Culture Friday: Taking difficult questions

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 30th of August, 2024.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

It’s Culture Friday, and we have a special guest today, a guest with deep roots at WORLD and foundational ones with this very program.

MONTAGE: [Clips of Megan hosting]

Megan Basham. She’s a culture reporter for the Daily Wire and the Morning Wire podcast, and she’s a New York Times bestselling author. Her book is titled: Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda.

Good morning! It’s been a minute!

MEGAN BASHAM: It has! This is a little surreal, but I love it. It feels good to be in the old stomping grounds.

EICHER: Let’s talk about this book, because it really does fit into the cultural conversation, and I’m sure I’m understating that it’s kind of been the cultural conversation in the evangelical world.

But here’s where I don’t worry that I’m overstating things: That this same evangelical world has become divided right now between Megan detractors and Megan partisans.

Do you think the premise is right, do you think it’s healthy, and is that what you set out to do when you wrote this book?

BASHAM: Well, it wasn't what I set out to do, but I will say that I did know on some level that I was kicking a hornet's nest, and I expected there to be a reaction. I didn't necessarily expect it to be as vociferous as it has been, but I think part of what you're seeing with the Megan partisans is a lot of people who feel like what I have written reflects their experience. So, for those people, the book really rings true, and they're reacting to that. And then, I also think you have some detractors—and obviously I wrote the book, so I am a partisan for the book—but I think a lot of those detractors tend to be the people who are either in some of these institutions or affiliated in some way with those institutions that I critique, and there's a tendency to want to hunker down in a defensive mode against what I write about in the book.

EICHER: You quote favorably another of our Culture Friday guests and that’s Rosaria Butterfield, the Christian author and former LGBT activist. You know that she once practiced what was known as “pronoun hospitality,” the idea being that we concede the point about how a gender-confused person chooses to identify.

Rosaria used to do that, but then very publicly renounced it as wrong and corrected herself.

So, let me frame up the next question this way: Every week, and you remember this, I know, we come on this program and correct our factual errors on the air. It’s my least favorite part of the program, and that’s coming just a few minutes from now.

But let me ask you this: Even friendly critical reviews of your book, and I’m thinking of another professional colleague writing in First Things, goes into detail about errors in the book. Here’s the question: Do you have any regrets at all about errors in your book and will you follow Rosaria and say, hey, I’m wrong?

BASHAM: Well, it depends in the sense of how I'm saying that I'm wrong. So, certainly, one of the benefits of having, what I have to think, is the most scrutinized book in evangelicalism for years, and having it sifted over with such a fine tooth comb is that people have found some genuine errors, and I've acknowledged some of those. And certainly I want to correct those, so I have a list. And it's been very convenient for me that people have brought them forward for me, so I haven't had to do a lot of work on that front. Some things like, I did get a federal contract that I thought covered one year actually covers 10 years, and I mistook where a couple of people graduated from seminary. So, there's legitimate things like that. And of course, I regret that, and a plan to fix it going forward in future editions.

So, yeah, but there has also been some claim of error that I disagree with. I'm thinking of people who will say something like, “Well, this author made a statement that depicted getting a COVID vaccination to being a pro-life issue. And I say that they draw an equivalency between being pro life and getting that COVID vaccine. And I think that was an entirely legitimate analysis to make.” And so some critics have said, “Well, that author also said in that piece...” I'm not drawing a moral equivalency. So what you would say is a quick disclaimer line, and for a number of reasons, I reject that.

And I would say that if you think about if you have a friend who is frequently making a lot of comments that are derogatory about people who are ethnic minorities, but then says, “but I'm not being racist,” you tend to discount that quick disclaimer of I'm not being racist because the totality of their commentary is racist. And so we don't ignore that in that case. And I think that in a lot of these critiques that have been brought forward, that's what's being done, is that the full breadth of the context clearly communicates one message, and there's been objections to acknowledging that communication. And so, you know, in that case, I'm not quite sure what to do with that, other than continue to have this public debate and public discussion.

BROWN: So Megan, obviously we’re friends and colleagues, but professional colleagues as journalists and we ask each other hard questions.

But I did read several of those critical reviews and there was a common theme I want to ask you about: That is, that you apply a strict standard that can’t be applied to yourself. In other words, you don’t interpret others the way you want to be interpreted. And that you’ve violated the 9th commandment, bearing false witness. Some say it outright, some say you’re on the borderline. But how do you respond to that?

BASHAM: Well, all I can say, Myrna, is that I disagree with that. Part of what I saw in some of those critics is they would say, “Well, look, this citation doesn't exactly communicate this particular claim.” And I can give you an example of someone who brought up Tim Keller, and in the book, I say that Tim Keller found voting for Trump uniquely discrediting in a way that he did not find voting for Biden. And this is also a work of opinion. It's a work of journalism, but also opinion. And they're saying that that's an error, and obviously I have to disagree with that. That's not an error. That's my analysis.

