REVIEW: Shepherds for Sale?

Megan Basham’s theology is compromised and her history misguided

Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda by Megan Basham. Broadside Books, 2024. 352 pp., $32.99

In 1953 J. D. Matthews, the research director for Senator Joseph McCarthy’s committee for investigating communism, published a bombshell article in the right-wing magazine American Mercury. Titled “Reds in Our Churches,” Matthews’s article purported to show that hundreds of prominent Protestant ministers were communist sympathizers and allies of the Soviet Union.

Matthews’s article prompted a firestorm that forced his resignation from McCarthy’s committee. At a time when mainline church leaders were generally held in high esteem, many Americans could not believe that such respected members of the cloth as Methodist bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, president of the World Council of Churches, could be an ally to the communists. 

They were right. Oxnam was not a communist, nor were most of the other pastors Matthews named in his article. Oxnam was a man of the left who had questioned America’s use of the atomic bomb and even some of the nation’s stances in the Cold War. But in conflating Oxnam’s left-leaning, social justice advocacy with communism, Matthews betrayed an ignorance of the Social Gospel and the decades-long history of liberal Protestant peace activism and advocacy for labor unions and other causes of the left. Liberal Protestants’ interest in social justice and equality did not come from Marx; it came instead from Walter Rauschenbusch, who thought he acquired it from Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount.

Megan Basham’s Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda reminds me of Matthews’ seventy-year-old article. Like Matthews, Basham names a lot of names—including the names of clergy that most would never suspect of being stooges of the left or corrupt subversives. Like Matthews, Basham is convinced that left-wing organizations have coopted America’s clergy and used sympathetic ministers to smuggle their corrosive ideology into unsuspecting churches. But also like Matthews, Basham has made a fundamental category mistake: She has confused traditionally moderate evangelical social justice concerns with the platform of the Democratic left. Contrary to her claims, most of the allegedly left-leaning evangelical leaders she has selected for excoriation did not acquire their social ethics from the Democratic Party; they instead inherited it from mainstream American evangelical theology.

The people whom Basham, a politically conservative Southern Baptist, accuses of being closet leftists are not theological liberals. For the most part, they’re not even progressive evangelicals like Shane Claiborne or the editors of Sojourners magazine. Instead, most of them are biblical inerrantists, and many of them are gender complementarians. Few have publicly endorsed Democrats, and none of them are pro-choice. They are people like J. D. Greear, Russell Moore, and the late Tim Keller. They belong to organizations like the National Association of Evangelicals and centrist evangelical periodicals like Christianity Today.

Basham argues that these evangelical leaders and organizations have betrayed the cause by embracing left-leaning ideas about climate change, racial justice, immigration, and even homosexuality and abortion. But on closer inspection, on every one of these issues the people Basham targets are closer to the longstanding positions of traditional centrist evangelicalism than Basham is. It is not the evangelical leaders who have allowed their political ideology to warp their understanding of evangelical theology; it is, rather, Basham herself who has done so.

On immigration, for example, evangelical leaders have long supported a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, expanded immigration quotas for refugees, and policies that treat immigrants with dignity. The National Association of Evangelicals passed resolutions supporting at least some of these positions in 1995, 2006, and 2009, and the Southern Baptist Convention did so in 2011 and 2016. Evangelical pastors and theologians who advocate for immigrants or express concerns about Donald Trump’s rhetoric on this point are not recent converts to a leftist cause; instead, they reflect a historic evangelical concern for the rights and dignity of immigrants, including those who are undocumented. When Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush supported similar policies, this was not particularly controversial. But now that it has become a point of political contention, Basham uses it to brand evangelical advocates of a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants as leftists. 

Likewise, when it comes to climate change, many evangelicals have long held the position that Christians have a duty to be good environmental stewards of God’s earth. No less a conservative evangelical icon than Francis Schaeffer made this point in Pollution and the Death of Man, published in 1970. While theologically conservative evangelicals were never radical environmentalists, they did believe in what would eventually become known as “creation care.” When the National Association of Evangelicals began exhorting Christians in the early twenty-first century to take action to slow the pace of climate change, it was thoroughly in keeping with longstanding centrist evangelical views.

Basham’s charges of a pastoral leftward shift on abortion are even flimsier. None of the people she takes issue with on abortion have endorsed abortion rights, it turns out. Instead, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, they cautioned evangelicals not to conclude that their quest to save the unborn was over, and they encouraged evangelicals to expand their efforts to care for women facing crisis pregnancies in order to lower the abortion rate. For this, Basham accuses them of embracing a leftist agenda—but that response was thoroughly in keeping with the historic goals of the pro-life movement from the 1960s onward. 

