The Puritans wrote dozens of treatises about family life, describing the proper roles and relationships between husbands and wives, fathers, mothers, and children.9 They placed every family relationship in the light of God’s sovereignty and fatherhood, and called every family member to live in the faith and fear of the Lord. Part of their genius was teaching people to stop looking at what others were doing, and to focus upon what they must do as their loving duty to God. Christ, of course, is the model in this; for what would become of us if Christ treated us the way we treat Him? God’s sovereign love is freely given, and so should ours be.

The universal scope of God’s sovereignty teaches us that we must glorify Him with all of our being. There is no “must” to enjoying God; it is but the consequence of glorifying Him. Do the one, and you will have the other. The Puritans fervently practiced this conviction in seeking to bring all of life under the direction of God’s Word. They believed in the great conclusion of Ecclesiastes 12:13: “Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.” John Bunyan (1628–1688) said that fearing God “sanctifies the whole duty of man.”1 He wrote, “It is a universal grace; it will stir up the soul unto all good duties. It is a fruitful grace, from which…flows abundance of excellent virtues, nor without it can there be anything good, or done well that is done.”2
To be lived out, a worldview must be practical, and that requires wisdom. The Reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone released Christians from an unbiblical system of sacramental salvation and church-mandated penance. After the Reformation, the human tendency to drift into formalism and inconsistency of doctrine and practice became commonplace. The Puritans revived Reformation doctrine and made it more practical by stressing how to live the Christian life in every possible facet. Authors such as Richard Greenham (c. 1542–1594), Richard Rogers (1550–1618), William Perkins (1558–1602), William Ames, and Richard Baxter (1615– 1691) wrote treatises addressing various “cases of conscience” to guide believers on how to fear the Lord and do His will in every sphere of human existence.3
Since so much is available today on Puritan views of personal godliness, family piety, and church reformation, we will touch briefly on these topics before immersing ourselves in the Puritan views of economics and politics.
Godly Personal Life
Ultimately, each of us will stand before the Lord to be judged for our own thoughts, words, and actions in life (2 Cor. 5:10). Therefore, the Puritans placed great emphasis upon personal godliness. The most important “case of conscience” they addressed was, “Am I a true child of God?”4 The Puritans relished full assurance of salvation and peace with God through the blood of Christ, for both afforded the believer the stability and power to serve God. Knowing God as a loving Father through Jesus Christ helped a believer live for God’s pleasure by the Holy Spirit as directed through the written Word.
The Puritans believed that all of life should be offered to God as a continual act of consecration in response to His mercies (Rom. 12:1).
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In the end, Basham desires not to tear the church down but to build it up. She desires to see the pure gospel truth that saved her soul taken up and preached without compromise, without apology. It is that saving gospel, undiluted by political pandering and corporate double-speak, that “still brings dead girls to life.”

