The Sunday Interview:  Paul Pressler, the SBC Takeover, and a Culture of Power and Abuse

Brad Onishi: Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. Brad Onishi here, author of American Caesar: How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America into a Monarchy. Founder of Axis Mundi Media, here today with a return guest, someone whose work I could not admire more, and that is Robert Downen, senior writer at Texas Monthly. Thanks for coming back, Robert.

Robert Downen: Thank you for having me back.

Brad: You're here to talk about your new bombshell 12,000 word feature about Paul Pressler, one of the architects of the Southern Baptist Convention takeover decades ago, somebody who's had an outsized influence on our politics, on American religion, and yet somebody who a lot of people may not know all that much about. We're here to talk about him, because your report contains new info about the widespread abuse that he perpetrated against young men, how that tied into the recent sexual abuse crisis that the SBC has faced, and leadership has tried to ignore, and what that portends for the country's largest Protestant denomination. So there's a great line in your piece — you've been reporting on Pressler for a decade. Let me just stop before I forget to say this: there's a lot of people, Robert, who can report the news, and some people are able to write. You're able to do both. You're a great writer and a great reporter, and this piece shows all of your talent on display, because from the beginning to the end, it's vivid. The characters are alive, and it draws you into a history that is at times grotesque and hard to read, but is just incredibly essential for understanding the current moment. Here's a line you have early on in the article: "You might not know Paul Pressler's name, but your life has been profoundly affected by the fruits of his labor." For those who don't know, what are some basic outlines of Paul Pressler's life, and how has he been so influential in people's lives, even if they don't know it?

Robert: So Paul Pressler, you know, is best known as the architect of the SBC, Southern Baptist Convention's conservative resurgence, this civil war that broke out in the SBC, the nation's second largest faith group, beginning in the late 70s and continuing really through the mid-90s or so. And it was the time in which this denomination was in a fight over biblical inerrancy, over scriptural views, that I think over time also kind of — that was what kick-started it, but over time it started to really change the denomination's stances on church-state separation, on women pastors, on abortion. And I think it really was the moment that this once comparatively apolitical denomination really became hand in hand with the GOP and really solidified the GOP as the white evangelical voting base. And so that, you know, the theological views, is what Pressler is best known for, but I think if you're a student of politics, it's really hard to miss his incredible influence in the religious right and kind of ordaining that marriage.

Brad: You might have heard, as you say in the piece, of Jerry Falwell, you might know about Tim LaHaye or Paul Weyrich, Pat Robertson, but Paul Pressler was a cohort of all of them, and was really in many ways competing for influence in terms of his stranglehold over the Southern Baptist Convention, along with Paige Patterson. Before we go further with Pressler, I want to say two things: one is people don't realize the Southern Baptist Convention used to have actual debates about things like abortion. Like, in the 60s and 70s, there were many Texas Baptists that were in favor of abortion. The SBC itself had documents saying that abortion in these circumstances was totally biblical. And so when you talk about this right-wing takeover, the ways we get the hardline patriarchal anti-choice politics of the second largest faith community in the United States is really a result of what we're talking about today. He doesn't come out of nowhere. This is not a rags-to-riches story. This is not a grassroots story. He's born into privilege. Tell us about his lineage and his grandfather and the ways he found himself into power.

