Author Megan Basham explains why some Christian leaders back policies that are anything but Christian.

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America faces a lot of enemies right now, foreign and domestic.

But from the perspective of the people who run the country, there's really just one enemy, and that's faithful Christians. Now, nobody ever says that out loud, of course.
Nobody ever says anything very meaningful out loud in the United States anymore. But if you're interested in who they really hate, well, look at what's happening.
So Christian churches across the country have been burning and no one in the government is doing anything about it. Look at how Christian churches are treated during COVID.
Strip clubs stayed open, weed dispensaries stayed open, liquor stores stayed open, but Christian churches were closed because public health. We talked the other day to a guy who's facing 11 years in prison, federal felony charges from the Biden administration for praying at an abortion clinic and daring to sing hymns.
So if you are a faithful Christian, not a fake Christian, David French Christian, but an actual Christian of the kind this country has always had, of the kind this country was created to harbor, actually, you are seen as an enemy by the people who run it. And of course, nobody hates Christians more than longtime Hollywood actor and producer Rob Reiner.
Amazingly. And he's just produced a documentary about how faithful Christians are the enemy, if you can believe it.
Here's the trailer from that documentary.

We should be blazing forth as a countercultural example. And instead, we're leading the charge of malice and division.
Christian nationalism uses Christianity as a means to an end, that end being some form of authoritarianism. Being a Christian is about the values of inclusion.
Christian nationalism is certainly not based on the values of the gospel. God wants America to be saved.
They're told over and over and over again that you're in danger. You need to fight if you don't want to lose your country.
We are in a civil war between good and evil. This is not a movement about Christian values.
This is about Christian power. The thing that keeps me up at night is that we lose democracy.
Does that seem possible? Yes. Rob Reiner lecturing us on what Jesus really wanted.
Now, part of the purpose of this is political, of course. Part of the purpose, maybe the main purpose, is spiritual.
There's something about actual Christianity that's the greatest threat of all to the people in charge. And again, you see it all around.
MSNBC the other day hosted a Politico reporter, Heidi Prisbala, attacking Christians who somehow got the idea, maybe from our founding documents, that their rights come from God and aren't granted out of the generosity of, say, Kamala Harris's heart. Here's Heidi Prisbala.
And the one thing that unites all of them, because there's many different groups orbiting Trump, but the thing that unites them as Christian nationalists, not Christians, by the way, because Christian nationalists is very different, is that they believe that our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don't come from any earthly authority. They don't come from Congress.
They don't come from their Supreme Court. They come from God.
They think their rights come from God. They're not granted by the U.S.
Congress and Politico and Heidi Prisbala, who, by the way, has no idea what she's saying, just another useful idiot. But what's going on behind the scenes, all the effort that went into getting Heidi Prisbala to carry this message, probably unknowingly, is worth taking a really close look at.
In fact, it's really the only conversation that matters at this point in the history of the West. And Megan Basham has been covering this and writing about it from a position of deep knowledge and we think some wisdom.
She's a reporter for the Daily Wire. She's written a book about this.
She joins us now. Megan, thanks so much for coming on.
So this is a much broader conversation, but let's just start with Rob Reiner lecturing the rest of us about what Christianity really is. What is this documentary and what's the purpose of it? Yeah, it's a little hard to get around the irony of that.
And thanks for having me, Tucker. You know, to start with, I might disagree with a little bit something you said in your monologue there, and that is that they're not saying this out loud because they're very much saying it out loud these days.
They are calling evangelicals, particularly evangelicals, who engage in the political process a threat to democracy. And I think that's the important thing to know, because the context of this and for people who don't know what evangelicals are or why we should care.
If you're not a particularly religious person, here's why you care. So they are 32 percent of the American electorate.
The Atlantic quite rightly called them in 2021 America's most powerful voting bloc. So they're right about that.
They are essentially the only obstacle that we still have to the left wing agenda. If you remove them, you removed all the brakes is essentially what evangelicals are and what they do when it comes to the political process.

