OPINION:
I shouldn’t have done it, but I couldn’t resist.
This week, I got into an exchange on social media with an evangelical pastor who was critical of Megan Basham’s new book, “Shepherds for Sale.” The book is a New York Times bestseller, and it exposes the overt leftward lurch of America’s evangelical denominations, publications, organizations and their leaders, also known as Big Eva.
In her book, Mrs. Basham does an excellent job of following the money and highlighting a fact: Influencers such as Russell Moore (editor in chief of Christianity Today magazine) and David French (contributing writer for The New York Times) and organizations such as the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities and the Trinity Forum are politically compromised because they are funded or influenced by billionaires such as George Soros who are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to infiltrate the church with pro-abortion politics.
One would think evangelical Christians would be united in chagrin over such revelations, but among those criticizing Mrs. Basham and her book is a Christian Missionary Alliance pastor of a modest-sized church in North Carolina. For the sake of anonymity, let’s call him “Pastor Ken Starch.” Here’s how my conversation with him unfolded.
Buried within a litany of politically laden tweets whereby he repeatedly disparaged conservative Christians as well as Mrs. Basham for their politics, Mr. Starch posted: “There seems to be some confusion as to what I am about. I am about wrecking the institutional capture of the American church by political forces of any kind, which places the gospel of Jesus and the people in subservience to partisan whims. That’s what I am about.”
Not being able to resist the irony of the pastor’s smug partisanship, I responded, “Does that include the ‘partisan whim’ of sacrificing children while they’re in the womb and even after?”
Pastor Starch retorted, “See, this is an example of what I’m talking about, and I’m very thankful that you, of all people, have shown up to prove my point.”
I countered: “I’m not sure what point you’ve proven. I merely asked you a question, and you haven’t answered it? Do you support child sacrifice, and will you vote for a party and or person who champions it?”
Pastor Starch, again, refused to answer. Instead, he made numerous attempts to lead me down his political rabbit trails. Keep in mind that this is all while he portends to be “apolitical” because, as he said, he is vehemently “opposed to political forces of any kind” within the church. (Sidebar: Is there some sort of punctuation I could use here that signifies the quintessential poster child of such lack of self-awareness?)
Anyway, despite this pastor’s obfuscation, I stayed on message. I simply kept asking him (no less than seven times) the following question, or a derivation thereof: “Do you support child sacrifice, and will you vote for any party or person who campaigns for it and says they’ll legalize it up to and after birth?”
To repeat: I asked him the same question seven times and got the same refusal to answer seven times. In fact, the best I could get from him was rhetorical sleight of hand, evasion and the oh-so-popular non sequitur of the evangelical left: “What about Trump?”
Finally, after I said, “I’m not sure what President Trump has to do with anything. I didn’t bring him up. You did. Please just answer the question,” Pastor Starch — still refusing to disavow child sacrifice — just went away. Apparently, he wasn’t as “thankful that I had shown up” as he initially claimed.
So, there you have it in a nutshell. Megan Basham writes a book about Big Eva’s political compromise, and she gets criticized as too political by pastors who are so soaked in their own politics that they’re like a fish who doesn’t even know it’s wet; pastors who are so “anti-political” that they can’t even disavow their own party’s politics of sacrificing babies on the altar of Moloch.
As I said, I probably shouldn’t have done it. I should have known better. I should have just shaken the dust from my feet and moved on. Anyway, buy Megan Basham’s book!
Endnote: Have you ever wondered who decided that the definition of a baby’s life was “political” and not biblical? And who decided the definition of marriage was “political” and not biblical? Or how about this one: Who decided that the definition of a woman was “political” and not biblical, or even biological for that matter? Yeah, me too. I’ve asked these same questions enumerable times of evangelical democrats like Pastor Starch and received the same answer: crickets.
• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host.
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