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Aug. 13, 2024 - Stew Peters Show
56:00
Millstone Report w Paul Harrell: Shepherds For Sale Triggers BIG EVA Self DENIAL
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Thank you.
Alright, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the program.
Thanks so much for being with us.
My name is Paul Harrell.
Can't do the show without you.
Give me a follow on X at RealPaulHarrell.
You see it on your screen there, as always.
I mean, we really do appreciate it.
It's a privilege to get to talk to you guys.
So, the book Shepherds for Sale by journalist Megan Basham.
We've talked a lot about it over the last two weeks.
It continues to whip woke evangelicals into a frenzy of self-denial.
As I've said, Megan Basham's book is really a mirror, and Big Eva leaders don't want to look at their reflection.
More importantly, they don't want average pew sitters who are there in church every week to look at the book, to give it a look, read the book.
Shepherds for Sale confirms what many of us have known for a very long time.
The author of The Case for Christian Nationalism, Stephen Wolf, put it this way, Now,
Stephen is exactly right, of course.
For years, most of the criticisms of Big Eva has come from truth-tellers on social media that simply don't have platforms as large as the podium of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Today, thanks to Basham's book, that is no longer the case.
Her book is selling very well and is now on the New York Times bestseller list.
Last I checked it had reached the number 12 spot, which means that more people than ever are aware of the leftist infiltration of churches and church institutions.
Keep in mind that this is all happening with the 2024 election in the background and emergent so-called groups like Evangelicals for Harris or Christians for Kamala are trying to give so-called Christians the excuse to vote against every single one of the Ten Commandments.
Watch.
So last year, 592 anti-transgender laws were introduced in state legislatures throughout the United States.
90 of them were signed into law in over 20 different states.
Who was driving those laws?
Well, of course, it was Republican legislatures, but people assume it was Republicans.
Well, two studies show us it was not Republicans per se driving those laws because 61% of Republicans believe transgender people should have the same civil rights as everybody else.
So who was driving those laws?
Who is still driving those laws?
It is the people I grew up with.
It is the people who taught me about Jesus.
It is the people to whom I preached.
It is evangelical Christians.
Truly disturbing.
More on that in a moment and protecting children in a moment.
One of the big names that Megan Basham exposes in her book is a man named J.D. Greer.
Now, you may remember him from last week when we played this clip of him claiming that the Bible only whispers about sexual sin.
Egregious in God's eyes than homosexuality.
Jen Wilkin, who's one of our favorite Bible teachers here and who's actually leading our women's conference, she said we ought to whisper about what the Bible whispers about, and we ought to shout about what it shouts about.
And the Bible appears more to whisper when it comes to sexual sin compared to its shouts about materialism and religious pride.
Throughout Jesus' ministry and his life, we see him demonstrating great, just incredible sympathy for those caught in sexual sin and great animosity toward the religiously proud.
So, Greer is the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, and he's the pastor of a very large church in North Carolina called The Summit.
Greer was the president of the Southern Baptist Convention during the summer of love and peaceful protests, and you know, you remember it all, the Black Lives Matter, when it was all the rage, man.
And because Basham features J.D. Greer as maybe one of the most prominent examples of shepherds who advance left-wing agendas within the church and from the pulpit, as you just saw, he felt the need to respond directly to her book.
Quote, an open response to Megan Basham's Shepherds for Sale, he says.
Now his response begins with this, quote, I've gone back and forth over the last several years, or the last several days, rather, on whether to post a response to Megan Basham's newly released book, Shepherds for Sale.
He says, That said, we serve a God of truth, he says.
And if the errors regarding me in this book are any indication of its broader accuracy, then the reader should be cautious about taking her claims at face value.
So there's the attack.
That's an attack against Megan's book and her credibility.
Greer is attempting to discredit The Messenger.
I would assume so his congregation does not read the book and take its message seriously.
So his response is very lengthy.
But thankfully, this morning, Megan Basham has responded to J.D. Greer with a series of very detailed and lengthy posts of her own over on X. And as always, she brings the receipts.
And so for more on that, let's go to these posts, shall we?
She says, an open response to J.D. Greer, as Greer is the first major figure in my book to publicly object to my depiction of his statements and actions over the last few years.
Now, you might say, wait a second, this is the first person.
Notice she says it's the first major figure in the book.
Because so many of the other detractors and the people that have been doing mental gymnastics to try to call into question the reliability and the sourcing of Megan Basham's book are people that are not prominently mentioned.
They're mentioned once here or there and people got all butthurt about it and decided to start to figure out how can we poke, make these pinpoint pokes in Megan Basham's work to call it all into question.
And quite frankly, it's really been good that they've done this.
It showed that Big Eva has very, very thin skin and it's also served to actually confirm what Megan Basham wrote as truth in many of these cases.