So there's been a very deliberate effort, and this film is part of it, but it is just a drop in the bucket, to be quite frank, of an entire cottage industry that is saying, if these people, these evangelicals, continue to engage in the public process to try to influence their neighbors through their vote, through free association, through using their free speech by, you know, get out the vote efforts, anything like that, that's dangerous and scary. And that's very much what you saw with this film.
So, I mean, it is over the top. I'm not going to do it the justice of pretending like it presents anything like a coherent intellectual argument.
It doesn't. What it essentially does is say, here are bad, scary Christians.
And they include in that bucket, by the way, everyone from Billy Graham to Mike Pence to the Unite the Right rally, which was led by Richard Spencer, an atheist. So it's essentially saying all these guys, Jerry Falwell, John MacArthur, all of them, they're the same as Unite the Right, which in itself is bonkers to even try to create a parallel there.
So that is the gist of the mouth. I'm sorry to interrupt.
They claim, and I haven't seen it, but Richard Spencer is a liberal who hates Christianity, and they're saying that Richard Spencer is a Christian nationalist? Correct. Yes.
So, you know, as they sort of trace the arc of Christian nationalism in American history, what they show is that it culminates in the Unite the Right rally and the January 6th riot, neither of which has there ever been any evidence were associated with any religious motives. So really what you could call this is a propaganda smear.
That's what it is. It's just one that's being helped along by people who claim to be speaking for the real Christians, the true Christians, which in this film are the Christians who are pro-abortion, pro-LGBTQ agenda, who demand political action on behalf of abortion in their rainbow-drenched churches.
I mean, I'm hardly a theologian, have no interest in becoming one, but I think we can say conclusively if you're pro-abortion, you're not a Christian. I mean, I think it's kind of that simple, is it not? I don't know how you could be for child sacrifice and for Christianity.
Right. Yeah, it absolutely is for me.
And, you know, that's part of what's so insidious is, you know, they say that Roe is the overturning of Roe was the culmination of Christian nationalist political victory. So if you're going to do that, you have now just said that evangelicals participating in the political process over a course of, gosh, 30, 50 years, They put in so much effort that that was nothing more than a political ploy, and it's not true Christianity.
It's not true religion. In fact, they say that the only reason Christians and evangelicals in particular picked up that issue was because they failed at blocking desegregation in private schools back in the 1960s.
So that's how unserious this film is. But what is serious about it is that it's part of a much larger narrative that we're seeing.
You know, everybody knows Rob Reiner, so everybody's talking about this particular film. But let's get real.
I mean, there's been an entire cottage industry of books from, you know, staff writers at The Atlantic through from Russell Moore, who is in this film himself, claiming to speak for the sober-minded, non-politically idolatrous Christians, which that in itself, given how political someone like Russell Moore, who is the editor of Christianity Today himself, is hugely ironic. And I think that there's also a little bit of don't look behind the curtain at what the man back there is doing, because Russell Moore is absolutely a political actor in a much more deliberate and well-funded way than any of the people that this movie is criticizing.
Well, let's talk about that. I mean, so he was a Baptist leader, of course, for years.
He didn't like Trump, which from my perspective is totally fine. You don't have to like Trump to be a Christian, of course, or any political leader.
But Russell Moore is himself a political leader. And he does, it seems from my outsider's perspective, very much like he is paid to subvert American traditional Christianity on behalf of the Democratic Party.
He seems like he's betraying his fellow Christians for money. But maybe I'm just being unfair.
You tell me who Russell Moore is, if you would. Who's backing him and why, you think? So if you're not familiar with Russell Moore, he was formerly, until the last few years, the head of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
And that is the political lobbying arm of the Southern Baptist Convention. That is the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S.
It represents some 47,000 churches, maybe 15 million evangelicals in the country. So if your purpose is to suppress or sway their vote, you're not going to get more bang for your buck than trying to infiltrate the Southern Baptist Convention.
And I think that's very much what we have seen with Russell Moore when he was in leadership. You know, part of the thing that he did was getting the ERLC involved with a group called the Evangelical Immigration Table, which is essentially just the faith front of the National Immigration Forum, which is a left-wing NGO that advocates for open border policies, amnesty policies.
They are George Soros funded. They don't like people to talk about that, but they absolutely are.
And so these are the kind of things that Russell Moore was involved in when he was with the ERLC. He did a lot of publicity with Obama, trying to convince all kinds of conservative legislators at the time that evangelicals backed amnesty policies and that that's what they wanted.
And he's still doing that kind of thing today. But eventually, it was sort of like the jig was up with Southern Baptists.
You had the rank and file, who did not feel represented by him, really dissatisfied with the kind of political lobbying that he was doing. So he said he was psychologically terrorized.
Now, he has never defined what he meant by he was psychologically terrorized. He said that he was psychologically terrorized? Yes, he said that.
He said he was psychologically terrorized by the Southern Baptists who were not fans of his. And again, and this was repeated in Atlantic writer Tim Alberta's book, but nobody ever defines what he meant by that.
Everybody just sort of takes him at his word. So I don't know what he meant by that.
But what we do know is the rank and file did not really like his political views. So he left and he went and became the editor in chief at Christianity Today.
And what they're doing in this cycle right now, for example, is they have launched a curriculum that is a political Bible study to help Christians reframe their political identity. And it's funded by people like the Rockefellers, the Rockefeller philanthropy advisors.
If you're not familiar with them, they fund a lot of left-wing things like abortion and

