Who are the billionaires and celebrity pastors supporting Megan Basham?

Megan Basham may have been given the 2024 Boniface Award for “fearless and faithful” journalism by the Association of Classical Christian Schools for taking “a stand for the Christian viewpoint … without bitterness and in a godly and grace-filled way.” But her latest book, Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda has evangelicals across the spectrum debating whether she should even be considered a journalist to begin with, or perhaps some kind of apologist.

The book sets out to prove that many conservative evangelical influencers and institutions have been bankrolled by billionaires so Satan could infiltrate Christianity with wolves. It considers such topics as climate change, illegal immigration, the definition of “pro-life,” Christian media, COVID, Critical Race Theory, the “Me Too” movement and LGBTQ issues.

As one might expect, in every instance, Basham takes the position of the most conservative Republicans and then resorts to lies and conspiracy theories to make her case.

Kristin Du Mez explains: “In reactionary movements, ‘in-group moderates’ are the real threat — in this case, devout Christians with a public voice who do not carry water for the MAGA/Christian nationalist cause. Because I’ve had more than my share of interactions with Basham in the past, I knew her tactics: selective quoting, misrepresenting subjects, and pushing her agenda regardless of facts at hand.”

“Because I’ve had more than my share of interactions with Basham in the past, I knew her tactics: selective quoting, misrepresenting subjects, and pushing her agenda regardless of facts at hand.”

According to Phil Vischer, creator of Veggie Tales who hosts the Holy Post podcast, Basham’s book “simply fails to present evidence of ANY leader or pastor changing their position on a social issue or theological conviction IN ORDER TO receive money or curry ‘media adulation.’ Zero. Zilch. Nada.”

Many others are making a public case against the claims in her book. But perhaps the bigger story is how Basham and the evangelicals who support her book are actually the wolves in bed with billionaires.

What kind of pastors are supporting Basham’s book?

Since Basham is concerned about who supports Christian influencers such as Phil Vischer, Andy Stanley and Kristin Du Mez, it’s fair for us to ask who is supporting her work both pastorally and financially.

Perhaps her strongest endorsement comes from John MacArthur, who says, “This may just be the single most important book on modern evangelicalism in recent years. It is bold, clear, and very well-researched.”

MacArthur is so obsessed with power that he calls the pastorate “the highest location they can ascend to — that power in the evangelical church.” When defending his church’s decision to disobey the government’s ban on churches gathering in person during COVID, his elders released a statement using the word “authority” 31 times, “right” 13 times and some form of “head,” “subject,” “command” and “rule,” at least another 70 times. In other words, the hierarchical power of authority and submission is the lens he sees the world through.

“Good Shepherds never would sacralize their own power and subjugate their sheep to sexist-fueled suffering as MacArthur has.”

Despite his opposition to abortion, he claims abortion is how the Great Commission will “produce people for heaven” from “every tongue and tribe and nation.” He says Israel was attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, because they are “experiencing what the wrath of God feels like” due to “rejecting the Messiah.” He publicly disciplined a woman for not reconciling with her husband who was convicted of child molestation. He applied the curse of Ham in the book of Genesis to “pygmies in Africa” and “primitive peoples … (who) run around stabbing pigs in the jungle naked,” and then claimed “slavery is not objectionable if you have the right master. It’s the perfect scenario.”

Good Shepherds never would sacralize their own power and subjugate their sheep to sexist-fueled suffering as MacArthur has. Only a wolf would say such things. And if such a wolf is the most influential pastoral supporter of Basham’s book, what does that tell you about the book?

The billionaires who platformed Basham’s writing

Of course, it takes more than misogynistic ministers to fund content creation these days. And in the case of Basham, her writing is featured at The Daily Wire, which was created by Ben Shapiro, who became so irate over the Barbie movie that he lit a bunch of Barbie toys on fire, showed them melting to screaming sounds, and then yelled, “Negative all the Barbies! Negative all of them! … Negative infinity Barbies!”

But creating The Daily Wire required more than the imagination and mind of Shapiro. It needed the money of billionaire frackers Dan and Farris Wilks. Since Basham is so deeply concerned about billionaires with non-orthodox theology funding platforms for evangelical leaders today, she might be interested in putting her “journalistic” skills into practice by investigating the financial and religious motivations of the Wilks brothers who funded the platform she writes for.

Financially, the Wilks brothers are oil and gas drilling billionaires from Texas who started the hydraulic fracking company Frac Tech in 2002. After selling their 70% share in 2011 for $3.5 billion, they began purchasing land in Idaho while putting up “no trespassing signs” and attempting to stop the public from driving through on public roads. According to the Idaho Statesman, they “removed logging operations, closed Forest Service roads and blocked recreational access to land that long had been open to public use.”

