Four Decades of Predatory Sexual Abuse by Prominent Southern Baptist Leader and Judge

Commentary by Brian Shilhavy
Health Impact News

A major investigative report on the life of Paul Pressler, the former judge and Southern Baptist Church leader who died on June 7, 2024 at the age of 94, was just published in the TexasMonthly ^[1], documenting four decades of predatory sexual abuse within the Southern Baptist Church.

The author is Robert Downen, who was one of the lead reporters who exposed massive sex abuse in the Southern Baptist Churches among their pastors and leaders back in 2019 in the Houston Chronicle.

I covered that story back in 2019. See:

Southern Baptist Church: Leader in Foster Care and Adoption – Home to Pedophiles ^[2]

In his recently published article at TexasMonthly ^[1] on the life of Paul Pressler, titled: He Remade the Southern Baptist Convention in His Image. Then Came the Abuse Allegations. – Downen gives an update on attempts to implement reforms to protect victims of sexual predators in the Southern Baptist Convention since his article shook the very foundations of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), where most of these pedophiles continue to pastor churches and still maintain leadership roles within the SBC.

As he chronicles the life Paul Pressler who was a founder of the modern Evangelical Christian Conservative movement, he shows how sexual abuse charges were routinely swept under the rug and then blamed on “liberals” who they claimed were attacking them on their Conservative religious and political views.

This was an incredibly written piece of investigative journalism! I learned quite a bit from it.

For example, he documents how those who exposed and were victims to the predatory sexual abuse among Catholic Priests, which became widely reported in the corporate news after the Boston Globe’s exposure of them, which was made into a movie ^[4], also tried to warn leaders in 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 U.S., second only to the Catholic Church.

And yet in the aughts, as other denominations responded to the Catholic Church’s unfolding abuse problem by adopting their own safeguards, Southern Baptist leaders blamed that crisis on Catholic theology, celibacy requirements for priests, and church hierarchy.

Not long after, the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests—or SNAP, the advocacy group that was instrumental in exposing the crisis in the Catholic Church—began pleading with SBC leaders to act, warning that their faith group’s decentralized nature and lack of uniform ordination standards created an environment in which predators could easily infiltrate and move among churches.

Christa Brown, a SNAP leader and abuse survivor, documented the problem on a website and alerted the SBC to her findings. Reactions were often hostile.

When Brown was allowed to address the SBC’s executive committee, she said one member defiantly turned his back on her while she spoke.

And when SNAP drew attention to the case of pastor Darrell Gilyard—whom Patterson had defended as Gilyard moved from church to church amid dozens of sexual misconduct allegations in the late eighties—Patterson called the organization “evildoers” and “as reprehensible as sex criminals.”

In 2007 leaders of the SBC’s executive committee received a letter from Reverend Thomas Doyle, a former high-ranking Vatican lawyer and early whistleblower about the Catholic abuse crisis.

“I am concerned by what I fear may be developing as a similar pattern in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination,” wrote Doyle, who by then was an activist working closely with Southern Baptist abuse survivors.

“Clergy sex abuse is a scourge that knows no bounds of theology, denomination, or institutional structure.”

Source ^[1].

Downen shows just how powerful Paul Pressler, who was also a Judge in Texas, was in influencing Conservative politics in the U.S. during the Reagan and Bush presidencies where covering up sexual abuse and child sex trafficking became the norm, and has continued to this day in Trump’s second term, where we know so much more now because of the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

From TexasMonthly ^[1]:

He Remade the Southern Baptist Convention in His Image. Then Came the Abuse Allegations.

Excerpts:

You might not know Paul Pressler’s name. But your life has been profoundly affected by the fruits of his labor.

Though he may not be as familiar as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, or other lions of the religious right, few have done more to shape our modern political and religious landscapes.

Pressler in the eighties and nineties pushed the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s second-largest faith group, into a civil war that drove moderates from its ranks. As the architect of the SBC’s so-called conservative resurgence, Pressler—or the Judge, as many knew him—played a crucial role in the marriage of the Republican Party and the white evangelical voters who still sustain its power.

For nearly four decades he served as a quiet GOP power broker, helping elevate generations of conservative Christians to the Texas Legislature, Capitol Hill, and the White House.

For the past eight years, I have been ensconced in Southern Baptist life, with an inside view of SBC leadership and a community of abuse survivors as they’ve dealt with fallout from the crisis. I’ve interviewed countless SBC members, attended their meetings, and reviewed hundreds of thousands of pages of letters contained in Pressler’s archives.

What follows is a story of one man’s rise, rule, and downfall, and of two prolonged battles for control of a massive faith group.

It’s a story about power and what those who want it will do for it. More than anything, it is the story of what happens to those left in their wake.

Long before the SBC’s abuse crisis made national headlines, there were clear signs of a problem. Since the late eighties, Baptist Press, the denomination’s news service, had published articles that spotlighted the growing number of churches sued for sexual misconduct, urged congregations to adopt background checks and other procedures, and warned that Christians were guilty of a “complicity of silence” on abuse.