Robert: Sure. And you know, this is something that we get into a little bit in the piece, but was something I spent a ton of time on in this reporting process that I think a lot of it actually is new within the history of Southern Baptists. I mean, I was finding stuff about Pressler's family that I think even some Baptist historians I brought it to were surprised by. But Paul Pressler was born into, you know, kind of the closest thing that the South has to aristocracy. His lineage is one of secessionist lawmakers, judges, state lawmakers, and oil men. And I think probably the most important person to Pressler's life was his grandfather, this man named Edgar Eggleston Townes — E.E. Townes — and he is known, and Pressler would talk about him as this guy who helped or was instrumental to the founding of what became ExxonMobil, founded the South Texas College of Law, and was really just a kind of incredibly important person to Texas politics at the time. But one of the things I found going through Pressler's sprawling hundreds of thousands, if not million-plus pages of archives, is that Townes was also the leader of this group in the 1940s called the Texas Regulars. And what they really sought to do — again, back when the South was still reliably voting Democrat — they sought to start using loopholes in the Democratic Party convention to fight against FDR's third and fourth term. They saw the New Deal as a massive betrayal of grassroots conservatives and the people that they felt were really emblematic of the Democratic Party's then-base. But also, as I started to go through the history of the Texas Regulars, there were moments where they would be a little bit more clear about what they meant, or one of the things that they feared. And one of the things that Townes said — I quote him in the piece — is that they're fighting for "the great cause of Jeffersonian democracy, states' rights, and white supremacy." And this was someone who Pressler, throughout his life, talked about constantly in his memoir. He is clearly probably the most influential person on Pressler's life. And Pressler never really, except for in sparing instances, mentions his connection, his grandfather's lead role in the Texas Regulars. And so what I found was that Pressler not only was influenced by this guy who was really at the front and center of this borderline explicitly white supremacist organization, but also that as an adolescent he had spent a bunch of time with the Texas Regulars, really getting an early lesson in how to politically mobilize, in how to take an ostensibly grassroots movement — something that is framed as grassroots but really has a ton of money and a ton of power behind it — and use that within the rulemaking apparatus of a political body to try and affect it. And what I think is so fascinating too — and we kind of briefly touch on this in the story — is that the Texas Regulars in the 40s, they lose that battle, but his father and the other leaders and funders of the Texas Regulars go on to be the fuel for the States' Rights Party. They have a ton of ties to the John Birch Society. And you start to see — we'll get into the Council for National Policy of it all later in this conversation, I'm sure — but if you actually look at who the funders of the John Birch Society and the States' Rights Party become, it's the New Right, which lays the groundwork for the religious right, which lays the groundwork for the Council for National Policy, which is funded by the same oil money. It is basically the progeny of the Texas Regulars who go on to become the fuel for this much more expansive movement in America that I think is still really redefining politics today.

Brad: I think of Anne Nelson's book, The Shadow Network, and one of the things Anne argues in that book is that oil money cannot be ignored as one of the most important factors in the creation of the religious right, contemporary Christian nationalism. And everything you're saying is that Paul Pressler's family was dead center in that whole succession of segregationist, white supremacist oil men who created the conditions for what would become the religious right and contemporary Christian nationalist movements. He's an interesting guy. Can we just stop for a minute — this guy is southern aristocracy, but he went to Phillips Exeter Academy, like the name-brand boarding school for boys in New Hampshire. New Hampshire is not in the South, the last time I looked, so that's interesting to me. Spent a lot of time in the Adirondacks, which is closer to Canada than it is to anywhere in Dixie, and also went to — he's an Ivy Leaguer. So there's a lot of bona fides here that are not Texas based.

Robert: And one of the fascinating things about Pressler is he is such an unreliable narrator, to put it kindly. And just to backtrack: when I mentioned his archives, I think it's worth pointing out, the finding aid alone for his archives is 57,000 Microsoft Excel rows. So that's just the list of every single correspondence in there, and some of those correspondences are ten or fifteen pages long. It is 63 cubic feet of the old kind of carbon copy paper that they used to use when sending letters. So it is one of the most expansive archives I've ever heard of. And it's one of those things that, as I've been reporting on him for over the last eight years and just kind of thinking about him, the archive itself is almost as instructive into him as a person as any of its individual components. This is a man who, from the earliest age, really saw himself as heir to a kind of Lost Cause southern aristocracy, someone who really saw himself as destined for greatness in line with his ancestors, and someone who also — going back to your comment about him being up north — if you read his memoir, if you read his letters, he is constantly mythmaking about himself. From even the age of ten, after he becomes a believer, he writes that he was so zealous in his views that his parents were concerned about it. And from the earliest age, he is putting himself in situations in the North, in particular at that age, where he is this lone crusader fighting for biblical truth. And I think that is such a helpful lens into the kind of way he ended up — the mythology of the conservative resurgence as it became over time.

Brad: And he's just one more man who grows up with this enormous privilege, enormous power, and yet a correspondent victimhood identity and myth that he is fighting against, right. So on one hand he grows up with this lineage of politicians and preachers and oil men, enormous amounts of wealth, aristocratic to the core in a southern sense, and yet somehow by age ten is convinced that it's him against the world, and that he has to lead the charge for the South to rise again. Going back to the white supremacist nature of his grandfather's views, Pressler said when it came to the Southern Baptist Convention and fighting for this conservative takeover, it was like Gettysburg, but this time the right side won. So it seems as if he did inherit his grandfather's understanding of the Civil War.

