Opinion | I Don’t Think You Can Even Call This Hypocrisy
I simply learn a remarkable article that helped me make sense of our occasions.
It’s by an investigative journalist named Robert Downen, and it appeared in Texas Monthly. It tells the story of one of the crucial highly effective American non secular leaders of the twentieth century.
And likelihood is, you’ve by no means heard of him.
His title was Paul Pressler. I wrote about him more than two years ago when the Southern Baptist Convention settled a intercourse abuse swimsuit filed towards him by Duane Rollins, who claimed that Pressler had repeatedly raped him, starting when Rollins was 14 years outdated.
Pressler, who died in June 2024, was a former Texas decide, an influential lawyer and one of many main architects of the so-called conservative resurgence within the Southern Baptist Convention, by far the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
In evangelical America, the story of this conservative resurgence is the stuff of legend. The well-liked story goes like this: At the onset of the sexual revolution, Southern Baptists, like many mainline denominations, had been starting to fall below the sway of liberal theologians and probably drifting away from biblical Christianity. While the conference was nonetheless overwhelmingly conservative, theological liberals had been current within the conference, together with in Southern Baptist seminaries.
But in 1967, Pressler met with a younger Southern Baptist pastor and seminary scholar named Paige Patterson at Cafe du Monde, a well-known coffeehouse within the French Quarter in New Orleans. The two males vented their frustrations about what they noticed as their denomination’s liberal drift and vowed to take motion.
They didn’t define a selected plan that night time, however they left with an immense quantity of conviction and resolve.
They spent the following few many years waging a relentless theological and political warfare throughout the denomination. It’s been referred to as the Battle for the Bible. Along with a substantial variety of allies, they purged theological liberals from the denomination, particularly from its seminaries.
Their techniques could possibly be ruthless. For instance, they inspired seminarians to report on their liberal professors, as a part of an effort to reveal them and purge them. They recruited lay members of Southern Baptist congregations to place strain on pastors and church leaders to toe the conservative line.
But the conservative resurgence wasn’t simply theological. Pressler was additionally carefully linked to the Republican Party. In 1981 he joined the Council for National Policy, a gaggle that Downen precisely described as a “secretive network of conservative religious, political and business elites.”
By the late Nineteen Eighties, Pressler was the president of the council, and in 1989, President George H.W. Bush nominated him to steer the Office of Government Ethics.
In 1990 the conservative resurgence was robust sufficient to ship, in Downen’s phrases, a “knockout blow” towards the denomination’s remaining liberals and moderates. The church elected Morris Chapman, a conservative pastor, as president of the conference, “all but ensuring that majorities of the denomination’s various trustee boards would be appointees of the conservative movement.”
(The Southern Baptist Church refers to itself as a conference reasonably than a denomination as a result of its church buildings are largely autonomous. As The Baptist Press explains, “The Southern Baptist Convention is most technically an annual convening of messengers from invested and involved Baptist churches rather than a perpetual denominational body.”)
Conservatives would now have the ability to train “total control over the S.B.C.’s seminaries and bureaucracy.” For their victory lap, Pressler and Patterson returned to Cafe du Monde to recreate their assembly 23 years earlier than.
This revolution, conservatives consider, didn’t simply save the conference; it helped gasoline extraordinary development. While the membership of liberal denominations declined, sometimes precipitously, the Southern Baptist Convention grew, hitting a peak of greater than 16.3 million individuals in 2006. (The denomination’s membership has declined yearly since its high-water mark. As of 2025, roughly 12.3 million Americans belonged to Southern Baptist church buildings.)
To many evangelicals, the teachings had been clear. The denomination’s non secular and political conservatism had been key to its development. God was blessing the devoted, and because the extra liberal denominations declined, he was turning away from the faithless.
But that’s not the complete story — not by a protracted shot. As Downen detailed in page after painful page, there was an awesome quantity of proof that Pressler was a morally corrupt and abusive man.
He was, for instance, a Confederate apologist, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
Reflecting on the conservative resurgence, Pressler mentioned, “It was like Gettysburg, but this time the right side won.” And in 2016, as considered one of his final public interventions in Southern Baptist enterprise, he tried to argue against a decision that condemned using the Confederate flag.
But by far essentially the most critical claims towards Pressler contain allegations that he sexually abused younger males and boys.
The earliest recognized experiences of Pressler’s abuse date again to the Nineteen Seventies, when he was working with younger individuals at a Presbyterian church in Texas. According to courtroom data, the church eliminated him after studying of an “alleged incident” at his dwelling involving a younger member of the church. A former youth group member later claimed that Pressler grabbed him and fondled his penis once they had been alone in a rustic membership sauna.
