How Soros Infiltrated & Is Killing The Church | Megan Basham

This episode discusses the alleged left-wing infiltration into evangelical Christian groups, primarily funded by influential figures like George Soros, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg.

1. High-profile evangelical leaders are being influenced by substantial funding from secular billionaires to adopt and preach progressive social policies.
2. This shift in doctrine is aimed at redirecting the powerful evangelical voting bloc towards more left-leaning political stances.
3. The infiltration strategy includes creating and promoting organizations with evangelical-sounding names to advocate for specific political agendas.
4. Pastors like Rick Warren and JD Greer have been highlighted as key figures in promoting these ideologies within their influential spheres.
5. The transformation within these religious groups is seen as a calculated effort to change the political landscape by altering foundational conservative beliefs.

1: Introduction

Michael Knowles introduces the topic and guest Megan Basham, who discusses her book and the underlying issues with evangelical shifts. Michael Knowles: "I now have my friend Megan Basham on the show."

2: Deep Dive into Infiltration

Megan outlines the systematic approach to infiltrate evangelical groups, highlighting the roles of specific billionaires and the consequences. Megan Basham: "There has been a lot of left-wing infiltration into the church, secular left-wing infiltration."

3: The Impact on Political and Social Stances

Discussion on how these shifts affect broader political alliances and the conservative movement in America. Megan Basham: "If we lose the evangelicals, it seems to me that the Republicans are sunk."

4: Call to Action

Megan and Michael discuss practical steps for individuals who disagree with these changes within their churches. Megan Basham: "When you have open wolves doing things like pushing the doctrinal transformation..."

1. Engage in open dialogue: Initiate conversations with church leaders to understand and discuss concerns regarding changes in church teachings.
2. Research and understand: Educate oneself about the real meanings behind terms like 'racial reconciliation' and 'creation care.'
3. Vote with your wallet: Consider redirecting tithes and offerings away from churches that promote doctrines that deviate from traditional beliefs.
4. Community involvement: Get involved in church committees or groups to have a say in the direction of church activities and teachings.
5. Support alternative media and publications: Consume and support media that align with traditional evangelical values to stay informed.

In this eye-opening interview, Michael Knowles sits down with Megan Basham to discuss how leftist-backed organizations infiltrated and are undermining the Christian Church. They delve into the tactics used by the Left and their organizations to influence religious institutions, spread progressive ideologies, and weaken traditional Christian values. Join us for an in-depth analysis of this critical issue and learn what can be done to protect the Church from such influences.

People

George Soros, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Rick Warren, JD Greer

Companies

None

Books

"Shepherds for Sale" by Megan Basham

Guest Name(s):

Megan Basham

Content Warnings:

None

Michael Knowles
I now have my friend Megan Basham on the show. Megan has a great new book out called Shepherd's for how evangelical leaders traded the truth for a leftist agenda. I actually don't have a copy of this yet, though. I've been looking forward to this book coming out for a while and I'm scandalized and furious that I don't have a nice inscribed personal copy of it. But I'm sure I will get one soon enough. The topic interests me greatly because as a mackerel snapper myself, I focus on a lot of the, the problems and the difficulties that the Catholic Church has faced. But seemingly out of the blue for the past four to six or seven years, it seems as though the evangelicals who had been rock solid right wingers in America have been rocked, I don't know, doctrinally, politically, socially. So I turn to my friend Meg. What is going on?

Megan Basham
Well, that trailer that you just played of Matt Walsh, let me explain that. There are a lot of pastors who look and sound exactly like that right now in the evangelical church, and I am not kidding. They will talk about their bag of white privilege and how we need to be anti racist. So that's really what's going on. And what I went into was, why is this happening? Where is it coming from? Why are these evangelical ministries suddenly sounding like Robin D'Angelo? And the reason for that is that there has been a lot of left wing infiltration into the church, secular left wing infiltration, in fact, from billionaires whose names, you know, like George Soros, Bill Gates, even Mark Zuckerberg, pouring money into these evangelical front groups to get evangelicals to support things like cap and trade, climate change policy, open borders, all manner of things that normally you would not expect evangelical christians to support.

Michael Knowles
So I noticed this just personally. Some of my evangelical friends who had been rock solid after George Floyd, they started to sound left wing. And it's not just that they moved left wing on anti racism or some of those issues, but they moved left on lgbt issues, even on all manner of issues. So this is unfortunate because the american conservative movement has been Catholics and evangelicals and to some degree conservative Jews. There just aren't that many Jews. So it's a relatively small number. But those groups have had outsized influence. So you have a lot of conservatives really in the leadership of the conservative movement. You think of like Bill Buckley, Phyllis Schlafly, Russell Kirk, all these kinds of guys. And then the reliable coalition had all these right wing evangelicals. When you look down at the polling tabs the most reliably right wing religious group in America, it's the evangelicals. So if we lose the evangelicals, it seems to me that the Republicans are sunk.

