Paul Pressler, a former Houston appeals courtroom choose who spent many years serving to conservatives achieve management of the Southern Baptist Conference, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, solely to turn into a humiliation to its leaders after as many as seven males accused him of sexual abuse, died on June 7. He was 94.
His dying was not introduced publicly. It was first reported on Saturday by the Christian information outlet Baptist Information World. It was confirmed by Dignity Memorial, a funeral dwelling chain, which didn’t say the place he died.
Decide Pressler died 4 days earlier than the Southern Baptist Conference held its annual assembly in Indianapolis, the place nothing was stated concerning the dying, Baptist Information World reported.
Decide Pressler was instrumental in constructing an inside grass-roots motion that in current many years moved the denomination towards adopting theological and social positions that had been strikingly extra conservative than these held within the Fifties, ’60s and ’70s. They embrace opposing abortion and same-sex marriage, forbidding ladies to function head pastors and deciphering the Bible actually.
Startled by the liberal theology he present in church buildings whereas attending boarding faculty at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and later at Princeton College, Decide Pressler, as he wrote in his autobiography, spent the remainder of his life attempting to root out Christian instructing that he thought-about biblically unsupported. He used the phrase liberal to explain a perception that the Bible might comprise errors, whereas he believed a conservative was somebody who believed that the Bible was written by God, freed from error.
In 1967, he was launched to Paige Patterson, a like-minded Southern Baptist, they usually later met over scorching chocolate and beignets at a New Orleans cafe, the place they continued to speak previous midnight. They went on to work collectively for years in constructing a conservative Baptist coalition. Decide Pressler acted as a political operative whereas Mr. Patterson, a seminarian, was seen as its theologian.
Beginning in 1979 and for a few years afterward, the coalition succeeded in getting its most popular candidates elected to the presidency of the conference. These presidents would then appoint different key leaders, who in flip would nominate trustees, all with the purpose of overhauling seminaries and different Southern Baptist organizations.
“I’ve described Paul Pressler because the Steve Bannon of the Southern Baptist Conference,” Mark Winfield, writer of Baptist Information World, stated in an interview. “The ways he used within the S.B.C. had been political ways that labored, and had been used at a nationwide stage. It grew to become a playbook for the Republican Social gathering.”
From the Nineteen Seventies to the ’90s, Southern Baptists tended to separate into two factions: “conservatives” and “moderates.” Conservatives described their work because the “conservative resurgence,” whereas moderates noticed it as a fundamentalist takeover.
Newly empowered conservatives had been recognized to bus folks to conventions to get their candidates elected. The place annual conferences of the devoted used to draw 15,000 to twenty,000 “messengers,” or delegates, the one in 1985, in Dallas, attracted greater than 40,000. Many moderates left the conference in 1990 to type the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
Recognized for his convening energy even outdoors the Southern Baptist Conference, Decide Pressler was a founding member of the secretive Council for Nationwide Coverage, a networking group for political conservatives. The group attracted evangelical leaders and donors and would usually meet with Republican presidential hopefuls, together with George W. Bush.
In 1989, Decide Pressler was President George H.W. Bush’s selection to move the Workplace of Authorities Ethics. However he was faraway from consideration after the Federal Bureau of Investigation, conducting a routine background examine, discovered what it described solely as “ethics issues.” (Officers didn’t elaborate on the F.B.I. findings besides to say that they didn’t contain accusations of crimes or monetary malfeasance.) Mr. Pressler went on to serve on Mr. Bush’s Drug Advisory Committee.
The abuse allegations first emerged publicly in 2004, when a person named Duane Rollins accused Decide Pressler of sexual assault in a Dallas resort room in 2003. Mr. Rollins stated Decide Pressler had threatened him if he got here ahead, in accordance with The Texas Tribune. Decide Pressler quietly settled the go well with for $450,000 in a mediation that additionally included a confidentiality settlement.