Their shell company, DF Development, owns 43,000 acres in Idaho County, 61,000 acres in Adams County, 32,000 acres in Boise County and 200,000 acres of Idaho forest land.

According to Reuters, they were “the biggest donors in the 2016 race for the White House,” even spending more than the Koch brothers. They apparently don’t care about climate change, as evidenced by Farris saying, “If (God) wants the polar caps to remain in place, then he will leave them there.”

They have supported cutting off all funding to Planned Parenthood, calling abortion “murder” even in cases of rape and incest. And they say homosexuality is “a perversion tantamount to bestiality, pedophilia and incest … . It’s a predatorial lifestyle in that they need your children, and straight people having kids, to fulfill their sexual habits.”

Farris is the bishop of the Assembly of Yahweh, which doesn’t even believe Jesus is God. According to their statement of faith, “Yahweh is One, the heavenly Father alone.” If that’s not clear enough for Basham, they explicitly say, “We reject the doctrine of the Trinity.”

Is it a coincidence that a billionaire oilman who made his money in fracking and became a pastor owns a publishing platform that gives space for Basham to use the Bible to deny any concern about climate change? Is it a coincidence that a billionaire pastor who believes being gay is inherently predatory would fund a space for Basham to promote homophobia?

Billionaire oil men funding ‘biblical Christianity’

Unfortunately for Basham, the problem of billionaires funding her version of “biblical Christianity” goes far beyond her platform.

Darren Dochuk, who teaches history at the University of Notre Dame, is the author of Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America.

Following the death of another conservative oil billionaire, David Koch in 2019, Dochuck wrote in a piece for Politico: “Over the past four decades, David and Charles funneled profits from the family’s petroleum company, started by their father, into the Tea Party Republican right. … The Kochs, however, are just the latest in a long line of oil-rich brothers driving the Republican Party’s rightward march. The very first were the Pews, who, between the 1930s and 1960s, spent their oil fortune remaking the GOP in their libertarian and conservative Christian image.”

After detailing the story of the Pews, he concludes by noting: “The Pews’ renown as God’s bankrollers was being passed on to other independent oilmen, none more illustrious than the Hunt brothers of Dallas. Their petrofunds would pour into an ever-broadening and politicized evangelicalism that would spawn the religious right of the late 1970s and fuel its rise in Republican ranks during the 1980s. They would also ensure that the Pews’ fierce passions for God, liberty and black gold would continue to shape the religious impulses of an aroused American society.”

Don’t forget Bannon’s billionaires either

Billionaires platforming rightwing religious and political influencers has been a theme we’ve had to visit a few times this summer. As I wrote about in May, former White House advisor Steve Bannon began recruiting billionaires to fund radical Catholics influencers during the Trump administration, reportedly as a way of getting retribution against Pope Francis after Francis embarrassed Trump with his opposition to the wall and his less-than-enthusiastic meeting.

Suddenly, about 40 key MAGA influencers started converting to Traditional Latin Mass Catholicism and getting hired by these platforms to criticize Pope Francis and the Democrats and to promote the reelection of Trump.

To make things even more concerning, this was the exact time the GOP’s vice presidential candidate, JD Vance, converted to “Resistance Catholicism,” started criticizing Pope Francis, defending the Traditional Latin Mass and promoting Trump.

While Vance met with Bannon in 2017 about possibly becoming president of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative organization behind Project 2025, he ultimately decided to run for political office a few years later.

His political campaign was funded by the billionaire Peter Thiel, who gave Vance, “the largest amount ever given to boost a single Senate candidate.”

In 2009, Thiel wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

He added: “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the (voting) franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

Vance, Thiel’s hand-picked politician, wants to give parents with children one vote per child. I told the “Straight White American Jesus” podcast last week: “In the 2021 census, American Christian families had 3.4 people per family. The average American family was 3.1. So that means non-Christian families are going to be less than that average of 3.1. So you apply that to the voting system and all of the sudden Christian families have more votes, significantly more votes. There was a 2019 Pew Research Center study where evangelicals and Catholics each had 2.3 children per family. Atheists had 1.6. Agnostics had 1.3. We’re talking a very significant increase in the white Christian, Catholic, evangelical vote.”

And what does Vance want to do with the power he’ll get from their votes?

He wants to punish companies that won’t submit to his religious culture war by making them “feel real economic pain.”

And thus, billionaires get to use politicians to punish other companies by inciting the passions of evangelicals through influencers like Basham.

‘Both sides’ of Babylon?

