Engaging the Culture
Jason Cherry
Sep 2, 2024
Megan Basham has written a deeply sourced book about how the political left has been pouring money and influence into evangelicalism for decades. There are initiatives, political action groups, conferences, books, and celebrity pastors that have introduced leftist political policies into the church. Rank and file evangelicals first exposure to the politicization of their church is usually through a sloganeering campaign: Supporting environmentalism is “loving the least of these”; supporting BLM is a “gospel issue”; wearing a mask is “love of neighbor”; supporting open borders is “practicing hospitality,” Love requires “pronoun hospitality”¹ towards transgender people.
For several years, evangelicals have witnessed their church leaders wield this new jargon and wondered if there is a substratum influence in the church. Basham’s thesis is that many church leaders are letting the culture rather than Scripture dictate the content of their teaching. There has been a well-funded and intentional effort to influence Christian churches, pastors, and institutions to support Democratic party politics. Many aspects of the evangelical order—denominations, churches, pastors, coalitions, seminaries, networks, publishers, journals—have been reduced to a program that confuses the Kingdom of God with socialistic progress.
Basham’s book has garnered strong reactions that roughly fit into three camps. First, there are those flummoxed by Basham’s research because they support, in part or in full, the “leftist agenda.” In the worst case, it is those who have received money from George Soros or Pierre Omidyar and never intended it to be common knowledge and they have a great deal to lose. Second, some are hostile to Basham’s book who have not themselves received money, but have been steered, at least in part, toward the “leftist agenda.”² Third, there are those bothered by Basham’s thesis because their church, their favorite celebrity preacher, or their seminary, has been compromised. These are the regular church members who grieve to see the church influenced by atheistic politics.
As riveting and needed as Basham’s book is, we have to acknowledge the pitfalls associated with both the one who writes and the one who reads such a book. We must be careful with other people’s reputations. We must not claim more about people than we know. We must not impute motives beyond the evidence. In the introduction, Basham acknowledges that the several categories of Shepherds aren’t equal. There are dupes and deceivers. There is organic influence and orchestrated influence. There are wolves, cowards, mercenaries, and fools. Many people are listed in the book along with many institutions.³ Perhaps the book’s biggest weakness is it could have been more scrupulous and careful about the definitions of these categories and who belongs to which label. There is a big difference between a wolf and a dupe. They don’t deserve the same estimation. Yet, Basham’s book on the whole is a responsible handling of a difficult topic. The strength of the book is that Basham has done her homework.
Basham’s point isn’t that Christians should rabidly support Republicans. Rather, she is revealing how progressive priorities have bullied their way into the church. The claim that shepherds are for sale has a spectrum of meanings. In some cases, it is the case that left-wing foundations create evangelical front groups that get their hooks on church leaders. In other cases, shepherds are enticed to support leftist politics because of the positive media attention, the rewards of a think tank, or cultural adulation.
Chapter One is about how left-wing think tanks influenced Christians to support the environmentalism movement. The Clinton Foundation and The Rockefeller Foundation funneled money into evangelical front groups with names like Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN). The hope was to entice high-profile evangelical leaders to talk about these issues and convince legislators that evangelicals support green initiatives. Rick Warren and Richard Sterns signed on to green initiatives, as well as institutions such as the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), Christianity Today, and the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, which represents over 180 Christian colleges.⁴
Chapter Two is about the Gang of 8 immigration legislation that wanted open borders. This bill would have given 11 million illegal immigrants legal status and further incentivized illegal immigration. The National Immigration Forum (NIF), which is a well-funded NGO that receives financial support from George Soros, partnered with the NAE to create a shell group, the Evangelical Immigration Table (EIT), that’s explicit purpose was to pass legislation, especially the Gang of 8 legislation. More recently it lobbied against Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy that was continued by the Biden administration. They backed the Senator Langford bill, which was similar to the Gang of 8 bill. The goal is to create the allusion that evangelicals support these measures, thus convincing lawmakers that their evangelical constituents want these laws. The immigration issue reveals that for some of the shepherds for sale, it's not just about policy. It’s about partisan politics. Russell Moore and J.D. Greear repeatedly and publicly cast Trump’s border policies as wicked and un-Christian. But when the Obama and Biden administrations used similar tactics, they kept silent.⁵
These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. You will have to read the book to get the rest. But be warned, if you are looking for a book that merely tosses around vague political sentiments to satisfy a pre-determined emotional feeling, then this isn’t the book for you. Be prepared for details, examples, and citations. And that leads us to consider two other books arguing with a very different method and from a very different perspective.
