Andrew Klavan and Megan Basham dissect the LGBTQ movement's infiltration of Christianity, highlighting how secular groups like the Arcus Foundation utilize "Pastors in Process" to alter doctrines on marriage and gender. Basham argues that feminism directly fuels transgender ideology by erasing traditional roles, while criticizing institutions like Christianity Today for endorsing Texas candidate James Tallarico's controversial claims regarding Mary's conception. The discussion notes a potential youth backlash against these shifts, citing increased church attendance following Charlie Kirk's death and declining support for gay marriage among 18-to-29-year-olds, ultimately suggesting that legalizing same-sex marriage has emboldened surrogacy trades contrary to God's design. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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God's Consent and Church Culture00:14:58
Given that James Tallarico has made these comments, like God approves of abortion because the angel visited Mary and said, This is what is going to happen.
You're going to conceive a son.
And Mary said, Let it be done to me as you say.
James Tallarico said, This is proof that God required consent.
Is his suggestion that God didn't know what Mary was going to say?
Was he sitting up there going, Gosh, I hope she says yes.
I don't know what I'm going to do if she says no?
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview, and I'm thrilled to welcome back one of my favorite topics, my sort of favorite interviewees, I guess, Megan Basham.
She is a cultural reporter for the Daily Wire and the author of the excellent bestseller, Shepherds for Sale How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda.
And as that title suggests, she is a fearless fighter for doctrinal clarity among fundamentalist churches, and that's part of what we are going to talk about.
Megan, it's wonderful to see you.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Thanks for having me.
In fact, I'm coming to you, Andrew, from the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum in Kentucky, which, if you look behind me, you can see that I'm here on Mount Ararat, actually.
I shouldn't have said Kentucky.
That was a mistake.
I'm on Mount Ararat.
You can see the Ark behind me.
It's right there.
That is the Ark.
Yeah, that is the Ark.
So that is a literal recreation.
They took the cubits that are mentioned in Genesis, and they did, as you go through it, they say, here are the things that obviously we took some creative license, but they They also built it to scale.
So, that is a scale, what they think of the cubits, the way it was described in Genesis, what it would have looked like right behind me.
And when you go through it, it's really fascinating because, you know, you will hear from non believers in particular about the flood story.
Well, how could an ark have been this big?
How could the animals have held it?
Where would they have gotten light?
And as you walk, it's really fascinating because they show you, given the technology they might have had in that era, how it could work.
So, you know, they show you, you know, little habitats for the The reptiles, how they could have just poured water through the top and soaked through cheesecloth and kept them moist, and how there would have been a waste disposal system.
And so it was really interesting.
We were thoroughly enjoying it.
That's interesting.
It's huge.
I mean, it does really.
How did they find out what a cubit was?
I mean, is there anybody alive?
Gosh.
Okay.
So there is a plaque in there that explained it.
Like, you know, they went through and said, you know, basic biblical texts and what we know from later historical records on what a cubit would have meant to the Israelites at that time.
And that's how they sort of scaled it out.
But I wish I had taken a picture of the little plaque that explained it because I would just read it to you.
Yeah, who knows?
It's not going to come in handy, that information.
It's kind of like algebra.
Yeah, and I do.
I describe it a little bit tongue in cheek as this is Disneyland for us fundamentalists who actually believe that there was a flood and there was a real Noah and there was a real ark and there was a real creation story that the Lord created the heavens and the earth and all the fish and the fowl.
And so here is where you come to get your scientific.
Backing to get armed to argue with atheists and skeptics about how those things could be.
So I'm thoroughly enjoying it because I'm not a scientific person.
I'm a pretty simple girl.
I go, I just believe it because it says it.
So I don't struggle with these doubts.
But for those who do, it's actually been, and even still, it's fascinating, but it'd be especially fascinating if you were one of those types of people who struggle with those questions.
So, what is the conference about?
Yeah.
So the conference that I'm at is, um, so that, you know, the overall company is Answers in Genesis.
So they put on various conferences throughout the year.
And one of them is their women's conference.
So I am at that and I'm speaking, um, on the subject of this year's topic, which is being faithful on matters of sex and sexuality.
And in particular, with the talk that I gave focused on, and you and I have talked about this before, the efforts from outside groups, from outside secular groups to try to move, Evangelicals in particular, but I mean, they're certainly targeting all denominations and all faiths, but to come in and move them on what the Bible says about marriage and sex and gender.
