On June 7th, Paul Pressler died (archive). For many decades, he’d functioned as the Kingmaker of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). But he died in near-obscurity. Nobody quite seemed sure of what to do about his so-called legacy: the Conservative Resurgence of the SBC that turned it forevermore ultraconservative. You see, from the very start Paul Pressler used the movement he created as a cover from which he could prey upon young men in the denomination.
Long before his death, evangelicals had been arguing among themselves about how to view the Conservative Resurgence from the standpoint of Paul Pressler being a sexual predator. But now, we’ve got evangelicals arguing if the guy was even a TRUE CHRISTIAN™ at all. Meanwhile, other evangelicals think he is a savior of their ultraconservative, hardline faith. What does a Christian do with such differing opinions?
Gatekeeping Christianity’s labels may be Christians’ oldest and most beloved pastime. Today, let’s marvel together at how they play this exhausting, impossible-to-win game.
(Previous Paul Pressler posts: The SBC has a Paul Pressler problem; Paul Pressler’s ultimate legacy. This post first went live on Patreon on 6/25/2024. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available now!)
Defining TRUE CHRISTIANITY™
Evangelicals, just like almost all Christians from all flavors of the religion, have a certain set of requirements in their heads regarding TRUE CHRISTIANITY™. They may not state those rules out loud, of course. Often, they seem unaware that they’re operating with them at all. But dig under their accusations and gatekeeping attempts, and you will find them.
A TRUE CHRISTIAN™…
- Believes more or less the same bundle of religious claims that the judge thinks is proper
- Hasn’t done anything that the judge considers completely out of bounds
- Dies with (1) and (2) intact
The third condition really only emerges when Christians tangle with ex-Christians (or evangelicals with ex-vangelicals). It is a trump card. Leaving Christianity/evangelicalism automatically disqualifies the person being judged from ever having been a TRUE CHRISTIAN™—no matter how firmly (1) and (2) existed beforehand. If the person died in the traces, then obviously they just judge by the first and second rules.
This definition is used by almost all Christians. All too often, even non-Christians use it to disqualify a particularly odious cretin from the label of TRUE CHRISTIAN™.
A system made for gatekeeping
Because Christianity does not have a real god at its center making its system work correctly, it’s extremely easy for a bad-faith actor—yes, like Paul Pressler—to infiltrate Christian ranks and wreak a great deal of damage. No gods will warn the flocks or stop those bad-faith actors from hurting others. Nor will any gods help them follow their own rules. No gods change them for the better or work within their hearts to make them decent human beings.
Within evangelicalism in particular, church congregations have absolutely no way of knowing if a fervent-sounding church member follows their rules or not. They won’t ever find out, either, until and unless that person’s rulebreaking gets exposed.
Making matters even worse, evangelicals tend to have an extremely shallow social system. It consists almost entirely of transactional elements, with almost entirely surface-level interactions. Only the most foolish evangelicals would ever trust any other with their deepest secrets. They hide their worst shortcomings from everyone else. And they’re right to do so: In their dysfunctional authoritarian world, secrets are both currency and weapons.
Even within the ranks of non-abusive evangelicals, though, people simply don’t share much intimacy with their friends. It’s best to think of the evangelical social system as “work friends.” Evangelicals don’t know any better, so they think they’ve established real friendships and what they call a “church home” for themselves. And they’ll think that until the day they leave that church—or if they dare to ask for real support from their wonderful “church family.”
It’s not a system made for intimacy. It’s a system made to provide believers with cheap substitutes for all the personal qualities and interactions that they can’t—or don’t wish to—obtain or develop naturally. Instead of relationships, they have transactions. Instead of evidence, they have endless arguments. And so on and so forth. Everything that is good in humanity has a cheap substitute within evangelicalism.
No wonder they gatekeep. Instead of a working, functional social system, they have circles of power and cronyism. There’s no real way to keep bad-faith actors out of their system, nor any way to eject those people from power once they’ve got it.
Paul Pressler was the kingmaker in fact as well as in his own mind
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Paul Pressler and his sidekick Paige Patterson roamed the entire country to persuade SBC pastors of their quirky li’l take on the Bible. They called this take inerrancy. Roughly speaking, inerrantists think the Bible is both literally true in all particulars and completely free of errors. Though Calvinists initially pushed this interpretation, most of the Conservative Resurgence schemers and leaders weren’t Calvinist at all.
