28.24

Episode Date: July 28, 2024

Left-wing billionaires have been pouring money into churches and ministries to sway evangelical voters to back progressive policies. What impact are powerful figures like George Soros having on American Christians and how they vote? Today’s episode features an interview with Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham about her new book, Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda and the secular progressive influences infiltrating churches. Get the facts first on Morning Wire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

evangelical Christians make up roughly 30% of the electorate, leading the legacy media to name them America's most powerful voting block. In the past, they have overwhelmingly supported the GOP, but recent elections suggest that could be changing, thanks in part to secular foundations on the left that have devoted significant money to capturing evangelical institutions and changing evangelical votes. In this episode, I talk with a guest many of our listeners will know well, Morningwire's own culture reporter Megan Basham, about her new book Shepherds for Sale, how evangelical leaders traded the truth for a leftist agenda. She explains how left-wing billionaires and secular influencers are infiltrating and transforming churches.

I'm Georgia Howe. It's July 28th, and this is a Sunday edition of Morning Wire. Joining me to discuss her new book is Megan Basham. So, Megan, this was such a fascinating read, and part of what struck me was the history that you start out with. This is not actually a new thing for American. in churches. It's something familiar that happened in the 1930s and 40s with the Communist Party USA. Why don't you start there with a little bit of that history? Yeah, you know, so I thought it was really

important to start the book out with that because you want to remind people that this is not the first time that we've seen activity like this. So in the 30s and 40s, you saw the Communist Party USA infiltrate churches in a very deliberate way in order to sway their views on politics and on social justice and on Marxism, and later this kind of information came out in congressional testimony. And what's fascinating about it is that at that time, Congress called some of the organizations that mainline Christian churches and denominations had become involved with some of the most seditious organizations in the United States. In fact, eventually government records showed that the Episcopal Church, which was then one of the largest and most influential Protestant denominations in the U.S., became

deeply compromised and estimated 20% of its rectors got involved with communist activities. And one of the ways that Communist Party USA members were able to do this was that they very deliberately ate the lingo and jargon of churches and of religious people because they understood that if they could mimic that language but apply it in new ways to Marxist ideology, that that would give them a credibility with evangelical and Christian audiences. So they would do that in such a way as to convince the average church member, hey, I'm one of you as well. And it was fascinating that when you looked in the documents, one of these Communist Party infiltrators who later left the Communist Party testified before Congress that they created these suckers lists of targets that they wanted to

infiltrate. And he said that pastors were the group that they had the most success with. He called them the biggest suckers of them all. Well, for people who are interested, a fabulous book on this very topic is witnessed by Whitaker Chambers or anything basically by Paul Kingor. This is a well-documented phenomenon that you're discussing. But bringing us to present day, or at least the recent decades, tell us about the connection between George Soros and evangelical institutions. So essentially what you're seeing as something very similar to what I just described with the Communist Party USA. So right around 2013 at George Soros's Open Society Foundation began to write internal memos that later leaked, where they talked about the fact that they were running into a roadblock getting their policy

preferences enacted. And they recognized that what that roadblock was was religious Americans, specifically evangelicals. And so in this discussion among various members of open society's board, the question came up, how do we harness that power of religious life for ourselves? And they spoke about things like distributing grants to influencers and other church members and well-known leaders who would then be able to use their influence with the rank and file to get them to sign on to policies that typically you don't see a lot of Christians agreeing with. Things like, in their words, reproductive justice or immigration policy or the LGBT rights movement. So these were things that you very rarely would see Christians agree with. And their idea was if we could use the right language

and harness the power of the right leaders, we would be able to use that influence to trickle down to the rank and file and get them to change their positions as well. And you saw this on any number of policy preferences in things like immigration, climate change, as I said, the LGBTQ movement. So really just a way to do exactly what we saw back then in the 1930s to 50s where there was just a new use of churchy language to convince Christians that these are policies you want to sign on to. And to give you just a couple of examples of that, Georgia, I think we've seen just through COVID that Love Your Neighbor was applied to everything from getting back. to convincing churches to comply with church shutdown orders.

We've also seen Love Your Neighbor applied to the point that we eventually even saw Democrats pick up this terminology so that Gavin Newsom, for example, used the phrase, love your neighbor in promoting abortion on billboards, which anybody who comes from an evangelical Christian background would recognize that that's a fairly shocking use of that phrase that comes from the Bible, but that's how elastic it had become. Now, abortion notwithstanding, you are pretty careful in your book to hedge that being a faithful Christian doesn't necessarily mean taking the right wing position on things like, say, climate change or immigration per se. But more your argument is that the left-wing position is being sort

of surreptitiously smuggled in as the biblical position and that these issues that really should be political are being presented as, quote, gospel issues. For our audience members who aren't really dialed in with evangelical terms, can you explain what is meant by the term gospel issue? Yeah, well, typically, gospel issue would mean something that pertains to salvation. So if you're a Christian, the gospel of Jesus Christ is that Christ died on the cross as the propitiation for our sins, and it is only through faith in him alone that we are able to obtain salvation. eternal life. Now, all of these other issues have kind of been added to that to say these are also gospel issues. So, for example, you saw mega church pastor and former president of the largest

