A pedophilia scandal tears through Southern Baptist history

The horror saga of Paul Pressler

You might think of Southern Baptists as ultra-conservative, but back in the 1970s that wasn’t so. The denomination lurched to the hard right in 1979, and largely because of one very determined activist.

Paul Pressler, the hero of the “Conservative Resurgence,” is back in the news. But this time, he is posing quite a problem to the conservatives who have celebrated him as a hero. It turns out he was a gay pedophile, with a long history of ‘grooming’ and abusing boys.

Paul Pressler seemed the image of conservative Christianity.

He was an appeals court judge who, with his wife, ran a high school youth group. His story was that in 1977 some teenagers who’d gone on to attend Baylor University were finding their religion classes were very “liberal.”

It set off a campaign to make Baptist churches and schools hold the line on the Bible being “inerrant.” He began traveling around and having meetings with nearly every pastor in a church affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention.

Even Baptists were shocked by the ultimatum that Pressler was forcing on them: believe in the Bible “cover to cover” or come under fire.

He talked up “biblical inerrancy.”

But then it started to seem like his goal was control of the Southern Baptist Convention. And he wasn’t playing nice.

Reporting on the story in 1979, Christianity Today quoted a pastor commenting on Pressler and his henchmen: “They may be as orthodox as Peter, but they’re as mean as the devil.”

In Bill Moyers’ 1987 PBS documentary, God and Politics, an interviewee recalls Pressler’s talk: “It’s our side against your side. We win, you lose.”

But what was his real motivation?

To look back on Pressler’s career, it might not be apparent that “biblical inerrancy” had ever interested him. It seems more to have been a mask over a range of other objectives. He was a ferocious racist who would work to keep Black leaders out of the Southern Baptist Convention.

He was a committed Southerner who would speak of the “Conservative Resurgence” as an effort to re-fight the Civil War. As he’d reflect back on the period: “It was like Gettysburg, but this time the right side won.”

Maybe he just liked power. In 1990, Bill Moyers called him “a little dictator so puffed up with power that he cannot distinguish God’s will from his own whims.”

Pressler was working to get Ronald Reagan elected.

The bid to take over the SBC was clearly part of Reagan’s campaign for president. Pressler had met Reagan, and as Anne Nelson notes in Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, Pressler seems to have “grasped his potential to build out their base.”

If able to take control of the SBC, Pressler could use it to prod the denomination’s sixteen million members to vote Republican.

Pressler was already organizing Christian leaders to chart out an agenda for the federal government. If Reagan won, then conservative Christianity—fronted by Pressler himself—would be in a position to shape America.

There was also the boys.

Whatever was going on with his wife, Paul Pressler appears to have been a very sexually aggressive gay man with a distinctly queeny manner and a taste for teenage boys, the younger the better.

A few have come foward, like Toby Twining, later a noted musician. In 1977, he was 17 and Pressler was his youth pastor who trapped him in a sauna and sexually assaulted him. Twining told the church leadership, and Pressler was fired — but quietly.

It appears Christians in the area were widely aware of Pressler’s ongoing predation. Another young man tells World magazine that, as a boy, he was told to stay away from Pressler.

Other boys didn’t get the memo.

Duane Rollins was a 14-year-old kid at a Baptist church. Paul Pressler was a church elder, seeming to take an interest in the boy’s Christian education, and so he learned about anal sex.

Pressler explained the sex as “our secret, our freedom, no one but God would understand.” What Duane understood was that it was some kind of religous exercise. Pressler seemed to be in love with him, telling Duane “he was the only boy he had kissed on the lips.”

For all the assurances, Duane was plunged into a private hell. He’d shortly afterward take up alcohol and marijuana, and later harder drugs.

The Christian world knew about Pressler—and didn’t care.

His sexual predation only proved a problem in 1989 when he was being considered for a job in Washington D.C. The FBI did a background check and found “ethics problems.”