Until the Paul Pressler & Paige Patterson Road Show, SBC pastors could range from extremely liberal to extremely conservative while still considering themselves completely valid SBC members. These two men changed that diversity forever. After their dreamed-of takeover came to full fruition in the 1990s, Patterson and Pressler served the denomination in positions of great power. Patterson became the president of one of the SBC’s seminaries, while Pressler served as both the power behind the SBC throne and in a variety of denominational capacities.
As someone at Religion News wrote in 2019, these two architects of the takeover enjoyed a great deal of prestige in their now-completely-conservative denomination. In particular, Pressler reveled in honors. At Patterson’s seminary, donors raised the money to create stained-glass windows of both Patterson and Pressler for their chapel.
The writer at Religion News expressed how distasteful he found the SBC’s sentiments regarding the Conservative Resurgence—or as he put it, their “bizarre exercise in vanity and self-congratulation.” He’s not wrong, either. Ultraconservatives gloated for decades about winning that civil war, and they openly considered Paul Pressler their savior against encroaching liberalism.
Oh yes, Pressler definitely enjoyed being honored.
Really, Paul Pressler began losing power even before his formal downfall
When he felt ignored by SBC leaders, though, Paul Pressler got furious. One instance of him feeling ignored happened at the 2016 Annual Meeting. Dude got BIG mad, especially when one of his cronies, Ronnie Floyd, seemed not to recognize him or offer him the deference he felt was his due.
Pressler was trying to raise a point of order in the video. He says in it:
I was deliberately ignored. I told you last night that I was going to speak to this. Barry McCarty [the SBC’s Chief Parliamentarian, or rules lawyer] knew that I was going to speak to this.
[From the speaker’s podium, Ronnie Floyd asks him to state his name.]
I’m Paul Pressler. I’m a messenger from Second Baptist Church. [. . .] I’ve been to 40 straight conventions with the exception of last year because they thought I was on my deathbed.
But I believe in fairness. I believe in openness. I think you deliberately kept me from speaking because tell me: did you know the beginning of last night that I was going to speak to this? Mr. President, did you know beginning last night that I was going to speak to this? [He repeats this question numerous times, but he never waits for an answer.]
Pressler was so furious that his voice just shook. I’m with the guy in green behind him: This was a shocking turn of events, particularly given the SBC’s descent into utterly dysfunctional authoritarianism. It should not have happened. I don’t know who Green Shirt Guy is, but those wide eyes of his tell a story that I can easily understand.
In response, Ronnie Floyd tried to tell Pressler that SBC bylaws had set a time limit for comments and discussion about motions raised, and they’d hit that limit. Whether Floyd had known or not about Pressler’s intentions, a time limit is a time limit. Pressler had missed it.
Pressler invoked Barry McCarty in the above quote. At the time, McCarty was literally standing right behind Ronnie Floyd on the podium! So that was an easy get at least. But Pressler interrupted McCarty so many times that eventually McCarty asked Floyd to have Pressler’s mic muted.
And then, McCarty explained the SBC’s system of taking speakers in order without knowing who they are. I loved the applause McCarty got at 3:21 in the video when he tells Pressler that not only does their electronic system not know who any speaker is, but it doesn’t even matter who a speaker is because they are all Messengers [equal attendees of the Annual Meeting].
After that explanation, McCarty dismissed Pressler’s point of order, and they held their vote. I wish, I wish, oh I wish we could have had a shot of Paul Pressler at any point after the muting of his mic, but no dice. Apparently, we do not deserve nice things.
(You can see a very sparse mention of this situation in their 2016 Annual Report on p. 90, item #90 at the top of the page.)
To me, it seems obvious that nobody was breaking any rules here in not hearing whatever Kingmaker Paul Pressler had to say. At worst, they used the SBC’s bylaws to bypass a windbag’s potentially embarrassing speech. I don’t think even that occurred, though. I’m just amazed to see his impotent fury about feeling ignored.
If you’re wondering, the debate was over whether or not it was okay for an SBC seminaries, churches, and meeting halls to display the Confederate flag. After rejecting Pressler’s point of order, the SBC formally voted to reject any showing of that flag (archive).
I don’t know what side of the debate Pressler would have taken. But I’m not inclined to grant him much credit at this point.
The next year, of course, would be the nominal—but far from functional—end of his reign.
