The ultimate legacy of Paul Pressler: the formal enablement of sex abuse in evangelicalism

Paul Pressler, possibly the most influential evangelical in modern times, recently died. As evangelicals are wont to do when their leaders die, they are already hard at work analyzing his legacy. Well, sort of. One official Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) site seems eager to forget he ever existed. But they can’t. He damaged them in a way that has caused decades of decline, loss, infighting, and endless waves of financial and sexual scandals. I don’t seriously think the SBC will ever recover from what Paul Pressler wrought in their denomination.

Hey, I never said ‘influential’ means ‘good.’ In this case, the influence was all negative. And today, we’ll explore what Paul Pressler really did to the SBC.

Paul Pressler: A short biography of abuse and power-seeking

I’ve written extensively about Paul Pressler’s odious past. So today, I’ll try not to retread well-trod ground.

Paul Pressler is a former Texas state representative, lawyer, and eventual judge. He served a great many years in the SBC as one of its top leaders.

But he had a very dark side. Before he even got to the SBC, he was originally Presbyterian. In 1978, his then-church leaders removed him from youth ministry after allegations of sex abuse.

Having been thoroughly barred from that Presbyterian church’s field of prey, he immediately pivoted to the SBC. The gullible, overly-trusting SBC welcomed him with open arms. In short order, he became a minister. You’ll all be relieved to know he especially focused on youth ministry—and in particular on fervent young men in his church and denomination.

Pressler also filled several denominational roles in the SBC’s Executive Committee (EC) and International Mission Board (IMB). He’d been very busy meeting influential young SBC leaders. Among these were Richard Land, who became the leader of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) in 1988 before getting unceremoniously fired in 2012 for racism.

When Land was only a teenager in the early 1960s, he joined Pressler’s Bible study group at their church. Decades later in the early 2000s, Land—at the time a big-name SBC leader in the ERLC—nominated Pressler to serve as the SBC’s First Vice President. Pressler ran unopposed, so he won that election. I wonder if nobody dared to face him head-on.

Eventually in 1993, Paul Pressler retired from his judge position. But he didn’t stop working tirelessly on his ultimate goals for the SBC.

More to the point, he also didn’t stop preying upon and allegedly raping any young men who came into his orbit.

The Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson Road Show begins

In 1967, Paul Pressler had a meeting that would change the entire course of the SBC. It was a little tête-à-tête with a doctoral student named Paige Patterson, who at the time attended the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. Also at the time, Pressler was in his lawyer phase and attended Second Baptist Church in Houston.

In a 2014 interview (archive), Pressler said this meeting occurred because he was “creat[ing] a little fuss” at his church over a ministerial disagreement with one of the church’s pastors. That other pastor supported Ralph Elliott, an SBC pastor who had written a book suggesting that the Book of Genesis in the Bible was more symbolic and poetic than literal and inerrant.

At the time, the SBC contained multitudes. Both far-right extremists and liberals could consider themselves valid Southern Baptists. Churches could go in either direction without fear of retaliation by the mother ship.

Paul Pressler didn’t like that.

The disagreement at Second Baptist Church divided its ministers and caused at least one resignation. During the squabble, Pressler became a deacon. From there, he became convinced that SBC-lings all needed to take a more literalist-inerrantist approach to interpreting the Bible.

One of the deacons at Second Baptist remembered a kid he’d known years ago from another church. He suggested Pressler meet this kid named Paige Patterson. Apparently, Patterson also held a literalist-inerrantist viewpoint.

For years, Pressler had offered a scholarship (archive) to inerrancy-addled seminary students. One year, he planned to award it during a “layman’s conference” in New Orleans. While he was there, Pressler and Patterson met up—and immediately resonated with each other.

Patterson didn’t get the scholarship. However, he did get something far more valuable: a crony who could help him ascend to the very heights of power within the SBC.

Over the next twelve years, Pressler and Patterson personally visited thousands of churches and convinced pastors all over the country to support inerrancy and literalism. By 1979, they thought they had a solid one hundred pastors who’d support their ultimate plan: the ultraconservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. They chose a shortlist of literalist-inerrantist men to put forward as president candidates for the denomination, men they were sure would follow their plan once in place.

And then, they put their plot into motion.

