Short-Selling Shepherds: Dark Money Will Dry Up, and That's a Problem for Us

Evangelical Elitists left ecclesiastical positions for leftwing parachurch ministries funded by progressive Dark Money. They'll be trying to come back.

Megan Basham’s book, Shepherd’s for Sale, collates much of what polemics ministries have been exposing for nearly a decade, but also includes additional research showing that many evangelical elitists are on the progressive political machine’s payroll. Now that it’s been demonstrated they control precisely 0% of the evangelical vote, their money is going to dry up. And that could be a bad thing for evangelical churches.

Let me be clear with my concern: The shepherds who sold out, will soon be in the market for shepherd short-selling, and they’ll return to the ecclesiastical organizations and churches they left.

Flashback to March 23, 2018: It was 3 o’clock in the morning, and I was in my home armory, which housed both my firearms and podcasting equipment. On my third or fourth Red Bull for the evening (or morning), I had just finished - for the second time in my polemics career - sending a few notes to trusted friends telling them that I would never harm myself, and reminding them of my favorite brand of ammo and grain of bullet just in case a forensics investigation is done in the event of my demise.

To put it mildly, I was freaked out.

Earlier in the evening, around supper time, I got a cryptic call from a distant associate affiliated with the Washington intelligence apparatus. They would not say much, besides the name “James Riady” like it was a clue to a puzzle I didn’t know I was working on. And so, I did what I do. I researched, and what I found was mind-blowing and, admittedly, had me shook.

Granted, I felt like the meme from Always Sunny, when Charlie is standing there bug-eyed on a caffeine binge, standing in front of a wall with red strings tied between clues taped to the wall. But it wasn’t fiction. It was real. A man with whom I was familiar because I followed Clinton’s scandals closely in high school as a politics and debate nerd, James Riady, was funneling millions upon millions into conservative Reformed and Baptist schools and getting, in return, social justice curricula in our institutions of higher learning.

I had wondered, for quite a while, if New Calvinism was a Trojan Horse for Social Justice. I surmised that the link between the two was only correlational. But over time, it became clearer that when Time Magazine listed New Calvinism as one of the ten ideas changing the world in March of 2009, some very dark forces decided to commandeer the movement to inject Critical Theory, Social Justice, and Neo-Marxism directly into the bloodstream of evangelicalism. But the link I found between James Riady and our educational institutions removed all doubt.

The synopsis was, as I explained in Is a Corrupt Globalist Billionaire Influencing America’s Reformed Community, Riady had been President Bill Clinton’s “money man,” raising for him close to a million dollars in foreign cash from South Korea (and elsewhere). Through the now-infamous Lippo Group, Riady funneled money to Clinton in a clear foreign influence scheme, lobbying Clinton personally at the White House more than 20 times, to grant Most Favored Nation Status to China. It became clear that Riady was an agent of Chinese Intelligence, and he subsequently pled guilty to a felony and 86 misdemeanors, fined 8.6 million dollars, and kicked out of the United States for successfully influencing the American election process with foreign cash (which is illegal).

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Riady was associated with Web Hubbell, who was at the center of Hillary Clinton’s Whitewater Scandal, which was set to end Clinton’s presidential ambitions. Hubbell would later go on to take the blame in the scandal, and was sentenced to 21 months in prison rather than testify against Hillary, effectively insulating her from being prosecuted. Afterward, Hubbell would go on to follow Riady back to Indonesia after the U.S. State Department kicked him out.

What I discovered is that in 2011, Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia was given a large financial endowment of 1.5 million, which they named after Riady’s Indonesian associate, Stephen Tong, and began the “Stephen Tong Chair of Reformed Theology.” In 2008, the seminary gave Tong an honorary doctorate from the seminary. Beginning about 2010, partnerships began between an Indonesian school, whose director is Riady’s daughter, and Reformed or evangelical schools in the United States. The partnership shuffled countless students from the U.S. to Riady’s institution, indoctrinating them in Social Justice. This partnership, between Riady and evangelical institutions, can still be seen in the pages of The Gospel Coalition, which recruited students to be sent to Indonesia for their Social Justice indoctrination.

Riady was also giving piles of cash to other institutions besides Westminster Philadelphia, including Reformed Theological Seminary (with Ligon Duncan) in Jackson. They also gave to undergraduate schools, including for example, Ouachita Baptist University back in Webb Hubbell’s Arkansas.

It was truly shocking to see a globalist billionaire, credibly accused by the Justice Department of being a Chinese intelligence asset, who had been expelled from the U.S. for election corruption, sending bags of cash to Reformed and Baptist institutions. After his removal by the State Department, any politician who took his cash would immediately be investigated for crimes. Instead, Riady sent his money to evangelicals, who greedily pocketed it without asking questions.