Books by Russell Moore and Tim Alberta
Basham’s Shepherds for Sale makes the recent books of Tim Alberta and Russell Moore not just beside the point but almost as though they were never the point at all. Tim Alberta and Russell Moore write with a particularly pointy political emphasis that resembles the condescending and divisive tone common in the secular academy.⁶ The Moore and Alberta books function as an updated version of Kristin Du Mez’s 2020 book, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.⁷ Du Mez’s book is written from a progressive, feminist perspective and condemns Billy Graham as guilty of the heinous sins of Christian Nationalism and patriarchy. She argues that these cultural shifts within evangelicalism helped pave the way for the widespread evangelical support for Donald Trump. Moore and Alberta are running a similar political play that treats haters of Donald Trump with deference, even adoration.⁸ They argue that professing Christians should disentangle their faith from partisan politics, especially from Donald Trump because of his hateful rhetoric.⁹
There is inherent instability in an argument condemning others for political machinations that itself is standing knee-deep in the very same machinations.(10) For example, when Russell Moore’s Christianity Today receives funding from the Lilly Endowment¹¹ he regards that as a pure transaction of trade. When a blue-collar, churchgoing, lower-middle-class person is drawn to Trump’s policy to cut government regulations, that is a selfish quest for political power. Moore’s book is just another stale maneuver of the cultural wasteland, the sort of power play that seeks power by saying no one else should have it.¹² It's cunning and ruthless. Even when warnings against lust for power are obviously applicable, it isn’t particularly cogent in the hands of Alberta and Moore, who ignore a large number of Christians to whom their squabbles do not in the least apply.
Alberta and Moore’s tired tropes of never-Trumpism are merely braying back the hee-haw of the donkey, a very political and well-funded donkey. Specifically, Moore and Alberta make three heuristic mistakes.
First, they misunderstand the battlefield
According to their moral calculation, those who reluctantly vote for Trump are impure. Those, like Russell Moore, who proudly attended Barack Obama’s White House Christmas party, are pure. Obama is granted an intrinsic integrity that contributes to human flourishing—but those who oppose Democratic policies are imputed with vile motives. The assumption is that Trump is a moral monster because he uses hateful and immature rhetoric, in contrast to Obama who is dignified, nuanced, and academic. Alberta is impressed with Barack Obama's intellectual background and his reputation as an academic. Obama is portrayed as a highly intellectual and introspective figure, whose academic credentials and thoughtful approach to politics set him apart from Trump.
Many evangelicals are noticing the corrosive political dynamics in evangelical churches, especially since COVID. Basham has written a book that proves this influence is coming from the Left. Shepherds for Sale offers a meaningful contribution to evangelical debates about political influence in the church. Moore and Alberta’s books, in contrast, have attempted to redefine evangelical political action so that it excludes support for Trump. They are further evidence of how political and feverish those debates have become. This is why Moore and Alberta’s books are unconvincing. These books are marked by the very same politicization that they accuse evangelicals of having. Are we supposed to take seriously the people who embody all the blots they criticize? Their books are a display of political allegiance framed primarily not of what they are for—but what they are against. The implicit aspects, however, are clear.