So she says that she's going to deal with his objections to her characterizations one by one and she does a very good job.
And the reason I'm going over this in such detail, and I'll just be perfectly honest with you folks, this is something that personally interests me.
I am a Christian.
I go to church.
I've seen this across all denominations, this slow leftist drift to where most big Eva...
Let's see, there was a time when big evangelicalism Was just default center-right.
The leaders were center-right.
And because of the George Soros money, because of the leftist infiltration, because of this idea that there's a third-way politics, people want to deny that historic Protestant political thought actually has always been right-wing, they've now made these big evil leaders center-left at best.
In many regards.
Not that there aren't great pastors out there today.
Not that there aren't great leaders out there who are consistent, who are biblically sound, and they're sticking to what the scripture says.
But there's a lot of them.
And of course, the media, the mainstream media that doesn't believe in God, that is very pagan, they are eager to promote God.
These shepherds who want to criticize the sheep for having conservative, biblically worldview, you know, biblical beliefs.
So that's why this is important to me.
Because this is something that has to be rooted out.
Okay?
And books like this, getting into the mainstream, are really helping our cause.
So that's why I am personally interested in this because I'm a Christian and I don't want them to put Christians in boxcars.
And I think the leftist infiltration of churches makes it easier to eventually put Christians in boxcars.
That's the 30,000 foot view that I'm coming at this from.
She says, and this is so...
Bear with me here, folks.
This is a lengthy post.
We're going to get through it, though, because it's very good, because J.D. Greer is, in fact, a progressive leftist.
And he has, while he may make a good argument here or there, he has accepted the phony false presuppositions of the left and has represented them to the congregation as to be more acceptable to the culture, as to try to win the culture instead of letting the church just be the church and not watering the message down.
Greer feels it was not fair, she writes, to mention his sermon wherein he said the Bible whispers about sexual sin, which we just told you about, because he later released a statement reversing his position after two years of pushback.
So he makes that statement that we played for you just a second ago.
He makes this statement.
Egregious in God's eyes than homosexuality.
Jen Wilkin, who's one of our favorite Bible teachers here and who's actually leading our women's conference, she said, we ought to whisper about what the Bible whispers about.
We ought to shout about what it shouts about.
And the Bible appears more to whisper when it comes to sexual sin compared to its shouts about materialism and religious pride.
So he gets a lot of pushback against that because that's ridiculous.
And, you know, I don't even have to prove that it's ridiculous.
It's ridiculous to say such a thing.
And, of course, he got it because he was taking the advice of a woman, you know, who's, you know, preached sermons.
Anyway, Bible whispers about sexual sin because he later released a statement reversing his position on that after two years of pushback.
So because he waited two years, it shouldn't be in your book, Megan.
You shouldn't have put that in your book because I reversed my position on it.
She writes, but the fact that he did later say that he does not believe that the Bible only whispers about sexual sin is something I myself noted in the paragraph he quotes.
Where then is our disagreement?
He just doesn't want to be called out.
He obviously did succumb to leftist thought here.
Now, they don't even want to qualify it as leftist thought.
Oh no, this is the third way.
There's a third way.
And it's like, wait a second, but the left in this country, they're the ones that are advancing the sex religion, this woke sex religion, and are putting it everywhere and are creating their own dogma, their own orthodoxy.
Anyway.
Megan goes on.
He says he was only speaking about Jesus' tone, but the transcript of the sermon he links to shows this is not true.
He was very clear that he was saying that the Bible whispers about the sexual sin itself.
There is no contrasting of tone.
Again, she's bringing the receipts here.
Further, the full context of the passage in my book shows that I was not accusing Greer of reversing his position on homosexuality, but reversing his position on whether one should whisper about it as a sin.
I stress that it is important for the church not to whisper about this issue because the culture is not whispering about it.
Indeed, there are few issues about which the culture speaks more loudly.
You know, that is a very interesting point.
Whatever the culture is trumpeting, like if you were going to make an argument of like something a church should address, I don't know, the sin of the age, that's going to be a sin that the culture is trumpeting, that the culture is saying is fine and good and righteous and wholesome.
That's not a time to whisper about it.
That's not the time for the church to say, well, we need to be quiet about this one thing that's leading people down a path to hell.
This one sin people don't want to give up.
This idea that we're going to define everybody by their own lusts.
Not about being made in the image of God, but no, everything has got to be viewed through the lens of sex and lust.
But we're going to whisper about sexuality, or we're going to say the Bible whispers about sexual sin.
Come on!
Let's be honest.
Do we not remember that Sodom and Gomorrah were once functioning cities with people in them that were wiped off the face of the map?
She goes on, And then,
again, she brings about receipts.