Megan Basham
No, that is exactly correct. And for my catholic friends, my jewish friends who are politically conservative, I always like to tell them, here's why you care about the evangelicals, because they're roughly 30% of the electorate and the legacy media has rightly called them America's most powerful voting bloc, which is why there has been this all out effort to co opt that vote to infiltrate their ranks.

And so as this is happening, this has actually happened in the Catholic Church before. And now we're starting to see it in these evangelical ministries. And it's a very deliberate effort. You will see them creating front groups with the name Evangelical in them. It's a little bit like that Steve Buscemi meme where he shows up, how do you do, fellow kids? It's how do you do, fellow evangelicals? With names like the evangelical environmental Network, the evangelical immigration table. And so these organizations are funded by secular left foundations, but they're astroturf campaigns to create the illusion that evangelicals want these particular policies that GOP lawmakers will go, oh gosh. Well, evangelicals are my most important constituency. That's how I get reelected. I better appease them and say, pass Senator Langford's border bill. So that's what's been going on. And that was kind of a big part of the money trail that I trace. But of course, there's also the fear of man. I mean, scripture tells us that that is always going to be with us and that nothing is more natural to a man than to drift away and compromise based on worldly influences. And so we're seeing a lot of that too. And what I did was basically trace one, how there has been an organic drifting away, but also an orchestrated drifting away.

Michael Knowles
So you do see these intentional efforts frequently. I guess my question for the effect of it is with Catholics. If you look at the polling on Catholics, it's 50 50, just about conservative and liberal. But the reason for that is that Catholicism is a sticky identity. So because someone will say, oh, I was raised Catholic or I went to twelve years of catholic school. You know, when someone starts out that way, you're about to hear the most heretical left wing apostate. You know, listen here, I know I went to twelve years at catholic school, so I'm pretty much Thomas Aquinas. You know, I haven't gone to church ever since. And I don't believe in a thing the church believes, but you can clearly point and say, okay, look, Joe Biden, maybe you call yourself a Catholic, but you contradict the church on non negotiable aspects of a doctrine that has been laid out now for 2000 years. And so you're just kind of an apostate, even if you call yourself Catholic.

But what's odd about what's going on with the evangelicals is what you're saying is, no, these are people who do go to church. These are people, these are pastors who will get up there at the pulpit. They seem to be in good standing with the broader evangelical coalition, and they're peddling this left wing garbage.

Megan Basham
Yeah. And that was a very deliberate effort. If you actually look at some of the documentation from some of these Soros funded think tanks, they openly talk about the fact that what we want to do is harness the power of these high profile, well known evangelical pastors in the hopes that their influence will trickle down to the rank and file. So they have made strong effort to, you could say, woo and charm and bring those people into the fold. And some of them who are the shepherds for sale have willingly done that. And so when you see some of these pastors doing this, you will see them use the language of CRT, just like Matt right there. Or you will see them sort of smuggle in some of these policies under different names, like quote unquote creation care, which really just means climate change policy. And what they're doing, it's so insidious, Michael, because they're not arguing like, hey, I really think that human activity is having an impact on our climate. And so let's debate the science and what the best policy would be. That's not what they're doing. They are skipping all of the debate and saying, to follow Jesus faithfully means that you must support climate change initiatives. You must support cap and trade. And there's a name for that, which is legalism. And Jesus had a lot to say about legalism. So this is the kind of activity that they've been getting up to to move evangelicals. And it's been a slow process, but it has been effective. You brought up, for instance, the LGBTQ movement.

There has been a very large foundation, the Arcus foundation, the largest gay transgender grant maker in the world. It has funneled, for example, millions of dollars into the United Methodist church, as it says, to transform their doctrine on marriage and sexuality. Well, what we just saw, job well done, I guess.

Exactly. We just saw a schism in the United Methodist church. Over those issues. So you can say that money was very well spent.

Michael Knowles
Wow. Wow. Because look, I've seen it with the Methodists, obviously. I drive past a Methodist church sometimes and it'll say, you know, Reverend Sally so and so, you know, it's some reverendess and, you know, diversity is our strength and, you know, love is love or whatever. You know, it's just all. It's just left wing slogans rather than a verse of scripture or some wisdom from a church father.

But it's obviously deeply troubling because these are high profile people. So I don't want to, you know, I don't want to get too much tea spilt here. But Meg, let's name some names. Who are the pastors? Let's go.

Megan Basham
Yeah, yeah. No, some of them are really well known people, like Rick Warren, who is the very well known pastor of Saddleback Church.