Moore and Alberta write with contempt and offer vague solutions. Moore says the issues compromising the witness of the evangelical church are “Political fusion with Trumpism, Christian nationalism, white-identity backlash, the dismissing of issues such as abuse as ‘social justice’ secularism, and several others.”¹³ It doesn’t take a proponent of Christian Nationalism to see that Moore’s chapter on the subject reads like he has not engaged any of the books defending it. The problem with the picture Moore paints is that he never attempts to understand those who think differently than he does. This is how you get rhetoric that says when evangelicals vote for Democrats they selflessly promote social justice; when they vote for Republicans they selfishly promote cultural wars with an untoward interest in political power.¹⁴
Moore concludes that the reason young evangelicals are leaving the church is because the church no longer believes in its own moral teachings. This is a dangerous claim if the reason young evangelicals leave the church is something entirely different, namely, the church looks just like the world. For example, Basham documents how the pro-life movement has been redefined. Brett McCracken is pro-life because he opposes the second amendment. Russell Moore is pro-life because he lobbies for illegal immigrants to get amnesty. Karen Swallow Prior is pro-life because she wears a mask. Ben Low is pro-life because he supported Obama. Beth Moore is pro-life because she opposes Donald Trump.¹⁵
Second, they misunderstand where on the battlefield they are standing
Much of these books are spent on a sweeping, straw-manned account of those evangelicals who “celebrate” the hateful rhetoric of Donald Trump. Moore says the sundry evangelicals who, for varying reasons, vote for Donald Trump, have compromised their ability to be “prophetic voices of truth and justice.”¹⁶ Alberta and Moore tend to condense the diverse “supporters” of Trump into one amalgamated archfoe, a hideous chimera rather like Bunyon’s Apollyon with scales like fish, wings like a dragon, feet like a bear, and fire and smoke out of his belly.
The Moore/Alberta slant is that republican politicians are leveraging the church for political aims. There is a sinister scheme driving evangelicals to prefer Republican candidates. Alberta claims that going back to the late twentieth century, Christians opposed pornography, homosexuality, and abortion, not for biblical reasons but to “satisfy the lowest common denominator of their socially conservative constituency.”¹⁷ It’s jaw-dropping to read Moore and Alberta when there is a verifiable history that demonstrates the exact opposite of what they claim. Moore and Alberta are blinkered by their political ideology.
It is the Communist Party that has intentionally infiltrated the church for political reasons for over one hundred years, a history that is not dependent on speculation.¹⁸ W. Cleon Skousen’s painstakingly researched book, The Naked Communist: Exposing Communism and Restoring Freedom (1958) outlines the patient strategies of the Communists to remake the world by taking control of schools and churches. Paul Kengor’s book, The Devil and Karl Marx, documents with real research—not speculation—how the Communist Party USA duped the mainline Protestant churches. Herb Romerstein, who died in 2013, was America’s foremost living expert on Communism. He scripted many of the Venona Papers. Romerstein was asked which particular group the Communists had the most success duping in the United States. He answered that it was the religious left. They were the biggest suckers of them all. There is a real, historically documented attempt of the Left to co-op evangelicals for political purposes. Moore and Alberta’s tribalism displays no awareness of this history. They don’t factor into their analysis that evangelicals are going to react to these real threats.
Whatever one’s opinion of the character and rhetoric of Donald Trump, the never-Trumper arguments are not responding to a meaningful threat. The country has never been at less threat for a President to become a tyrant than if Donald Trump were re-elected. Trump can’t cross the street without being indicted. He can’t go to a rally without being shot. He can’t deregulate Health and Human Services without being stonewalled by the bureaucrats who might deregulate. A person doesn’t have to love Donald Trump to see that Moore and Alberta have created a fantasy nemesis as the composite for collective fears and anxieties with little connection to reality. They dismiss opposing viewpoints as the manifestation of an irrational phobia when their own position against Donald Trump is an irrational phobia.
There is where Megan Basham’s book stands in stark contrast to Moore and Alberta. She documents “the manipulation of Church leaders who claim that to stand where the Bible stands is ‘political,’ yet not accepting their view on some issue where biblical application is disputable is somehow—even when they’re pressing you to lobby for legislative remedies—paradoxically not political. Republicans who speak of how their faith prompts them to vote for a certain candidate are grasping for power. Democrats who do the same are illustrating faithfulness in the public sphere.”¹⁹
Part of the misunderstanding is that of unfairly applied weights and measures on the standards used to judge the character of public officials. The argument from Moore and Alberta is that Christians can’t vote for Donald Trump because he is a moral monster. What are we to make of this claim? What would it look like to be morally and politically consistent with this claim?