Do you see where Megan Basham is bringing the focus?
She's bringing the focus to the Christians who come to church every Sunday, one day out of seven, and then the other six days are going out into a world that wants to eat them and their children, specifically wants to convert their children to this woke sex religion.
And so she is saying that it is more important than ever for the church to have clear doctrine and clear black and white boundaries about what is good and what is evil, not trying to equivocate to try to get one of these people in your doors on Sundays.
And don't get me wrong, that's not me speaking against evangelism or trying to convert the lost.
Jesus does save sinners.
But the idea that you're going to water down the message so that you don't offend somebody in that lifestyle, so they might come, wherein then you're going to confuse the people who are actually in your congregation, who are sent out six days a week and actually have to live in this world that hates Christians with increasing fervor every single year, is not actually taking care of the sheep.
It is an assault against the sheep.
That is her point.
And it's excellent.
Another one.
Again, she's addressing J.D. Greer.
That said, I did not choose the major figures I feature in the book for an ill-advised comment or two, but for patterns of behavior.
So when she singles these people out in her book, she's singling them out for patterns of behavior and she brings the receipts.
As Greer has been demonstrated by Dr.
Robert Gagnon, he has a history of minimizing the seriousness of this culturally unpopular sin.
Greer says he did not heavily push to change the name of the Southern Baptist Convention.
So here's another part of his critique of Megan Basham's book, saying it doesn't represent him accurately, so don't read the rest of it, or, you know, maybe you should take the rest of it and take it with a grain of salt.
Greer's own objections undercut his claim that he did not make a heavy push to change the name during his time as president.
So this is one of her accusations was that J.D. Greer wanted to drop the Southern from the Southern Baptist Convention.
Now, why would you do that?
Well, because you're trying to make it more palatable for people that don't like the South.
You know, where most of the Baptists live in the South?
Greer's own objections undercut his claim that he did not make a heavy push to change the name during his time as president.
Simply because others moved to allow alternative names does nothing to prove or disprove whether he did.
As he concedes, he made the theme of the 2021 convention, We Are Great Commission Baptists, and announced that his church would begin using that descriptor.
That alone would be enough to support describing his push as heavy.
Additionally, in interviews with National newspapers like the Washington Post, Greer indicated his desire to see the denomination's name change.
The fact that a reviewer of my book, Samuel James, also overlooked media interviews Greer gave during his time as SBC president does nothing to bolster Greer's argument.
If the Washington Post misrepresented Greer in their 2020 interview, why did he not raise the issue then?
Again, prominent Southern Baptists are dropping Southern name amid racial unrest.
What was that?
Racial unrest?
What was that going on?
Oh yeah, the peaceful protest, the summer of love, George Floyd, Fentanyl.
It says Greer says retiring to get...
So here's another thing.
There's another...
So Megan Basham points out that Greer wanted to use a different gavel as SBC president.
You know, a gavel, like, you know, court in order, that sort of thing.
I bring this legislative body to order, whatever.
So he says in his rebut of Megan Masham that retiring the gavel that had belonged to Robert E. Lee's chaplain.
Now why would you no longer want to use the gavel that Robert E. Lee's chaplain John Broaddus used?
We're not going to use John Broaddus's gavel because that's not politically correct because he was the chaplain of Robert E. Lee.
You see a pattern here?
Let's drop the Southern out of the Southern Baptist Convention name and let's use a different gavel that's not connected to the Confederacy.
Robert E. Lee's Chaplain John Broaddus was his right and does not make him a progressive or a sellout.
Now, Megan Basham says, You
know, burn, loot, murder.
Get the acronym right.
She goes on, we are not really to believe the timing of this decision as Black Lives Matter activists were marching through the cities all over the country was coincidental.
As news reports noted at the time, his announcement about the gavel came a day after he gave an address calling on Southern Baptists to use the slogan, Black Lives Matter.
Again, J.D. Greer, she's exposing this guy.
She's exposing this guy.
These guys are political opportunists who don't really have their own thoughts.
They don't have thoughts of their own.
They take what's going on in the culture.
They take what they have heard on the Gospel Coalition or Christianity Today to care about this because we want to love our neighbor.
And all that really means is we're going to attack those Christians who are on the right to try to gain people on the left who are not at the moment professing Christians.
It's some sort of defunct strategy of evangelism is what it is.
It's totally messed up.
And actually, that's just, in my opinion, that's just the ruse.
That's just the cloak that this is all taking place under, under the notion of evangelism.
He now says he was primarily motivated by a desire to use the Judson and Armstrong gavels, but at the time, multiple news organizations were very clear that Greer's decision to retire the gavel against Robert E. Lee's chaplain Was part of a broader effort to remove Confederate statues and icons from public display.