And so, as I covered in my talk, there are groups like the Arcus Foundation, which was started by a man named John Stryker, who inherited a $100 billion surgical supply company.
And he has used some of that money to try to move.
Evangelicals, Christians, but also Muslims, Jews.
I mean, really any religious faith that is standing in the way of total domination of all of the predilections represented in that pride flag.
So they train people.
He gives money to groups like, for instance, the Reformation Project to try to change doctrine on what marriage is, because obviously, you know, I'm someone who believes that marriage is between a man and a woman.
And so what they do is they will train, particularly young people, To challenge that theology and to quietly, I mean, and they will literally, Andrew, they have programs called Pastors in Process, and its purpose is to teach pastors how to slowly and secretly take their Bible believing congregation and move them towards an affirming position over time, carefully, so it's not to spook any of the Bible believers.
So, this is what they're doing.
And so, that was what I covered for this audience of mostly women and my husband.
This is that that may be the most sinister thing I've ever heard.
But it's funny, you know, I was just on the member block on my last show.
I was just talking about the fact that.
One of the hardest things to do, especially in a country as free and as safe as America, free from consequences, is to train your imagination to see reality because your imagination is what you use to see the invisible world.
It's about how we relate to God.
That's the sense, that's what I call it anyway, the sense, the sixth sense that we use to see things that aren't apparent.
And if you get the imagination wrong, if you imagine the world wrongly, you are going to go down some dark paths.
And my entire member block was about basically these sinister people.
I wasn't talking about fundamental church.
Fundamentalist churches, I was just talking about our educational system, sneaking into children's lives to teach them falsehoods about the human body, and especially, I think, about women's bodies.
Because I believe that if you could chart how much time people spend imagining women's bodies, whether they are men or women, I think it would be the most imagined thing, the thing that people imagine more than anything else.
And I think if you pervert our idea of that, you pervert our imaginations completely, basically.
Yeah, very much.
And I think that that is what gets into this conversation within the church that we're having some very difficult debates on the impact that feminism has had because it has reimagined women's roles in various ways that have moved us away from the obvious implications of what our bodies can do, which is produce children and nurture children.
And so that is part of what we're talking about.
But there's a connection to that to the transgender movement because if you erase What male and female are meant to be, then it becomes much easier to say that one can become the other and that they're interchangeable.
Because if our bodies have no particular purpose, then it doesn't really matter what we do with them and what we choose to do with them.
And so, you know, I would say there is a straight line between feminism and transgenderism.
And it took us some time to get there, but it was kind of inevitably where we were going to end up.
And that's been one of the topics that, you know, we've been covering at this conference.
I've really enjoyed being here.
I kind of feel like I'm maybe the dumbest one here, but I'm happy to be.
I mean, you know, I've got Dr. Rosaria Butters.
Dr. Ken Ham, Dr. Al Moeller.
I think I'm the only one here, maybe, without a doctorate.
So just plain old Megan Basham, but I'm happy to be here.
You can tell them you're a doctor.
I always wanted to name my son Lord.
So it'd be Lord Clavin, but I didn't get away with it.
You know, this is so fascinating to me.
It's fascinating the determination that they have, and I guess that they have to insinuate themselves into churches, especially.
And I guess I'm wondering you've written this book, Shepherds for Sale, you talk about this.
They're clearly.
Corruptible.
Their churches are clearly corruptible.
And I guess what I'm wondering is how alert are the churches now, now that you wrote this book, now that they're having conferences like this, how alert are they to this happening?
Still not very alert at all.
I mean, I think part of the reason that my book did as well as it did was because people were aware that changes were happening, that influences were coming in.
They didn't understand why.
They felt that something was off.
And so, when I wrote this book, I don't think there was a reaction of, you're telling us something completely new that we didn't sense.
I think part of the reason it resonated was because people did sense that something was going on.
They just didn't know what it was.
And this, I don't know that this was the longest chapter in my book, this issue on infiltration, particularly.
On the pride flag issues, LGBTQ issues, but it may have been the longest chapter because this is really one of the things I said in the book is that this is where the fight is now over faithfulness.
I think that if you are a Christian and you say, I believe in a literal virgin birth, no one is really going to bat an eye about that.
If you say, I am someone who even believes in a literal six day creation, as I do, you'll get some funny looks, but nobody's going to particularly hold it against you and say you're a bigot.
They're just going to say you have some funny ideas.
But this is the issue where I think the church has, for a number of reasons, been really reticent to speak clearly and to educate their children clearly, because it's the issue where you're going to get called a lot of mean names.