Protestant denomination in the U.S., J.D. Greer, say a couple of years ago that supporting Black Lives Matter, not necessarily the movement, but the ideology behind it is the same as a gospel issue. He said, this is a gospel issue that Christians need to support. You also saw some of these climate change activists who come into seminaries and give presentations to the seminary students and who are part of groups like the evangelical environmental network, which is a left-wing-funded foundation. They will also say that creation care, by which they typically mean climate change initiatives, is also a gospel issue. And that's where a lot of this controversy comes in, because of course, you're adding things that are not typically understood to be pertaining to salvation.

So if you're a Christian, you might call something like that legalistic because it's not something that you need to support in order to obtain salvation. And the other reason that this gets a little controversial is because it's not always disclosed. And in fact, in most cases it is not disclosed that the people who are funding these initiatives and these evangelical front groups who are backing these particular policies are themselves not Christian. They are secular left-wing foundations who are funneling money into these groups. So, you know, George Soros is just one example. You could also look at the Clinton Foundation has been involved in this work. The Rockefeller Foundation has been involved in this work.

And kind of any major left-wing foundation like Tides or Hewlett that gets involved in distributing a lot of money, they will often pop up as far as being a dark money sponsor of this kind of activity. And so that was a lot of what I wanted to track was how they are doing this to advance their preferred policies in a way that the evangelical audiences who are absorbing it aren't aware of. And part of that is why I think it's controversial, not so much because we can't disagree on what the particular policy or legislation is, it's because who is behind it as being hidden. And the way that these arguments are being made

are sort of circumventing the normal give and take of debate that you would expect. So instead of saying, hey, here is an immigration policy, let's debate whether or not this is good for the citizens of the United States, whether it will help alleviate chaos at the border. instead it's being pushed by secular left foundations as saying this is something that to be a faithful Christian you need to support. And I think that is where the controversy comes in.

Now, in 2020, numerous analysts found that enough evangelical voters either voted for Biden or just stayed home in key states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to swing the election for Democrats. Can you draw a direct line between the efforts you discovered in your research and the election outcome? Well, you know, it's hard, of course, to draw a direct line because correlation is not necessarily causation, but what we can certainly show is that there won were very strong efforts from Democrat-backed groups to sway that all-important to evangelical vote. To give you one example, there was a political action committee that was spearheaded by Billy Graham's granddaughter called evangelicals for Biden. and another one that was orchestrated by a alumnus of the Obama administration, Michael Ware, and his was called Not Our Faith. And its very explicit purpose was to get some of that evangelical vote to swing over to Biden,

or at worst, maybe they would stay home and not turn out so that the evangelical support that Trump enjoyed in 2016 would not be there. And what we did see is that in a few of those key swing states, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. It wasn't a huge number, but there does seem to have been enough to make a meaningful difference so that those states did tip over to Biden. And some analysts have suggested that because evangelicals either didn't show up or switch their vote over to Biden rather than Trump from 2016 to 2020, that made enough of a

difference that it cost Trump those swing states. Another interesting thing that you brought up in your book was your speculation as to why this effort has been so successful, specifically why some of these evangelical elites, high-profile pastors, et cetera, are so eager to jump on these bandwagon. What do you believe their motivation is? Well, you know, I think there's different motivations for different evangelical leadership. In some cases, I think you can point to some fairly transactional arrangements. So when you see a group like the National Association of Evangelicals, which was once so conservative that Ronald Reagan gave his famous evil empire speech to its national convention,

suddenly partnering with these left-wing foundations to do things like promote climate change legislation to Christians. I think it's a very obvious partnership, and it has expanded their influence among a much more, let's say, upper-class, powerful level of people than the National Association of Evangelicals was involved with before. But I also think that the National Association of Evangelicals was involved with before. But I also think there's something of just a friendship network that happens. So if a particular group of well-known evangelicals are publishing a general statement of principles, they may go and ask friends to sign on to this statement of principles. And a pastor who is busy or a large ministry leader who just doesn't have time to investigate all of this,

he may go, oh, well, my good friend, so-and-so pastor is signing it. So I'm going to sign it to too. And so they do, and they don't really recognize how that foundation is then going to use that general statement of principles, which is they then go to GOP legislators and say, look, you're all important to evangelical constituents want you to back this cap and trade policy. So without ever having meant to sign on to a particular policy, that signature is nevertheless used in that way. And I think in some cases, maybe because of awkwardness or naivety, they just let their voices be used that way without really realizing it or intending it for it to be used that way. And there's something a little slippery in that because, of course, the impression that a lot of the average people in the pews

