The dark legacy of Paul Pressler and the Southern Baptist Convention

The man who reshaped white evangelical politics also helped create a culture where victims of abuse never stood a chance

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In 2015, when Sen. Ted Cruz was running for president (and before Donald Trump was seen as a viable candidate), he ran an ad featuring an endorsement from Paul Pressler.

Pressler said he had known Cruz since he was a teenager and “observed personally” Cruz’s integrity and principle. He went on to say, “I’ve dedicated my life to the conservative principles on which our country was founded, and I know Ted Cruz has done the same thing and that he will stand firm.”

That’s downright wild to watch in hindsight because, in the decade since, Cruz has proven to be nothing but a MAGA cultist who doesn’t give a damn about the Constitution. He’s a right-wing zealot who’s never seriously been considered a model for integrity. You knew that back in 2015. I knew that back in 2015. Why didn’t this guy know?

In fact, who the hell is he and why was his endorsement such a big deal at the time?

The video listed Pressler as a former Texas state representative, a retired district and appellate court judge, and leader of the “Conservative Baptist Resurgence.” But what the video didn’t mention is that Pressler was one of the most powerful Southern Baptist Convention leaders ever. He’s the guy who sidelined moderates in the fold and made the SBC an ultra-conservative powerhouse. The conservative “Resurgence” wasn’t just a theological correction either; it was an institutional takeover that rewarded loyalty, punished dissent, and trained SBC leaders to treat internal critics as existential threats.

He was a key reason that denomination became a major force in the Republican Party, shaping its policies and helping elect numerous candidates. (Everyone except Ted Cruz for president, really.)

What also went unmentioned in that video—because even Cruz couldn’t have known it at the time—is that Pressler was an unrepentant sexual predator whose worst abuses didn’t get much press until after he died in 2024.

Paul Pressler in 2015 (screenshot via YouTube)

The Texas Monthly’s Robert Downen just published a damning article (gift link) about Pressler’s legacy, and it’s really an overview of how badly the Southern Baptist Convention has failed its members. (Downen has spent years tracking abuse in the denomination. In 2019, he and his colleagues at the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News published the first of many articles resulting from a six-month-long investigation into Southern Baptist churches. They found that, over the previous decade, more than 250 staffers or volunteers had been charged with sex crimes against more than 700 victims.)

What do we learn in this new article? Every time the SBC had a chance to fix their own problems, they seemed to go in the other direction, and Pressler played a major role in that. He was arguably the reason so many predators, including himself, avoided accountability.

But before we can get to that, here’s how Downen frames Pressler’s impact on the political landscape:

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. Fueled by an unyielding belief in biblical inerrancy—the notion that Christian scripture is the perfect, literal word of God—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.

He was a behind-the-scenes force when it came to his political work, which helped shield his more private criminal actions. In 2017, a man sued Pressler “alleging that Pressler had raped him repeatedly over decades and that prominent Southern Baptist figures and churches had concealed or mishandled evidence that Pressler was a sexual predator.” The assaults, the man said, began when he was only 14 years old. After that lawsuit, others came forward with similar allegations. The first lawsuit was eventually settled out of court. The terms are confidential. The survivor died in 2025 of cardiac arrest.

Pressler’s personal life was no less disturbing, as his law office partner Jared Woodfill later testified under oath.

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.

It was bad enough this was happening through his law office. But that mentality was amplified when it extended to the Southern Baptists. Pressler made sure abuse was considered a low priority for the denomination, at least compared to the acquisition of political power. When he and his colleagues assaulted others or at least fostered an environment where those acts were normalized, he turned a blind eye to it all until public pressure finally made that impossible.

Consider his SBC partner-in-crime Paige Patterson. Patterson was the sort of guy who encouraged women to stay with their abusive husbands because divorce would go against God’s will. When he was head of a theological seminary, he also told a woman who claimed she was raped not to tell the police and to forgive the rapist. He once described a 16-year-old child as sexually appealing. Patterson’s antics were so indefensible, he was kicked out of his seminary job. But that only happened after years of putting people in positions of power at the SBC to continue a culture that never taught him a damn thing.

All of this came to a boiling point in 2021. That’s when the SBC eventually had to hire an outside group called Guidepost Solutions to investigate sexual abuse allegations in the denomination. The eventual 288-page report covered roughly two decades of bad behavior. The conclusions were devastating. It’s not that they listed a set number of abusers or victims. It’s that the report showed a pattern of covering up or downplaying abuse and creating an environment where victims couldn’t get justice.