Answering that question requires answering another. What is character? A politician’s character is determined by their personal behavior, their moral principles, and their political actions. One must first evaluate a politician’s character along these lines. Second, they must ask, “Compared to what?” The Christians who voted for Trump understand his moral defects. But are voters really to assume that Trump’s character, as salacious as it is, is worse than, say, Barack Obama or Joseph Biden? Biden has been accused of sexual assault,²⁰ protects abortion access, expands LGBTQ power, and reduces religious liberty protections.²¹ Obama used the IRS to target political opponents,²² supported sodomite marriage, allowed the Muslim Brotherhood input into foreign policy,²³ enabled the persecution of Christians,²⁴ and was the most pro-abortion president in U.S. history until Biden.
Basham explains, “Let’s be clear, no one cast a ballot for Trump because he committed adultery or because he bragged in 2005 about grabbing women’s private parts. Nor was the legal protection of adultery or lechery a feature of the Trump campaign’s platform. In contrast, Clinton and Biden did promise voters that electing them would allow the butchery to continue. They did make it part of their platforms, and a significant number of voters cast ballots for them based on those promises. Given this, which vote is more morally compromising for the Christian—the one that places power in the hands of those who promise to allow the innocent to be put to death or the one that vests power in those who promise to make a way to rescue the innocent.”²⁵
Here is the point. It is a plausible Christian position to be cautious about voting for a man with Donald Trump’s moral record but only if those cautioning against Trump are even more cautious about voting for people with the character of Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, and Joseph Biden. Moore and Alberta’s lack of moral and political consistency reveals it’s not really about character. It’s about partisan politics. Moore and Alberta promote a political agenda that is intolerant of Christians who reject it. Moore, for example, lobbied for open borders, among other Democratic policies. He is also the editor of evangelicalism’s flagship magazine where “100% of the political donations from 2015-2022 by staff members at Christianity Today… went to Democrats.”²⁶ Basham writes of Tim Keller, who made similar never-Trumper arguments as Moore and Alberta, “Though only a handful of staffers at Keller’s church network and preacher-training ministry have donated to political campaigns since 2015, those who did, donated frequently, and according to Federal Election Commission records, gave exclusively to Democrats.”²⁷
Third, they mis-divide the battlefield
They make the Bazian error when they propagate what they claim to oppose, namely a Trump-centric view of the world. They are contributing to a Trump-centric view of the world by sorting evangelicals into camps for or against Trump. It’s almost like they’ve forgotten that God rather than Trump is at the center of meaning.
The cultural divide today isn’t really about Donald Trump. It is between those who grasp for unreality and those searching for reality. Even outside the church, there are unbelievers thirsty for moral sanity. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Christian conversion encourages glimpses and visions of the opportunity for gospel witness among those who seek what C.S. Lewis calls, “the Normal.” Some oppose the deconstruction of family, life, and law. They regard the stable, objective realities of God’s world and stand ready to learn the Transcendent framework for distinguishing moral ideas from immoral ones.
The sociological divide is between those who see, agree with, and love the world as God made it versus those who can’t see, agree with, or love the world as God made it. It is between those who reinforce reality and those redefining it, which raises a question for Moore and Alberta: Since reality is not as secularists tell us it is, how can Christians compromise with, let alone join them? The effect of these books is to open evangelicals up to the possibility of voting for Democratic politicians, which places Moore and Alberta as further evidence of the Basham thesis.
None of this is to excuse a lust for power if it has manifested in evangelical support of Trump. But if support for Trump is as bad as Russell and Alberta claim, then how much worse is evangelical support for the Democratic Party, which is as radically pro-abortion as it can possibly be?²⁸ Hating Donald Trump can’t explain everything, especially for Christians. Basham‘s book, though not a direct interaction with Moore‘s and Alberta’s books, highlights that not only are the books by Moore and Alberta self-refuting, but those Christians tempted to affirm the Moore/Alberta arguments need to first understand how hypocrisy undermines an argument. For example, Moore approvingly quotes Robert P. Jones, who claims, “white Christian churches” are “responsible for constructing and sustaining a project to protect white supremacy.” Readers are left wondering why they are supposed to oppose the rhetoric of Donald Trump and approve of the slander of Robert Jones.²⁹
Now What?