get is that something with a name like, say, the evangelical immigration table, they think that what it does is maybe minister to impoverished immigrants to ceded their material needs, or maybe its purpose is to teach the Bible or spread the gospel to those who are coming across the border. And in fact, that's not what the purpose of these organizations is. Its purpose is to collect those signatures and to convince lawmakers to pass certain pieces of legislation that a lot of these evangelicals, even some of those who signed these letters would not have agreed to. Now, you had a line in the book that stood out to me, and it was regarding climate change, which has been rebranded as, quote, creation care. You said, quote, those Christians who resisted

being drafted into this project are the ones who creation care activists accuse of being political. Can you explain that a little bit? Yeah. So when you see some of these evangelical environmental activists lobbying for climate change, if they say you're doing this because you believe it is a gospel issue, again, then people are much more likely to sign on. And if you, conversely, using the stick, say, if you do not sign on to this program, that is proof that you have been politicized, then that's really a way if you haven't given the matter a lot of thought to say, well, I don't want to be viewed as someone who's been politicized. And it's a really effective tool. And it's a little ironic because if you are someone who feels like, look, I didn't really

have a strong conviction on this either way, or maybe it's something that I'm still thinking through, or maybe it's something I disagree with, but maybe we can disagree in good faith. You have now been someone who is targeted as the political person. And I think once again, there's something a little slippery in that in saying that if you do not agree with me that this is something that as a Christian you should sign on to in order to follow your faith in a meaningful manner, in order to be a faithful Christian, then that is an abuse of scripture. That is an abuse of authority. And yet it's a really effective one. So what would you say then to critics who would accuse conservative organizations of trying to influence churches? Is there a difference there? Is that

happening frequently? Well, you know, I think that's actually a fair criticism to make, but there are a few differences that you have to point out. One is that typically when it is organizations on the right mobilizing for particular policies like say a pro-life policy or something in the realm of sex, gender, marriage, I think it's very easy to point to scripture on issues like the sanctity of life, the nature of marriage as being between one man and one woman, and what the Bible's position is on issues of sexuality and gender, it's a lot harder to find that kind of clarity when it comes to something like, what should our immigration policy be, or what should our views be on gun control, or whether we should regulate our fossil fuels? Then it's not so easy to point

to reverse and say, well, it says that. That should therefore be our stance as Christians. And then I think you also have to look at the fact that typically the people in those right-wing organizations are themselves professing Christians, and the people who are funding those organizations are professing Christians, if not pastors themselves. On the left, you may have some of the leadership and front-facing people as Christians, but the funding isn't coming from Christians. So again, if you look at George Soros, he's a professed atheist, but is someone who is funding these evangelical ministries. So I think that that would probably be the other big disconnect. It's that there's a covertness on the left that you're not seeing on the right. So really importantly, what red flags

should listeners be on the lookout for when it comes to some of these secular influences in churches and ministries? How can listeners recognize it when it's happening in their church? Well, you know, a few things that I think we can go back to how we open this discussion, which was how the Communist Party USA did it in the 1940s and 50s and how it can. continues today is using that lingo. So if your church is suddenly using phrases like creation care, but they're not being very specific about what they mean by that, and they're not tying it to specific scripture, but at the same time suggesting that you need to engage in activism on some political policy, to me that would be a red flag. And it's something I would certainly ask my pastor

some questions about. And then another issue I think we can look at is how they are tending to be covert about where their funding is coming from. I would encourage people if suddenly your church is bringing in a new curriculum and it's an explicitly political curriculum. And just to give you one really quick example, Georgia, just this year, an election year saw three pretty well-known, never-trump evangelicals bring out some curriculum that is supposed to teach Christian churches and colleges and ministries, how to be less politically polarized. But the three people who developed this curriculum are all never Trumpers, New York Times columnist David French, Christianity Today editor and chief Russell Moore, and a dupe divinity professor named Curtis Chang. And all three of them

share this view that one should not vote for Trump. And so I think you have to question, okay, is that really a nonpartisan and is that a broad representation of evangelical views? It seems pretty one-sided. And so if you dig into it a little bit more, you actually find that this church curriculum was exclusively funded by these large left-wing foundations. In this case, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, which supports things that most Christians would disagree with, things like abortion through the third trimester, transgender treatments on youth, and things that would certainly be very controversial,

and I think that's something that indicates that maybe its purpose is less spiritual and more political. All right, well, Megan, this was a fantastic read and a huge accomplishment. Thank you so much for coming on and talking about it with us. It's been really fun to be on this side of things. Thanks for having me. That was Daily Wire Culture Reporter, Megan Basham,

discussing her new book, Shepherds for Sale, out July 30th. And this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.