(REVIEW) “Shepherds for Sale” is a book that addresses worthy concerns regarding modern evangelical politics, but its own ideological blind spots may cause it to do as much harm as good.

When people warn about religious people being co-opted by politics, they’re almost always referring to White evangelical Christians being sucked in by right-wing politics. Since White evangelicals voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in 2016, there’s practically been a cottage industry of books and articles alleging that the American church has sold its soul to the Republican Party from the likes of “Jesus and John Wayne,” “Losing Our Religion,” “The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory,” “The False White Gospel” and the documentary “God & Country.”

Megan Basham’s new book “Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda” hopes to flip that conversation. Basham argues that the real co-opting of American evangelicals is happening from the left as secular activists and their evangelical allies wage an intentional partisan takeover of evangelical institutions because they see that voting bloc as the largest barrier to their preferred political aims. Basham finishes the book by calling on faithful Christians to resist and root out this political church corruption on a local and institutional level.

READ: Why Battles Over Parental Rights Are Not Going Away

Basham is a culture reporter for the conservative media company The Daily Wire (part-owned by political podcaster Ben Shapiro) and author of “Beside Every Successful Man.” She was once a film and TV editor and has since become widely known as a persistent online presence on social media, engaging in fiery exchanges on X.  

“Shepherds” is certainly a book that is stuffed with footnotes, each page linking to multiple articles and websites to back up Basham’s claims. It’s unfortunately a book many people will jump to either attack or support without actually looking up the sources themselves. But it is a book that requires just that to responsibly engage with it. To Basham’s credit, she provides the footnotes for people to check her work. For this review, I did not fact-check every source that Basham cited. But I fact-checked just enough that I thought I could address the main points that she was trying to make and that I found most interesting. 

First, Basham deserves lots of credit for bringing attention to how politicized American evangelicalism often is to the left. While politicization on the religious right gets more press, putting politics first on the religious and secular left is statistically more widespread. As professory George Yancey writes in his book “One Faith No More,” progressive Christians are far more likely than conservative ones to determine their theology and their social circle based on politics compared to their conservative counterparts. Likewise, sociologist Ryan Burge shows secular Americans are far and away more politically active and partisan than religious Americans.

Basham gives numerous examples of evangelical organizations, including the Evangelical Environmental Network, the Evangelical Immigration Table, pro-LGBTQ organizations such as Embracing the Journey and leaders and institutions that often partner with them, such as Southeastern Baptist Seminary, Russell Moore and North Point and Saddleback churches.  

Many of these activist organizations got their start or funding from either national religious organizations like the National Religious Partnership for the Environment or secular ones such as Open Society and the Arcus Foundation. Many of them speak openly (such as New America and Arcus Foundation) that they see evangelicals and Christians as primary obstacles to their goals. Basham also highlights how many evangelical institutions — like Redeemer or Christianity Today — have staff who either primarily or exclusively donate to liberal candidates. For what it’s worth, I write often for Christianity Today, and it has never prevented me from criticizing liberal views.   

Basham points out that many evangelical leaders and institutions seemingly have a double-standard when it comes to what divisive issues Christians should speak up about. Former Southern Baptist Convention President J.D. Greear counseled only “whispering” about issues like homosexuality but loudly condemned churches for not taking racism seriously enough. Another double standard is which support for which political party equates “compromising the gospel for political power.” Evangelicals like Moore and David French will claim voting for Donald Trump to stop legal abortion is compromising faith for political aims, but voting for a party that pushes abortion and gender ideology to stop Trump is not.   

If you are a conservative evangelical, all of this is rightly a cause for concern. If you think abortion is murder, LGBTQ ideology is child abuse, government regulation of climate change and lax immigration policy hurt the poor and Critical Race Theory hurts race relations, then organizations pushing those things are harming God’s children. It’s then a problem that many evangelical leaders and organizations support these causes or abdicate much role in pushing back. It’s reasonable to moderate or remove (as the case demands) the credibility you give these people and institutions. Both try to hold them accountable and seek out alternative voices. 

But this also matters for the religious and secular left. After all, if it’s bad for Christianity to be co-opted by the Americans on the political right, isn’t it just as bad when it happens on the left?  

If that doesn’t bother you, doesn’t that just mean that your problem with political co-opting is that the wrong politics are the ones co-opting it? If so, how do you argue that the religious right shouldn’t marry their politics with their faith as well? Is there a standard we can apply consistently to both the left and right? Dismissing these ideas rather than engaging them in good faith only guarantees that conservative Christians will rightly dismiss you as well.