Paul Pressler eventually fell from grace, but not everywhere
The next year in 2017, Paul Pressler’s sexual predation on young men became public knowledge. Just one year later, Paige Patterson’s own downfall came when SBC-lings discovered he’d massively mishandled sex assault allegations on his seminary campus.
In April 2019, those stained-glass windows finally came down. The seminary gave no comments regarding why.
Around the same time, the Calvinists at Pulpit & Pen took the news about the windows as an opportunity to sneer at and dishonestly smear their factional enemies as “full woke.” They were way more upset over the seminary “more atrociously” having stained-glass windows depicting Rick Warren, one of their enemies.
They completely hand-waved away the allegations against Patterson and Pressler both. Decades of sexual abuse was fine, they imply in their post. So was humiliating and degrading sex assault victims to protect a seminary’s reputation. No, the real problem here was Warren’s refusal to go full hardline Calvinist like them.
By January 2024, Marv Knox wrote in Baptist News Global (archive) that he thought “the SBC should publicly disavow its relationship with Paul Pressler.” Of course, the SBC’s leaders ignored his suggestion.
Even now, Paul Pressler has admirers and adoring fans. One of them, “Baptist Blogger” Benjamin Cole, wrote a grotesque op-ed (archive) expressing his “overwhelming sadness” about Pressler’s death. Cole refuses to engage at all with Pressler’s decades of sex abuse, saying only that when he learned about the 2004 sex assault settlement in 2006, he put the matter out of his mind forever and “never thought about it again.” He seems very proud that he was apparently so valuable to Pressler that Pressler refused to break their friendship at Patterson’s demand at around that same time in 2006.
I’m sure Pressler has a lot of people missing him like that. Most, like Cole, will be the beneficiaries of his immense generosity and network-building. See, most SBC-lings don’t care who he hurt or what rules of both the SBC and Christianity he broke. What they care about is what he did for them. He was good to them, and so therefore he was good for the SBC and evangelicalism as a whole. They’ll brook no criticism of him.
(See also: The same thing happened with Ed Stetzer. Dude got a nice car from James MacDonald, likely among other perks. He entered a “season of deep lament” over the news of MacDonald’s financial scandals and his abusive behavior.)
That attitude is a big part of why the SBC is completely, utterly broken by now. It serves the very earthly interests of its authoritarian masters, not whatever SBC-lings think their mission or goals might be.
Yes, yes, but was Paul Pressler “even a Christian,” asks a site that ought to know better
This past spring, Wartburg Watch ran a long, multi-part story (archive) about Paul Pressler. Its headline asks: “Paul Pressler Sought Power Over the SBC as well as His Abuse Victims But Was He a Christian?”
I like Wartburg Watch. It’s an evangelical watchdog blog that does a good job of collecting citations and resources to support its claims. So yes, I like its writers overall. They’ve even mentioned me and Roll to Disbelieve positively before! Sure, I’m always wondering how they can remain Christian at all, knowing what they know. But I don’t need to understand it to accept that they’ve managed it.
So please understand, I’m completely head-desking here over their question. Though they never answer it themselves in that post, they write this as a clear contention for a “no” answer:
Paul Pressler was known for his penchant for young, good-looking teens and men for years. Pressler also played a game called “Stand for doctrinal purity.” He seemed to care about purity only in writing or discussion. He did not live doctrinal purity in his life. The powers that be decided to ignore the allegations of abuse because he served a purpose. He played the game, and somehow, people thought he was powerful enough to win the war against so-called “doctrinal liberalism.’
At the end, they plaintively ask: “[H]ow does one play doctrinal politics yet behave like a degenerate?”
The answering of questions about Paul Pressler
Wartburg Watch ends their post with a list of questions. Each bullet point presents their quoted question. I’ll answer them in square brackets:
- Why was he attempting to gain power in the SBC as a Presbyterian? Was it a cover for his activities? [100% yes. At least some of the Calvinists pushing for inerrancy weren’t SBC either. Some still aren’t, and yet they participate in SBC infighting.]
- Was Patterson aware of Pressler’s extracurricular activities? [Probably not at first. They fell out in 2006 over a squabble over who conservative SBC-lings should support as the SBC presidential candidate that year. So at least by then, I’m sure Patterson knew—and said nothing. I doubt he’d have dared oppose Pressler otherwise. This squabble sure puts that 2016 video in a whole other context, doesn’t it? Was Pressler still pissed at Ronnie Floyd for winning that year? I bet so. He seems like the type to never forget a slight.]