Within ten years, the two masterminds had achieved their goal: the hijacking of the biggest Protestant denomination in America. They called it the Conservative Resurgence.

It’s important to know that both of these guys were already power-maddened predators who figured out how to use the SBC’s poorly-written bylaws against it. They only learned how to exploit the SBC’s culture and rules better over the ensuing decades.

Warning bells sounded about Paul Pressler, but they were all ignored

Eventually, Paul Pressler wrote a book about the takeover (archive). In it, he lamented the SBC’s “‘good ol’ boy’ system.” Notably, he blamed that development on “liberals.” He wrote movingly about how he yearned for TRUE CHRISTIAN™ leaders (like himself) who could steer the denomination properly (as he wanted). Imagine the sheer gall of Paul Pressler writing this:

The “good ol’ boy” system evidently started years ago. Liberals developed under this system, because the liberals were careful not to voice their extreme positions publicly (with a few exceptions) and were careful to pay their dues to the system. Such a system must not be allowed to develop under conservative leadership. We must always seek the very best individuals to lead and to serve in our agencies. We must guard against a reinstallation of a “good ol’ boy” system under which anything could occur as long as it didn’t harm the bureaucracy.

He knew damned good and well that his takeover had been exactly like that. Operating as he had with that shortlist of president candidates, he didn’t care who the opposition was or what that opposition’s credentials were.

Pressler also knew damned good and well that he was preying upon young men with the assurance of cronies to protect him.

Perhaps that is why, when George HW Bush chose him to lead his Office of Government Ethics in the late 1980s, the FBI investigated, then immediately disqualified him for the post (archive). Yes, you read that right: The guy HW Bush chose to lead his ethics office was ruled out for “ethics problems“ (archive).

Unfortunately, by then the SBC was thoroughly captured and broken to heel. This curious rejection didn’t raise any serious alarm within the denomination. Its leaders did not pursue the matter at all. Nor did they ask any serious questions about what the FBI might have uncovered about their Kingmaker.

Perhaps this incident emboldened Pressler. In 2004, his church, First Baptist Houston, reprimanded him in writing (archive) for “his habit of naked hot-tubbing with young men.” One of those young men had accused Pressler of groping him. This letter did not become public or even SBC-wide knowledge for many years. Once again, Pressler had evaded true accountability. He evaded it again that same year when he settled a sex assault lawsuit from one of his victims, Gareld Duane Rollins (often referred to as “Duane Rollins”).

Eventually, the mighty Paul Pressler falls

But Paul Pressler’s secret sins would eventually catch up with him. So would Paige Patterson’s, eventually. So would those of all the rest.

In 2018, Patterson’s shocking mishandling of sex abuse cases at his seminary led to his firing and downfall. His former seminary’s still figuring out and trying to fix (archive) all the sketchy stuff he did (archive) while he was the God-Emperor of that school (archive).

Eventually, almost all of Pressler’s hand-chosen leaders and cronies had similar showdowns with consequences. Jerry Vines, one of his shortlisted president candidates, turned out to have been shielding a long-time sex abuser (archive), Darrell Gilyard, from justice—along with Patterson. Another crony of his, Frank Page, had to resign his Executive Committee position due to “a personal failing” over a “morally inappropriate relationship.”

But Paul Pressler couldn’t help any of them. No, the Kingmaker had even more serious problems of his own. His predation of young men had finally come to light.

O how these mighty (hypocrites) had fallen!

By 2017, the SBC was cruising right toward its reckoning for covering up endemic, entrenched, long-term sex abuse across the entire denomination and all up and down its ladder of power. Its leaders and flocks didn’t know it yet, but they were about to face the first instance of real accountability they’d ever experienced in their lives.

And they were not gonna like it.

Paul Pressler was a predator

I’m telling you all of this so you have a timeline in your mind of what Paul Pressler was officially doing in the SBC versus what he was doing in secret at the same time.

(See also: This excellent chronology of the Conservative Resurgence.)

In 2017, Pressler’s former victim Gerald Duane Rollins filed a sex abuse lawsuit against Paul Pressler (archive; here’s some of the court documentation). He did so because Pressler had stopped making his agreed-upon installment payments for the 2004 settlement.

That’s when we all found out the full story about this case.