So this was also going on.
Summer of 2020.
Tear down Civil War statues.
And the head of the Southern Baptist Convention is there arguing against the name.
We want to remove Southern from the name.
And I'm going to retire the gavel that was used by the chaplain of General Robert E. Lee.
It's all a coincidence, though.
It's not, you know, he's not woke.
He's not a progressive.
Megan Basham says, again, if his motives were being misconstrued, even by the Gospel Coalition, where he serves as a council member, why did he not correct the record then?
Number two, Greer objects to my saying that the media fawned over him As an anti-racist reformer.
Now, we all remember what is anti-racist.
It's not enough.
Remember what they said.
That's part of their religious dogma.
It's not enough to just be not racist.
You have to be anti-racist, which means you have to be actively working to tear down systems and institutions that are systemically racist.
So the media praised the head of the Southern Baptist Convention as an anti-racist reformer.
Greer says that he could not find the PBS, Washington Post, or any other credible outlet using this term for him.
These were my words, she writes, which is why I did not put them in quotes, but that the media fawned over him because of his bolstering of anti-racist terminology.
Like and priorities, the like and priorities is clear.
And she brings receipts here of a PBS article.
And then we have this here.
I also chose the term because Greer himself used it and amplified it.
Here we go.
In praise of birth moms, down with PowerPoint and the pro-life anti-racist movement.
So he's used the word anti-racist.
And then he says the New Testament is one of the most emphatically anti-racist texts ever written.
So he's adopting the terminology of the left.
Greer complains that I bring in larger cultural contexts like the removal of statues and the renaming of schools while discussing his activities.
Obviously, this is important to show how his preoccupations paralleled those that were dominating academic entertainment and corporate culture at the time.
It's almost like J.D. Greer is just being willfully ignorant here of what a journalist's job is.
A journalist reports on the facts but also reports on the other things that were going around at the time.
That are circling around these issues.
And that it makes it relevant.
The idea that J.D. Greer was coming up with these ideas in a vacuum and it had nothing to do with leftist drift or leftist dissemination, leftist propaganda is nuts.
We have another one here.
As to his objection that he does not wear a Patagonia vest.
So he even goes in his...
He even objects to Megan saying that he wore...
But she didn't actually say Patagonia.
As to his objection that he does not wear a Patagonia vest, I said Mega Church...
By the way, some people are now saying Megan Basham is basically putting J.D. Greer on trial now.
And I'm here for it.
I think that's exactly what's going on.
The denial of Big Eva is...
I mean, it's just embarrassing, the self-denial that's going on.
As to his objection that he does not wear a Patagonia vest, I said megachurch pastors of Greer's Variety favor that type of outdoor apparel.
And if he does not personally buy that brand, I can only say that he certainly wears vests that are Patagonia-like, and authors should be allowed some incidental creative license to make the reading more enjoyable.
I mean, look at that.
I mean, yeah.
Hey, kid, what's with the life preserver?
Greer complains that he has not used the lingo of CRT and anti-racism.
What he does not mention is that I gave a specific instance where he did so.
In a roundtable on racism, Greer used the Aspen Institute's glossary on dismantling structural racism, promoting racial equity.
And you can see this video.
I mean, you can see it right here.
Here it is, folks.
She brings receipts.
Did it say...
Especially if they really want to know.
Karen, I think that's a great question because I think that's where particularly a lot of those that are in the majority culture are like, what do we say here?
We've talked about the parable of the Good Samaritan that just because I'm not the one, that doesn't mean that I'm relieved of responsibility.
But I think in the United States, it even goes a little bit deeper because we recognize that because certain people defined by race were in power for so long, they created some of these systems that have worked better for them, quite frankly, than they have for other people.
Just look at the history of whether it's Jim Crow laws or practices like redlining and some of the long term damage.
There's a political commentator and he's very conservative.
Let me just add that.
So this is not, you know, just sort of a left-wing talking point.
He says the word systemic used to really bother me because I thought it meant that the laws themselves were bad.
And he said we got that corrected in the civil rights movement, and so why are we talking about systemic laws?
Here's how he defined it, and I thought it was really good.
His name is David French.
Did he just call David French a conservative?
He says, a system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations in things like movies and books and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequity.
It identifies dimensions of our history and culture that have allowed privileges associated with the color of one skin, whiteness, and disadvantage associated with color to endure and adapt over time.
Structural racism is not something that a few people or institutions choose to practice.
Instead, it's been a feature of the social, economic, and political systems in which we all exist.
Yeah, that's really good.
Yeah, that guy's not woke at all.
I mean, you know, you see that and it's like, how can this guy even defend himself?
Like, Megan Basham is just reporting the truth of what you say and what you believe and what you stand for.
Unbelievable.