Christian discussions of power dynamics tend to use metaphors referring to Babylon because the Bible talks about Babylon taking Israel into exile. The argument essentially says those who are exercising their power over their neighbors are being Babylon. In conversations about modern politics, conservatives tend to view themselves as Israel being persecuted by Babylon.

Some evangelicals, however, talk about “both sides” of Babylon and attempt to equate opposing sides of an argument as essentially two sides of the same coin.

Patrick Miller, pastor of The Crossing in Columbia, Mo., and cohost of the “Truth over Tribe” podcast, posted a picture online equating Basham’s Shepherds for Sale with Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne, with the comment, “No caption necessary.”

Du Mez responded, “My book has been out 4+ years, I quoted hundreds of people in it. I’m not aware of a single person who claims I misquoted them or misrepresented their words. Not one. But sure, same thing.”

Sociologist Samuel Perry added, “I get concerns about Christian complicity in mindless partisan tribalism. I really do. Christians should be so careful to avoid this. But THIS comparison is embarrassingly bad. So ludicrous it damages your reputation as a pastor w/serious claims worth considering.”

Patrick doubled down on his “both sides” comparison, saying, “The fact that neither side can take this tweet is making my day.”

Then Preston Sprinkle, who like Miller spent time in 2023 dismissing the research of women and defending Josh Butler’s Beautiful Union book that sacralized male sexual hierarchy over women, responded, “Those who aren’t on one of Babylon’s two sides knew what you were suggesting.”

Babylon, billionaires and ‘biblical Christianity’

As the conversation unfolded online about whether or not it is legitimate to compare Du Mez and Basham as both sides of Babylon, Du Mez wrote about the basic contours of her critique of conservative white evangelicalism in a way that illustrates what’s really going on here.

“For decades, conservative evangelical power brokers defined ‘truth’ in terms of what advanced their idea of Truth — which neatly aligned w/ their own agenda,” she said. Then she detailed: “They founded institutions, organizations, publishers, & media platforms to advance, defend, and perpetuate this Truth. They platformed writers who amplified pre-determined narratives. They shunned, de-platformed, and cast out those who questioned these Truths. They educated kids to debate, feeding them pre-established talking points. They replaced disciplinary expertise with in-house apologetics.”

Her critique continues to include how conservatives contrast themselves from what they consider to be secular error, how they wield control through inerrancy, how they demonize outsiders, and how they are now turning on themselves by attacking fellow non-MAGA conservatives to “neutralize them, shift the center, seize power.”

But her contrast of “disciplinary expertise with in-house apologetics” gets to the heart of the problem not only with Basham’s book, but with Basham’s brand of evangelical Babylon.

The difference between disciplinary expertise and in-house apologetics

The primary pastoral supporter of Basham’s writing is a misogynistic minister who interprets the entire universe as a power hierarchy with him in charge and who thinks slavery is “the perfect scenario.”

The primary financial supporters of Basham’s writing are billionaires who made their money in the oil industry and started a platform designed to justify their views of money and their dismissal of environmental concerns.

In the broader conservative Christian conversation that includes radical Catholics, billionaires are funding politicians who want to punish other companies that won’t submit to conservative Christian values in a culture war.

“She’s playing fast and loose with the facts in a power-sacralizing promotion of in-house apologetics.”

Basham’s world is one where unimaginably rich men fund influencers and politicians who will punish those who won’t submit to the values taught by power-sacralizing pastors. In other words, Basham isn’t doing “fearless and faithful” journalism. She’s playing fast and loose with the facts in a power-sacralizing promotion of in-house apologetics.

Imagine the effect such a presence in the world might have in a faith and a nation that includes neighbors who don’t agree.

Du Mez, on the other hand, is a historian. And a historian describing accurately “how white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation” is not being Babylon. It’s sharing her gift as a historian with such skill that it helps us recognize and name the corruption we’ve experienced and the fractures we feel.

Sacralizing and exposing Babylon are not two sides of Babylonian power because Babylon is a vertical relationship of authority and submission that oppresses and dehumanizes those at the bottom. And there’s no way any honest person can consider the words of MacArthur and the money of these billionaires along with the threats of ecclesiastical and economic punishment they wield and make the case that these men are the dehumanized ones at the bottom.

Now Basham’s Babylon has set its sights on other conservatives it sees as a threat. But as Du Mez said, “The problem is, after decades of embracing propaganda at the expense of rigorous truth-telling, careful reasoning, and good faith engagement, conservative evangelicals now under attack are ill-prepared to fight back. This is the fruit of the scandal of the evangelical mind. … What we’re watching is a battle for the hearts & minds of evangelicals. But truth & integrity probably won’t win it.”

 

Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a bachelor of arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He earned a master of arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and produces music under the artist name Provoke Wonder. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.

 

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