A major investigative report on the life of Paul Pressler, a former judge and Southern Baptist church leader who died on June 7, 2024 at the age of 94, has just been published. TexasMonthlydocumenting four decades of sexual abuse within the Southern Baptist Church.
The author is Robert Downen, who was one of the leading reporters who in 2019 in the Houston Chronicle exposed mass sexual abuse in Southern Baptist churches among their pastors and leaders.
I covered this story in 2019. See:
In the recently published article TexasMonthly on the life of Paul Pressler, entitled: He rebuilt the Southern Baptist Convention in his own image. Then came the abuse allegations. – Downen reports on efforts to implement reforms to protect victims of sexual predators in the Southern Baptist Convention, as his article shook the foundations of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), where many of these pedophiles continue to pastor churches and still hold leadership roles within the SBC.
As he recounts the life of Paul Pressler, the founder of the modern conservative evangelical Christian movement, he shows how accusations of sexual abuse were routinely swept under the rug and then blamed on “liberals” who they said attacked their conservative religious and political views.
This was an incredibly well written piece of investigative journalism! I learned quite a bit from it.
For example, he documents how those who were victims of predatory sexual abuse among Catholic priests were widely reported in the corporate news after the Boston Globe exposé. that the film was createdalso tried to warn the leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention that the same things were happening in their churches, but their warnings fell on deaf ears.
The SBC is the largest Protestant denomination in the US, second only to the Catholic Church.
However, while other denominations responded to the Catholic Church’s abuse problem by adopting their own guarantees, Southern Baptist leaders blamed the crisis on Catholic theology, celibacy requirements for priests, and the church hierarchy.
Soon after, the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests – or SNAP, an advocacy group that has been instrumental in exposing the crisis in the Catholic Church – asked SBC leaders to act, warning that the decentralized nature of their faith group and the lack of uniform ordination standards created an environment where predators could easily move between churches.
Krista Brown, a SNAP leader and abuse survivor, documented the problem on a website and informed the SBC of her findings. Reactions were often hostile.
When Brown was allowed to speak to the SBC’s executive committee, she said one member turned away from her while she was speaking.
And when SNAP focused on the case of Pastor Darrell Gilyard, who Patterson defended as he moved from church to church amid dozens of sexual misconduct allegations against Patterson in the late eighties, Patterson called the organization “evil” and “like convicted sex offenders.”
In 2007, SBC executive committee leaders received a letter from the Reverend Thomas Doyle, the Vatican’s top lawyer and early whistleblower about the Catholic abuse crisis.
“I am concerned about what I fear is a similar pattern emerging in the largest Protestant denomination in the country“wrote Doyle, who at the time was an activist working with Southern Baptist abuse survivors.
“Sexual abuse by clergy is an epidemic that knows no boundaries of theology, denomination, or institutional structure.”
Downen shows that Paul Pressler, who was also a judge in Texas, influenced conservative politics in the US during the Reagan and Bush administrations, where the cover-up of sexual assault and sex trafficking became the norm, and continues to this day in Trump’s second term, which we now know much more about because of the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
He rebuilt the Southern Baptist Convention in his own image. Then came the abuse allegations.
Quotes:
You may not know the name Paul Pressler. But your life was greatly affected by the fruits of his labor.
While he may not be as well-known as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, or other lions of the religious right, few people have done more to shape our modern political and religious landscapes.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Pressler pushed the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s second-largest religious group, into a civil war that drove moderates from its ranks. As the architect of the SBC’s so-called conservative revival, Pressler, or Judge as many knew him, played a crucial role in the marriage of the Republican Party and the white evangelical voters who still hold it in power.
For nearly four decades, he served as a quiet GOP power broker, helping to elevate generations of conservative Christians to the Texas Legislature, Capitol Hill and the White House.
For the past eight years, I have been immersed in Southern Baptist life with an inside look at SBC leadership and a community of abuse survivors as they grapple with the aftermath of the crisis. I have interviewed countless SBC members, attended their meetings, and reviewed hundreds of thousands of pages of letters in the Pressler archives.
What follows is the story of one man’s rise, one man’s reign and fall, and two long battles for control of a giant religious group.
This story is about power and what those who want it will do for it. Most of all, this is the story of what happens to those left behind.