It's unreal.
The level of self-denial is just insane.
And so she concludes on this point, yes, Greer was employing critical race theory terminology in his pastoral role and in his role as president of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Greer objects, again, goes on to say that he objects to my saying, writing that he made supporting the Black Lives Matter movement a gospel issue, saying that he explicitly distanced himself from the BLM movement, even as he said Christians could affirm the three words, Black Lives Matter.
This does not go to what Greer actually said.
What Greer actually said was, I realize that the Black Lives Matter movement and website have been hijacked.
Now, so what was going on then?
Remember the Black Lives Matter website?
Do you remember?
The Black Lives Matter website, all of a sudden people found out that they had on there that their goal was to destroy the nuclear family.
Man is the head of household.
Woman is a mom with kids.
To destroy the nuclear family was one of their goals.
That is a Marxist goal.
That has nothing to do...
Well, it shouldn't have anything to do with race, but then again, it's cultural Marxism, racial Marxism.
It's just new class, right?
We need a constant new...
Rollout of marginalized groups in perpetuity.
So what Greer actually says, I realize that the Black Lives Matter movement and website have been hijacked by some political operatives whose worldview and policy prescriptions would be deeply at odds with my own.
See, this is what these woke pastors do.
They try to make these justifications, but Megan Basham has them dead to rights.
She says, in fact, the BLM movement, though, was Marxist from its inception.
It wasn't This movement that then was hijacked, the website was always about this, the people that run the website, the people that founded the movement, it was always Marxist.
So when that news comes out and you've already taken the bait, you've already jumped on the latest cultural bandwagon that told you to care about the latest thing, whatever it is, whether it was George Floyd or COVID or Ukraine or whatever the next thing is going to be, so many of these pastors, they jump on the bandwagon because...
Because they want to be first, I guess.
And so they get outside and say, yeah, this is awesome.
And then when it's exposed by conservative media outlets, hey, by the way, these guys say they want to destroy the nuclear family.
You don't support that.
And they say, oh, yeah, yeah, I don't support that.
But I support this in theory.
And this has been it's been co-opted and corrupted when they don't want to admit, no, this was a left wing, evil, wicked idea from the very beginning meant to destroy the normal family.
So even back then, they don't want to admit that they are being duped or they are actively deceiving themselves or actively deceiving their own congregation.
That they are supposed to be spiritual overlords of, shepherds of, caretakers of.
So she says, right, I mean, it was created, the distinctiveness it created between categories it branded as the oppressed and the oppressors was always its aim.
It's always been well documented.
Further, his insistence the American Christians need to take a deep look at our police system and structures was perfectly at peace with the message of both BLM organization and the movement, even if he rejected their calls to defund the police.
Nowhere did Greer, as he claims, make it clear that he did not align himself with the BLM movement or its official goals.
He indicated that he aligned with the ostensibly non-hijacked aspects of the movement, and one of its official goals was restructuring the policing system, which he explicitly said he did align with.
Greer objects to Megan Basham pointing out that he set racial quotas for committee appointees because he says this was in line with past SBC resolutions and thinkings.
Now this is a real tricky one of how he's trying to wiggle out of racial quotas.
All the resolutions he cites call for a general encouraging of nominations and appointees from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, but none of those resolutions he cites actually call for a racial quota within the SBC and their committee make-ups.
Greer links to other SBC leaders touting the percentage of breakdowns of their minority appointments, and she says, I don't see this as a refutation of Greer's DEI policies, diversity, equity, inclusion, but rather...
Further evidence that this is an issue worth spotlighting.
But one book cannot contain every person involved in such activities and must be limited to the most recent and most prominent, which was J.D. Greer.
Greer goes on and says that his commitment to ensuring that 30% of his appointees were female or minorities is not a quota.
So he says this is not a quota in his response to Basham.
Basham says, of course it's a quota.
His insistence that setting a requirement for a certain number of hires in a particular demographic isn't an argument with me.
It's an argument with a dictionary.
Greer then disagrees.
He disagrees that it is ethnic Gnosticism for him to say that the SBC needs a quota of minority appointees because we need their special wisdom.
On that, he's free to take that position.
But as I wrote in my book, I see Greer's belief that female and minority appointees will have a particular wisdom that male and white appointees will not as a perfect example of the phenomenon Votie Bauckham wrote about when he described, I guess in Fault Lines, when he described the coins, he described and coined the term ethnic Gnosticism, which is the belief that minority Christians possess some special insight available only to them by virtue of their color.
Greer said, now, by the way, when Votie Bauckham came out with Fault Lines, Big Eva did the same thing to him that they're now attempting to do to Megan Basham.
Greer says that the paragraph in my introduction reads like his words came from one sermon.
I disagree, and I'm not sure why he would think so.