If you say, This is what we believe, you know, we believe that men cannot become women.
We believe that the creation of the female body, as you said, means something and it means something ontological.
It's not just, gosh, you know, there are slight differences and God doesn't really know why, you know, but.
We can be interchangeable, that actually being able to produce and nurture children means something.
So, these are the issues that I think the church has been most uncomfortable with, even though you will have a lot of faithful churches that believe it, they're not really excited about talking about it.
So, you know, on the one hand, we have, I mean, if I described it to you, Andrew, we have, like with this Reformation Project group, for instance, they will do training programs that are almost like a college level course.
So, if you come into their training program, you're going to get trained on this affirming theology.
And your purpose is to bring it into these Bible believing conservative evangelical churches.
And this is not me saying this.
They say this in their own literature that our purpose in doing this training is we want you to go into conservative evangelical doctrinally sound church.
They wouldn't say doctrinally sound, but they would say we want you to go into conservative churches that have this theology and we want you to change their theology.
Your work is to get them to change their theology.
So they do openly admit that that's what they're trying to do.
And so, you know, they do this extensive training where on the other side, you have churches that are manipulated with, I think, largely false claims that the church has been incredibly harmful to transgender people, to gay people.
They've been so hurtful.
And so they're kind of in a crouching position.
So we don't want to talk about these things openly because we are being told that we've been hurtful and it's been harmful.
And so we don't engage these topics.
Where on the other side, you have people who are so committed to their beliefs that they're not just engaging these topics, they're spending millions of dollars.
To train proselytes to go out and change the theology of the church.
You know, one of the things that I've noticed that is just a constant in American social politics is that a movement will start with.
What you might call a righteous ask.
In other words, they'll start by saying, well, women should have the same rights that men have under the Constitution.
And you sort of think like, well, yeah, ultimately that's the only way that works logically.
But at some point, when they have achieved that goal in our imperfect human way, they've gotten close to that goal, the left infiltrates the movement and turns it into the exact opposite of what it was supposed to be.
So now feminism basically is anti femininity.
It's anti home, it's anti husband, it's anti male, it's anti children, it's anti anything that has to do with what we think of as the relationship between men and women.
But when you say I'm against feminism, as I am, they basically accuse you of being against the original righteous ask, which I'm not.
I mean, I think people have to be covered by rights.
So I guess what I'm wondering is why is the church unable to say, well, maybe we have occasionally been cruel to gay people, but that doesn't make it.
Homosexuality is right, and it doesn't mean it's not destructive to a society to accept it.
You know, those are two different things.
Right.
I mean, one, I think you're assuming that the motivation is the altruistic motivation of we don't want to hurt people.
And I think there's some truth to that.
But I think the larger motivation is we don't want to be embarrassed by having a belief that is very out of date now.
And we still believe it, but we would rather not talk about it.
And I think that it has opened up an enormous Room for harm with it, not just within the church, but within our culture, because our purpose as a church is to be salt and light within a culture and to have a preservational impact.
And if we're not being clear about our beliefs, if everybody, like if you have a culture that is moving strongly to the left, even if it's debating these issues with those people who are sound Bible believing Christians, and they're debating it, we're at least keeping it in the public sphere that it is a legitimate.
Topic for debate.
But if we shirk that and say, no, we're not going to do that anymore, we're just going to be quiet, then what you have is something that runs so far rampant that it gets to the point where you have such blindness that you have, I don't know, a presidential candidate saying, yes, it's okay to rob children of their sexual identity and sexual function.
Hostile Christianity in Public Square00:07:05
And that's how far we got because I think the church was not serving in that preservational role that we've been given to be salt and light.
And so that is what happened.
And You know, you talk about this issue with taking a good thing, like let's not mistreat women, let's make sure that you know women have equal rights, those are good things, but that's what we see biblically all the time taking something that is good, like sexuality, and twisting it into something that is not good, like pornography.
Yeah, so I mean, that's kind of like you know the basic creational picture something beautiful, something good, and then it's twisted into something ugly, and that's still what happens today.
Yeah, yeah, no question about it.
You know, as you were talking about this, I was thinking about the Senate.
Candidate in Texas, James Tellerico, who is really smarmy.
It's almost like he attended this place that you're talking about.
He'll say things like, God is non binary.
And you'll think, What a stupid thing to say.
Our stupid categories apply to God, who is, I am, he is God, that's it.
And that's what we know.
Is that the kind of logic that you're facing?