Megan Basham’s work makes all this pale by reasonable comparison, and I have to wonder if she had any Always Sunny moments of her own. I’d bet $5 she also had an evidence wall somewhere, but I could be wrong.

Nonetheless, what the Dark Money donors have figured out since last Tuesday, is that their attempt to interfere in our elections was pointless, as was the millions they spent propping up leftist evangelical parachurch ministries who they believed could persuade evangelicals into staying home this election cycle. The Harris-Walz campaign ended with 20 million dollars in debt, and their donors will be cutting their losses.

Shepherds for Sale details much of that funding. Donors to progressive evangelical causes are not donating because they’re Evangelicals for Harris. They’re donating because they’re godless pagans, paying evangelical carnival barkers who work for the highest bidder. But as is now evident, they have no influence remaining in evangelicalism (by God’s great mercy).

The directional flow will be changing. The flow of evangelical elitists from churches, to denominational appointments, and on to parachurch ministries, has been one-way for the last decade. But it’s about to become a two-way street. Those who prophesy for cash will be out of a job, and they’ll come back where their food bowl is located.

Consider, for example, Russell Moore’s tenure at Bay Vista Baptist Church in Biloxi ended in 2001, when he became a faculty member at Southern Seminary, and then Dean of the School of Theology in 2004 and then, pastor of Highview Baptist Church in Louisville until 2012. In 2013, he left local church roles for good, and took a position as president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, where he immediately sought to sever all ties with political conservatives and drove the SBC lobbying arm hard to the left. He lobbied for a mosque to be built under the cause of “religious freedom” (please note: the ERLC charter explicitly says it exists to protect the religious liberty of Baptists, not Muslims) while casting shade at Kim Davis, who was prosecuted and incarcerated for refusing to sign gay marriage licenses. Moore repeatedly attacked conservatives, like Judge Roy Moore, and made enemies out of Donald Trump and Trump’s Republican Party through constant attack, while praising Barack Obama at the drop of a hat. Mainstream media noticed his “softening tone” on homosexuality, as he attacked so-called “conversion therapy,” said that Christians should attend gay wedding receptions, and introduced the SBC to a whole string of “celibate” homosexual celebrities. And he stacked the deck with ERLC research fellows that would get worked up over things like animal rights, but stayed largely quiet about abortion.

After pressure was repeatedly applied to the ERLC through Baptist messengers and the Executive Board, Moore pulled his golden parachute and landed at Christianity Today in 2021. Moore would not go on to serve a local Southern Baptist-affiliated church.

Moore’s trajectory from the local church, to denominational appointment, to progressive parachurch institution, is illustrative of the path of many others. Ed Stetzer, for example, bounced from his position at Lifeway Christian Resources, an entity of the SBC, in 2016 after his political (and theological) progressivism simply became too unbearable for Southern Baptists to any longer tolerate. He wound up at Wheaton, and eventually Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

Mike Cosper left his role at a Southern Baptist Church in 2016 to launch a Christian non-profit, but it failed - he claims - because there was no stream of money for him because of his progressive political views. But, he eventually did find a parachurch organization that was happy to put him on staff regardless of his leftist views, Christianity Today.

These three are only a few, of the many, who have used their local church affiliation to catapult them into denominational and, ultimately, parachurch roles with suspect leftist financial support.

I would highly suspect that in coming months, you will see more than one evangelical elitist leave their Dark Money-funded parachurch organization and come back to local church positions in order to eat. It is, for them, their Plan B.

No, I don’t have a crystal ball. And I could be completely wrong. But I seldom am, and if you gambled against my track record of being proven right, you’d be broke by now. For now, it suffices to say it’s “just a hunch.” Those hunches are usually correct.

Kingdom-builders and ladder-climbers have habitually used local church roles to springboard their careers into denominational and, ultimately, prestigious parachurch roles. But as Cosper discovered in 2016, they have to procure funding from someone other than grandma, dropping her egg and milk money into the offering plate. Legitimate Christians simply don’t support their cause. And so, as Basham reports in Shepherds for Sale, they found funding sources for the low, low price of their soul.

Okay, that’s my paraphrase, to be clear.

However, the only people who invest money in losing causes are those who support the Cooperative Program or other ecclesiastical organizations because it’s a part of their tithe. Dark Money donors will be drying up like the dew on a hot Texas morning.

And they’ll be back. Or at least, they will try. It will be up to you, the church members and tithers, to tell them their services are no longer needed.