The fact that I wrote Greer went on to liken suggests a second sermon.
I also include two different citations to the two different sermons.
How then could it not be clear I was speaking of two different occasions?
Bring in the receipts.
To my asking about evidence of Greer's claim that closet racists and neo-Confederates are in SBC churches, Greer offers this, quote, Many friends I had in seminary could recount a time they heard a racist joke offered by someone in their church.
Megan Basham says racist jokes are bad, to be sure, but they would not seem to rise to the level of a term like neoconfederate.
As to the jokes, Greer graduated from seminary in 2003, so his motivation for warning of closet racists and neoconfederates in the Southern Baptist Convention churches in 2021 was from hearing friends joke more than 20 years ago.
I'm sorry, was from hearing friends talk about more than 20 years ago, they once heard a bigoted joke.
Oh my goodness. - Yes.
Greer says that when he uses terms like divisive and demonic, he was not referring to people who raised objections at all, but rather those who deliberately stirred up division.
Now pay attention to this one, folks, because this is the type of...
Well, the Bible talks about shepherds not lording their authority over the sheep.
This is kind of one of those deals.
It's more Bishop-like, if you will.
But Greer does not distinguish how observers could distinguish between those who had legitimate criticism of him and those who were simply stirring up division.
Nor did he indicate that any of the critiques levied against him were legitimate.
This rhetorical approach allows the hearer to class any criticism among the division stirrers.
So if you have anything to say that we don't like your division stirrer...
And this is how comments were widely received at the time as indicated by essays like those of Pastor Gabe.
Gabe Hughes.
Then she goes on.
Greer points out that the SBC leaders besides him were involved with the secular left-funded evangelical immigration table.
True enough, and that is why I make that very point at several points throughout the immigration chapter.
Greer says that he was not speaking of Trump's general border policies as wicked, but only his family separation policy.
To be fair, I could have been more specific, she says, in that sentence about which Trump border policy he was objecting to.
That said, only a couple of sentences later, I reference Greer's ire towards Trump's six-week-long policy of family separation.
So I do indicate to the reader in the same paragraph precisely which policy Greer was addressing.
Do you see how she's addressing each point of criticism that Greer is making here in great detail?
So for all of that, oh, I've just waited so long to address Megan Basham's book.
I didn't know if I should do it.
I didn't know, and...
And now I feel like I'm going to, because I need to basically, you know, if all of her, if the errors about me and her book are any indication about the rest of it, you need to maybe just not really take her book very seriously.
Shepherds for Sale, how evangelicals traded the gospel for the leftist lie or the leftist agenda.
We don't really need to take this seriously, folks.
And so Megan is answering every one of his objections, from what I can tell.
Let's just skip down because there's a lot more hypocrisy here.
This is interesting.
So it is not, she says, number six, it is not to Greer's credit that That the shortest section of his objection deals with the now acknowledged wrong he committed against the former members of First Baptist Church Naples by publicly branding them racists without any evidence that this was actually what they were.
J.D. Greer, a tweet.
Thanking God for the bold gospel faithful response of the leadership of FBC Naples.
Sin has to be taken seriously in the church and racial bias bellies our gospel.
Let us be united and lament that any vestige of this kind of sinful prejudice remains in our church.
Thing is, there was no racism.
Greer says, I accepted their account and supported their public statement in good faith.
No, Megan Basham says, one cannot in good faith publicly label ordinary members of a church racists without clear evidence.
That is slander.
Greer was SBC president at the time and had the biggest megaphone in the denomination.
He had all the more responsibility not to speak unless he knew that the allegations were true.
But in a world where you are accepting all the false presuppositions of the left and in a world where being called a bigot or a racist lives rent-free in your head as the worst thing that somebody could ever say about you, where those words have so much power.
By the way, they have less and less and less power today, thankfully.
But maybe not among the J.D. Greer types.
That are trying to bend over backwards to try to constantly prove that we are a colorblind society and all of our Protestant denominations are also colorblind.
Megan Basham says that the true story of what happened by branding these people in Naples, Florida racist when they really weren't is that an 80-year-old woman was pushed out of the church that she had been a member of for 30 years and that Megan Basham talked to her and that this woman cried on the phone to her.
She says, when the church calls you racist, people believe it.
That's because there's still great respect that the church is going to be arbiters of truth and not bear false witness, J.D. Greer.
People were humiliated and ostracized and named the worst thing one can be called in our society.
She says, I would hope Greer would now do more than issue a tepid, if anyone was falsely accused, I'm sorry I contributed to that.
In summary, with the exception of whether a sermon Greer made came from February or June of 2021, and I will check this and correct if necessary, nothing Greer brought up in his letter, which again is here, an open response to Megan Basham,
Nothing he brought up, she says in his letter, nothing Greer brought, let's see, in summary with the exception of whether the sermon, okay, nothing Greer brought forth is an error, she says, Greer.