In 2008, after years of pleas from survivors, leaders of the SBC executive committee officially declined to pursue basic reforms—namely, maintaining a database of ministers convicted or credibly accused of sexual abuse that churches could consult when hiring. Publicly, they contended that they had no authority to do so.

Privately, in emails that were made public years later, they acknowledged that such a mechanism was both possible and effective, but it might open them up to lawsuits.

Over the next decade hundreds more Southern Baptist church leaders would be accused of sexual abuse.

Pressler ramped up his political work, using the influence he’d accumulated at the Council for National Policy to help shape Texas and national politics.

Ahead of the presidential election in 2000, he played a crucial role in pushing the CNP to back the campaign of George W. Bush. Pressler was also an early supporter of Ted Cruz’s 2012 Senate bid and 2016 presidential campaign and served as an early adviser to Attorney General Ken Paxton.

In 2007, as a tribute to his lifetime of religious and political accomplishments, Louisiana College (now known as Louisiana Christian University) announced plans to open the Judge Paul Pressler School of Law in downtown Shreveport, which would train the next generation of Christian lawyers.

Its star-studded, CNP-affiliated board was a testament to Pressler’s influence.

Among the board members: James Dobson, the longtime head of Focus on the Family; former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese; and Kelly Shackelford, whose Plano-based First Liberty Institute has been instrumental in lawsuits that have eroded the wall between church and state.

The school’s founding dean, J. Michael Johnson, is now the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

As Pressler’s political influence increased, so too did the allegations against him.

In 2004 leaders of First Baptist Church of Houston, where Pressler was a deacon, looked into accusations that Pressler had pressured a twentysomething man to pray naked with him at Pressler’s home and then forcibly undressed and groped him.

Church leaders wrote a private letter to Pressler warning him that the behavior was

“morally and spiritually inappropriate. . . . 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,” they wrote.

“We desire neither.”

Accusations weren’t just coming from within Southern Baptist life.

In 2004, Pressler’s longtime law partner, Jared Woodfill, was alerted to allegations of sexual misconduct involving Pressler, according to sworn testimony Woodfill gave years later.

Woodfill, a hardline antigay crusader who had just started a twelve-year stint as chair of the Harris County GOP, relied on Pressler’s political connections to bolster the law firm.

“He was a big name,” Woodfill, who did not respond to interview requests for this story, said under oath.

“A lot of people would come and ask for his endorsement.”

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.

The arrangement continued until at 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.

“He talks way more about nudity, the male body, being naked in spas in Europe [or] being naked in general than [he does] God, or his Baptist background,” the email read.

Then, in 2022, a series of high-profile and expensive legal fights began.

They were held out by opponents of abuse reform as proof that the denomination’s leaders had been duped: The SBC announced ^[5] that the Department of Justice was investigating its handling of sex abuses; Sills sued the SBC, Lyell, and others for defamation; and Johnny Hunt, the former SBC president who was accused of sexual abuse, demanded up to $100 million in damages as part of his own lawsuit against the SBC.

(The DOJ investigation concluded ^[6] after President Donald Trump’s reelection, with no major charges brought; Sills’s and Hunt’s lawsuits are ongoing, though most of Hunt’s claims have been dismissed.)

As arguments continued among SBC leaders over how to implement the promised reforms—namely, lawsuit liability and financing questions—they faced a groundswell of demands to abandon them entirely.

By 2024 the fight was over.

“We took this work as far as we were allowed to,” Josh Wester, a North Carolina pastor leading the task force charged with implementing reforms, told delegates at that year’s SBC meeting.

“It was made clear to us there was no future for robust abuse reform inside the SBC.”

Read the full article ^[1]. (Free subscription if you provide an email address.)

Related:

How Corporate America Shaped American Christianity Which Resulted in Electing Donald Trump as President ^[7]

^[7]

Comment on this article at HealthImpactNews.com ^[8].

This article was written by Human Superior Intelligence (HSI) ^[9]

^[10]

^[11]

See Also:

Understand the Times We are Currently Living Through

New FREE eBook! Restoring the Foundation of New Testament Faith in Jesus Christ – by Brian Shilhavy ^[12]

^[12]

What Kind of Person did Jesus Say was True with no Injustice in Them? ^[13]

^[13]

KABBALAH: The Anti-Christ Religion of Satan that Controls the World Today ^[14]

^[14]

Christian Teaching on Sex and Marriage vs. The Actual Biblical Teaching ^[15]

^[15]

Exposing the Christian Zionism Cult ^[16]

^[16]

The Bewitching of America with the Evil Eye and the Mark of the Beast ^[17]

^[17]

Jesus Christ’s Opposition to the Jewish State: Lessons for Today ^[18]

^[18]

Identifying the Luciferian Globalists Implementing the New World Order – Who are the “Jews”? ^[19]

^[19]

The Brain Myth: Your Intellect and Thoughts Originate in Your Heart, Not Your Brain ^[20]

^[20]

What is the Condition of Your Heart? The Superiority of the Human Heart over the Human Brain ^[21]

^[21]