quote-unquote, gender-affirming care for minors and youth. So puberty blockers, mastectomies for young girls, hormones, all of that.
So things that rob children of their sexual function. so he's involved with a group that's taking money from them and also from the

Kulit Foundation which is the second largest funder of Planned Parenthood. So they have created this Bible study to go into churches, to go into Christian colleges, universities.
The Council for Christian Colleges and Universities has been pushing it onto all of their 185 campuses. And essentially what it does is say that issues are complex.
And at the beginning of this, you brought up abortion, Tucker. And one of the things that this curriculum stresses is that if anybody tells you they think they know the answer on how you should vote for when it comes to abortion and protecting innocent lives, you should run from that person because you shouldn't buy into package deal ethics.
And it's insidious, but it is somewhat overt in this curriculum. At one point, David French, who was also involved in this curriculum, is talking about how complex the issue of abortion is, and we don't always know how we should vote regarding it, they show on the screen a woman holding up a pro-life sign at a march.
So, you know, the visual messaging there is very clear. So when you look at this, you go, here you have guys like Russell Moore, David French, who are taking money from hard left secular foundations to push their political curriculum into churches, onto Christian campuses.
This is explicitly political lobbying. And yet at the same time, they're in this movie of Rob Reiner's warning.
Oh gosh, look at all the idolatrous Trump voters, all of the idolatrous evangelicals who are trying to oppose Roe, who are happy about the Dobbs decision, who made political choices to bring that day about. So, you know, there's just a huge irony there, or we might call it hypocrisy and Phariseeism.
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Well, I do think that there's a different standard for leaders. i mean they they have the privilege of leadership and all of its many benefits but they also have deeper obligations to the people they lead and i wonder of those of the people you've mentioned david french and russell moore there's been a lot of killing of christians around the world there's killing of christians in gaza right now killing christians in armenia, the Christians of Iraq were genocided under George W.
Bush. And then there are Christians in the United States going to prison for practicing their religion.
Have they said anything about any of that? No. And, you know, that's part of what this is, is that they push forward a message of here is what faithful Christian witness in the public square looks like.
But it's only on specific issues, right? It's only on things like welcoming the stranger when it comes to illegal immigration. So, you know, that's a big messaging push that Russell Moore, David French have been involved in.
It includes things like not idolizing Trump. But when it comes to these complex issues that we should be talking about from a biblical worldview, they don't delve into that at all because that is not part of the messaging that, let's say, the mainstream media, let's say, the secular progressive foundations who are funding their ventures.
These are not the political ideas that they're interested in. That's not the political debate that they're interested in.
And, you know, therefore, don't talk about that and you're not going to hear them talk about that. And look, I think these are issues on which Christians of good faith can have different views and it's something that we can wrestle with and discuss.
But what you notice is they don't wrestle with it and discuss it. They say, you know, there is one legitimate Christian outlook to take.
And if you express or even ask in any way about it in any curious or you present something else that may go, hey, what about this? I just read about these Ukrainian churches that are being shut down. I have a concern about that.
The immediate thing is to tag you as somebody who is a Christian nationalist, who's a conspiracy theorist. And, you know, one thing that made me laugh in this film when they were tying January 6 to Christian nationalism is they said, one of the dangers we may see coming out of this is that Christians may begin to second guess what happened on January 6, and that would be a threat to our democracy.
So the things that should be the foundations of our democracy, open debate about these issues, about what's happening in Ukraine or what's happening in Gaza or any of these subjects where we should have free and open debate. Instead, they're saying it's a threat to democracy to have free and open debate as Christians about these issues.
You must obey and not question people who hate Christianity and want to kill Christians. Otherwise, you're not a Christian.
That's what they're saying. One of the things that bothers me most about all of this and shocks me a little bit is if you live in a pluralistic society like ours, which is great, one of the rules is you can't attack other people's religions.
And you may disagree with them. I disagree with a lot of

