Shepherds for Sale Puts SBC Elites in a Conundrum. Their Response Will Be Telling.
A new and unavoidable litmus test for Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) leaders (both entity heads and major pastors) just dropped. It’s currently sitting at #5 on Amazon’s Chart of “The Top 20 Most Sold & Most Read Books of the Week.” Yes, SBC elites’ response or non-response to Megan Basham’s New York Times bestseller Shepherds For Sale should be viewed by rank-and-file Southern Baptists as an important gauge of our denomination’s spiritual state and of these leaders’ fitness to continue to serve at the highest levels of our Convention.
Let me explain why.
My own awakening to the possibility that something might be seriously amiss at the highest levels of SBC life was precipitated by two events. The first was Russell Moore’s declaration that evangelicals who vote for Trump have to deny their faith to do so. The second was when I realized that Voddie Baucham had been canceled by Baptist elites, including, most egregiously, by the presidents of every Southern Baptist seminary. I could not then and cannot now think of an explanation for Moore’s or these SBC elite’s behavior that would be flattering to them. Nor can I see how men who would behave in this way could be a good fit for leadership in the SBC. Moore eventually came to agree and bolted the convention.
For the first time in my life, I moved from the reflexive trust I had placed in Southern Baptist leaders from childhood to the posture Ronald Reagan took toward negotiations with the Soviet Union and Mikhail Gorbachev—trust but verify. I set out on what, at present, is a nine-year stint of close observation of SBC leadership. My posture toward my beloved denomination is now, sadly, one of distrust until compelled not to.
I have discovered that the more likely accountings for elite SBC behavior and predictors of future behavior not only need not, but ought not, look first to Holy Scripture or to any Baptist confessional standard. Comprehension of otherwise surprising or strange or downright objectionable behavior by SBC brass requires no recourse to the Bible or to anything Christian whatsoever. Imagining otherwise will send enquirers on a wild goose chase. Explanations of SBC elite speech and silences, actions and non-actions, lie elsewhere.
Where then?
In sync with the CEO models of leadership promoted by the Church Growth movement associated with the names Bill Hybels and John Maxwell, elite SBC behavior reflects the values, concerns, and strategies of the business world, including the quest to expand market share and to move spiritual products and services such as seminary educations or seeker-friendly church experiences. Or, as Basham has demonstrated, deceptive and dark money-funded Christianizing of progressive agendas. To answer the question of what products our SBC entities deliver to their customers, we must look beyond the Bible and the BF&M 2000. One must also monitor and scrutinize the content of branding, messaging, and platforming decisions of the various institutions.
This is where Basham’s blockbuster book becomes uniquely significant as a test of my thesis but, more importantly, of the spiritual state of Southern Baptist leadership. If my thesis is correct, Basham’s book has put the SBC entity heads under significant pressure—the pressure of the sort brought upon them previously by the rise of Trump, the death of George Floyd, the rise of BLM, #MeToo, the open southern border, and the publication of Voddie Baucham’s bestselling book Fault Lines plus one additional element, actual corruption.
Why? They are confronted with several clashing but inescapable realities. Once again, much of the present-day liberal compromises in evangelical and Southern Baptist posturing on theological and political matters goes back to Timothy Keller. Keller was a liberalizing urban church guru who successfully marketed the spiritual product of seeker-friendly church experiences to Democrat-voting young people—young people that the SBC elites want to attract to their seminaries and into their pews in order to secure the viability of the institutions they lead. They did this even though the vast majority of Southern Baptists do not vote Democrat. But if you chart a course set by “liberal sensibilities,” it demands a particular response to each of the aforementioned pressure-producing occurrences as mandatory bona fides of Christian love and justice.
One might object that Keller and Baptist elites cannot be charged with such catering to liberal sensibilities on account of their formal and confessional standards on traditional marriage, homosexuality, and abortion. My thesis is that the answers to the questions “What do Keller and the SBC elites formally affirm?” and “What do they deliver to their customers?” are not one and the same. Discernment of what they deliver is better indicated by their ongoing branding, messaging, and platforming. Examination of these reveals an increasing loyalty to the urban, elite, and liberal positions held by the Democrat Party.
The most consistent predictor of SBC elite silences and cancelations is the dogma of the sanctification of Christian votes for Democrats that Timothy Keller and The Gospel Coalition never violate. SBC elites climbed aboard the Keller train years ago to capitalize on his success with young Democrat voters. Thus, the cancelations. Thus, Keller’s Redeemer Church in Manhattan proved so seeker-friendly to liberal Democrats that the pro-abortion and pro-homosexual marriage political operative Kirsten Powers found it a safe place for her. But she was outraged when, after years of consumption of Keller’s preaching and his wife’s small group teaching, she discovered the church’s formal conservative positions and left feeling deceived and betrayed.
Basham’s book, like Baucham’s, is odious to Democrats and liberal sympathizers alike. Baucham, formerly a darling of SBC elites, was canceled when he refused to embrace the racist interpretation of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri. Thus, SBC elites ignored his book.
In fear and thrall to the Democrat-voting black establishment as necessary to their virtue signaling of non-racism, they refused to embrace Baucham once he dared to step out of the Democrat plantation. Democrat and liberation theology-friendly blacks who teach at SBC seminaries are protected from conservative blacks like Baucham, Carol Swain, and Lee Brand.
Basham’s book puts the SBC elites through another iteration of the “Baucham bestseller problem” with the new element of progressive dark money influencing SBC entities. Baucham and Basham are both Southern Baptists. So is Carol Swain, who is also an award-winning and prolific author. What to do? All three of these authors hold to orthodox, evangelical, Southern Baptist theological convictions. The seminaries have hosted and lauded many, many speakers over the last decade who have written zero books, people no one has ever heard of, and many of whom have not even been Baptists.
Will the SBC elites bash Basham? Attack her? Give her the cold shoulder? Put her in a “cone of silence?” Or will they publicly thank her for her important work? Will they laud, celebrate, and host her? Basham’s book exposes the profound co-option of evangelicals, including Southern Baptists, by progressive forces who only wish us and the gospel of Jesus Christ ill. What would explain the failure to welcome, engage, and give thanks for this arduous service Basham has offered to Southern Baptists? What are they afraid of? Are they hiding something?
If there is a good explanation for the SBC elite’s silence (at best) and criticism (at worst) of Basham’s book—or for the failure of at least one or two seminaries to celebrate and host her on campus—that speaks well of leadership in the Southern Baptist Convention, I cannot think of it.
But I can think of some very bad reasons. Foremost among them is our SBC elite’s intractable desire to be winsome to the very same progressive and anti-Christian forces that Basham’s book demonstrates are taking an outsized interest in the SBC.
However, while our elites want to be friends with these dark forces, they want to destroy us. Will Basham’s book wake them up to that fact?
Only time will tell.
