Megan Basham, Shepherds For Sale (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2024), 319 pp.

Jude warned the first-century church to “contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). To contend involves a fight with adversaries. It requires passion and zeal for the truth. Jude was not a conspiracy theorist. Nor was he overreacting to a momentary glitch in church history. Verse 4 reveals the reason for his warning: “For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.

The warning of Jude is as relevant now as it was in the first century. Megan Basham’s new book, Shepherds For Sale, bears witness to the compromise and apostasy sweeping through the church. As one might assume, Basham’s alarm is not being received well in some quarters – especially from the Big Eva establishment. She is being accused of misrepresenting people and engaging in sloppy scholarship. But a careful reading will reveal these accusations are unfair and unfounded.

Basham’s central argument is that pastors and evangelical leaders have “traded the truth for a leftist agenda.” But the real focus is the strategic move of liberals and progressives to curry favor with conservative Christians. And as the author shows in many places, these Christian leaders are taking the bait.

The book explores several issues including abortion, illegal immigration, climate change, Covid-19 propaganda, the homosexual agenda, and critical race theory, to name a few. Shepherds For Sale exposes how progressive thinkers have “run the table” in a cultural blitzkrieg to infiltrate the church. Basham gives countless examples of how enemies of the Christian faith are gaining ground, not to mention the willing consent and capitulation of left-leaning Christians. The end result is a weakened and compromised church. Thought leaders in the church who once appeared to stand on biblical principles have been seduced for a mess of pottage. Basham shines the spotlight on these spineless turncoats, catching them red-handed with their hands in the pottage.

J. Gresham Machen addressed similar matters in the 20th century. He wrote, “False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.” Tragically, many Christians have failed to heed his warning.

Shepherds For Sale, a meticulously researched book, illustrates the harm to the church when it accepts false ideas and repackages worldly ideology to appear palatable. Basham’s book should be required reading for every thoughtful Christian.

I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review.