Long before the SBC abuse crisis made national headlines, there were clear signs of trouble. Since the late 1980s, the Baptist Press, the denomination’s news service, has published articles denouncing the growing number of churches suing for sexual abuse, urging congregations to adopt background checks and other procedures, and warning that Christians are guilty of “collaborating in silence.”
In 2008, after years of pleas from survivors, SBC executive committee leaders formally refused to proceed with a major reform, namely maintaining a database of ministers convicted or credibly accused of sexual assault that churches can consult when hiring. Publicly they claimed they had no authority to do so.
Privately, in emails released years later, they acknowledged that such a mechanism was both feasible and effective, but that it could open them up to lawsuits.
Over the next decade, hundreds of Southern Baptist church leaders would be accused of sexual abuse.
Pressler expanded his political career, using the influence he had amassed at the National Policy Council to help shape Texas and national politics.
Before the 2000 presidential election, he played an important role in pushing the CNP to support the election campaign. George Bush. Pressler was also its first supporter Ted CruzSenate candidacy in 2012 and presidential campaign in 2016 and as first adviser Attorney General Ken Paxton.
In 2007, as a tribute to his religious and political achievements, Louisiana State College (now known as Louisiana Christian University) announced plans to open the Judge Paul Pressler School of Law in downtown Shreveport to train the next generation of Christian lawyers.
Its star-studded board, affiliated with the CNP, was a testament to Pressler’s influence.
Among the board members: James Dobson, longtime director of Focus on the Family; former US Attorney General Edwin Meese; and Kelly Shackelford, of the First Freedom Institute in Plano, has been instrumental in the lawsuits that have eroded the wall between church and state..
Founding Dean of the school, J. Michael Johnson is currently the Speaker of the US House of Representatives.
As Pressler’s political influence grew, so did the accusations against him.
In 2004, leaders of the First Baptist Church of Houston, where Pressler was a deacon, were accused of pressuring a 20-year-old man to pray with him naked at Pressler’s home, then forcibly stripping him of his clothes and groping him.
Church leaders wrote a private letter to Pressler warning him of this behavior
“It is morally and spiritually incompatible. . . . Given your stature and various leadership roles in our church, the Southern Baptist Convention, and other Christian organizations, we believe that such behavior, if discovered, could distort your testimony or cause others to stumble.“, they wrote.
“We don’t want either.»
The accusations did not come only from within Southern Baptist life.
In 2004, Pressler’s longtime law partner Jared Woodfill was made aware of Pressler’s sexual misconduct allegations, according to Woodfill’s sworn testimony years later.
Woodfill, a staunch anti-gay crusader who had just begun a twelve-year term as chairman of the Harris County GOP, relied on Pressler’s political connections to shore up the law firm.
“He was a big name” Woodfill, who did not respond to interview requests for this story, said under oath.
“Many people came and begged him.”
According to Woodfill’s testimony, instead of paying Pressler a salary, the company paid a number of young, male personal assistants to work in Pressler’s home.
The arrangement continued until at least 2017, when a personal assistant wrote in an email to Pressler’s family that he recently overheard Pressler boasting about being naked with young children and saw that he was oppressing a poor young man giving money to her naked massage while kissing her repeatedly.
“He talks more about being naked, the male body, being naked in European spas (or) being naked in general than God or his Baptist history.“, was written in the e-mail.
Then, in 2022, a series of expensive legal battles began.
They were held up by opponents of abuse reform as evidence of deceiving denominational leaders: the SBC announced that the Department of Justice was investigating sexually abusive relationships; Sills sued SBC, Lyell and others for defamation; and Johnny Hunt, former SBC president accused of sexual assault, has sought up to $100 million in damages as part of his lawsuit against the SBC.
(DOJ investigation concluded after the re-election of President Donald Trumpwithout serious payment; The Sills and Hunt lawsuits are ongoing, although most of Hunt’s claims have been dismissed.)
As arguments continued among SBC leaders over how to implement the promised reforms, namely the liability and funding issues, they faced demands to abandon them entirely.
By 2024, the struggle is over.
“We took it as far as they would let us,” Josh Wester, a North Carolina pastor who leads the task force responsible for implementing the reforms, told delegates at the same year’s SBC meeting.
“It has become clear to us that there is no future for sustainable abuse reform within the SBC.”
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