The long-running Paul Pressler lawsuit seems to have been settled, thus putting a poorly-fitting cap on a very sordid tale. This story shows us just how deep the rot in evangelicalism goes, though the flocks still warming church pews probably won’t take it nearly as seriously as they should.
Situation Report: The Paul Pressler lawsuit
If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in [Jesus]—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.
Matthew 18:6
At the very end of 2023, the world learned that the Paul Pressler lawsuit had been settled at long last (archive). This was an extremely embarrassing lawsuit for the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). It’s one of the sparks that caught journalists’ attention, leading them to uncover and expose the denomination’s huge sex abuse crisis.
(Related: The SBC braces for a long-overdue reckoning.)
This lawsuit began in 2017 when Duane Rollins accused Pressler of raping him many years earlier. At the time, Rollins had been a member of Pressler’s youth group in Houston. This would almost certainly have occurred at the First Baptist Church of Houston (archive), where Pressler served as a deacon and Sunday School teacher. Rollins claimed that Pressler’s alleged abuse destroyed his life by leading him into crime and drug abuse.
In the lawsuit, Rollins also accused others of knowing about the alleged abuse and covering it up for years. These others included the SBC itself and Pressler’s law partner Jared Woodfill. Woodfill was a virulently bigoted politician as well as the former chairman of the Republican Party of Harris County. Evidence strongly suggests (archive) that the accusations against Woodfill, at least, were spot-on.
Later, the court would learn that Woodfill provided a series of young men to be assistants to Pressler. Three of those assistants would later accuse Pressler of abuse. One of them even alleged that Pressler had bragged to him about swimming naked with young boys.
In total, seven other men came forward to make accusations against Pressler. A December 2017 news story calls Pressler’s alleged behavior “the worst kept secret in Houston.”
And making matters completely indefensible, evidence emerged that revealed that First Baptist leaders became aware of Pressler’s misconduct and abuse in 2017 and decided to keep quiet about it to preserve both the denomination’s and the church’s reputations.
Pressler never faced criminal trials for any of the aforementioned. By 2017, the statute of limitations for those alleged crimes had already passed. The civil trial, however, was cruising straight for a February date, and I’m betting Pressler and his SBC cronies weren’t looking forward to it at all.
But that’s over now. Pressler’s legal team figured out a settlement with Rollins.
The settlement Pressler arranged is confidential. It apparently also precludes the possibility of any of Pressler’s alleged victims filing suit against Woodfill.
Everyone, meet Paul Pressler
Scoundrels use wicked methods, they make up evil schemes to destroy the poor with lies, even when the plea of the needy is just.
Isaiah 32:7
Paul Pressler is about 93 years old, having been born in 1930. He has a long and storied life. In the late 1950s, he won election as a state representative in Texas. By the 1970s, he’d become a judge in that same state. He served as a judge until the early 1990s, at which point he retired. By then, he’d become a powerful figure not only in the SBC but also in the Republican Party.
Early on, Pressler was Presbyterian. But in 1978, church leaders removed him from youth ministry over allegations of sex abuse. Only then did Pressler pivot to the SBC, where he quickly found another youth ministry position within the denomination.
In the SBC, Pressler has held a variety of roles. He’s served on their top-ranked Executive Committee (EC) and on their International Mission Board (IMB).
In 2002, Richard Land, then the leader of the denomination’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), nominated Pressler for election to the SBC’s First Vice President role. (Like the Sith, the SBC always has two: one to hold power, and one to covet it. Also, Land got himself fired in 2012 for racism [archive].) Land said he was 16 years old when he met Pressler at a regular Bible study for college-bound teens that Pressler ran at the time—which doesn’t sound ominous at all, does it?
If you didn’t know any better, you might consider it strange that Pressler hasn’t held any high-level elected roles within the SBC.
But he’s still a household name in the SBC for another reason entirely: He’s the primary reason why Southern Baptists evolved into the ultra-conservative and fundamentalist lot they are today.
(Related: Before evangelicals and fundamentalists fused together.)
Everyone, meet the Southern Baptist Convention before Paul Pressler mangled it
They profess to know God, but by their actions they deny Him. They are detestable, disobedient, and unfit for any good deed.
Titus 1:16
Back when Paul Pressler first joined the SBC, it looked nothing like it does today. Both liberals and conservatives inhabited its churches. The mother ship observed a relatively hands-off stance regarding today’s culture-war topics. In 1971, SBC members even passed a resolution regarding abortion that was downright liberal-sounding compared to the denomination’s draconian stance today.