Greer objects to my taking his word and his pattern of behavior seriously and setting it into the broader cultural context that he seems, quite obviously, to have been responding to.
There is nothing dishonest about this.
In fact, In fact, it's dishonest to suggest that this is an illegitimate or unusual form of journalistic analysis.
Finally, if anyone would prefer...
Okay, so this whole article is going to be posted over at Clear Truth Media tomorrow sometime.
So anyway, this is...
I just felt like I spent this time on it.
Again, it's what personally interests me.
I spent the time on it because it's very important.
It's very important for us to recognize.
Number one, there has not been...
To my knowledge, a single person that's been mentioned in this book as a negative way is somebody who's been either a victim of the deception of the left and the George Soros money and all this, or somebody who's been an active participant of it.
There's been not one person that's come out and been like, oh my goodness, I was wrong about this.
And what that means is these people at the top who don't want to have conversations with us.
They don't want to have conversations with the people who see this.
They want to continue to have conversations with the left, but they don't want to really have an honest, good faith conversation with us.
And it just goes to show that this is about protecting what they've already carved out.
And what they've carved out, what they think they've carved out, is a safe space for leftist, Marxist thought within the church.
And that's why so many big evil leaders now, they get risen, they get raised up to the top, they get promoted by the pagan press.
They're getting this attention because it's successfully, and it has successfully made these leaders, many of them, center-left by defaults.
The default position now is this Mickey Mouse, kid gloves, center leftism.
Well, it's not really a legitimate political opinion unless as a passer I can find a way to criticize both sides.
And don't get me wrong, you can criticize both sides.
There's plenty to criticize on the right.
But there's a huge difference.
There's a huge difference on the scale of moral depravity.
When you have people coming after our kids, when you have essentially national campaigns that are like, hey, abortion's good for you, you should try it.
Hey, sodomy is good for you, you should try it.
And if you have a problem with it, then you're a bigot.
Anyway, this is the continued fallout.
Shepherds for Sale certainly has triggered a giant amount of self-denial.
We're going to take a break real quick.
Don't go anywhere.
back here in just a moment.
I know that my Redeemer lives Glory, Hallelujah!
What comfort this sweet sentence gives, Glory, Hallelujah!
Shout on, pray, and we're gaining ground.
Glory, Hallelujah!
The dead's alive and the lost is found.
Glory, Hallelujah.
He lives to crush the fiends of hell.
Glory, Hallelujah.
He lives and death within me dwell.
Glory, Hallelujah.
Shall our own prayer and we're gaining ground.
Glory, Hallelujah.
The death's alive and the lost is found.
Glory, Hallelujah.
Shall our own prayer and we're gaining ground.
Glory, Hallelujah.
The death's alive and the lost is found.
Glory, Hallelujah.
All right, folks, welcome back.
Welcome back to the program.
I'm so grateful that you're here with us.
My name is Paul Harrell.
Before we go any further, though, I am going to tell you a little bit about the Beard and Sarkin Coffee Company.
This is a veteran-owned coffee company, and they import coffee beans from around the world, and they roast them back home here in the United States.
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At the Bearded Sergeant Coffee Company, they want to provide you quality product while also making a difference in the lives of other people.
It's fresh Costa Rican coffee.
And you can go to beardedsergeant.com slash millstone right now and save 15% and help support the Millstone Report when you use promo code Paul.
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We would very, very much appreciate it.
So yeah, I got something wrong yesterday.
I didn't mean to, but maybe it's just because I wanted it to be over.
As the show was ending yesterday, I told you that the DNC was this week, and I was corrected when I got off the air.
No, DNC's actually next week.
I was kind of hoping it was this week.
And I also thought it would have been crazy for that Elon Musk, Donald Trump spaces that went on that reached a billion people now.
I mean, what a historic night last night was with Elon Musk and Donald Trump having their Twitter conversation.
And of course, it was initially under attack.
Because people don't want this conversation to take place.
They don't want this massive force to actually be disseminated, to be able to rise above the liberal media information iron curtain that we all have to overcome.
We want to actually get a message out that's different than what the globalists would have.
So...
So yeah, that was interesting.
But yeah, I messed that up.
So I apologize for being, I don't know, I don't know where I was.
I don't know why I thought the DNC was this week, but it's not.
It's next week.
So I apologize for that.
But speaking of censorship, it wasn't just the internet attacks.
We also had, what is the European Union, the European commissioner threatening Elon Musk because he's about to interview Donald Trump and it's going to be disseminated all across Europe.
Dear Mr.