Rollins claimed that in the late 1970s when he was only 14, he met Pressler during a Bible study. (Sound familiar?) For years after that, Rollins claimed, “several times a month” Pressler assaulted him. Rollins also named Paige Patterson and Patterson’s seminary, Pressler’s wife Nancy, Pressler’s former law partner Jared Woodfill and Woodfill’s law firm, and a church that’s probably where the abuse began.

Allegedly, Pressler only stopped abusing Rollins when the young man moved away from Houston in 1983 to attend college elsewhere. As well, Pressler had callously used his religious power to cow Rollins into silence. Rollins claimed that all of the other people and businesses named in the lawsuit knew very well what Pressler was doing, but they all protected him from justice and discovery.

So when the Conservative Resurgence was starting to get steam, that’s when Pressler began abusing Rollins. It’s a lead-pipe cinch that the FBI had uncovered this abuse in 1989.

Rollins was far from Pressler’s only victim, of course. In all, seven men made accusations of sex abuse against Paul Pressler. Considering how his law partner Woodfill apparently funneled potential victims his way and lied about never having received any reports of abuse (archive), Pressler probably had many more victims. Their stories might never be revealed.

For many, many years, the Kingmaker used his power and religious posturing to sexually abuse young men. Thanks to that power and the crony network he’d deliberately created, he had no fear whatsoever of ever facing justice.

The Kingmaker died, and none mourned his passing for weeks

On June 7th, Paul Pressler died at 94 years of age. Of particular and special note, Baptist Press—the SBC’s official site—said not a word about it. After over a week, Baptist News Global, which is not affiliated with the SBC and is far less extremist, finally broke the story (archive). By then, the SBC’s silence had become at least as big a story as Pressler’s actual death.

In fact, the Kingmaker’s passing had barely rippled the evangelical waters, as Baptist News Global discovered:

About 70 people were reported to have attended the [funeral] service. [. . .]

A Google search for Pressler’s name shows a preview of an obituary from Dignity Memorial, but there is no obituary when a reader clicks through on the hyperlink. This most likely is the result of a once-public obituary being taken offline. (The online obituary was restored on Sunday, June 16.)

Yes, and it was probably restored after the SBC’s shocking inattention to Pressler’s death made the news.

On June 17th, Baptist Press finally ran a post about the death of Paul Pressler (archive). They didn’t omit his darkest deeds at all. But they described him in the headline as a “disgraced Conservative Resurgence strategist.” They barely touch on the vast amount of power he held within their denomination, saying only:

Prior to the lawsuit and sexual abuse allegations, Pressler would have been considered one of the most influential and powerful Southern Baptists of the 20^th century.

This is such a misstatement. Even after the lawsuit, even after the sexual abuse allegations, he remained one of the most influential and powerful Southern Baptists in the 20th century.

I’d say they’re grappling with his legacy and downfall, except they aren’t

It’d be nice if those events had actually ended Paul Pressler’s tenure as “one of the most influential and powerful Southern Baptists of the 20th century.” But they definitely did not.

On June 17th, one of his made men, Benjamin Cole (the “Baptist Blogger”), wrote a post for Baptist News Global (archive) about the aftermath of learning of Pressler’s abuse allegations in 2006:

I left that lunch meeting [with a Dallas journalist] rattled and placed a call to a denominational executive who was intimately familiar with the case that prompted my initial contact with the Dallas reporter. I asked him if he had heard anything about the settlement arising from an alleged “assault” in a Dallas hotel room. He had heard the same thing I had, but neither one of us were interested in asking the judge about it.

It was a settled matter, and the settlement agreement was sealed. I never thought about it again.

The next section of his post on Baptist News Global is titled “Life moves on.” Because for him, as someone who’d greatly benefited from Pressler’s generosity and never faced abuse from him, life could indeed move on. He ends by describing both Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson as examples of:

[. . .] what can happen when zealous ecclesiastic reform gets entangled with personal ambition, political machinations and the corrupting power that still haunts the nation’s “largest Protestant denomination.”

But Cole is wrong. He’s got the order of operations all mixed up here. He thinks that the personal ambition/political machinations/corrupting power were just a sad human failing in the course of “zealous ecclesiastic reform.” He acts like that terrible stuff just happened but didn’t need to—as if it never would have happened had those two leaders had been Jesusy enough.