Rumors about Pressler would possibly, in truth, have induced him to withdraw his title from Senate consideration for head of the Office of Government Ethics. As Downen reported, “In a 2005 letter, Patterson acknowledged that Pressler’s nomination was scuttled by a ‘charge of homosexual behavior’ made to the F.B.I. by Abner McCall, a past Baylor University president.” Pressler used this incident to show himself, in Downen’s phrases, right into a “victim of vengeful liberals who would do anything to destroy God-fearing men.”
But questions on Pressler continued. In 2004 the First Baptist Church of Houston investigated claims that Pressler had tried to strain a person in his 20s to hope with him bare after which forcibly undressed and groped the person. The church wrote a personal letter to Pressler calling his conduct “morally and spiritually inappropriate.”
The most chilling a part of Downen’s report described Pressler’s relationship together with his regulation companion, a far-right Texas Republican, Jared Woodfill.
According to sworn statements by Woodfill, he knew about allegations towards Pressler but — extremely — stood by whereas their agency granted Pressler extraordinary entry to younger males. As Downen wrote, “Instead of giving Pressler a salary, the firm paid a string of young, male personal assistants to work out of Pressler’s home, according to Woodfill’s testimony.”
This association lasted, Downen wrote, till at the least 2017, “when a personal assistant, in an email addressed to Pressler’s family, wrote that he had recently heard Pressler brag about being naked with young boys and saw him pressure a young, destitute man into giving him a nude massage for money while kissing him repeatedly.”
Again, it’s price repeating that these allegations adopted Pressler for many years. Yet he retained his energy. He retained his affect. For all too many Baptists, the ends justified the means.
Or, because the leaders of First Baptist Church of Houston wrote to Pressler, “Given your stature and various leadership roles in our church, the Southern Baptist Convention and other Christian organizations, it is our considered opinion that this kind of behavior, if brought to light, might distort your testimony or cause others to stumble. We desire neither.”
In this context, “testimony” refers to Pressler’s public non secular instance. Here the church is saying that exposing Pressler’s misdeeds would “distort” his public Christian credibility.
Downen’s story is notable not only for its deal with Pressler. Patterson, Pressler’s key companion within the conservative resurgence, confronted his personal scandals. In 2018 the trustees of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary compelled Patterson out of the presidency after a extensively learn open letter condemned him for horribly mistreating girls who claimed that they’d been raped or abused.
In one case, he’s mentioned to have advised a seminarian who said that she’d been raped to forgive her attacker and urged her to not contact the police. In one other, he wrote in an e mail to campus safety that he wished to fulfill with a girl who mentioned she’d been raped, to “break her down.”
Patterson, Pressler and Woodfill denied all wrongdoing.
Trust me when I let you know that I’m barely scratching the floor of Downen’s report. It’s agonizing to learn. But as a substitute of diving much more deeply into the sordid particulars, I thought I’d attempt to reply a query: Why does all this matter now?
The finest method to describe the Baptist response to Downen’s report was an enormous collective yawn. Some individuals thought-about the report back to be nothing greater than a liberal hit piece. Others took a unique method, sustaining that the conservative resurgence was good, even when its leaders had been abusive and unhealthy.
But right here’s the issue with that second line of thought: Institutions tackle the character of their leaders, and political evangelicalism can look rather more like Paul Pressler than Jesus Christ. Political evangelicalism is a system that’s deeply influenced by wicked males, and it has precisely the options that wicked males will demand of an establishment they management.
First, the wicked man will alter the very definition of advantage. He’ll place a better premium on his ideas than his actions, in order that the aim is theological or ideological purity reasonably than, say, the fruit of the spirit, which incorporates kindness, peace, endurance, gentleness and self-control.
In this formulation, absolutely the worst factor you could be is a heretic, with heresy outlined in response to the chief’s rigid interpretation of Scripture.
You can see this temptation throughout the size and breadth of American faith and politics. How many individuals see themselves pretty much as good as a result of their theology or ideology is pure? How most of the identical individuals then really feel righteous at the same time as they inflict excessive cruelty on their theological or ideological foes? To them, cruelty within the title of fact isn’t cruelty in any respect; it’s a type of powerful love.
Second, wicked males are intensely susceptible to scrutiny, so that they hate inquiry and accountability. They’ll create secretive establishments that zealously guard their privateness and autonomy. And when accountability comes, it’s handled like martyrdom. Instead of going through justice for his or her misdeeds, they act as in the event that they’re the victims of a hostile, unbelieving world.
The media turns into the enemy. So does anybody who challenges the leaders, together with even intercourse abuse survivors. Their cries for assist are seen not as righteous pleas for justice however as malicious assaults on the church and God’s anointed leaders.