Unfortunately, there’s not much of this kind of reflection in “Shepherds for Sale.” Basham criticizes people who claim left-wing beliefs are synonymous with Christian faithfulness, but she frequently does the same thing with one coming from the right. While certain issues (such as abortion) are understandable and arguably justified, she tends to do that with nearly every topic. In the chapter on CRT, she gives the then-provost of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary grief for saying, “I’m going to struggle with racism and white supremacy ‘till the day I die and get a glorified body” because it suggests that “God is not capable” of getting rid of “unrighteousness.” Perhaps Hall is too pessimistic, but is believing that you will always struggle with sin now considered a left-wing position?  

But Basham’s weakest argument is framing the evangelicals she’s critiquing as being “bought” in one form or another (hence the title of the book). She rightly points out that activists are trying to flip evangelical Christians politically. Yet she rarely conclusively points to a single person or institution who she can demonstrate became politically left because of this money or activism. In fact, many of the examples she gives show the exact opposite. The National Religious Partnership for the Environment found evangelicals who already agreed with them as ones funding the EEN. Restore and Embrace the Journey already existed when Arcus started funding them. The After Party sought out left-wing money itself when it couldn’t find it from fellow evangelicals. The story of the Saddleback Church members being influenced by the Restoration Project conference is a good example of the kind of chain of causation this thesis needed more of.

When I asked Basham about this on the Religion Unplugged podcast, she pushed back with this: No one can know another person’s heart. As a result: 

1. The liberal drift within evangelicalism often happens after the introduction of these activist groups. 

2. A smoking gun is not required to make a reasonable inference.

3. Being “bought” can mean many different things, like status or respectability.. 

I’ve thought about this since she and I talked. And I don’t entirely agree. Correlation doesn’t equal causation, and the weight of the accusation should be in proportion to the evidence. There is undoubtedly influence in evangelicalism by left-wing activist groups and money and by right-wing activist groups and money, too.

But Basham goes further than that. She calls out individuals and institutions and repeatedly frames their left-wing views as necessarily “dupes or deceivers” of one form or another. She agrees she doesn’t know if these examples are “literally” bought and paid for but will only allow that they might be influenced by other negative motives, or — at best — fooled. 

Why can’t people ever simply have good-faith disagreements? She agrees in the introduction that such a thing is possible, but in practice largely ignores that possibility for the majority of the book. If conservatives like French have moved left, why can’t it be because he sincerely changed his mind for valid reasons? If movements like Revoice embrace LGBTQ+ views, why can’t it partly be because of something lacking in traditional evangelical churches for faithful gay Christians? That doesn’t make them right. It also doesn’t make them “dupes or deceivers.” 

There are other theories for why there’s been a leftward drift within evangelicalism. Consider the argument conservative Aaron Renn makes in his book, “Life in the Negative World”: Evangelical culture has long discouraged excellence in areas of life that lead to upward mobility, like the life of the mind. This means that as any individual evangelical rises in status, he finds himself more and more alone and having less and less in common with others. That means his primary influences will be nonevangelicals. Renn recently pointed to Trump’s 2024 VP pick J.D. Vance as an example of this, showing how the Ohio senator left the evangelical faith of his roots to become a Catholic like his more sophisticated college-educated friends. This shows how evangelical elites, and the wider church, can move apart without the elites having problematic motives.

There are a couple of reasons why this matters. The first is because, whether you share Basham’s views or not, a bad evangelical culture is bad for society given the numbers. And a culture that assumes everyone who deviates from the tribe’s accepted wisdom must be a villain or brainwashed is a bad culture. It’s a culture where love and fellowship are impossible and where the communal wrestling with truth is squashed. 

But it’s a problem especially if you agree with Basham that a leftward drift for evangelicalism is a bad thing. Because if it is, you want to actually solve the problem, which means getting the causes right. If the primary cause is pernicious agents buying influence, the solution is purging of the activists and sellouts with eternal vigilance ever after. But if Renn is right, the solution is to strengthen evangelical culture by not sabotaging its upwardly mobile members.

Can you do both? Absolutely. That requires you to be open-minded to the idea that dissent in your ranks might be fair-minded and worthy of consideration — something “Shepherds” actively discourages. 

This is exactly the kind of culture that will alienate many of its members most likely to be its best leaders. A Barna study showed that most Christians wrestle with doubts, but the difference between the ones who grow in their faith and those who leave is whether they wrestle with their doubts within a church community. Assuming that doubts and disagreements are due to deception or delusion will create a culture where openly discussing doubts is less likely.

“Shepherds for Sale” pushes the conversation on American evangelicalism forward both in important and unhelpful ways. Hopefully, enough people who engage with its ideas do so in such a way that the former has more lasting power than the latter.

“Shepherds for Sale” is on sale now wherever books are sold.

Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York City. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at his website josephholmesstudios.com.