Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsExposes leftward drift of Big Eva, often funded by secular leftist billionaires
Reviewed in the United States on August 11, 2024
The book documents how many soi-disant Evangelical leaders have departed from biblical truth and indeed from what many of their congregants believe. The book covers the following:
1. Global warming, climate alarmism
2. Illegal immigration
3. Abortion
4. COVID lockdowns (including vaccines/masking)
5. Critical race theory
6. #MeToo movement and guilt-by-accusation
7. LGBTQ
The book also documents how much funding from wealthy leftist anti-Christian sources have been used to try to sway Evangelicals, often the largest voting bloc against their agenda. But the author is careful to say that not all those named in the book have taken funding. Sometimes, the funding has followed the shepherd's previous move to the left.
The book also documents the emotional blackmail, where “Love thy neighbour” is used to justify the leftist policies. Big Eva often gives little thought to whether the policy actually DOES good to the neighbour. The author has case studies of individuals at the beginning of each chapter to show the opposite. She also documents that ‘green’ policies have caused the collapse of the economies of Ghana and Sri Lanka, thus hurting many Sri Lankan and Ghanan neighbours.
Similarly, she writes in Ch. 2 that Big Eva justifies open-slather illegal immigration, and “pepper their speeches with Bible verses about the fatherless and the widow but fail to acknowledge how the positions they’ve staked out have created plenty of both” (46).
In Ch. 3, Mrs Basham documents how many Big Eva downplay the right to life, without which there is no other right. Often they insist that to be ‘truly pro-life’, people must also adopt many leftist policy positions, e.g. even more illegal immigration, spending even more than the $1T on welfare that we already do, etc. It gets to where a politician who supports abortion up to birth for any reason can be ‘truly pro-life’ because of wide support of leftism. Much of it was to give cover to vote for pro-abort lefist politicians.
For Ch. 5, I respectfully dissent from her position in some respects. Yes, many of the lockdowns were very unfair. Closing churches but opening pot-shops, abortion mills, liquor stores, and casinos was politics not science. Same goes for encouraging the 2020 riots, at a time when even outdoor church services and funerals were banned, even though the virus didn't spread much outdoors. But the vaccines were both very safe and very effective at preventing serious disease and death. It is also common sense that masking helps. After all, we cover our nose and mouth while coughing and sneezing, to put up an imperfect barrier against droplets that carry pathogens. As a pro-vaxer, I fault Francis Collins in holding up approval of the vaccines for weeks because of an unscientific ‘Diversity’ reason, at a time when Covid was killing maybe 600 unvaxed Americans per day. But Mrs Basham is right to expose Collins’ very unbiblical viewpoints. She also exposesTim Keller's lame defense of Collins: supposedly he was like Daniel working under the pagan Nebuchadnezzar, but when "Nebuchadnezzar" was Trump and wanting to outlaw these antibiblical things like research on aborted baby parts, "Daniel"/Collins was pushing for the antibiblical things.
In Ch. 6, Mrs Basham documents how the SBC unequally yoked with the anti-Christian Guidepost organization to come up with what amounts to Guilt-by-Accusation. One of the key players treated Justice Kavanaugh as basically guilty simply because someone accused him. There is also a Popperian unfalsifiability: if an accuser's claims can be corroborated, that proves the claims. But if they are found to be false, then it's evidence that the accuser suffered such trauma that her recollection is off. Heads, accuser wins; tails, accused loses. The same person also helped draft an SBC report, then helped someone sue the SBC based on that report, a clear conflict of interest.