- Was Pressler’s involvement in the Conservative Resurgence merely a balm for his apparent power-hungry soul, whether sexual or doctrinal? [Of fucking course it was. He needed inerrancy to abuse others.]
- For those who think I’m harsh, how does one play doctrinal politics yet behave like a degenerate? [You almost can’t play doctrinal evangelical politics without being a degenerate abuser. In dysfunctional authoritarianism, all forms of power belong to the powerful. One of the most potent flexes of power has always been sex abuse.]
- Did members of the SBC Executive Committee know anything about this? [The higher-ups almost certainly did fairly early on—and said nothing.]
- This brings up the question… Can someone who abuses over decades while knowing it is wrong be a Christian? [They do it every day by the thousands. The more fervent and inerrancy-addled the evangelical, the more of a hypocrite they always prove to be behind the scenes.]
- Do any of the SBC leaders feel guilty for not reporting this to the police or even not confronting Pressler? [I don’t care. They didn’t report it, and I don’t care what excuses they offer to distance themselves from their abuser-shielding. I can hope the memory gnaws away at them every waking moment of their lives, but I’m not naïve enough to think it does.]
- If they don’t care, should they be leaders in the SBC? [Like it or not, they are. I doubt there’s a single righteous man anywhere in upper SBC leadership today who dares to take a stand against abuse and abusers.]
- What did Patterson know? Did he think it was odd that Pressler came to his apartment late at night? [See below.]
That last one needs some explaining.
Patterson has said he never got a scholarship from Pressler. Take that as you please. He’s also said he lived with his wife in student housing at the seminary in New Orleans. That historic night, he and his wife went to the dorms and met Pressler and his wife. After a bit of discussion, the four of them went together to the café. College people do that all the time. The meeting occurred at night because Pressler was attending a conference during the day. It sounds like the Presslers had dinner with the conference people, then went to visit Patterson. As far as I can ascertain, the men had only that one meeting. It doesn’t sound like they were ever alone or sexually involved.
It’s important to note that Pressler didn’t tend to prey upon any men he’d decided to make leaders. Thus, it would have been quite out of character for him to prey upon Patterson. The anonymous source the post mentions was almost certainly in a similar situation: Pressler had earmarked him for leadership, not abuse. He only preyed upon young men he’d decided could be safely abused. Those men did not become leaders.
The question unasked: How does “Jesus” allow this to happen over and over and over again?
Paul Pressler stripped accountability from the SBC
With no exceptions, every inerrancy-derived evangelical doctrine has the same exact problems as complementarianism. At heart, they have one cause: There’s no accountability in inerrancy.
That’s a deep-level and intentional part of the design of inerrancy. It is designed to omit accountability measures that make other authoritarian systems work fairly effectively.
Say what you want about the US Military. I could say a lot! But what I won’t say is that it lacks all accountability like the SBC does. When accountability falters, that’s when scandals like Tailhook occur. When accountability is operating as it should, military groups tend to be pretty functional. As long as someone does their job and follows the rules, they should have no fear of abuse, wrongful blame, or mistreatment. Moreover, those who are not suited for leadership either don’t get it at all or lose it fairly quickly. I couldn’t call the US Military a cronyism-based system like the SBC has been for decades.
There’s a reason why power-hungry abusers don’t tend to get that itch scratched in the military. Or in mainline churches. Both of those groups would either refuse them immediate and complete power—and cut them off from whatever power they’d managed to scrape together.
To scratch that itch, power-hungry abusers gravitate to evangelicalism. That is precisely why Paul Pressler pivoted to the SBC after his first Presbyterian church fired him as a youth minister in 1978. That same year, he put his hijacking plan into motion for the SBC.
Inerrancy’s lack of accountability is exactly why it appeals so much to dysfunctional authoritarians. No other system would allow evangelical abusers to gain so much undeserved power so easily over so many, then allow them to abuse others with impunity for decades.
The powerful win at the expense of the powerless, always and forever, with inerrancy. Inerrancy-addled evangelicals can’t even recognize their own utter inability to spot bad-faith actors, much less remove them from power. They cannot even question their indoctrination—because in broken systems like evangelicalism, the message is always perfect.
The dichotomous multitudes of Paul Pressler
So yes: Paul Pressler introduced inerrancy to the SBC. He convinced them to adopt it. He wrote odes to inerrancy and clearly prided himself on being the five-star general of the Southern Baptist Inerrancy Wars. When he felt slighted, his wrath could be epic and last for years afterward. (Holding grudges is one of the very most pious things an evangelical can do, it seems.)