I mean, is that because it does seem to me that that's provably not true?
Well, and here's what I think is I think what we're seeing and what we're going to continue to see is, you know, to some degree, there has always been this debate over, okay, who's more Christian, the left or the right?
And we can recognize that the God of the Bible and the moral code of Scripture transcends our, you know, petty little political categories.
I can recognize that.
But at the same time, we can also go, okay, when we use the language of transgenderism to somehow justify transing children, mutilating bodies, and to do that, we're going to say God is non binary.
I can look at that and say that's a clearly wicked thing.
But what it has done is it has made it clear that, you know, I think some time ago, we would have had a Democratic Party that was more just hostile, openly hostile to religious faith.
Yeah.
Think of Barack Obama clinging to their guns and religion, or you had certainly a movement to go, let's not do the Ten Commandments and courthouses.
And so it was just more openly hostile to religion.
I actually think the left is getting smarter about this.
And we see this in James Tallarico that now what they're saying is instead of opposing Christianity, let's say that we are the real Christians, actually.
And that's what you're seeing Tallarico do.
And in fact, he's getting some help by some of the recognized evangelical and Christian institutions.
Christianity Today, who you and I have talked about before, we know I'm not a fan of that publication, but it was surprising to me, given that James Tallarico has made these comments like God is non binary and that God, I mean, and worse, more offensive to me was his commentary on the Immaculate Conception and saying that.
God approves of abortion because the angel visited Mary and said, This is what is going to happen.
You're going to conceive a son.
And Mary said, Let it be done to me as you say.
James Tallarico said, This is proof that God required consent and he's okay with abortion.
Two things to that.
One is his suggestion that God didn't know what Mary was going to say.
Was he sitting up there going, Gosh, I hope she says yes.
I don't know what I'm going to do if she says no?
I mean, that's a ridiculous thought.
But even more.
Just abhorrent is the thought.
Is he suggesting that if this story means God is okay with abortion, is he suggesting that Mary might have made the decision to abort our Savior and God would have been okay with that?
I mean, you know, it sounds ridiculous and comical, but also horrific.
And I think that the idea that a Christianity today, after those comments, then recorded a podcast saying he is a refreshing picture of Christianity in the public square because he's not like these mean MAGA Christians. was astonishing to me.
I think I sat there as a fellow Christian and went, there was a level at which I did not think you guys would go, and you did.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You dislike Donald Trump so much that you're helping prop up the false claims of this heretical Christian because you want to say that he is a better Christian in how he conducts himself than Donald Trump, who I don't believe is a Christian at all.
So it's a very apples and oranges comparison, but that's what they're doing.
They're saying James Tallarico is a better representation of Christianity.
In the public square, even though he has these abhorrent heretical beliefs, because I don't know, he says them nicely and wears a nice sweater when he says it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, it's first of all, the fact that God asked for consent means he's opposed to rape.
It doesn't mean he's in favor of abortion.
I mean, that's it.
It's even yeah, I don't really get how he made that leap.
It's weird biology, too.
That was my first thought when I heard it.
I just thought, I don't even see how you're getting there.
And I think you're right about Donald Trump.
I think Donald Trump, I think after his assassination attempt, Donald Trump may have come to some sort of faith, but you know.
I don't think it's a very constructive thing.
And in his comments, I mean, he, whatever it is, he's maybe has a greater interest in eternity and more spiritual things.
But you've heard him say, you know, maybe I'll get into heaven.
Maybe I've done enough now to get into heaven.
And that just tells me, okay, he doesn't really understand Christianity if he thinks that.
So, right, right, right.
So, There's now supposedly a mini boom in Catholic churches.
I don't know how real, you never know how real these things are.
They seem to come and go.
Is any of that happening in fundamentalist churches?
Yeah.
And by the way, I made a joke about fundamentalists.
So just so you don't get letters, I would say evangelical.
Evangelical, sorry.
Yes.
Yeah.
No, it's okay.
Just because I joke.
I am a fundamentalist, but they might go, hey, I'm not a fundamentalist.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
But yes, it is.
And actually, you know, one of the interesting things that I traced in this talk that I was giving here at this conference is the fact that young people, for instance, have by eight points between 2021, I think 2021 and 2025, have dropped eight points in their support for gay marriage, which really surprised me.
I mean, 18 to 29 is not a group that we expect to see that in.
And my sense of that is because one, you do have some of these younger people.
who are reacting to the excessive nature of the LGBTQ movement.