Musk, I'm writing you in the context of the recent events in the United Kingdom and in relation to the planned broadcast of your PlatformX of a live conversation between U.S. presidential candidate and yourself.
Yeah, so, you know, there's all kinds of threatening that's going on there.
It also kind of got the attention of a guy that I really respect, an author, Aaron M. Wren, who says, As we see from the UK and now from the EU, officials across the Atlantic want to eliminate or restrict freedom of speech for Americans in America.
Why are we defending these people from Russia again?
Hmm, that's a great point.
It actually brings up an even bigger point, which is why I wrote, Exactly!
Exactly!
NATO was supposed to protect Christian Europe from the godless communist Soviets, but who are the godless communist Soviets today?
When NATO and the West spread democracy, why does it always mean LGBTQ rights?
And why is exporting the rainbow America's central goal?
And the reason I bring up Aaron M. Wren here is because he's been instrumental in kind of shaping the narrative of where we were and where we're going.
Where we were, where we are now, and where we're going.
And he wrote a book about it, I believe, and he wrote this back in 2022, The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism.
And it's really good.
And all you need to know is this.
And this is how a lot of evangelical Christians are processing the world right now.
We used to be a Christian country and a proud Christian country.
And so that was positive world, right?
Where people were just saying, hey, yeah, I mean, we're Christians here in America.
This is just, you know, assumed Christian culture is a good thing.
He says that this was, you know, from 1994 and I guess to the founding.
Society at large retained a mostly positive view of Christianity.
To be known as a good church-going man remains part of being an upstanding citizen.
Publicly being a Christian is a status enhancer back in those times.
Christian moral norms are the basic moral norms of society, and violating them can bring negative consequences.
Okay, that's simple enough.
But then we went to Neutral World, which is a very short amount of time.
Neutral World, he describes, was from 1994 to 2014.
Oh, about the time that people like J.D. Greer, by the way, started adopting and all these other shepherds for sale.
Neutral world, 1994 to 2014.
Society takes a neutral stance toward Christianity.
Christianity no longer has privileged status, but it's not disfavored.
Being publicly known as a Christian has neither a positive nor a negative impact on one's social status during this time.
And Christianity is a valid option within the pluralistic public square.
Christian moral norms retain some residual effect.
Even now, we've got the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, where there's still certain words that you cannot say on the public airwaves because it's considered wrong.
It's considered dirty language.
We don't want little kids to hear it.
That's a product, by the way, of a Christian nationalistic past.
Then we get to negative world.
He writes that negative world was from 2014 to now.
So we've been in this now 10 years.
Society has come to have a negative view of Christianity.
Being known as a Christian is a social negative, particularly in elite domains of society.
Christian morality is expressly repudiated and seen as a threat to the public good and a new public moral order.
or end the new public moral order.
Subscribing to Christian moral views or violating the secular moral order brings now negative consequences like loss of job It's really a direct threat on many people's lives, right?
If you say that men are men and women are women or men can't become men and women can't become women and women can't become men, you can lose the ability to literally feed your family.
You can literally lose your ability to live and exist.
Because obviously if you can't feed your family, put a roof over their head, then your life and the very lives of your family are at risk.
It's a direct assault on us as human beings in our lives.
So that's where we are now.
Say the wrong thing, work at a corporation, say the wrong thing, no longer have a job because of Christianity.
And this is why I have been saying that their goal is to put Christians in boxcars.
That's very obvious to me at this point.
Anyway, we've got...
So tomorrow on the program, we may take a little bit of a deep dive into that Elon Musk conversation with Donald Trump.
But, I mean, I know a lot of you probably heard it.
I mean, look, it was reviewed by a billion people.
That's why I didn't really cover it that much on the program today.
Combined views of the conversation with Donald Trump and subsequent discussion by other accounts is now estimated to be around $1 billion.
And there's great updates on Twitter about the conversation and exactly what was said and what wasn't said and that sort of thing.
There's all kinds of...
Yeah, I mean, Elon Musk.
I will say this.
It was interesting that Musk is, you know, at least in what he's saying, is anti-communistic.
Again, I said this earlier in the week, but from a guy who was on talk radio and tried to convince the people that the left were socialists for forever, and he got all this pushback, but now the richest man in the world is saying that, no, the Democrats are actually communist.
That, to me, is a very, very big deal.
So, that's all the time that we have for this broadcast of the Millstone Report.
My name is Paul Harrell.
Thank you so much.
Don't forget to check out the podcast.
Millstone Report is now available in audio-only format.
For those of you that don't want to watch the show, you can listen to it on Apple and Spotify.
Just search for Millstone Report or my name, Paul Harrell.
That is all the time that we have.
Thank you guys so much for watching.
And unless I'm providentially hindered, we'll see you tomorrow.
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