And I think when I present not just the citation in the book that this critic was dissecting but the full breadth of the context of the commentary, and in that case, it was Keller's promotion of Michael Wear, who was a former Obama staffer who became a major architect in that Evangelicals for Biden movement, and he was the head of a political action committee that was buying advertising during the 2020 election in swing states to detract from the Trump campaign. So that was obviously a political operative who Tim Keller was happy to promote and praise. The Gospel Coalition did the same. So when you look at his essays, a particular essay in The New Yorker, where he asked whether evangelicalism could survive Donald Trump, and you combine that with some of this other praise and promotion of someone like Michael Wear, I don't think it was beyond the pale to say that Keller found voting for Trump uniquely discrediting.

And then, there were additional items that I didn't even put in the book, because you can't put in everything. And so part of the critique has been, “Well, yes, the thing she said was technically true, but we think she should have used this other support for it.” So it seems to me like we're trying to get away from the actual truth of the argument to more of this nitpicking kind of thing. And I'm fine to have that discussion. You can feel that I could have used a better or a different citation, but the fact of the matter is these were the comments that Keller made, and these were the people that he praised and promoted.

BROWN: The part of your book many people find most compelling, most of your detractors ignored, that is your Jesus story. Before Jesus/after Jesus. You say that testimony is key to understanding the entire book. What do you mean by that?

BASHAM: Well, I can tell you, it was a little scary for me to put my testimony out in that way, because I have friends like you and Nick who may not know this part of my history. I wrote about my years as a prodigal party girl on the campus of Arizona State University, and how that landed me in the clink a couple of times before I came to Jesus. And you know, that's a vulnerable thing to put that out into the world.

But I wanted people to know it, because there has been such a cottage industry of books, particularly coming from the political left, that attack the church. And I'm thinking of books like Kristin DuMez’s Jesus and John Wayne, or a book from Politico writer Tim Alberta called The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory. And there's been a lot of articles like this as well, and it has seemed to me like their purpose is to deconstruct the church. And I wanted to be very clear that that has not been my purpose, that I love the church, and this was not an effort to deconstruct or to damage the church. It is really something to say I love what the local church and what larger Christian institutions have done in my life, for my sanctification process. And I want to ensure that all of these institutions and churches and the leaders who are speaking in them maintain that strong Gospel message for the sake of the next Megan who needs to come out of that sinful lifestyle and doesn't need confusing messages. She needs that strong clarity of you are a new creation in Christ, and you need to take hold of that and stop looking for how you have been harmed and stop manufacturing grievance in your life. But instead, take hold of gratitude for the way you have been saved and for these priceless gifts of the process of sanctification and all of these Christian leaders who poured into me. So I just want to protect all of that.

EICHER: I want to end where we began: And that’s with the idea of dividing into camps, Megan detractors and Megan partisans, falling into one camp or another, and I asked basically whether that was an intended or unintended consequence. So let me return to that thought and ask this way: What do you hope your book will accomplish?

BASHAM: Well, I did have a sense that the book would create, at a minimum, some discussion. Let's put it that way. But I think when we talk about division and unity, we can't unify when we're shying away from being honest about what's really happening. And I think that's what had been going on for a number of years. And I think that it's like a marriage. And when these issues are going unaddressed, you feel it in the relationships. And I think that's what had been going on for a long time in evangelicalism. That we felt these fault lines, as Voddie put it in his bestselling book, and that we were trying to avoid that conversation. And I don't think you can have real reconciliation and unity unless we finally sort of acknowledged openly, here's what's happening. So, that was part of what I wanted to do, is to really have these discussions: Okay, where are these influences in the church coming from? Should we be allowing secular left foundations and their money to set the agenda for some of our institutions? Is it important to know when that's happening? Do we all agree? Are we on the same page when it comes to how the church should be involved in political questions regarding immigration or climate change or gun control or what have you? So, that's one thing. Is I wanted to create a space to really have these conversations openly and with clarity.

And then the second thing, I really did want to do was arm people who have felt discomfort and they have felt that something is going wrong, and in a large way, they have been dismissed from so many that are in evangelical leadership. And I didn't want to do it in a contentious or combative way, but I wanted to acknowledge for those people that these are real concerns and they shouldn't be dismissed.

BROWN: New York Times bestselling author Megan Basham, Daily Wire reporter, and WORLD alumna.

BASHAM: I’m so grateful for you guys for having me. You didn't have to do this, but thank you!

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