Robert: Yeah, I mean, that is a quote we have in the piece, but to be clear, that's something he said in 2004. So this was — he said that in 2004. One of the things I found in his archives is his resignation letter to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which is a neo-Confederate group. And then, from everything I can tell — and this is something that didn't make it into the piece either — the last time he appeared in any kind of meaningful capacity at a Southern Baptist event was in 2016, where there's a video of him furiously dressing down the leaders of the SBC because he felt that he was not allowed to speak in favor or against a resolution that was condemning the use of the Confederate flag.

Brad: Yeah. It's not something that stopped for him in childhood or when his granddaddy passed away. He goes on to spend some time — a short amount of time — in the Texas legislature, if I'm not wrong. He becomes a judge. But he eventually says, "I'm gonna leave some of that behind and basically go into a role where I am wielding great influence and power over the Southern Baptist Convention" — and eventually the Council for National Policy. What leads to that kind of path that he chose, that in many ways might have been seen as an aberration from what others expected of him?

Robert: Yeah. And I think that when I first really started looking into Pressler's life — and again, this is about eight years ago, he is the reason why we started reporting on Southern Baptist sexual abuse, so he has kind of been the looming figure in my life for almost a decade now — when I first started really looking into his life, the moderate Baptist retelling of the conservative resurgence is often couched in this idea that it was like a naked political ploy. And I think there's often a corresponding doubt about the sincerity of Pressler's beliefs on biblical inerrancy, but if you go through his archives, dating back to the early 60s and 50s, this was a man who was fully committed to that cause, and who spent almost twenty years of his life fighting people he accused of being biblical liberals and heretics before he even really saw his movement starting to get any kind of real support beginning in 1979. So I think that is really important in the context of everything we've discussed about the kind of grandiose way that he saw himself as an almost great man of history. But this was someone who, from the earliest age, was convinced that there was a liberal takeover of the denomination. And he often, when he writes about his motivations, it is about children. He is concerned about what people are learning. People from his Sunday school class will go to Baylor, and he'll check in with them, and they'll tell him that they are being led theologically astray. And, as I get into in the piece, up until when he is starting to formulate the final plans for what becomes the conservative resurgence — when the plan is really starting to come much more into shape around 1978 — he's also chased out of a Presbyterian church in Houston for allegedly at least one incident, or at least one allegation, involving sexual abuse of a young man from his youth group. And so I want to be very careful when I talk about the piece to make it clear that we are not — this piece is not an indictment of the conservative resurgence or any of the countless people who sincerely believed in its cause. But I do think that especially the culture that it created within the SBC, this mythology around the conservative resurgence — it is something that I hope people are looking at with nuance now, especially given what we now know of its two leaders in Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson.

Brad: Let's pause and talk about that. So basically, we need to go back just quickly here for a few minutes to the late 1970s and what becomes known as the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. It's led by Paul Pressler, this guy we've been talking about for fifteen minutes, and he has a kind of partner in crime, and that's Paige Patterson. Would you give us the one-minute download on Paige Patterson, so we can understand Batman and Robin here?

Robert: You know, it's fascinating. There are so many different versions of the history of the conservative resurgence, and once you really start talking to people, there are a lot of people, even today, who will say that Paige Patterson was actually far less of a player in the kind of strategy of the conservative resurgence, and really Pressler was this singular architect. But as far as the general history goes, yeah, Paige Patterson is this young man, born into a Texas Baptist family. His father ran the Texas State Association for Southern Baptists for, I think, more than a decade at least. He claims — there's reporting that he claimed — by the time he goes to college, to have manned 400-plus pulpits around the country and world. And then he gets to New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, by which time he is fully as concerned about the direction of the SBC as Pressler. And as the lore goes, in 1967 Paul Pressler knocks on Paige Patterson's door in New Orleans. They quickly bond and go to Café du Monde, where they stay late into the hours over hot coffee and beignets. The moderate Baptist version of this history is that they sketched out on napkins the plan to take over the denomination. Pressler challenges that idea, but either way, this becomes like a Martin Luther nailing his theses to a church door moment for the Southern Baptist Convention in its current history. It's something that is imbued into the mythology of the denomination's conservative resurgence, and therefore to many, to a large extent, into the denomination itself. And so they meet in '67, kind of break, and spend the next twelve-ish years writing letters to one another, trying to figure out ways to exert control until 1978, where they really start to see more and more of a concerted — there's more and more fuel behind their movement. And I think also one of the other important things to talk about is — and again going back to what I was saying earlier about wanting to be very careful not to impart motives on the actual grassroots Southern Baptists who are involved in this — that is such a crucial moment in American history and politics. We are starting to see urbanization taking away some of the power of the southern agrarian class. There is two decades of the free love movement, the anti-war movement — so many things are happening that are really kind of anathema, I think, to the typical white southern Christian conservative. And so this movement just happens to come along at the same time that all of those kind of political and cultural forces are coalescing into, for the first time, a real, forceful political movement, and those two things really kind of quickly merge with one another. In the same way that if you were to talk to someone like Paul Pressler, or some of the people who were in the movement, about their views on church-state separation, it's not an A or B question — these two things become almost indistinguishable to them. And there's also Nancy Ammerman, the famous Baptist historian who covered a lot of this at the time, who has a lot of research showing how biblical inerrancy became a stand-in for the loss of power, the loss of status, which meant it could be used as the lens through which you view the feminist movement, the Equal Rights Amendment, gay rights, abortion, all these things.