At the same time, Paul Pressler was a longtime sex abuser who broke every rule evangelicals had about sex and relationships. He did this for decades, and I don’t think he kept it much of a secret from his cronies and closest associates. Other SBC leaders definitely knew what he was doing and said nothing to stop him. His predation was an open secret in the halls of SBC power, not only in Houston’s legal circles.
The second truth is not some strange, unrelated, extraneous failing. It is the first truth’s constant and necessary outgrowth. It is the result we should expect from extremist ideologies like inerrantism—and from all groups that lack real accountability.
Paul Pressler couldn’t exist in his chosen form without inerrancy. He could not prey upon so many men without it. Inerrancy served his purpose.
There’s no way to gatekeep the label of Christian even from abusers like Paul Pressler
Unfortunately, there’s no real way to gatekeep the label of Christian from Paul Pressler and others like him. Without a single authority to speak for Christians and make those decisions, anyone can call themselves a Christian. It’s completely valid every time.
I’ve never in my life run across a flavor of Christianity that pushed something completely whackadoodle, like Jesus living in a mattress on the side of I-10 near Houston. Overall, Christians all believe the same basic things:
- There is some kind of god.
- This god has a certain level of activity in the real world.
- Jesus is important somehow.
Everything else is just doctrinal squabbling and personal preference. No one doctrine has more of a claim to authenticity than any other, for all the inerrancy-addled arguing in the world that evangelicals might offer to the contrary.
Nobody really has any idea what the first Christian groups believed, not even (or should I say, particularly not) evangelicals. We’re not likely to learn too many details about it this far along in time. What we do know is that the earliest Christians argued over every single doctrinal point under the sun. They did not have a collective, standardized set of beliefs. What they had were many competing beliefs. Many of those beliefs would be utterly alien to today’s evangelicals, like Monophysitism, but back in Christianity’s earliest centuries, believers had no universal beliefs at all.
Segue: One of the weirdest, oldest, and least-known squabbles in Christianity’s history
Monophysitism is the belief that Jesus had only one nature: human or divine. Eventually, Christian leaders declared it a heresy and adopted their current belief, Dyophysitism. That’s the belief that Jesus was one person with two natures: ultimately divine and ultimately human.
Another heresy, Miaphysitism, is slightly different: Jesus was divine and human, but had one nature. Now, that may sound exactly like Monophysitism, but early Christians fought over this slight distinction like cats in a pillowcase.
Around the 5th century and after a lot of bloodshed and political feuding, Monophysitism lost. To varying extents, though, Monophysitism and Miaphysitism still exist to this day.
It all goes to show you that Christianity’s always been like it is today. One Christian’s heresy has always been another’s Bible-supported, Bible-derived belief.
Answering the question: Was Paul Pressler a Christian in the first place? Yes.
So was Paul Pressler a Christian?
Yes, he was. He was a shitty, evil, nasty Christian who used religion and shows of fervor and piety to hurt others and obtain a huge level of personal power. And yet he was still as 100% as valid a Christian as any writer or commenter at Wartburg Watch.
In that way, he wasn’t too different from the earliest Christian leaders. The very moment they got real power in their hands, they glommed onto it and began using it to its fullest extent. No gods forced them to stop controlling and abusing people. Only real-world governments stopped them, and even then not everywhere.
Instead of policing labels, I’d much rather see evangelicals finally deal with their accountability problems. But that’d require them to drop inerrancy—along with other beloved inerrancy-derived doctrines that help abusers like Hell-belief, Creationism, church discipline, complementarianism, and Matthew-18-style confrontation rules. That stuff’s way too firmly entrenched in the evangelical power network by now. Thus, I don’t see it happening.
No, it’s much, much easier to police labels than impose accountability on a broken system that has operated for decades without it.
But a girl can dream, right?
And I do.
I dream of seeing compassionate evangelicals reject the system entirely. To walk away from “Ocabos.” To forge a new path based on human rights and grace, on charity and kindness, on justice and fairness. On this world rather than any imaginary ones. On what is real and true as a bedrock foundation.
I don’t think most evangelicals are anywhere near ready for that kind of step. Hell, maybe most of us aren’t. But that’s the world I work toward, all the same.
NEXT UP: For years, Christianity skewed female. That demographic truth may be changing at last. See you soon!
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