And I think that you're starting to see a little bit of a backlash there.
And I see it anecdotally.
There's a lot of argument over do the numbers bear this out?
Do the numbers not bear it out?
But anecdotally, I can tell you, I do see more young people coming to church.
Young Backlash on Life Insurance00:02:31
I have told this story on X, but we saw it immediately in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death in that some of the young men that my husband knows, one of them, for example, a young 20-something, Trainer who helps him work out and lose weight suddenly came to him.
We've been inviting him to church and he said, I really want to come now.
And he brought his girlfriend.
And that to me, we've seen this story a number of times, particularly in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination.
So I think that it is happening.
I think it may be a little time before we see it bear out in the statistics.
So to me, these are the leading indicators.
And I'll be interested to see what the numbers are next year.
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Wicked Ideology Captures Denominations00:10:12
I have to say, by the way, that the thing that I thought, I knew the minute the Supreme Court ruled on gay marriage, I knew that it was actually bad for gay people.
I thought like this is going to be a real setback because over time, I think like we would have come to some kind of accommodation of, you know, some kind of allowed, legally recognized partnership without calling it marriage, which is what most of the gay people I talked to actually were talking about at the time.
I mean, Dave Rubin always says, I'm gay married, you know, which I think, okay, I get that.
That is something different because I think that marriage is a sacrament, and I don't think that's what it is.
I think it's between a male and a female, but I do think people should be left alone.
And when the reaction turned out to be when by declaring gay marriage a right, they set people free to start suing bakers for not making cakes and all that stuff, I thought, oh man, this is really bad because now even I hate this movement.
I, who just wasn't paying attention to it, thought this is awful.
This is an awful thing.
And it has opened a Pandora's box of, you know, continued dominoes that I think people see now that I think it emboldened this transgender movement.
I think it emboldened a surrogacy trade that we had not seen before.
And I think as women, we do sit back as mothers and go, children need mothers.
And so, you know, it is nothing against people who I personally love and have great affection for.
But when I see two men with babies and no mother there, that breaks my heart.
Yeah.
Because there is a reason that God created women to make mothers, I mean, to make babies.
And, you know, we can say there are terrible exceptions where a child may not grow up with a mother.
There may be death, there may be divorce, abandonment, but those things are all tragedies.
We don't take the tragedy and make it the standard then for having children.
And that's what we've done so much with this surrogacy trade.
So I think that's part of why you're starting to see this backlash in the younger generation is that.
They have grown up, some of these kids, with these strange sort of amalgamations of, I have two moms and one dad I don't talk to.
And I think that's very hard for kids who grow up and say, I needed this connection, both with the mother and with the father.
And that's the reaction that they're starting to have.
And they're the ones who have borne the weight of this rotten fruit that I think Obergefell opened the door to.
So I think we may continue to see this.
Yeah.
No, I agree with you.
And I think they do this all the time with like abortion.
They'll say, well, what if I, You know, a 12 year old is raped by her uncle or something like that.
And you think, why?
You know, that's not who's getting abortions.
That is not what's happening.
So, how are you feeling?
I mean, you took a lot of flack for writing Shepherds for Sale, how evangelical leaders traded the truth for a leftist agenda.
You lost a publisher at one point.
I've always deeply admired you for not backing down and not changing the text to overcome that.
You got another publisher.
How are you feeling about this fight at this moment?
In other words, it seems to me to do no good if the church conquers the world but loses its own soul.
So, what are you seeing in the near future and the distant future?
Certainly, there are some things I wouldn't have anticipated.
I was aware of some fringe elements on the right, but they were so fringy that it wasn't the kind of thing I was writing about.
I was writing about really large, powerful foundations, secular actors coming into the church and trying to move it.
And I was aware of some of these fringy things on the right, but as they have continued to grow strength, particularly when you look at people like Candace Owens, I put Joe Kent now in that basket, who are taking these things and now wielding them.
in ugly, unbiblical ways.
I didn't see that threat coming, I will confess.
And now I was a little bit blindsided about it.
And I go, okay, we need to figure out how to handle that.
But at the same time, so, you know, there's some criticism that I would say to those who told me, you're not seeing what's happening on the right.
There's a little bit there.
I really did not think that there would be this many people who would be captured by that kind of wicked ideology in the name of Christ.
I really didn't think that.
So, you know, that's one I will concede.
But on the other hand, a lot of what I wrote about that people were denying.
Then later became so transparent that it's been nice to take a few victory laps and go, Yes, I was right about this.