Brad: Let's hover there. So these two guys meet in 1967 over beignets. I want to just point out that in an age of warrior Christian masculinity and crusades, the plan was hatched over beignets, which I'll take over guns, over war. Just — let's have beignets.

Robert: In another era, they'd be smoking cigars and drinking black coffee.

Brad: They would. There'd be mahogany. There'd be —

Robert: And they would both be very bearded, yes.

Brad: The beards would be curled, the mustaches would be curled. It would be a whole thing.

Robert: "We bonded over a podcast" doesn't have the same lore as —

Brad: I went on Michael Knowles' podcast — and anyway. All right. So things don't take off until 1978. And as you say, there's all these social issues that are changing the country, the South is changing, but also 1978 and 1979 are the years where the GOP and the religious right turn against Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter is seen as the wrong kind of southern Christian Baptist, and they organize against one of their own to elect someone like Ronald Reagan. So the Southern Baptist Convention's conservative takeover is taking place in concert with a kind of national revolution, or counter-revolution, in our politics and in the ways that religion and the GOP were aligned. And then let's just make sure everybody understands what happened. At the forefront is an inerrantist approach to the Bible — an unflinching, unbending idea that there is no error in the Bible, and if you question that authority, you are a heretic. There is a strong stance against any gender norms being transgressed — there are men, there are women, men are in leadership, women are submissive, women are wives, women are domestic, men lead the church, men lead society, men lead the family. There is no ability to discuss abortion as anything but murder and as sinful. Family, gender, children, and the Bible — these are the hallmarks of the Southern Baptist Convention's uncrossable lines. I'm sure I've reduced it. What do you want to add to that portfolio?

Robert: I mean, I think that's generally correct. I would add that church-state separation becomes a bigger and bigger thing. There is a prolonged battle in the 80s over the SBC's ties to the Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Liberty, which — as I'm sure your listeners know — Baptists, for the longest time, have generally had a very ardent support of church-state separation, owing to the persecution faced by their forefathers. And in the 80s, on issues like abortion, school tuition vouchers, prayer in school — kind of all of the same blowbacks that really were the fuel for the religious right — these become issues on which the SBC is breaking with the BJC, of which it was the most prominent member for a long, long time. And they are starting to really see politics and religion as two parts of a broader battle for the culture — a culture war, perhaps. And I think that's really one of the things that is so important to this story: all of these things become part of this much broader existential fight for American culture. And that fight for American culture, because it is couched in biblical inerrancy to start, takes on a certain theological existentialism that really imbues it with stakes that set a culture in the SBC that lays the groundwork for so much of what I get into in the piece about how Pressler was able to continue escaping accountability for repeated abuse allegations.

Brad: So when we say "takeover," we're not just saying that Pressler and Patterson and their allies got up at the Southern Baptist Convention meetings, went to churches, and really persuaded their Baptist brethren to see it their way — that they were great negotiators, great orators who were somehow able to woo audiences into seeing things theologically through their own eyes. Instead, as you report, they were doing a lot of incredibly sketchy, shady, manipulative, and in many ways authoritarian tactics. Can you talk about the ways that they tracked people, spied on them, and basically used any trick in the book to get the Southern Baptist Convention churches to agree with their hardline theology and political stances?