It’s impossible to choose just one excerpt from the report, because so much of it is jaw-dropping, but look at this one passage detailing how various SBC leaders acted—including Pressler and Patterson:

While stories of abuse were minimized, and survivors were ignored or even vilified, revelations came to light in recent years that some senior SBC leaders had protected or even supported abusers:

Former SBC President Steve Gaines admitted that, as senior pastor at Bellevue Baptist Church, he had delayed reporting a staff minister’s prior sexual abuse of a child of heartfelt concern and compassion for th[e] minister, while acknowledging that he should have brought it to the attention of our church leadership immediately;”

Former SBC President Jack Graham, when he was pastor at Prestonwood Baptist Church, allegedly allowed an accused abuser of young boys to be dismissed quietly in 1989 without reporting the abuse to police. The accused abuser, John Langworthy, later was charged with abusing young boys in Mississippi in 2011;

Former SBC President Paige Patterson was terminated from his position at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2018 after it was revealed that he told a student not to report a rape in 2003 and, in 2015, emailed his intention to meet with another student who had reported an assault, with no other officials present, so he could “break her down;”

Former SBC Vice President Judge Paul Pressler is the defendant in a civil sexual abuse lawsuit alleging that he repeatedly sexually abused the plaintiff beginning when the plaintiff was 14 years old. Two other men submitted separate affidavits in the case also accusing Judge Pressler of sexual misconduct; and

Former EC Interim President and General Counsel Augie Boto testified as a character witness for Mark Schiefelbein, a gymnastics coach convicted of multiple counts of sexual assault against a minor. During his testimony at a post-conviction evidentiary hearing in September 2008, Mr. Boto identified himself as general trial counsel for the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention.

If those were the men heading up the organization, was it any wonder that so many pastors figured they could get away with abuse?

One way to minimize the number of predators in SBC ranks was to maintain some sort of database of offenders, so that they couldn’t just move from church to church if they ever got fired, but the SBC claimed that was impossible. They were lying.

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.

In fact, we later found out they did have a list of accused predators. It was just kept private.

The findings of nearly 300 pages include shocking new details about specific abuse cases and shine a light on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Evidence in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether they could maintain a database of offenders to prevent more abuse when top leaders were secretly keeping a private list for years.

The SBC claimed it couldn’t maintain a database of offenders… but kept a private list for years. They knew who the bad apples were but said nothing publicly. The report said: “The latest iteration of the table contains the name of 703 abusers, with 409 believed to be SBC-affiliated.” One of those bad apples was another former SBC President Johnny Hunt, who allegedly sexually assaulted a woman a month after stepping down from his post.

So the SBC mishandled abuse allegations, mistreated victims, intimidated victims or their advocates, and resisted attempts at reform. All the while, SBC leaders ignored the crisis, with one saying the focus on sexual abuse was “a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism.” The report summarized the response more honestly: “Survivors were always viewed through the lens of potential plaintiffs threatening lawsuits, rather than as individuals who had been harmed and were in need of care.”

And Pressler, who had the authority to do something about this, never did. He was insistent that the SBC should kick out churches for having female pastors or affirming same-sex relationships… but if they had abusers on their staff, he said nothing could be done about it. The SBC, he added, simply didn’t have the authority to do anything because the churches were all autonomous… even though that autonomy apparently didn’t apply to churches that dared to let a woman speak from the pulpit.

What’s shocking is that this man, with all this religious power, was very close to having even more political power himself. At one point, in 1989, he was on the verge of running the first Bush administration’s Office of Government Ethics, but Pressler abruptly bowed out before any confirmation hearings could take place because, we now know, there were allegations of “homosexual behavior” that he didn’t want publicized.

In 2007, he finally got some public recognition when Louisiana Christian University announced plans for a Judge Paul Pressler School of Law. But because of a lack of funding and accreditation, the school never opened. That almost-school is perhaps most famous now because its founding dean would have been Mike Johnson, now the Speaker of the House.

The point is: This man had power over the Republican Party. He had power over the Southern Baptist Convention. He used that authority to brush aside allegations of abuse. And he used that power himself to victimize boys as young as 14 because he knew his denials would always be louder than their complaints.

If anything, the SBC became structurally incapable of reform because Pressler’s movement taught generations of Christian leaders that preserving conservative control was the only value that mattered and everything else was secondary. Anything that got in the way of that power—whether victims of abuse or women speaking out about their treatment—needed to be destroyed. This crisis wasn’t some anomaly; it was a natural outgrowth of the culture he built. If anything, the moderates and dissenters who warned the SBC about these problems were treated as enemies by the machine Pressler built.

Pressler died in 2024, “days before the SBC announced that no major reforms were coming and months after he confidentially settled [the sexual abuse lawsuit] after a six-year legal battle.”

The SBC is just as corrupt as ever—and more conservative than it ever was. They haven’t changed their positions on homosexuality, abortion, victim-blaming, sex-shaming, or women with thoughts. But the same people who have built their careers on railing against feminism, LGBTQ people, secularism, and the collapse of “family values” have simultaneously enabled catastrophic abuse within their own institutions.

Maybe that helps explain why membership is currently at a 50-year low. (One recent SBC leader said 10% of SBC church members under the age of 35 have left the denomination specifically because “they believed sexual abuse was not being treated seriously.”)

That’s what Pressler accomplished: pretending to champion ethics and values while violating them privately, and allowing the organization he built up to become a hotbed of abuse.

That’s all spilled over into the Christian Nationalism we see today. The grievance politics, the rhetoric about purity, the institutional capture, and the unwavering partisan loyalty are all ingredients in the SBC culture he championed.

In that sense, maybe Pressler’s endorsement of Ted Cruz made sense. He’s one of the movement’s logical products.

Pressler’s real legacy isn’t just that he was a predator. It’s that he helped build a religious and political culture where public declarations of biblical morality became a shield for institutional corruption. If you praise Jesus loud enough, there’s nothing you can’t get away with. And once protecting the institution became synonymous with protecting God’s truth, victims of abuse never had a chance.

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