Kevin Williamson on “Shepherds for Sale”: “Reviewing a book like this is like trying to argue with an avalanche—an avalanche of stupidity and error.”

Ouch! There are reviews, and then there are REVIEWS.

Kevin Williamson’s review of Megan Basham’s Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda is a REVIEW.

I haven’t really been following all the publicity surrounding Basham’s book. (It seems like most of the publicity is of Basham’s own making–straight from her X feed). But Williamson’s review at The Dispatch drew me in.

Here is a taste:

As a Catholic, I suppose I should try harder not to enjoy Protestant factional infighting as much as I do. But every time I read something as bog-bottom dumb as Megan Basham’s excruciatingly imbecilic new book, Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda, I am reminded of the poetic justice arising from American-style choose-your-own-adventure theology and exegesis: There never was a better advertisement for the benefits of maintaining as Magisterium… 

If you are in the market for an argument that Trump’s approach to immigration is the genuinely Christian one, then this is the book for you. If, on the other hand, you are not a self-moronizing cretin, maybe try Pope John Paul II. 

Reviewing a book like this is like trying to argue with an avalanche—an avalanche of stupidity and error, to be sure, but an avalanche all the same. I have the same problem with this book I had reviewing Alissa Quart’s similarly idiotic Bootstrapped: The author can make enough errors in a dozen words that the critic needs 400 words to correct them. And so one ends up writing an annotated companion to a work that was not worth reading in the first place, much less annotating. (If you would like a more conventional review of the book, please do check out Warren Cole Smith’s excellent contribution.) And while readers have often suspected otherwise, I do not generally get paid by the word.

Here is how the book is advertised: “Basham documents how progressive power brokers—from George Soros to the founder of eBay to former members of the Obama administration—set out to change the American church.” That is, of course, a rather different thing from the premise of the book’s title, and Basham does very little to document, or even to seriously argue, that there are a lot of American pastors who are “for sale,” and who have been corrupted by money from George Soros et al. In fact, she does very little even to document that Soros money, and what she does is the usual thing you see in second-rate right-wing outlets such as the Daily Wire (her online home) and Breitbart (the generally incompetent “journalism” of which she takes some pains to defend), which is to construct one of those cop-show murder walls with the red string connecting this and that: Soros gave money to this group, which gave a grant to that group, which did a project in partnership with this group, which has a board member who previously served with that other group, etc. There isn’t any question that Soros and his Open Society project hope to influence prominent institutions, including conservative-leaning churches and religious associations. Soros is engaged in a social change project, and that is what social change projects do. His ends are not generally ends that I share, but that doesn’t make it nefarious.

But Basham is one of those extraordinarily self-assured Protestants who believes that any major disagreement with her worldview must be a sign of sin, religious error, or personal intellectual corruption, who treat Scripture as self-evident and their own interpretive powers as inerrant.  That is by no means limited to religious issues per se: Christians who take a more activist view of, say, environmental issues come in for it, too. What kind of conservative Christian goes in for environmental stuff? Off the top of my head, there’s the one whose name is at the end of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind from Burke to Eliot. (How could the author of The Waste-Land fail to notice environmental degradation or to understand its religious significance?) But Basham seems to be limited in her religious reading to angry political partisans writing on social media...

Read the entire review here. Or wait for our review at Current. Our editorial staff tells me it is coming soon.