The stark actuality of this depravity is hidden from hundreds of thousands of evangelicals, together with hundreds of thousands of Southern Baptists. They love God and their neighbors and reside lives far faraway from politics. You would need them subsequent door. You would discover a lot to admire in the best way they increase their kids and serve their communities.
They virtually all vote Republican, however for a lot of, it’s as a lot a matter of behavior as it’s a matter of deeply held conviction. It’s what you do whenever you go to an evangelical church. It’s a part of the way you match into the neighborhood you’re keen on.
As a end result, many Christians, perhaps most, are fully unaware of the cruelty inflicted on political dissenters in Jesus’ title. And to the extent that they examine scandals inside evangelicalism, they learn it in right-wing media, which consistently denies, defends and deflects. They are genuinely shocked once they lastly hear the reality.
It’s to the good credit score of the denomination that hundreds of its messengers (the conference’s time period for delegates) voted in 2021 to provoke an out of doors investigation of the Southern Baptist Convention govt committee’s response to sexual abuse allegations. The committee even voted to waive its attorney-client privilege in order that the investigation could be thorough and full.
In 2022, Guidepost Solutions, the surface investigator employed by the manager committee, launched a searing report that mentioned survivors and others who reported abuse “were ignored, disbelieved or met with the constant refrain that the S.B.C. could take no action due to its policy regarding church autonomy — even if it meant that convicted molesters continued in ministry with no notice or warning to their current church or congregation.”
But Pressler’s cultural affect stays far too robust. The denomination created an Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force, but it surely closed its doors in 2024 with its work incomplete. Sex abuse survivors have confronted a storm of criticism. Many despair of ever reaching lasting change.
The fashionable historical past of political evangelicalism is riddled with the identical form of story: A robust man beneficial properties a following by casting himself because the heroic warrior towards the heretical and the godless. When he makes use of his energy and fame to indulge his basest needs, he treats publicity as an assault and justice as persecution.
And as a result of he’s constructed a following, he has a military of individuals able to leap to his protection. After all, in the event that they keep silent, then the liberals will win, and nobody can let the liberals win. Ever.
Against this backdrop, President Trump wasn’t an aberration; he was an inevitability. When he requested evangelicals for his or her political assist, little did he know that he was strolling into the home that Paul Pressler constructed.
Some different issues I did
My Sunday column was in regards to the Democratic temptation to assist Graham Platner. He will virtually definitely be the Democratic nominee to tackle the Republican incumbent, Senator Susan Collins, in Maine. He additionally only in the near past coated up what seems to be a Nazi tattoo and has a protracted file of maximum and merciless statements on-line. A charismatic man has a troubled previous. What may go mistaken?
I don’t need politicians to be genuine. I need them to be respectable. I need them to be trustworthy. I need them to be competent. And in the event that they fail these exams, they don’t redeem themselves by opposing President Trump.
If you’re a conservative watching Democrats speak themselves into supporting Graham Platner, the Maine Democrat who till lately wore what certain seemed like a Totenkopf tattoo (he covered it up after it turned a political embarrassment), you’re in all probability experiencing déjà vu. To a lesser however nonetheless acquainted diploma, I’m seeing Democrats have interaction in the identical means of absurd lodging and justification that Republicans use to excuse their deep love for Trump.
This week the round table discussion featured Michelle Cottle, David Wallace-Wells and me, and we talked in regards to the Iran warfare. We coated a variety of floor, however I wished to emphasise how a lot the Trump administration has lied. Among different issues, it deceived America in regards to the extent of the injury Iran inflicted on American bases:
I don’t suppose Americans realized the extent that we had been topic to Baghdad Bobbery from our personal authorities. And should you keep in mind, the Iraq warfare in 2003, Baghdad Bob — he was the spokesperson for the Saddam Hussein authorities. “Everything’s going great.”
Iraq’s data minister, Mohammad al Sahaf: We are destroying tanks, personnel carriers, killing them, and we are going to proceed.
And he’s saying, “Americans are nowhere near us,” and so forth.
al Sahaf: They will not be even 100 miles or no matter. They will not be in anywhere.
We’re not used to having a Baghdad Bob administration. It’s not that our governments have at all times been truthful towards us. They have lied. But the form of complete dishonesty — and this warfare started with an avalanche of complete dishonesty — primarily calling this an enormous rout. “Why is the media not reporting more on the incredible success of American arms?” When the media was reporting on Americans hitting targets, what we weren’t reporting on, what was being withheld from us — and remains to be being withheld from us, but it surely’s having to leak out, as David was saying, in different methods — is the intense injury that has been carried out to American amenities.
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