Robert: Yeah. I think one of the things that becomes more and more apparent the more you study the early days of the conservative resurgence is the degree to which most moderates — the liberals, as Pressler would call them — the Southern Baptist Convention had, for more than a century by then, really avoided a lot of the schisms that other larger Protestant denominations had faced, in part because their central ethos was: we are hyper-focused on evangelism, that is what we exist to do. More than anything, we are 47,000 voluntarily cooperating churches. And for a long time, up until really the 60s and then increasingly afterwards, there was an ethos of the SBC that tamped down insurgent movements. I'm thinking of something like J. Frank Norris in the 40s — there were people who tried to seize control of the levers of the SBC, but those movements were often defeated by this hyper-commitment to evangelism above all else. And so what you start to see is, at the same time that southern culture is starting to kind of adapt and develop what becomes the mentality that leads to the broader culture war, the SBC's Patterson and Pressler wing are able to really gain a lot of power quickly, in part because the moderate wings are so of the mind that this movement will peter out, that their cooperative nature will be an effective enough antidote for these disgruntled brethren. And that alone was such a huge upper hand to the Pressler and Patterson side. But at the same time you have Pressler, who is incredibly adept at studying how the convention worked, and figuring out where the power centers were and where to push. I mean, they had databases, allegedly, that they were using to track open pastorates that they could staff. They had paid seminarians to spy on professors at the seminaries, which was kind of the ground zero of the fight, and report back any inklings of theological liberalism. Pressler would tape phone calls. It really runs the gamut of just how sophisticated an operation this was. And when you compare it to the moderate wing — it took them probably five-plus years to really understand just how strategic this movement was — by that time it was kind of already too late.

Brad: One of the things I learned thinking about your writing here is that this is really a kind of prototype of the kind of politics we see nationally now. Pressler and Patterson are not engaging the moderate wing, their Baptist brethren, their Baptist siblings, in good faith. There's not a sense here of, "hey, why don't we work out the ideas, really hash it out in a public debate and get a sense of cooperation among where these 47,000 churches want to go." Instead, it is: we're going to spy on professors, we're going to have data sheets that show us churches with open pastorates so we can make sure we get somebody in that position who is a hardline inerrantist like us. We're going to use every dirty trick we have.

Robert: Control the purse strings, control the flow, apply pressure on the financial side. Yeah. Pressler — to his credit — he knew what he was doing. I'll say that much.

Brad: It's a total institutional takeover. And they're not doing this in an open debate form, hoping their ideas are the best ones. They're pressing on every soft tissue in the Baptist body in order to get control of it. And you know, this eventually leads to Pressler having just enormous political clout. He's a big player at the Council for National Policy, which was started by Paul Weyrich among others, and is perhaps the pantheon of conservative think tanks that really connects all the various nodes in the network of conservative activism across the country. He's connected to the Bush family — Bush number one, Bush number two. He's an early supporter of Ted Cruz. He's tied to Ken Paxton. I mean, we can go on and on in terms of how Pressler becomes one of the most influential men in Texas politics. But he does so on the foundation of this takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. What else do we need to add there before we go into the ways that all of this public persona as a political powerhouse was shielding a man who for decades was a systematic sexual predator?

Robert: Yeah. Again going back to Pressler's archives — what I found fascinating is that, and granted maybe I missed something, but he really was very good about not, at least in his letters, talking about the political things that he was maneuvering at the time. A lot of what I found on that front came from Jerry Falwell's archives, other archives of the religious right. And what I started to find is that really throughout the duration of the conservative resurgence, Pressler — who always maintained that his SBC and GOP lives were two distinct projects — is horse-trading his influence in both circles to accumulate power in both. So there are letters where he is talking about sending lists of pastors for get-out-the-vote registration purposes to the Moral Majority. He's meeting with Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus to strategize on a church-per-congressional-district political strategy, and that's in the mid-80s. But by 1988 he is running the Council for National Policy — he's the president. And he sees that his old friend George H.W. Bush has kind of meager, or lukewarm, support from conservative Christians who were once enamored by the Reagan administration but over time felt that he had not delivered on all the things they were promised. And he writes this letter to George H.W. Bush, along with four or five other CNP evangelical leaders, and says basically — wink, wink, nod, nod — if you give us direct access to the White House, we can assure you that white evangelical voters will come to your rescue. And to caveat that: white evangelical voters were probably going to vote for George H.W. Bush by and large in that election anyway. But the fact that these men are openly saying to the vice president, "Hey, we have enough power to decide this election, and it's up to you if you want us to activate that power in a way that can make the difference" — and of course, H.W. Bush is elected, and in 1989 he immediately nominates Pressler to be the leader of the Office of Government Ethics. What could have been, what should have been, a crowning achievement for Pressler's life and movement. And then, as I'm sure we'll get into, it quickly goes south.

