Paul Pressler, a former Houston appeals courtroom decide who spent many years serving to conservatives achieve management of the Southern Baptist Conference, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, solely to grow to be a humiliation to its leaders after as many as seven males accused him of sexual abuse, died on June 7. He was 94.
His loss of life was not introduced publicly. It was first reported on Saturday by the Christian information outlet Baptist Information International. It was confirmed by Dignity Memorial, a funeral residence 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 mentioned concerning the loss of life, Baptist Information International 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 have been strikingly extra conservative than these held within the Nineteen Fifties, ’60s and ’70s. They embody 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 educating that he thought of biblically unsupported. He used the phrase liberal to explain a perception that the Bible might include 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 sizzling 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 intention of overhauling seminaries and different Southern Baptist organizations.
“I’ve described Paul Pressler because the Steve Bannon of the Southern Baptist Conference,” Mark Wingfield, writer of Baptist Information International, mentioned in an interview. “The ways he used within the S.B.C. have been political ways that labored, and have been used at a nationwide degree. It turned a playbook for the Republican Get together.”
From the 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 have been identified to bus individuals to conventions to get their candidates elected. The place annual conferences of the trustworthy 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 kind the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
Recognized for his convening energy even exterior 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 go the Workplace of Authorities Ethics. However he was faraway from consideration after the Federal Bureau of Investigation, conducting a routine background test, 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 lodge room in 2003. Mr. Rollins mentioned Decide Pressler had threatened him if he got here ahead, in line with The Texas Tribune. Decide Pressler quietly settled the swimsuit for $450,000 in a mediation that additionally included a confidentiality settlement.
The 2004 settlement turned 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 decide’s church youth group in Houston.
The allegations have been investigated by denomination officers as half of a bigger investigation into how the Southern Baptist Conference had mishandled sex-abuse instances up to now. 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 at the least seven males of sexual abuse or sexual misconduct, in line 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 specific outrage, writing on the social media web site X this 12 months that Decide Pressler was a “harmful predator who exploited boys based mostly 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: How one can present their revulsion over the allegations whereas discovering a solution to have a good time what Decide Pressler had championed by means of the conservative resurgence, mentioned Nathan Finn, a Southern Baptist historian who cataloged Decide Pressler’s papers at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in North Carolina.
“I’m unsure there’s a conservative resurgence if he wasn’t there to channel it right into a motion,” mentioned Mr. Finn, the provost at North Greenville College in South Carolina. “It wanted at the least one individual within the room who was a strategic thinker who understands grass-roots actions.”
However Mr. Finn mentioned questions stay about whether or not the conference’s management understood Decide Pressler’s darker facet.
“Have been there rumors? Have been there purple flags?” he mentioned. “When did individuals know? I’m wondering 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 USA (earlier than it turned Exxon Mobil), and Elsie Pressler, who was energetic 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 shocked {that a} preacher would devour alcohol.
After his Princeton commencement, the Navy ROTC commissioned him as an ensign on the Navy Provide Corps Faculty at Bayonne, N.J. In 1957, he acquired 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 to 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 decide from 1970 to 1978 and served on the Texas 14th Court docket of Appeals from 1979 to 1992, when he retired and returned to non-public apply. He switched his occasion affiliation to Republican in 1982.
Decide Pressler’s survivors embody 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 Battle. “It was like Gettysburg however this time, the correct facet received,” he mentioned to laughter.
His views have 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 mentioned. “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.”