He wrote the best selling book, the Purpose Driven Life, one of the best selling books in us history. And he signed this climate change initiative, promoted it, promised to try to get evangelicals to pass it. He boasts of being wined and dined by the World Economic Forum and being invited to Davos to advise on how the church can partner with the World Economic Forum to harness the people in the pews for the World Economic Forum's policy goals. So these are open conversations that they were having a few years ago when I think maybe they didn't realize that that would become controversial eventually and people would go, hold up, wait a minute. What are you guys doing?

I can give you the example of the Southern Baptist convention's recent president, JD Greer, who is a very well known megachurch pastor. And he openly pedaled CRT, promised that in his extremely influential position as the president of the largest protestant denomination in the US, that he was instituting a racial quota hiring policy. So that he promised that 30% of all of the hires within the Southern Baptist convention and all of the appointees to those committees would be racial minorities or women. So you can imagine how that is transforming the nation's largest protestant denomination. And it has been traditionally the most conservative as well. And there's such a huge divide between what the rank and file support and what the leadership supports. But over time, you do manage to influence those people because they're going to. To church every week to say, pastor, how should I live my life? How does Jesus expect me to apply scripture to the voting booth and those type of things? So it's inevitable that a secular left is going to want access to that captive audience and they're getting it. And I can tell you that the Southern Baptist convention is ground zero for this. They represent about 5% of the us population, and they have done things like openly advocated CRT as a positive analytical tool for christians to use in considering how to view racial issues in the United States. And I mean, I can tell you just this week we saw some of this going on.

I don't want to go too deep in the weeds, but really quick. They have a policy arm, this largest protestant denomination, that is supposed to lobbied the government on behalf of southern baptist interests. But instead what it's been doing is lobbying southern Baptists on behalf of issues like gun control, open borders policies. And when the rank and file got very upset about this and the head of that entity was removed, a guy named Brent Leatherwood. Just two days ago, you saw the entire left wing media lose their minds that this guy was removed. The New York Times editorial board, CNN, had it as a main story on their main page. A lot of their reporters, their foreign analysts, reacted in mass outrage that this guy, Brent Leatherwood, was fired. And the next thing you know, spooked southern Baptist leaders, went, never mind, he's not fired, he's reinstated. So that's kind of how this sort of thing is playing out.

Michael Knowles
That is, you know, that's a lot of information. Zora, right now, I was feeling kind of good about, you know, President Trump survived the assassination attempt, and our poll numbers are looking pretty good. And I don't know, but you've left me in a. In a. Once again, in a state of worry and distress, although, you know, I don't know. Our Lord uses history to play out his goals. And so even when groups that had been once quite reliable, you know, if they're going to be infiltrated and they're going to be attacks on them, and maybe they're going to break up, and maybe the Methodists have just. I don't know, maybe there go the Methodists. So people need to read the book. They need to know what's going on. What advice do you have for evangelism? If they don't want to take the knowles advice of swimming the Tiber, they're not quite there. What do you do? You got some pastor who's preaching CRT and environmentalism or whatever from the pulpit. What is the person in the middle of the country supposed to do?

Megan Basham
Well, the first thing you do is you graciously and respectfully have a conversation with your pastor. Because, let's be fair, maybe his buddies are pushing this stuff. He hasn't thought the issue through deeply, and we are all fallible in many ways. So I would encourage you to maybe shoot your pastor a note and say, hey, can we go to coffee and talk about my concerns? So that's one. And then two. When you have open wolves doing things like pushing the doctrinal transformation of what the scripture says about marriage or sexuality, at that point you need to get out of that church and you need to stop giving your tithes and offerings to those church leaders. So those are the first two things. And the second thing is buy my book, be forewarned. So that when you hear some of these disguised, sneaky terms like racial reconciliation and creation care, you know what they really mean. And your spidey senses should tingle when you hear them.

Michael Knowles
That is very good. All very good advice. Especially, you know, if they're shepherds for sale. Maybe voting with your pocket is an important thing to do. But the first thing you should do, speaking of your pocket, is go shell out the money for Megan Basham's book, shepherds for sale. Really wild. And I can't wait to read it myself. Meg, thank you for coming on the show.

Megan Basham
I can't believe I didn't bring you a copy to the RNC.

Michael Knowles
I am furious.

I'm working through my anger day by day and I will be consoled by the book that I'm sure is extremely excellent. I've really been, this is not flattery at all. I've been looking forward to this book for a while. I've been hearing about it for a while and it's an under discussed political time bomb that is about to go off for conservatives, if it hasn't gone off already. Meg, thank you for coming on the show.

Megan Basham
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Michael Knowles
I'm Michael Knowles. This the Michael Knowles show. I will see all of you tomorrow.