Brad: And the way you write it in the piece is perfect, just as the way you teed it up just now is perfect. Here's a man from 1980 all the way until the Trump era connected to every possible person in Texas politics as well as national politics — whether it's the president, whether it's folks running for Texas Senate — and yet in 1989 he has a chance to really hold a national office, with clout, forward-facing, in the national spotlight, and he pulls out. And that's really the second half of what we need to talk about today: he pulls out because there were already in 1989 those whispering, those accusing, those saying that he was a sexual predator. How does this 1989 moment lead into the rest of his life and the allegations against him?

Robert: Sure. Just to clarify — the allegations that scuttle his FBI background check for that job, from what I understand, were not — I have no proof that they involved actual sexual predations. It was more so about his sexuality. So as he's kind of going through the FBI background check —

Brad: So just the rumors that he was gay — is that what you're saying?

Robert: 100%, yes. And to be clear, there were rumors by then about his sexuality, but also within the moderate wing, as I found through archives, they are starting to raise questions about why does this man always travel with a group of young men and boys and stay in hotel rooms with them? Like, there were all of these things that people could not come out and say they believed he was a predator, but they started really looking into this. And I think one of the things that's so fascinating about that period too is that Pressler, when he ends up declining the White House job, claims for years that it was because of ethical problems involving, like, his use of a copier at his old judge place, or that he needed to be at home with his son, who has a significant disability. It kind of runs the gamut of reasons why he didn't take it. But then in 1992 he watches Clarence Thomas survive a contentious hearing related to sexual misconduct, and he sits down and writes a letter to Clarence Thomas, and basically says, this is exactly what happened to me — the liberals will do this time and time again, they try to destroy a God-fearing man. And it's so fascinating too. That letter, compared to what I can now see in the archives was actually going on with moderates — moderates had, you can see in the moderate Baptist archives, that they are starting to home in on what appear to be serious allegations about him taking young members of churches to his ranch. There are rumblings about whether this goes far beyond just his sexuality. And if you look at the restraint that they held in not going forward with those — there's a Texas pastor who wrote, not long ago after Pressler's death, about how "we didn't have proof, and a good Christian doesn't go to the press unless they have definitive proof" — the amount of restraint that they showed, and then you compare it to the way that Pressler was framing them as these power-hungry liberals who would stop at nothing to destroy God-fearing men, it is really just a fascinating contrast between how he was able to perpetually make himself this victimized, constantly-being-attacked martyr for the cause. And then you compare it to what was actually going on. It's fascinating.

Brad: The letter to Clarence Thomas just stopped me in my tracks. And we can get into that in a minute. But here we have, starting in the late 80s, this sense among people around him that something's not right. People are whispering about the idea that he might be gay — okay, so that's one. Being gay is one thing; being a sexual predator is another. And yet, into the 90s and the aughts, these things really start to develop into public view, and it comes to a head. Tell us about that period, because it's the chapter in this story right before what will become the sex abuse crisis era of the SBC later — and the two are intimately connected, at least in my mind.

Robert: So, a little bit more specifically — what years are you referring to?

Brad: So I'm thinking of, like, after the new millennium. In 2004 he's still talking about Gettysburg and the SBC and "the right side won." This is a man whose career — every time you read your stuff, Robert, I'm like, oh, surely they got Pressler here, and they didn't. Surely this allegation will take him down, and it won't. Surely the fact that he got run out of a Presbyterian church because people said he was doing things that were disgusting to young boys in the youth group will get him, and it won't. And so he's still standing in 2004, 2007, still wielding power. Am I getting that right?