I think that Basham is right to worry that pastors will be tempted to substitute politics for the gospel, or that evangelicals will be insufficiently vigilant in guarding against ungodly cultural influences on their thinking. I applaud her when she expresses frustration with pastors who are “letting culture rather than Scripture dictate the content of their teaching.” But the issues that Basham highlights are not the ones leading the evangelical church to deviate from God’s standards. In fact, on nearly every issue covered in this book, both the last half-century of evangelical articles in magazines such as Christianity Today and the last few decades of denominational and NAE resolutions line up closely with the views that Basham labels a “leftist agenda,” while her own views closely echo those presented on FOX News and the Republican Party in the Trump era.  

Basham has made the mistake of thinking that the contemporary Republican Party’s positions on immigration, race, and climate change are grounded in scripture, but she makes almost no effort to prove it. Instead, aside from a few brief verses used as chapter headings and as calls to action in the conclusion, Basham’s book is almost entirely devoid of scripture, and it does not present any theological arguments in favor of its position. Basham seems completely unconcerned by the fact that on nearly every issue she presents, her own views are directly opposed to the positions of most Christian leaders in the United States, including Catholic bishops, leading evangelical theologians, and other Christian thought leaders outside of partisan conservative circles. 

Christian reformations have been led before by those who were willing to challenge church leaders who lost sight of the gospel. But in the past, the burden of proof was always on those reformers to show that their understandings of the gospel reflected scriptural principles. Basham’s book instead relies on an appeal to common sense. 

She says that “dismantling white privilege” and “lobbying for fossil fuel regulations” are “causes that no plain reading of Scripture would demand”—but she makes no attempt to justify that statement. Actually, a good theological analysis of the creation mandate to care for God’s creation (Genesis 2:15) and a systematic exegesis of passages that talk about God’s concern for justice for the oppressed (Psalm 72:1-4) and God’s call to people “of every tribe and nation” to participate in his redemptive story (Revelation 7:9) might suggest to some people that a “plain reading of Scripture” might have implications for how we think about “white privilege” and fossil fuels. But Basham doesn’t engage with this theology.

Instead, she says that since “this book is not a theological treatise,” she does not have to “start at square one” by providing scriptural justification for what she assumes her readers already believe. She assumes that her readers “are sensible enough to know that no nation can long remain a nation that does not police its borders.” 

Yet I think that a careful reading of scripture will show that what Basham considers the plain truth of Christianity is more a reflection of contemporary populist conservatism than it is of any historic message of Jesus or church teaching. 

Basham seems to take for granted that mainstream news reports cannot be trusted—which means that on many issues her views of the science or of the facts will differ markedly from those who are willing to trust the New York Times to report accurate information. In Basham’s view, climate science is questionable, COVID masks and vaccine mandates were harmful, and some of the leading accusations of sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention were fallacious. She assumes that her readers will agree—and that they’ll therefore also agree that pastors who respected climate science, asked their churches to comply with mask mandates, and called for alleged abusers to be held accountable are either dupes or wolves in sheep’s clothing. 

Basham gives strong hints in her concluding chapter that she sees a “civil war” emerging in evangelical churches over these issues. As she says, “open war is upon us whether we would risk it or not,” and it’s time to fight. 

Unfortunately, for those who take their gospel from contemporary populist conservatism, this will probably be a persuasive call. The last few annual meetings of the Southern Baptist Convention have been sharply polarized over some of the issues that Basham highlights, and I suspect that she hopes that her book will serve to mobilize the conservative side in those battles. 

But I hope that people who are tempted to enlist in the fight Basham recommends will instead spend time with the words of Jesus. If they do, they may discover that the most damaging worldly cultural influences on the contemporary church are not the concerns of the left—whether climate science, anti-racism, or COVID health protocols—but are instead the sins of the heart that Jesus warned about. These sins manifest themselves in evils that transcend party lines and that include such things as divorce (Matt. 19:4-9), covetousness (Matt. 6:24), and a lack of concern for people in need, even when they’re of a different race or nationality (Luke 10:25-37). The best way to protect the church from these sins is not to go to battle against suspected subversives among evangelical leaders but instead to cultivate a greater love for the Lord and for one’s neighbor (Matt. 22:36-40).

If that happens, a genuine revival in the church can occur. It won’t be the type of revival that Basham calls for. But it will be a reformation that leads us back to a historic evangelical gospel-centered theology and the principles of scripture—even if those principles differ markedly from the views presented on FOX News or in the Republican Party platform.

Daniel K. Williams is a historian working at Ashland University and the author of The Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship. He is a Contributing Editor at Current