In the end, Basham desires not to tear the church down but to build it up. She desires to see the pure gospel truth that saved her soul taken up and preached without compromise, without apology. It is that saving gospel, undiluted by political pandering and corporate double-speak, that “still brings dead girls to life.”

Sometimes, a book comes along that creates irreconcilable differences between sociopolitical factions. Other times, a book comes along that diagnoses them. Megan Basham’s Shepherds for Sale is the second kind of book. According to its critics, it’s a shrill, dissident right propaganda screed, designed to foment civil war within the evangelical church. But to anyone who hasn’t spent the past decade in a particular kind of echo chamber, Basham’s thesis will ring true: Civil war has been upon evangelicals for a long time, whether it was welcomed or not.

To say the book has hit a nerve would be an understatement. Its heated reception was inevitable, given its audaciously wide scope; chapter topics include antiracism, the #ChurchToo movement, Covid, LGBTQ issues, and more. Much of the material was not new to me, because I have been independently logging these rifts in real time, not just among evangelicals but within my own Anglican tradition. (Parts of the LGBTQ chapter follow my First Things article on the many errors of the “Side B” movement.)

Despite the juicy title, not everyone in the book’s large cast of evangelical characters will emerge as a pure heretical sell-out. This has been a common critique, but Basham herself pre-empts it in the introduction, where she acknowledges that people’s motives can be complex, and degrees of compromise can vary. As she’s documented, big leftist money has certainly changed hands, yet not every commentator will follow David French to the point of stumping for Kamala Harris, and not every pastor will follow Andy Stanley to the point of guiding his flock over a cliff into blatant heresy. Even so, there remain many ways for a “shepherd” to be stubbornly blind.

Basham’s highest-profile rebuttal so far has come from megachurch pastor J. D. Greear, who appears in several chapters. The chapter on “critical race prophets” details how he participated in a witch-hunt against members of First Baptist Church Naples who rejected a black pastoral candidate. Their swift and ruthless excommunication as racists, cheered on by multiple high-profile Southern Baptist voices like Greear’s, is the most shocking injustice Basham documents in her book. Greear pleads ignorance in his long complaint, claiming that he accepted the account of church leaders “in good faith.” In a detailed reply, Basham responded, “No. One cannot in good faith publicly label ordinary members of a church racists without clear evidence.” Their exchange vividly demonstrates why the loss of institutional trust among rank-and-file evangelicals is so profound, and most likely irrevocable.

One way to crystallize Basham’s thesis is that for far too long, certain “elite” evangelicals have seen themselves as a kind of Protestant magisterium, delivering wisdom to the rank and file while mutually refraining from in-house criticism. Meanwhile, they themselves have uncritically deferred to people who claim “expert” authority, whether on behalf of an “oppressed” group (immigrants, women, black people, gay people) or on behalf of science (environmental science, epidemiology). Not every member of the new magisterium has been equally vulnerable on every issue, but all have sought approval in the eyes of their preferred experts, and all have bought into some manifestation of the leftist logic that if one doesn’t subscribe to a particular political solution, one must not care about the problem it claims to solve. Whether as dupes or as willing collaborators, they opened all manner of doors that should have been firmly shut, and ordinary churchgoers have reaped the consequences—

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