different religions. But if you want to all live together, you can't just attack the theological precepts of other people's religions or else people really start to hate each other and it's impossible to live together.
And yet these attacks on Christian nationalism are exactly that. Does anyone see that as unwise? Like, let's not do this.
I mean, you know, certainly you're seeing rank and file people saying this is unwise, and you are starting to see something of a, okay, and we can debate whether or not this is wise, but you're seeing some people going, we are getting tagged with this Christian nationalism label anyway, so maybe what we should do is just accept it and, you know, give it a definition that is different from the definition that they're going to give it, since they're going to push this agenda anyway. And here's the situation, is that we see where this spins out.
We see what happens in societies where we've made it okay for the government to start investigating churches, starting to question people's doctrine and theology. And that actually is a dangerous road to go down.
And that's not something that they grapple with at all in this film. It's certainly not something that, you know, the public theologian of Christianity today, which is the flagship magazine of evangelicalism and should be grappling with this issue, that's not something that they discuss at all.
And, you know, you don't want to scare monger, but at the same time you go, I can see very clearly the direction it goes in when we have our DOJ investigating Catholic churches as hotbeds of domestic terrorism. That is not a good place for us to head down.
And so this entire narrative is setting something like that up. And if we're going to do that, you do get to the place where you go, these are legitimate religions and these are not legitimate religions.
And that actually is something that foundationally our founding father said, no, that's not what this country is about. You have freedom to practice your religion and the state is not going to tell you whether you have a legitimate interpretation of biblical writings or not.
Well, that's exactly right. And if we're already there, I mean, they're sending Biden, DOJ sending a man to prison for 11 years for praying in an abortion clinic.
So, you know, if that doesn't bother you as a defender of democracy and freedom of religion, I mean, you're obviously on the side of totalitarianism and they are. So last question, is it working? I mean, the whole idea is to take sincere, faithful Christians and make them abandon sincere, faithful Christianity and turn to the left.
That's the point of this. Is that working? Yeah, I think it has been a very effective gambit.
So when you look at it as this two-pronged approach, you have one where people who genuinely sincere Christians might hear, oh gosh, I'm not loving my neighbor if I am very clear about my views in the public square and that the way of Jesus is to be somewhat ashamed and quiet of what our biblical convictions are and we shouldn't exercise our constitutional rights in the same way that all of our neighbors do. I think that absolutely is having an effect, particularly with, you might say, younger evangelicals.
They might feel a little embarrassed, like maybe it's not such a good thing to be so bold and so outspoken about what we think about the cause of life. And then on the other hand, I do think you absolutely have people who are a little bit nervous of where this is heading as far as how our government is talking about Christians now, how you see some very powerful actors saying, I don't want to be viewed as a threat to democracy.
So I'm just not going to participate in this voter mobilization effort. I'm not going to do things like question January 6th because I don't want to be lumped in with the people who are viewed as a threat to democracy.
And that becomes a problem because there's a tacit threat there that if you question anything outside of the official narrative, you're now a threat to democracy. Yeah, no, it's totally right.
I mean, I said that was my last question, but I do have one more, which is if we accept, you've made a very powerful case, and I believe it, that the leadership of a lot of these Christian institutions is totally, totally corrupt and actually working against their flocks, their members. But who, I mean, who are the leaders that you listen to? You know, maybe, and I'm not even asking this in political terms, who they vote for is, you know, not as relevant as whether they're clear thinking and honest about the religion.
Who is resisting these attempts at subversion, do you think? Well, look, and that's a really good part of this conversation is that you're seeing, I would say, a new generation of young pastors, young theologians, young thinkers. You know, look, guys who are a lot more educated and intelligent about the theological debate

around these issues than I am, but I read them and I love them.

You know, guys like Doug Wilson are doing, Pastor Doug Wilson doing really fascinating

work.

You're seeing old guard guys like Pastor John MacArthur out of California who fought the COVID closure mandates and guys like that who never wavered and they never got sucked into all of this. And, you know, in all of my research for this book, these are the guys that I went, I never saw any money being funneled to them.
And so it's sure funny how they never picked up any of this messaging. So I am seeing that.

I'm also seeing young guys within the Southern Baptist Convention.

I mean, look, there's a, people won't know this.

This is very granular, but there is a soul for that massive battle for the soul of that

massive Southern Baptist Convention right now that is happening.

And that's actually very good news to me, because what that means is that, you know,

it is not beyond saving and it matters because its seminaries educate the majority of pastors