Have ever wondered how cultural institutions get commandeered, captured by their enemies, hollowed out,

and worn like a skin suit? This episode is for you.

Welcome back to another T-Rex talk, and this was going to be a book review of a book called Shepherds for Sale

by Megan Basham, which came out last week to much, what's the opposite of acclaim? Consternation.

A lot of consternation. And I think that this book is a great book. It's worth reviewing.

But I kind of want to back up and just talk about how people get bought, how institutions get taken over. I think that is a really important

thing to talk about. And this book is great if you want to know about some of these specific

institutions, how it was that they were captured, or at the very least, heavily swayed. Shepherds for sale talks

about how some specific institutions and organizations in the Christian space have been co-opted

by others. The denominations, churches, publications, individual spokesmen and theologians, that kind of thing.

Now, that may not interest you because you're not in that Christian space.

But this is a fantastic book for describing the process, how it is that stuff gets taken over and compromised.

So whether or not you care about those institutions, you got to realize

that some people do. Evangelicals make up a gigantic voting block in the United States. And so the same

people who might want to, I don't know, take over media institutions, academic institutions,

political power institutions might just be interested in the evangelical church and all of its other sort of

apparatuses. So the short book review is that I highly recommend the book, and it's very important

for anyone that wants to see how these particular groups were co-opted. And it's well written,

it's well laid out, and most importantly, it's well documented,

which we will get into a little bit later. But let's talk about compromising institutions or

people. So this is something that isn't really that mysterious if you go back and you read

intelligence and surveillance and spy books.

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