The 2004 settlement grew to become public in 2017, when Mr. Rollins filed one other lawsuit, this one accusing Decide Pressler of many years of rape, starting when Mr. Rollins was a 14-year-old member of the choose’s church youth group in Houston.
The allegations had been investigated by denomination officers as half of a bigger investigation into how the Southern Baptist Conference had mishandled sex-abuse instances previously. The conference, which was additionally named within the 2017 lawsuit, settled with Mr. Rollins out of courtroom for an undisclosed sum in 2023.
By 2024, Decide Pressler had been accused by not less than seven males of sexual abuse or sexual misconduct, in accordance with The Texas Tribune. He was by no means criminally charged and denied any wrongdoing, however the allegations prompted the conference’s lawyer Gene Besen to precise outrage, writing on the social media website X this 12 months that Decide Pressler was a “harmful predator who exploited boys primarily based on his energy and his false piety.” He added, “The person’s actions are of the satan.”
Because the allegations emerged, Southern Baptist leaders distanced themselves from Decide Pressler however few denounced him publicly. That muted response mirrored a problem they confronted: The right way to present their revulsion over the allegations whereas discovering a solution to have a good time what Decide Pressler had championed by the conservative resurgence, stated Nathan Finn, a Southern Baptist historian who cataloged Decide Pressler’s papers at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in North Carolina.
“I’m undecided there’s a conservative resurgence if he wasn’t there to channel it right into a motion,” stated Mr. Finn, the provost at North Greenville College in South Carolina. “It wanted not less than one particular person within the room who was a strategic thinker who understands grass roots actions.”
However Mr. Finn stated questions stay about whether or not the conference’s management understood Decide Pressler’s darker facet.
“Had been there rumors? Had been there purple flags?” he stated. “When did folks know? I ponder that.”
Herman Paul Pressler III was born in Houston on June 4, 1930, to Herman P. Pressler Jr., who was a vice chairman of Exxon Mobil, and Elsie Pressler, who was lively in group organizations and helped discovered their household’s Baptist church.
He went to Phillips Exeter when he was 16 and earned an undergraduate diploma in authorities at Princeton in 1952. As a freshman, he met the dean of Princeton’s chapel, who invited him to have cocktails. He wrote in his 1999 autobiography, “A Hill on Which to Die,” that he was stunned {that a} preacher would devour alcohol.
After his Princeton commencement, the Navy ROTC commissioned him as an ensign on the Navy Provide Corps College at Bayonne, N.J. In 1957, he obtained a legislation diploma from the College of Texas, the place Townes Corridor, the legislation faculty constructing, is known as for his great-grandfather Decide John C. Townes. Decide Pressler served as a Democrat within the Texas Home of Representatives from 1957-1959.
In 1959, he married Nancy Avery, who had simply graduated from Smith School in Massachusetts and who shared his concern about liberalism within the church buildings she had attended.
In Houston, he was a district choose from 1970 to 1978 and served on the Texas 14th Courtroom of Appeals from 1979 to 1992, when he retired and returned to non-public observe. He switched his social gathering affiliation to Republican in 1982.
Decide Pressler’s survivors embrace his spouse; their two daughters, Jean Pressler Visy and Anne Pressler Csorba; a son, Herman Paul Pressler IV; his brother, Townes Garrett Pressler; seven grandchildren; and 12 great-grandchildren.
Throughout a twenty fifth anniversary celebration of the conservative resurgence at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2004, Decide Pressler spoke of the motion’s success by way of the Civil Struggle. “It was like Gettysburg however this time, the fitting facet gained,” he stated to laughter.
His views had been distressing to some, together with Dwight McKissic, a Black Baptist pastor in Arlington, Texas.
“I believed he had philosophical beliefs concerning the inerrancy of scripture,” Mr. McKissic stated. “In hindsight, was it a cloak to manage ladies, a cloak to manage racial inclusion, a cloak to conflate political conservatism with theological conservatism? We had an issue on the root.”