Later, receipts came out with the USAID scandal, the fraud and the waste that was happening there.
And we found out how many of these Christian organizations have basically just become arms of the federal government.
So there were other things like that that I went, Okay, I feel very good about what I wrote.
There have been evolutions of people that I wrote about in the book.
Where they have continued to follow that trajectory.
People like David French, who is now one of those out saying, look at this nice young man, James Tallarico, he's a better Christian than these MAGA Christians.
Where I go, okay, so I was right about what I wrote about French.
So I feel good about that too.
So, you know, it's a little bit of both.
But, you know, certainly I do think that if I had it to do again, I would probably devote at least a chapter to what's happening with some of those fringier elements on the.
They're not right wingers anymore.
I mean, Tucker Carlson is no longer a right winger.
He's like, you know, there's no enemy of America that he doesn't love, no friend of America that he likes.
It's just amazing.
Yeah.
And so I would have written about that had, you know, if I flashed forward and been writing this book a year later.
You know, when you get to confusing things in the Gospels, like love your enemies, you can really see that, like, hatred just makes people cry.
I mean, David French hates Donald Trump.
I'm not, I don't entirely blame him given what happened to him, but it's driven him nuts, you know.
It's turned black, white, and, you know, yeah.
Turns out God had a good reason to successively hate your enemies.
Yeah, it really is a bad thing.
On the big scale, I guess what I'm wondering is are you happy about where things are going with the faith in general?
I mean, the Catholics have an advantage of having sort of like the American Constitution, they've written down their doctrine so they can't really change it without a big to do.
Whereas anybody can start an evangelical church essentially and just declare it.
Do you feel that there's a place to go for people now and they'll find it?
Yes, absolutely.
In fact, I think there's more places to go now because I think.
What has been nice for me to give you the example of my own denomination is I didn't expect anybody to come out and publicly say, Megan Basham was right, we repent.
So that hasn't happened.
But I have seen shifts that not me alone, but I think I contributed to my book, the work that I was doing, that others like Ali Bastucci, people like Elisa Childers, who are also speaking on these issues, have also helped move the needle.
And so when you look at something like the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which is the lobbying arm, Of the Southern Baptist Convention, which I'm a member of.
It's the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S. For years, they were partnered with the Evangelical Immigration Table, which is one of these groups that I wrote about in the book an open borders group that was funded by George Soros.
And they denied it, denied it, denied it.
I was just a meanie for saying I don't think that we as Southern Baptists are well represented by our lobbying arm that wants to push amnesty bills.
And while they never said, Conceded that yes, it turns out this was all correct.
They did finally cut ties and they have replaced the leadership of that organization.
So I am seeing that kind of thing happening all over, you know, not just in the Southern Baptist Convention, also in the PCA, which is the Presbyterian Church in America, and other denominations like that.
So I think that's a really good thing.
I'm really intrigued by what's happening with Pete Hegseth because he is a member of a very conservative denomination.
And I don't remember what the acronym stands for, but it's the CREC.
And, you know, they have planted a church right there in Washington.
And Pete Hegseth has come under intense fire for his association with that church.
And Doug Wilson, who I know you know and have interviewed.
And so these are the things that I find interesting there has been a very robust Christianity within this administration.
Even if I don't believe Donald Trump is necessarily Christian, I heard his Easter message that he recorded.
And I'm like, that was a gospel presentation.
I have never seen anything like that from an American leader in my lifetime.
Yep.
So, you know, when I see that kind of thing, it tells me that we are going to have a much more clarifying religious debate in the public square than I think we've had in, you know, past eras.
And you and I kind of discussed offline that all of these political debates that we have are ultimately religious debates.
And I think that's coming clear in a more stark way than we've seen in the past.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I always say Donald Trump is a godsend, but God sends some weird people.
I know.
Talk about the Bible.
That is the Bible.
Right.
Megan Basham, it is always wonderful to see you.
Your writings at the Daily Wire are always great.
And your book is Shepherds for Sale How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda.
I hope we get to do this again soon.
Absolutely.
Thanks for having me, Andrew.
All right, see you again.
Megan Basham, always love seeing her.
She's looking great.
She seems to have recovered her health, which is one of the things that I pray for every day.
And I think it's wonderful to see her.
And she's doing God's work, officially God, not just metaphorically, but officially God's work.
And if you really want to see God's work, No, that's not true.
But if you want entertainment, come to the Andrew Clavin Show on Friday.
I'll be there and I look forward to seeing you as well.