You may remember in June, The Dissenter reported that ERLC vice-chair of the trustee board and prominent Southern Baptist pastor, Kevin Smith, took to the microphone at the SBC annual meeting during a panel discussion with Matt Chandler, Danny Akin, Mark Dever, and others, to lambast Trump voters as “whores.”
And I think some Southern Baptists just bent over and became political whores with this whole Trump stuff. And if black innerrantists like Ralph West (Pastor of Houston’s The Church Without Walls who announced he left the SBC) feels alienated and black innerrantists like John Onwuchekwa (Pastor of Cornerstone Church in Atlanta who left the SBC) feels alienated and black innerrantists like Charlie Dates (Left the SBC) feels alienated, I just wonder if white brothers think this has been kind of crazy- black/white stuff going on, Asian, Hispanic. Just people who aren’t white feeling like they’re tolerated but not really embraced.
Later, we reported that this same Kevin Smith took to the microphone later to lecture the rest of the Church on “tone.”
So we know going into the scenario that we’re dealing with unclean, world, flesh-influenced people in scenarios. Do we come in like the Lord who says “come unto me all of you who labor and are heavy laden and I’ll give you rest?” Or do we come in like the Pharisees and the Scribes murmuring in Luke 15:1-2. Tone is going to matter brothers and sisters!
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“Tone is going to matter brothers and sisters,” Smith said right after calling conservative Southern Baptists who voted for Trump “whores.” But more importantly, who was sitting behind him? Well, the man sitting behind him, laughing, smiling, and giggling as Smith hypocritically lectured us on “tone” was none other than Brent Leatherwood.
Today, in an epic display of quid pro quo, or “you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours,” Brent Leatherwood was unanimously elected to the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) as the permanent president of the organization by the very trustee board that Smith has vice-chaired for years.
Say it aint so!
So, who is Brent Leatherwood? Well, he’s basically a clone of his predecessor, Russell Moore. After Moore left the Southern Baptist Convention, Leatherwood, who was Moore’s right-hand man, stepped in as acting president until a new president was elected. The trustee board then formed a search committee to interview new candidates for the position, but never made public who it was they were considering.
Today, we find out that it’s Brent.
Here’s a snippet of what we can expect with Leatherwood—more of the same woke social justice nonsense carried out by the former president. Leatherwood claims he’s against abortion, but says that under no circumstances should a mother who has one ever be punished for it. In other words, he wants to keep it legal for mothers.
In fact, Brent Leatherwood recently signed a joint letter calling on politicians not to criminalize women having abortions.
“Women are victims of abortion,” the letter reads, “and require our compassion and support as well as ready access to counseling and social services in the days, weeks, months, and years following an abortion.”
“As national and state pro-life organizations, representing tens of millions of pro-life men, women, and children across the country, let us be clear: We state unequivocally that any measure seeking to criminalize or punish women is not pro-life and we stand firmly opposed to such efforts,” the letter signed by the ERLC’s Brent Leatherwood stated.
Leatherwood also holds the position that abortion is currently necessary in some situations and argues that it is the task of the Church to make sure it becomes “unnecessary.” In May, the ERLC posted on Twitter that the organization “will always advocate…toward a day when abortion is not just illegal, but both unnecessary and unthinkable.”
This idea, that abortion needs to be made “unnecessary,” stems from the idea that a lack of social justice, welfare, and communitarian collectivism is the actual reason we have abortions. These are not biblical views and we can expect the Southern Baptist Convention to continue heading down the road to destruction under the new leadership of its ethics branch.