Moore concludes each chapter with advice on how to counter the described problem. For example, chapter two is called, “Losing our Authority.” Moore, without any hint of irony, claims the church has surrendered its authority by aspiring to political power. The chapter ends with the following suggestions for action: Maintain Attention, Tell the Truth, Avoid Foolish Controversies, Don’t Self-Censor, Question Authority, and Inhabit the Bible. It is not the fundamental meaning of these vague statements that are false. But there is a particular falsification of the statements themselves arising from the slant of regarding everything only in relation to the progressive political perspective. It’s a tactic that crowds out the Truth.
If we need a political theology sensitive to the variations of change in the world, we also need one that can transcend the myopic politics of the next election. Thus, the primary political platform of all Christians is “Christ is King!” Earthly politics is in its nature a secondary and dependent thing. But Moore and Alberta treat politics as the primary and independent thing, as if Democratic policies are absolute. Such a conception of what is primary lacks the metaphysical finality that is proper in the church.
All three books—Basham’s, Moore’s, and Alberta’s—embody the problems that result when politics becomes a person’s totalizing reality. Each book has a deeply personal, professional, and political investment in exposing the other side as wayward and no investment in finding what makes the two sides alike. There is a natural tendency in books like these to obscure common beliefs, convictions, and concerns. Yet the sweeping assertions of Moore and Alberta’s books leave readers asking different questions than the copiously researched book by Basham. To Moore and Alberta, the discerning reader asks “Why should I believe what you say?” To Basham, the reader asks, “What should I faithfully do with this well-researched information?”
G.K. Chesterton said that only by explaining things in their simplicity can we correct their complexity.³⁰ There is no way out of the political tangle without increasing the proportion of Christians who are curious about why so many evangelical institutions are taking money from secular political groups—groups that hate the Christian’s summa political principle, “Christ is King!” That’s why Basham’s book matters. If Moore and Alberta take readers into the abyss of irony and contradiction, Basham takes the reader out by shining light on the echopractic paradox of Christian institutions becoming like the secularists that fund them.
Conclusion
On the whole, Shepherds for Sale is an original, yet disheartening read. It answers a lot of questions and raises others. The broader question that is beyond the scope of Basham’s book is this: Why are evangelical institutions so susceptible to being manipulated by ideologies that hate Christ?
The answer is knotty, but it starts with the history of American Christianity. The one binding integration point of evangelicalism is subjectivism.³¹ The integration of conversionism, “God spoke to me” spirituality, anti-clericalism, anti-creedalism, and the so-called gospel-centered culture, is a porous foundation to defend against an intentional, well-funded, devilish, and politically obsessed ideology.
¹ This phrase was used by J.D. Greer.
² Basham’s book describes, rather than creates, a divide in evangelicalism. Gavin Ortlund is a pastor named in the book who has resisted Basham’s claims in a spicy back and forth. Basham’s point of referencing Ortlund was that he used his large platform to convince Christians to support environmentalism. Ortlund claims he was misrepresented. All the back and forth between the two, when combined with Ortlund’s original climate change video promoting “unity” on the scientific consensus of climate change, vindicates Basham’s modest point regarding Ortlund, which is that he is an example of someone who promotes climate change. Disagreement is not slander and Ortlund’s alleged example of being misunderstood by Basham does not discredit the rest of the book. Bethel McGrew points out that Basham has a few “lapses in rigor” that “provide unnecessary excuses for bad-faith critics to miss the forest while fixating on a few leaves of one tree.” McGrew says that the bad faith critics operate with a “double standard is undeniable when reviewers obsessively pick apart these sorts of imprecisions while turning a blind eye to truly egregious misrepresentations by an ‘approved’ figure such as Russell Moore.” https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2024/08/how-the-evangelical-elite-failed-their-flock
³ Megan Basham, Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda (Broadside, 2024), xxi-xxvi.