Sometimes, a book comes along that creates irreconcilable differences between sociopolitical factions. Other times, a book comes along that diagnoses them. Megan Basham’s Shepherds for Sale is the second kind of book. According to its critics, it’s a shrill, dissident right propaganda screed, designed to foment civil war within the evangelical church. But to anyone who hasn’t spent the past decade in a particular kind of echo chamber, Basham’s thesis will ring true: Civil war has been upon evangelicals for a long time, whether it was welcomed or not.
To say the book has hit a nerve would be an understatement. Its heated reception was inevitable, given its audaciously wide scope; chapter topics include antiracism, the #ChurchToo movement, Covid, LGBTQ issues, and more. Much of the material was not new to me, because I have been independently logging these rifts in real time, not just among evangelicals but within my own Anglican tradition. (Parts of the LGBTQ chapter follow my First Things article on the many errors of the “Side B” movement.)
Despite the juicy title, not everyone in the book’s large cast of evangelical characters will emerge as a pure heretical sell-out. This has been a common critique, but Basham herself pre-empts it in the introduction, where she acknowledges that people’s motives can be complex, and degrees of compromise can vary. As she’s documented, big leftist money has certainly changed hands, yet not every commentator will follow David French to the point of stumping for Kamala Harris, and not every pastor will follow Andy Stanley to the point of guiding his flock over a cliff into blatant heresy. Even so, there remain many ways for a “shepherd” to be stubbornly blind.
Basham’s highest-profile rebuttal so far has come from megachurch pastor J. D. Greear, who appears in several chapters. The chapter on “critical race prophets” details how he participated in a witch-hunt against members of First Baptist Church Naples who rejected a black pastoral candidate. Their swift and ruthless excommunication as racists, cheered on by multiple high-profile Southern Baptist voices like Greear’s, is the most shocking injustice Basham documents in her book. Greear pleads ignorance in his long complaint, claiming that he accepted the account of church leaders “in good faith.” In a detailed reply, Basham responded, “No. One cannot in good faith publicly label ordinary members of a church racists without clear evidence.” Their exchange vividly demonstrates why the loss of institutional trust among rank-and-file evangelicals is so profound, and most likely irrevocable.
One way to crystallize Basham’s thesis is that for far too long, certain “elite” evangelicals have seen themselves as a kind of Protestant magisterium, delivering wisdom to the rank and file while mutually refraining from in-house criticism. Meanwhile, they themselves have uncritically deferred to people who claim “expert” authority, whether on behalf of an “oppressed” group (immigrants, women, black people, gay people) or on behalf of science (environmental science, epidemiology). Not every member of the new magisterium has been equally vulnerable on every issue, but all have sought approval in the eyes of their preferred experts, and all have bought into some manifestation of the leftist logic that if one doesn’t subscribe to a particular political solution, one must not care about the problem it claims to solve. Whether as dupes or as willing collaborators, they opened all manner of doors that should have been firmly shut, and ordinary churchgoers have reaped the consequences—
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This is the art of the Christian life: reconciling what needs to be remembered with what needs to be forgotten—concerning both our faithful God and our sinful selves. Jesus and his disciples point us to this reconciliation of remembering and forgetting at the Last Supper and the days that follow Jesus’s death. As Jesus—a real-life flesh and blood reminder of the Passover Lamb—instructed his disciples as they took the bread and the cup.

In February of this year, I was diagnosed with a rare type of brain cancer. I am, quite literally, one in a million. A seizure brought me to my knees and was the catalyst for the discovery. A brain biopsy and a craniotomy followed in the days and months after. I went from being independent and in the prime of my life, just on the cusp of turning forty, to being dependent, unable to drive, living with family, and staring down the face of a life-altering diagnosis that is presently incurable. My tumor, well over two inches wide, sits in the right frontal lobe of my brain near the motor control strip, impairing most of the movement on the left side of my body. When I woke up from the craniotomy in April, I could not so much as wiggle my left toes or lift my left hand off the hospital bed. Even two months later, I didn’t have the strength to open a Ziploc baggie or the motor control to type with both hands.
Looking back on the months following the surgery, which were filled with countless rehab and doctor’s appointments, my memories of that time are like the Bermuda Triangle—memories went in, but most have never come out. I’ve sent out mental search parties to see if I can find the wreckage but all I come back with are remnants of debris—hazy, vague, and tattered around the edges. A doctor’s appointment here. A hard conversation with my family there. And then nothing but vast expanses of open water and tears in between. So much has vanished from the recesses of my brain, maybe to never surface again.
Perhaps it is more of a gift of grace than I realize that those memories haven’t surfaced and remain at the bottom of the mental ocean. Even the prophet Isaiah commends God’s people to forget the former things, “Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert” (Isa.43:18–19). As harsh at it may seem, maybe cancer is the “new thing” springing forth in my life, if only I would have eyes to perceive it as such rather than rail against it. I hold fast to the truth that he is making a way in this wilderness season, and maybe it is for the better some memories from those months are lost, perhaps forever. Maybe the mental search parties can quit working overtime.
On the other hand, some of my memories are very vivid. I remember my first seizure well, as the type of seizures I experience impact only one side of my body, and I never lose consciousness. I had a string of four seizures in the space of two weeks in late May, and I can recall every one of them. Why does my brain remember some memories, but forget others? There’s obviously a science behind what our brains do and do not remember, especially concerning trauma, and people far smarter than I can unpack that elsewhere. I’m more interested in how all this ties into our spiritual ability to remember and forget.
There’s a long list of things I’ve been asking of God since February, like healing, strength, coordination, and recovery of cognition. However, in more recent months, one prayer has chiefly risen to the surface, one which echoes bits of Isaiah 43: “Help me remember what needs to be remembered and help me forget what needs to be forgotten.”
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