Leeman’s Reversal and the Collapse of the Professional Christian Caste

It was just a small Protestia news item, barely a blip in the daily churn of evangelical absurdities. In the Big Eva news cycle, this sort of thing barely registers anymore. Most folks saw it, shrugged, and scrolled on. That’s understandable. After all, evangelical leaders reversing themselves is now as common as the Southern Baptist Convention forming another task force that will accomplish nothing. But this moment is different. It is not just another curiosity. It is a signal. Leeman’s reversal, though delivered in the modest tone of a private correction, reveals a tectonic shift beneath the entire evangelical establishment. Something much larger is happening just out of sight, something most Christians have not yet connected to this tiny headline. If you pay attention, you’ll recognize the first cracks in a collapsing system.

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Jonathan Leeman, one of the leading voices in the polished evangelical establishment, recently appeared on a podcast and admitted that he was wrong to advise Christians that they could, in good conscience, vote for pro-choice political candidates.

This admission might sound ordinary to those unfamiliar with the tangled web of Big Eva rhetoric, but for several years Leeman and Mark Dever stood before crowds at their events and argued that Christians had the “freedom” to support candidates who champion abortion as long as those Christians weighed other political issues and believed the trade was worth it. When I exposed Dever’s Democrat voter registration, we were told it was a “strategic decision” (the same as when I exposed Tim Keller’s party affiliation).

They claimed to oppose abortion personally, yet they carved out a wide moral lane for believers to empower politicians who promised to expand its reach. These were not offhand comments. They were repeated talking points delivered from stages, written into articles, and presented as serious ethical reflections from men who styled themselves as guardians of principled evangelical engagement.

Many young pastors and laypeople trusted these voices, believing they were receiving sober, carefully considered counsel rather than the theological version of a fig leaf offered to protect elite respectability in Washington, D.C. Now, years later - as Protestia has explained - Leeman has publicly reversed himself. He explained that he and others wanted to maintain influence with both Republicans and Democrats for “gospel purposes,” and that in the politically charged environment of Washington, they felt pressure to appear balanced. He now claims that, upon further thought, supporting pro-choice candidates is usually sinful, and that he no longer wants to create space for such decisions.

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HEY GUYS, ABOUT THAT THING I SAID…

At first glance this might be welcomed as a moment of clarity, but the timing is simply too exquisite to ignore. The evangelical elites who once defended, excused, softened, and nuanced the issue of abortion in order to maintain credibility with the political left have suddenly rediscovered their moral backbone only after the left’s financial and cultural incentives evaporated. It is not repentance that changed their tone. It is rebranding under duress.

The real story is not Jonathan Leeman’s shift itself, but the reason it is happening now. For the last decade, the evangelical establishment bet heavily on being the theological wing of the professional class. They were funded by foundations, praised by mainstream media, propped up by out-of-touch seminaries, and recruited as the respectable religious arm of the political left. They used their platforms to discourage Christians from supporting conservative candidates, to soften moral lines, and to baptize progressive priorities in biblical language.

They argued that Christians should be suspicious of strong conservative leadership, that voting for Democrats was permissible or even virtuous, and that the church should broaden its political conscience to make room for policies that aligned closely with the worldview of the very donors funding their institutions. They told Christians to abstain from voting, to vote for third-party cultural ornaments, or to abandon political influence entirely. They often sounded more like NPR commentators than shepherds, yet they insisted their approach was the mature, winsome, thoughtful expression of Christian witness in a polarized age. However, something catastrophic happened for them in the last election. Evangelical voters ignored them completely. In fact, evangelical support for populist conservative candidates increased even while the elites were lecturing them to shrink back. The evangelical establishment discovered that no one was listening to them anymore. Their claim to speak for America’s Christians cracked wide open.

Their carefully crafted image as voices of moderation evaporated. Their influence dissolved like sugar in hot water. And once their value to the political left diminished, so did their funding. The progressive donors who had poured millions into evangelical organizations, seminaries, and parachurch ministries suddenly realized they had purchased nothing. They received no return on investment. Their ideological missionaries failed to convert the pews. Their money could have been shoveled into a fire pit for all the effect it had.

This is where Leeman’s sudden change makes sense. His reversal is an early sign of the evangelical elites preparing to crawl back to the very churches they once treated as backward, embarrassing, and beneath their intellect (I warned about this right after the November election, answering a question asked by Megan Basham).

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