⁴ Megan Basham, Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda (Broadside, 2024), 1-30.
⁵ Megan Basham, Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda (Broadside, 2024), 31-50.
⁶ Russell Moore writes, “Many evangelicals have traded the Sermon on the Mount for the sloganeering of political tribalism, and nowhere is this more evident than in the embrace of Donald Trump. The cost of this exchange is a crisis of credibility that has undermined our witness to the world” (54). He also says, “It's not just a matter of political differences; it's a matter of whether we are willing to be prophetic voices of truth and justice, even when it costs us something. Supporting a leader who embodies the antithesis of Christ-like humility and compassion is a betrayal of our mission” (78). Russell Moore, Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America (B&H Publishing Group, 2023).
⁷ Kristin Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (Liveright, an imprint of W.W. Norton, 2020).
⁸ For a refutation of the most stubbornly persistent cultural unreality of the last four years, click here.
⁹ Russell Moore writes, “The hateful and immature rhetoric that has become a hallmark of Trump's public persona is not just a political problem; it is a spiritual crisis. When evangelicals excuse or even celebrate such behavior, we betray the very message of love and grace that we are called to embody” (91). He also says, “By aligning ourselves with a leader whose words are often cruel and divisive, we risk becoming desensitized to the destructive power of such language. The normalization of hateful rhetoric among evangelicals is a grave danger to our witness and to the health of our communities” (104). Russell Moore, Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America (B&H Publishing Group, 2023).
10 https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/protestant-deformation/
¹¹ Megan Basham, Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda (Broadside, 2024), 73-79.
¹² Tim Alberta has written, in the words of Aaron Renn, “a deeply hostile book.” Alberta fights the culture war by decrying those of different political opinions fighting the culture war. Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. New York: HarperCollins, 2023.
¹³ Russell Moore, Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America (B&H Publishing Group, 2023), 11.
¹⁴ Megan Basham, Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda (Broadside, 2024), 62, 71.
¹⁵ Megan Basham, Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda (Broadside, 2024), 68-71.
¹⁶ Russell Moore, Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America (B&H Publishing Group, 2023), 78.
¹⁷ Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (New York: HarperCollins, 2023), 66.
¹⁸ The Communist International was established in Moscow in March of 1919. In America, in September of 1919, in Chicago, the American Communist Party began. From the outset, the American Communist Party was taking orders from the Soviet Union. The original dispatch that was sent from Chicago to Moscow reports as follows: “Comrades, we did it. Long live the Great Soviet Republic. Long live the Comintern.” The goal was for a Soviet American Republic to exist under the Soviet Constitution. So the American Communist Party, even their newspaper the Daily Worker, are all creatures of the Soviet Union. They answer to the Soviet Union. The people who ran the day-to-day business of the party were hired, fired, and approved by the Soviet Union. They received subsides from the Soviet Union throughout the entirety of the Cold War until the 1980’s.
¹⁹ Megan Basham, Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda (Broadside, 2024), xxv-xxvi.
²¹ Megan Basham, Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda (Broadside, 2024), 61.
²² http://freebeacon.com/blog/obamas-scandals-didnt-embarrass/
²³ Glazov, Jamie, ed. Barack Obama's True Legacy: How He Transformed America (Republic Book Publishers, 2023), 31-49.
²⁴ Glazov, Jamie, ed. Barack Obama's True Legacy: How He Transformed America (Republic Book Publishers, 2023), 50-64.
²⁵ Megan Basham, Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda (Broadside, 2024), 71.
²⁶ https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/protestant-deformation/
²⁷ Megan Basham, Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda (Broadside, 2024), 62, 85.
²⁸ https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2024/08/kamalas-abortion-extremism
²⁹ Russell Moore, Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America (B&H Publishing Group, 2023), 213.
³⁰ G.K. Chesterton, In Defense of Sanity (Ignatius, 2011), 267.
³¹ Russell Moore’s understanding of the history of evangelicalism is that it is “built from the beginning on nationalism, racism, militarism, misogyny, populism, or right-wing politics.” Russell Moore, Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America (B&H Publishing Group, 2023), 14.