(Very related: The dark origins of the evangelical culture war against abortion)
But it was the possibility of female pastors in SBC pulpits that became the straw that broke the progressive SBC camel’s back. Women had begun making some serious inroads in leadership, and the misogynistic good ole boys in SBC leadership didn’t like it one bit.
The United States fought the Civil War over slavery, but some Southerners have sanitized that fact to a mealy-mouthed appeal to “states’ rights.” Similarly, the SBC was poised to fight a civil war over female pastors—though they immediately sanitized that fact to “biblical inerrancy.”
In both cases, we rightly ask: Inerrancy/states’ rights to do what, exactly?
How Paul Pressler mangled the SBC
There are six things that the LORD hates, seven that are detestable to Him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that run swiftly to evil, a false witness who gives false testimony, and one who stirs up discord among brothers.
Proverbs 6:16-19
Let’s give credit where it’s due. Pressler had a quick mind and an eye for scheming, at least back then. He noticed some serious exploitable loopholes in SBC bylaws. And he figured out how to take advantage of them. He and his fellow ultra-conservatives wanted to force the SBC to adopt inerrancy as a bedrock doctrinal stance. Once inerrancy became the denomination’s idol, its worship would ensure that women would never, ever get near a pulpit again.
(Related: Seduction of the innocent; How inerrancy became the SBC’s idolatrous marker belief.)
Inerrancy is simply one way to interpret the Bible. It holds that everything in the Bible is true and happened just as the Bible tells it. The Bible contains no errors, ever, under this interpretation. Often, inerrancy pairs up with literalism, but not always. For our general purposes here, inerrancy and literalism can be considered near-synonyms. From inerrancy, evangelicals derive all of their most extreme and reality-denying doctrinal stances.
Pressler figured out that if his faction could hold the SBC presidency for a certain number of years, their president could stuff committees and appointed roles with so many inerrancy-addled faction members that they could hijack the entire denomination forever. “He put two and two together,” wrote one sociology professor (archive) of the scheme he devised.
And he pulled it off almost without a hitch.
Nowadays, most folks call this hijack the Conservative Resurgence.
In 2018, Rod Dreher of The American Conservative referred to Pressler and Paige Patterson—a disgraced SBC seminary president fired (mostly) for mishandling sex-assault allegations on his campus—as “the Peter and Paul of the Conservative Resurgence” (archive). He’s not wrong, either (archive).
But Patterson was just a seminary student when he met Pressler in the late 1960s. By contrast, Pressler was a politician and just a couple of years away from becoming a Texas judge. Don’t make any mistakes about who drove their clown car as they campaigned together for years to get Baptists on board with their message.
Paul Pressler isn’t just any Southern Baptist leader mired in scandal, however
So when you, a mere human being, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God’s judgment?
Romans 2:3
By now, most Americans encounter news stories every day about yet another evangelical sex scandal. I have a running not-so-funny-joke with my husband in which I read an evangelical scandal’s headline out to him—but then, I pause before naming the crime. He then guesses what the crime might have been.
Who are we kidding, though? It’s almost always something sex-related. So far, he’s only been wrong once or twice. Really, we’re both relieved if everyone involved in an evangelical scandal is at least of-age.
But Paul Pressler’s scandal isn’t just any regular evangelical sex scandal. He’s a big part of why Southern Baptists are who they are in the modern day. Without him, they would not be the ultra-conservative, hyper-politicized, and breathtakingly-sexist, -racist, and -bigoted denomination that they are now.
There’s no saving or redeeming this mess; it’s rotted from the inside out
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.
Matthew 23:27
Evangelicals like to say that fresh water can’t flow from a salt-water spring. That’s from James 3:11. This saying means that evil can’t come from good sources. Likewise, good can’t flow forth from evil sources.
Well, Paul Pressler is the fountain from which flowed the modern-day SBC.
In a very real way, his scandal indicates that the rot in evangelicalism goes to its very roots and its very heart. At every step in his SBC career, leaders at all levels covered for him and enabled him. The leadership structure of the SBC looks like it does and operates as it has for years because Paul Pressler and men like him ran rampant within it. It is custom-designed to serve predators and their perverted purposes.
The SBC began thanks to its founders’ desire to condone and maintain slavery. Even if its start wasn’t rotten, its bylaws and structure were ripe for exploitation by bad actors. The real surprise is that it took so long for someone to notice that fact and take advantage of it.
The SBC is now a power-focused, dysfunctional authoritarian group. Its structure accommodates abuse and enables abusers. It can’t change meaningfully. At every level, it serves untold numbers of bad actors taking advantage of those facts—and protecting their own and their cronies’ interests.
As a result, there’s no saving or redeeming any of it. And that’s kinda ironic, given that Southern Baptists are officially all about both.