In fact, the “zealous ecclesiastic reform” was part and parcel of gathering together the “corrupting power” that served “personal ambition” and “political machinations.”

Does Cole think it’s some unfortunate fluke of fate that Pressler’s SBC lacked any way to stop him from abusing multiple men over the course of his tenure as the Kingmaker? Does he just not understand that Pressler’s system operated exactly as he’d designed it?

I’m afraid so—on both counts. I wish I could take him by the chin to direct him to the truth about his hero and benefactor. I wish I could tell him “Look! See!” so intently that he could never ignore reality ever again. The look of sudden comprehension on his face would be rewarding to behold (image comes from Elfquest).

But the nature of cronyism is simple:

Cronies defend their benefactors and higher-power leaders to the last breath, at least until that person and his cronies can no longer destroy the bad-mouther.

(Related: Russell Moore refuses to play ball.)

The legacy of Paul Pressler

From the very beginning, Paul Pressler was a phony. Very early on, he discovered that he could leverage his religious power to prey upon young men. But the first church and denomination he tried that at weren’t interested in protecting ministers caught abusing the flocks. That first church rightly fired his ass.

So he cast about for a denomination and church that would enable his predilections. And he found exactly what he needed in the SBC and in that first church of his in Houston.

It’s no secret at all that literalism and inerrancy serve the interests of abusers. These doctrinal viewpoints always have.

Years ago in the mid-2000s, when I haunted the long-gone Big Love forums at HBO, one common sight there was plaintive failed middle-aged men wanting side pieces like the hero of that show had. These men haunted those forums seeking Bible verses they could use to clobber their longsuffering wives into accepting polygamy. They weren’t interested in golden-tongued persuasion, probably because they were incapable of such subtlety. No, they wanted Bible verses. If their wives already bought into the literal inerrancy of the Bible, then that’s all they thought they needed.

Similarly, I don’t think I’ve seen cults grow out of any other mindset. The one that almost recruited my Evil Ex Biff in the early 1990s was even more literalist-inerrantist than our Pentecostal church was! Be they Christian or Eastern mystic or Catholic, hardline doctrine-idolizing positions like literalism and inerrancy are the potting soil that abuse needs for proper growth. Abusers need their prey to have those mindsets.

How Paul Pressler turned the SBC into a broken system

When we talk about broken systems, we always link them to power. They are dysfunctional authoritarian in nature. That means they have a generally authoritarian structure, but they cannot ever achieve their own stated goals. Hell, they can’t even protect their own members from leaders’ abuse. Nor do they want to do either of those things. Its recruiters and leaders persuade potential victims of the group’s stated goals only to get those victims into their clutches. In reality, a dysfunctional authoritarian group is nothing but a conduit for power for its equally dysfunctional leaders.

The problems for this kind of group begin well before they become obvious—long before.

First, a vulnerable group accidentally designs a social structure for itself that opens the door to takeover and transformation. The group may not even be an inherently abusive system yet, nor even dysfunctional. It might even be achieving at least some of its stated goals. If it is, then that means it hasn’t attracted the attention of hijackers and bad-faith actors.

Those sorts smell potential power in the air like sharks smell blood in the water. They work their way into leadership in the group. Then, they set about transforming it into a vehicle for the acquisition of personal power. They rewrite a rule here, redesign a custom there, invite some friends to help out over yonder. Before the rank-and-file even know what has hit them, their group has been broken.

Paul Pressler had a keen mind for manipulation and rules-lawyering. I’m sure it didn’t take him long to spot the serious flaws in the SBC’s operational bylaws that would open the door to his wildest dreams.

The principles of power that Paul Pressler embraced

Once a given system has been infected and redesigned, its new leaders care about nothing but gaining more power—and guarding it against all comers.

To do that, they follow the principles of power:

1. People in the system seek to gain as much power over others as possible.
2. Power is the meta-religion, the goal, the whole point. Every person in the power-seeking process wants to control as many people as possible—while being controlled by the fewest people possible.
3. Nothing is ever off-limits for those who hold power. More to the point, following the group’s rules is for the powerless. The powerful not only do not follow those rules, they flaunt their disobedience.
4. The powerful delight in the most potent expressions of power: forcing people to do things they don’t want to do; rubbing their own disobedience in the noses of the powerless. If power is not flexed, the powerful might as well not have it at all.
5. Those in power protect their power at all costs. In protecting their power, they inevitably protect other leaders in their group who have done utterly disgusting things. Nobody in power ever faces any real accountability for their actions. The powerless get it in the shorts, though, always.