Robert: 100%. I mean, there are — I could not definitively find it, but in 2003 and 2004, which is a really pivotal moment in the beginning of what eventually comes out about his abuse allegations, he is leading the SBC's charge against the Baptist World Alliance, to get the SBC to pull out of the BWA over its ties to gay-affirming churches overseas. Post-2000s, he is kind of slowly starting to step away from Southern Baptist life and really focus on the Council for National Policy, Texas Republican politics, and GOP politics more broadly. But I think one of the things that happens really in the 90s and going into the 2000s is the myth of the conservative resurgence — and I should backtrack here. In one of his letters, Pressler in '81 writes that only 5% of the SBC is out of step with his theological views. He sees that 5% as this cabal that has overtaken the SBC bureaucracy and is Trojan-horsing their views into it. But by the time you get to the turn of the century, the mythology of the conservative resurgence has become like they vanquished this domineering force in Southern Baptist life. And to their credit, there were plenty of people in the moderate camp who were in very powerful positions, but the way the mythology becomes — it becomes like this God-ordained grassroots movement that vanquished this gigantic menace, this cabal, and returned the SBC to its conservative theology. And also became, again because of all the things we talked about, almost like a vanguard between true American conservative Christianity and a culture that hated it. So he is by then as close to sanctified in the Southern Baptist Convention as one could be. I mean, he and Patterson are in stained-glass windows in a chapel. They have almost a free pass to do whatever they want, for they were the ones who saved the Southern Baptist Convention. And so he really starts to use that credential to be a kingmaker in GOP politics and the CNP. And time and time again — really beginning in 2004, which is the earliest definitive example — when people do come forward with allegations against him, at best he is given a lot of plausible deniability. Like, "Oh, that's just an old man — yeah, he invited you to go skinny dipping, but he's just an old man, and that's just how he is." The amount of times I've heard that. The amount of times you would hear the phrase, "Oh, that's just how the judge is." Well, how the judge is seems anathema to who he is in public — so that's a whole other thing. But you start to see really all of these places where he is using that power and influence not just to ingratiate himself into the lives of the young men who he tries to sexually groom, but also when they do come forward, people are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt or just look away entirely. Because there's a letter that First Baptist Church of Houston wrote to him in 2004, after a young member of the church came forward about Pressler allegedly forcibly undressing and groping him, and they basically write Pressler a letter saying, "Your behavior was morally and spiritually inappropriate, but we fear that because of your stature in the SBC, publicizing it will cause others to stumble." And so, beginning with the FBI background check and continuing all the way through really 2017, there is a deference — Pressler is either too valuable to the SBC and the movement more broadly, or the allegations against him are easily swept away as part of a satanic liberal scheme to destroy him because he is so important to the movement. And there are a lot of people who I think are going to read this story and think it's a story about Paul Pressler, but I think that's really what this story is about.

Brad: I was just going to go there. And if you read the piece, folks, what you're going to find are allegation after allegation, survivor after survivor, coming forward to talk about Pressler doing just what Robert just said — we were in a sauna, we went skinny dipping, we were on a trip and we had to share a hotel room, and this happened, and that happened, and he's always talking about being nude, or hey, maybe this or that. And there's just a lot in there. And so I think we could spend the next fifteen minutes, hour and a half, whatever we wanted, talking about Paul Pressler the individual. To me, the real import of your piece is that Pressler as an individual represents a systemic plague on the Southern Baptist Convention — that by the time we get from 2007 all the way to 2021, there's a full-blown sex abuse scandal in the SBC. There are survivors coming forward to say that across the denomination, in churches and youth groups, there are pastors and others in leadership who are abusing women, boys, girls, and so on. How does Pressler the individual emblematize a larger culture of abuse, protection, and fear in the SBC?

Robert: That's such a great question, and that is what the back third of this story is about — the power struggle that broke out in the SBC in the wake of our years of reporting on the abuse crisis. And it's so funny — if you look at the parallels, the kind of downfall of Pressler and Patterson — I mean, it is hard to overstate how important those two men were to the identity of how Southern Baptists identified with their culture.

Brad: Would you say it's the same as if MAGA actually admitted that Trump is in the Epstein files? Like, if MAGA folks actually had to face the idea that Trump was in the Epstein files, it would so ruin MAGA that there's just going to be no willingness to do that. Patterson and Pressler are so important that if they go down, it feels like the entire thing goes down — is that what you're saying?