It appears the president of Baylor University, Abner McCall, with whom Pressler had long been at odds, revealed Pressler’s homosexual history, but again, very quietly.

Other than losing out on the job, though, or being shuffled from church to church, Pressler never faced any reprisals.

Duane ended up in jail, multiple times.

Pressler made efforts to help him get parole, and in 2003, Duane was paroled on the condition of Pressler’s law firm employing him. He left jail and entered the lifestyle of a wealthy Christian celebrity, working as office assistant — and bedroom assistant.

Pressler took him around the world as his “masseur” — though Duane wasn’t the only one. On a church trip to Algeria, Duane recalls one time when a group of Christian leaders were kept waiting while Pressler finished up with a youth named ‘Farid’.

In 2003, Pressler and Duane battled in a Dallas hotel room.

Duane sued, citing physical assault. In a whirlwind of sex and secrets, Pressler agreed to pay him $1500 a month, for twenty-five years — if he kept quiet about their relationship.

Soon Duane was back in jail. A session with a prison psychiatrist in 2015 prompted him to realize, the lawsuit says, “that his relationship with Pressler was neither ‘God-approved’ nor part of any ‘divine plan.’”

In 2017, Duane sued the Christian hero

For the first time, Presser was outed. The allegations fell outside the statute of limitations. But on appeal, owing to Duane having been impaired by PTSD, the courts allowed the case to go forward.

Duane’s lawyer told the press that Pressler has “been very blatant and very careless over the years running after young boys and picking them up from these various church youth Bible study groups.”

The discovery phase on the lawsuit produced startling documentation of Pressler’s sex life, like a resignation letter from an assistant who described to his boss Pressler’s continuous flirting with him, paid erotic massages with young men, and stories of being naked with young boys.

The boss was Pressler’s law partner Jared Woodfill, also known as an anti-LGBT activist. He’d known Pressler’s gay secrets, and kept them.

Difficult facts came out—like that the SBC knew.

As just revealed, lawyers for the Southern Baptist Convention had tried to craft a legal strategy to evade the problem of Duane’s accusation being true.

More young men kept coming forward.

In 2018, a young pastor named Chris Davis wrote about his interaction with an unnamed “much older, respected Christian leader who was well-known in my circles.”

Davis writes of this “leader” taking an interest in him, ushering him into the upper elite of Southern Baptist clergy. He narrates: “The first night when we settled into our hotel room, he told me how special I was, that he loved me, and he gave me a long hug before lights out.”

There were odd naked scenes around the shower. Davis writes of his mentality at the time: “You just go with it because of who he is.”

Davis later identified the man as Paul Pressler.

How many Christians knew?

It’s a question that gets into some tricky territory. Pressler’s close associates, like the famous Albert Mohler, are oddly quiet, refusing comment now that it’s all come out.

Nobody ever asked Charles Stanley, the famed pastor who was also close with Pressler. Could he not have known?

In 2014, a young Christian lawyer named Mike Johnson was selected to be the dean of a possible new law school named after Paul Pressler.

The school never happened, and Johnson got into politics instead. He’s currently the Speaker of the House.

Pressler’s story leaves a range of problems.

One of them is that Republicans seem very concerned about pedophilia and ‘grooming’. They accuse others. They love that movie Sound of Freedom. They seem on the side of the children.

There’s also an apparent open tolerance of pedophiles in churches and in Republican politics.

Was Paul Pressler even a Christian?

He’s still living, and not at all interested in the religious practices of contrition or confession. Through lawyers, he “vehemently” denied Duane’s allegations, calling the lawsuit “frivolous.”

The religion moves to try and erase him. The stained glass window is gone. But Southern Baptists want to stay ahead of the really awful realizations—like that they’d hired a sexual predator to be their star activist while knowing of his taste for boys.

Pressler was gifted, ruthless, and effective. He’d bring them to power. The price would be their sons. 🔶