A broken system cannot be fixed. Its leaders have no interest in changing a system that benefits them so grandly, and its rank-and-file members no longer have the power to override their dysfunctional system’s leadership. By intent and design, change from within is impossible.

Paul Pressler’s goal was not turning the SBC into a literalism and inerrancy-addled dysfunctional-authoritarian mess. His goal was achieving vast amounts of personal power. To get that power, he had to turn the SBC into a literalism and inerrancy-addled dysfunctional-authoritarian mess.

Inerrancy and literalism are just stepping-stones to what dysfunctional-authoritarian leaders really want

Simply put, the SBC wasn’t designed to defend against men like Paul Pressler. If it had been, power-seeking bad-faith actors like him would have been thwarted. They would have had to go elsewhere to get their desires fulfilled.

Nothing I’m saying here today should be a shock to any evangelical. After all, the Calvinist guys who sold literalism and inerrancy to Paul Pressler and his cronies in the 1960s weren’t doing it to make the SBC literalist and inerrantist. No, they were selling those ideas to get the denomination to accept church discipline—a form of evangelical leadership in which leaders dominate the entire lives of their followers and can brutally punish disobedience and wrongthink.

Nobody would accept such an obviously abuse-prone, power-grabby mess of an idea without first accepting literalism and inerrantism. That’s why the persuasion was so necessary. Once the flocks accepted those doctrines, those Calvinists thought, all abusers would need to do was clobber them with Bible verses supporting church discipline. They sure got mad when the SBC accepted literalism and inerrancy but then balked at wholesale accepting church discipline! But the hijackers themselves had been officially selling literalism and inerrancy as a way to stop women from holding any real power in SBC churches. To them, that was the end goal. Once met, they could relax a little—and enjoy the rotted fruits of their labors.

A lot of SBC pastors and members could get on board easily with that goal. They didn’t even suspect the abuse that came with these ideas. When that abuse came roaring into public view, they couldn’t comprehend that it was an integral part of their beloved Conservative Resurgence. They still can’t, if Benjamin’s Cole repulsive retrospective is anything to go by.

“Life moves on,” indeed

Do not let any evangelicals try to fool you into thinking that Paul Pressler, Jerry Vines, Paige Patterson, Richard Land, Ronnie Floyd, Frank Page, and dozens of other SBC hijackers did something noble that was only tarnished a bit by their abuse and abuser-shielding.

You can know this by noticing just one detail about today’s SBC:

Nobody’s ever plugged the loopholes that allowed Paul Pressler and the rest to abuse others with impunity for decades. Nobody’s interested in even trying. It sure looks like everyone else is just trying to figure out how to use those loopholes themselves.

In broken systems, the system’s message is always considered perfect. In the SBC’s case, the message is literalism and inerrancy. (Even their recruitment attempts, which are mostly extortion attempts using Hell as a threat, hinge on that message.)

So off and on for many years to come, a few SBC leaders and activists will haltingly try to make their broken system at least a little less prone to enabling abusers and predators. They won’t understand why it doesn’t work. They won’t comprehend why their leaders keep abusing people and hiding abuse and enabling abuse. Instead, they’ll think they just need to Jesus harder and pick more Jesusy leaders at their Annual Meetings.

Not one of them will question the perfect system’s idolized message. By now, they can’t.

The funny thing is, nobody in an errancy-addled flavor of Christianity can ever really accept that literally any position can be justified and defended fully with Bible verses.

Shh, don’t tell them. By the time they figure it out, hopefully their religion will be nothing more than a fable in storybooks written by rabbits—a “can you even believe it?” story discovered thousands of years later like the burial of Summanus’ lightning.

NEXT UP: Evangelicals’ attempt to distance themselves from Paul Pressler has already begun. “Was he Christian?” asks one blog. We’ll answer that question next time. [Spoiler: JFC, of fookin’ course he was.] See you soon!

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