Robert: I mean, kind of, yeah. I think it's hard to separate them from the mythology of the conservative resurgence, and it's also hard to separate the mythology of the conservative resurgence from the culture that existed amongst the kind of elite Southern Baptist class, the people who really held power in the denomination. And time and time again — I mean, we talk about Pressler's sexual abuse, but Patterson is doing things where now people are starting to be critical of him, but at the time the idea of criticizing Paige Patterson, this guy who really just lorded over the SBC for decades and was allegedly keeping dossiers on his opponents — I've had him compared to a Baptist J. Edgar Hoover type. The amount of reverence those two guys had, for what they kind of represented, was so profound that to question them almost became to question the movement itself in some cohorts. And so 2018 — you start to have the first real signs of Pressler's abuse starting to come out via a lawsuit, and then Patterson is ousted as the longtime president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary for his handling of student rape claims. There's a sermon that gets unearthed where he talks about coaching a domestic violence survivor to stay with her abusive husband, and how she shows up to church one day with two black eyes, but Patterson is overjoyed because her husband was apparently so remorseful for beating her that he showed up to church that day. And again, he delivered that sermon years earlier, and no one said anything. But not dissimilar to what we're talking about, a kind of cultural framework within which the conservative resurgence happened — 2018, you're starting to see a lot of parallels in the cultural winds of just America more broadly. You're starting to see the MeToo movement, racial justice movements are starting to pop up — things that are really starting to challenge power structures. And so when the abuse crisis happens, there is a new generation of leaders — J.D. Greear, Russell Moore — who are coming in and saying, no, we need to seriously confront this. And again, as someone who was living through the response to that crisis every hour of my life for four-plus years — there were a ton of people in powerful SBC positions who were very serious about confronting the crisis. But over time you start to see the cultural milieu of a denomination that had for so long prided itself on vanquishing this liberal menace — it's very easy to just tell some Southern Baptists that no, this is actually just a liberal Trojan horse. There's a two-year period where there's a concerted effort by, I guess for lack of better term, the far-right wing of the Southern Baptist Convention to just talk about critical race theory — before it even emerged as a major issue in US politics, it was already being positioned as an existential threat in the SBC. Sex abuse over time becomes this Trojan horse for feminism, for critical race theory, for women pastors, for gay affirmation — all these things. And I think that is again — you asked about how Pressler emblematizes this problem — I think that is his true legacy: that he created this culture in which the SBC viewed any outside critique as a satanic, existential threat against them, and was able to — not dissimilar to how abuse allegations were often handled with him — just kind of wipe their hands clean of even documented problems that people are coming to them in good faith by just saying, "Oh, this is part of a liberal attack on our faith — liberals tried to take over our faith once before, so why wouldn't they try again?" And that is kind of the through-line of what happens in the post-abuse-crisis era. And I think that is truly, of the many legacies that Pressler has on the SBC, probably the most profound.

Brad: Yeah. The way you summed it up there — that's his legacy. And folks, some of you are deeply aware of the SBC sex abuse crisis and scandals — everything from Christa Brown's coming forward to Russell Moore and his excommunication, in essence, from the SBC.

Robert: I don't even get into Beth Moore in the story, but yeah —

Brad: I was going to say there's Beth Moore, and there's about three hours here to talk about. If you're not familiar with that, you can find Robert's writing about this going back a decade at the Houston Chronicle and other places. You can find my interviews with him about these things over the years on our feed, and that's all available. I want to ask you, if you have another couple minutes, about the effect on the SBC and the ways that things are going, because a lot of people are leaving the SBC every year. And before we do that — where can people find you? Where are you writing and what's next? Maybe something happy — are you writing about daffodils? Maybe a road trip to Whistler National Park? I don't know. Something smiley, Robert.

Robert: You can read my stuff at texasmonthly.com. I'm on Bluesky at Robert Downen and Twitter, if you're still on there, at Robert Downen underscore. Yeah, I'm gonna try to find something happy and nice, but knowing me, I'll probably end up finding a racist or a white supremacist in there, or a sex offender. I don't know — it's hard. It's all I've covered for almost a decade now. But we'll throw something happy in there. Maybe I'll go do the Houston Astros nine beers, nine hot dogs, nine innings challenge and write about that.

Brad: See, now that's the kind of content we're looking for. Okay, that is what we need. All right, folks, if you're a subscriber, stick around. I'm gonna ask Robert two more questions — I want to ask about James Talarico, I want to ask about the SBC's numbers, I want to ask about William Wolfe, who seemed to respond to you on Twitter the other day. Before we do that, this is the Sunday Interview. You can find us this week with great content coming on Tuesday for me, It's in the Code from Dan on Wednesday, the weekly roundup on Friday. We have big announcements coming — can't show them yet, but there are some innovations coming to our show and a new chapter for us. So I hope you'll stick around for that. If you're not a subscriber, today's a great day to do that. You can catch the bonus content on the Sunday Interview, like today, with a free listening invite to our Discord, and it's really that support that makes public media and public scholarship like this happen. So please consider it.

Robert: Oh, can I say one thing real quick?

Brad: Of course.

Robert: For anyone watching on video, I should mention that I'm in the Texas Monthly studio. I don't have, like, a corkboard. I want to make sure you guys don't think I live in the garage from season one of True Detective.

Brad: But that's what I needed from this. I needed you to have, like, that crazy Matthew McConaughey hair.

Robert: Yeah, I ran out of red strings.

Brad: Yeah, where's the 18-pack, and why aren't you drinking them? All right.