9 Marks President Jonathan Leeman has walked back controversial comments made at the 2018 9 Marks for Nine event, now saying he was wrong to suggest that Christians should have the freedom and a guilt-free conscience to vote for pro-choice candidates.
Speaking at the Room for Nuance podcast, Leeman was asked: “What’s the belief you held five years ago that you don’t hold anymore?”
I think it was 2018, at the SBC, we did a 9 Marks at 9 ine, in which Mark (Dever) and I on stage talked about the freedom to vote for pro-choice or pro-life candidates. Not because we believed in pro-choice, we are both vigorously opposed to it, but we recognized or we believed that there was still space for Christians to, there’s multiple rocks on the scale.
Wanted to say a Christian might choose to do this for other reasons- ok I’m looking at these five issues and I disagree on this issue, but as I do my cost benefit analysis, I’m gonna vote for this DEM for this reason- and we created space for that.
Even as we were saying it, I was thinking to myself, and it’s the sort of thing that we had thought for a while and been saying for a while. You know, keep in mind, just to give a little charity to us, you you’re in Washington, D.C. in the 90s and the early 2000s, and you’re desperately trying to, not desperately, you’re trying very much to appeal to both Republicans and Democrats for gospel purposes.
I think we’re, I think I said that, we said that too long. I don’t think you should vote for a pro-choice candidate. I think that was wrong. And these days I would say ‘I think you’re sinning by doing that’, at least in most circumstances.
If you have two pro-choice candidates, for instance, that, you know, there might be exceptions to this, but you ordinarily, yeah, I think I think you’re sinning by doing that.You’re giving, you’re giving the sword of state to somebody who’s going to kill babies with it. And that was beginning to clarify in my mind 2018-2019, I never have personally voted in that direction, but I wanted to create a little space for it.
And I think that was wrong. I don’t want to create that space anymore. I want to say you should not do that Christian.
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