The man nominated to lead the embattled Southern Baptist Convention Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission believes “a married couple’s efforts to prevent pregnancy might be morally problematic.”
Evan Lenow, an administrator at Mississippi College, is the nominee to lead the ERLC, based in Nashville, Tenn. The last two leaders of that small agency have been forced out by critics who claimed they were “woke” and influenced by secularism.
Multiple attempts have been made from the floor of SBC annual meetings to either defund or abolish the ERLC, which continues to draw criticism from all sides in the generally conservative denomination. The anti-abortion and anti-Democrat credentials that used to be enough for ERLC leadership have been challenged by the far right in the SBC who want to prosecute women who have abortions and deny the reality of mass gun violence and clergy sexual abuse.
In an interview last fall with Baptist Press, Lenow said: “Within Southern Baptist life, we are always going to have a diversity of opinion on this question, but what I want to prevent from happening is just a wholesale acceptance (of the notion) that everyone should use contraception until they feel like now is the right time to have the 2.1 children we’re going to have.”
Lenow told BP Christians may need to “rethink how we have approached the question of contraception.”
Lenow also has ties to Paige Patterson, who was fired as president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.
In this 2016 photo, Evan Lenow (right) discusses the 2016 presidential election with Richard Land (center) and Paige Pattersoh (left) on the campus of Southwestern Seminary. (SWBTS photo)
In 2007, 28-year-old Lenow came to Southwestern Seminary from Southeastern Seminary in North Carolina, where he had been a student and staff member under Patterson’s administration there. Patterson had subsequently moved to head Southwestern Seminary. Lenow first landed as director of what was initially called the Smith Center for Leadership Development, now known as the Riley Center. This is a campus hotel and conference center.
By August 2012, Lenow was named associate director of the Land Center for Cultural Engagement, then given the title of director two years later, in August 2014. That center is named for Richard Land, who was the first conservative president of the SBC Christian Life Commission, which later was renamed Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
Patterson was fired by Southwestern trustees in May 2018. One year later, in July 2019, soon after a new seminary president was named, Lenow was gone as director of the Land Center and relocated to Clinton, Miss., where he became director of church and minister relations at his alma mater, Mississippi College, a Southern Baptist-affiliated school.
Today he also serves as director of the Institute for Christian Leadership and chair of the Christian Studies Department at the small conservative Baptist college that has its own history of transformation through the SBC’s “conservative resurgence.”
Lenow grew up at Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, which was led by Pastor Adrian Rogers, a seminal figure in the SBC’s rightward shift beginning in 1979 when Rogers was elected convention president.
After earning a undergraduate degree at Mississippi College, Lenow went on to Southeastern Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C., where he earned a Ph.D. in theological studies with a concentration in Christian ethics as well as a master of divinity degree.
Since 2012, he has served as a research fellow in Christian Ethics for the ERLC. He also is author of Ethics as Worship: The Pursuit of Moral Discipleship, Biblically Sound: Embracing Doctrine for Life and Biblically Correct: Engaging Culture with Truth.
Richard Land
Land is among those publicly praising Lenow’s nomination.
“I could not be more pleased with the nomination of Dr. Evan Lenow as the next president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission,” Land said. “I cannot think of anyone more qualified and prepared by background, training, experience and conviction to lead the ERLC in assisting Southern Baptists and other faithful Christians in being the gospel ‘salt and light’ in America that our Heavenly Father has called us all to be.”
Lenow was nominated by a search team led by Mitch Kimbrell, senior pastor of Christ Memorial Church in Williston, Vt. Kimbrell called Lenow “exceptionally qualified” with “time-tested experience.”
The full ERLC board will vote on the recommendation in April.
His immediate predecessor at the helm of the ERLC, Brent Leatherwood, resigned last summer after earlier surviving a rogue effort by the ERLC trustee chairman to fire him. Among the criticisms of Leatherwood was anger over his role in calling for gun reform in light of a mass shooting at the Nashville private school his children attend. He also was criticized for voicing support for Ukraine in its defensive war against Russia.
Leatherwood resigned the post with no other job lined up.
He was preceded by Russell Moore, who likewise faced criticism from the far right in the SBC mainly over two issues: His declaring Donald Trump to be morally unfit for office and his advocacy for victims of clergy sexual abuse. Moore resigned the ERLC in 2021 to become editor of Christianity Today.
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