Paul Pressler Disgraced Christian Conservative Leader Dies at 94
The first thing I thought when I saw this was, “how must this obituary headline make his family, siblings, children, grandchildren feel? Did he ever consider that as he was sexually abusing people? I guess not!
People who sexually abuse others seem to have the common characteristic of believing that their actions are sufficiently hidden from view to avoid being nailed. That they are too smart & clever to be caught. Actually, the unfortunate fact is that depending on how clever, intelligent and conniving a perpetrator is, it can take a long time! In fact, we’ve seen plenty of cases where years pass before the “light” finally exposes them. But when it does…
Paul Pressler! You were in the position to do tremendous good and leave a wonderful legacy that your parents, siblings and future generations would be proud of and inspired by. Instead you made really bad choices Paul. Hopefully you being revealed will stop others from thinking they too are impervious. Hopefully they will make better decisions! Its all about our decisions Paul. Nobody forced you. Shame, shame, shame!
I just wonder how many times that the words “What Goes Around Comes Around,” came out of your mouth. I’d bet it was many. Yet you missed that those words also applied to you! A shame on many levels
Find Rob’s book & ebook “What Goes Around Comes Around – A Guide To How Life REALLY Works” at Amazon or Audible
Kirkus Reviews says:
A stable, nonpreachy, objective voice makes the book stand apart from others in the genre. A successful guide that uses anecdotes of real human experiences to reveal powerful truths about life.
Paul Pressler, Disgraced Christian Conservative Leader, Dies at 94
A former judge, he helped steer the Southern Baptist Convention to the right. But at least seven men accused him of sexual abuse.
Paul Pressler, a former Houston appeals court judge who spent decades helping conservatives gain control of the Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, only to become an embarrassment to its leaders after as many as seven men accused him of sexual abuse, died on June 7. He was 94.
His death was not announced publicly. It was first reported on Saturday by the Christian news outlet Baptist News Global. It was confirmed by Dignity Memorial, a funeral home chain, which did not say where he died.
Judge Pressler died four days before the Southern Baptist Convention held its annual meeting in Indianapolis, where nothing was said about the death, Baptist News Global reported.
Judge Pressler was instrumental in building an internal grass-roots movement that in recent decades moved the denomination toward adopting theological and social positions that were strikingly more conservative than those held in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. They include opposing abortion and same-sex marriage, forbidding women to serve as head pastors and interpreting the Bible literally.
Startled by the liberal theology he found in churches while attending boarding school at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and later at Princeton University, Judge Pressler, as he wrote in his autobiography, spent the rest of his life trying to root out Christian teaching that he considered biblically unsupported. He used the word liberal to describe a belief that the Bible could contain errors, while he believed a conservative was someone who believed that the Bible was written by God, free of error.
In 1967, he was introduced to Paige Patterson, a like-minded Southern Baptist, and they later met over hot chocolate and beignets at a New Orleans cafe, where they continued to talk past midnight. They went on to work together for years in building a conservative Baptist coalition. Judge Pressler acted as a political operative while Mr. Patterson, a seminarian, was seen as its theologian.
Starting in 1979 and for many years afterward, the coalition succeeded in getting its preferred candidates elected to the presidency of the convention. Those presidents would then appoint other key leaders, who in turn would nominate trustees, all with the aim of overhauling seminaries and other Southern Baptist organizations.
“I have described Paul Pressler as the Steve Bannon of the Southern Baptist Convention,” Mark Wingfield, publisher of Baptist News Global, said in an interview. “The tactics he used in the S.B.C. were political tactics that worked, and were used at a national level. It became a playbook for the Republican Party.”
From the 1970s to the ’90s, Southern Baptists tended to split into two factions: “conservatives” and “moderates.” Conservatives described their work as the “conservative resurgence,” while moderates saw it as a fundamentalist takeover.
Newly empowered conservatives were known to bus people to conventions to get their candidates elected. Where annual meetings of the faithful used to attract 15,000 to 20,000 “messengers,” or delegates, the one in 1985, in Dallas, attracted more than 40,000. Many moderates left the convention in 1990 to form the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
Known for his convening power even outside the Southern Baptist Convention, Judge Pressler was a founding member of the secretive Council for National Policy, a networking organization for political conservatives. The group attracted evangelical leaders and donors and would often meet with Republican presidential hopefuls, including George W. Bush.
In 1989, Judge Pressler was President George H.W. Bush’s choice to head the Office of Government Ethics. But he was removed from consideration after the Federal Bureau of Investigation, conducting a routine background check, found what it described only as “ethics problems.” (Officials did not elaborate on the F.B.I. findings except to say that they did not involve accusations of crimes or financial malfeasance.) Mr. Pressler went on to serve on Mr. Bush’s Drug Advisory Committee.
The abuse allegations first emerged publicly in 2004, when a man named Duane Rollins accused Judge Pressler of sexual assault in a Dallas hotel room in 2003. Mr. Rollins said Judge Pressler had threatened him if he came forward, according to The Texas Tribune. Judge Pressler quietly settled the suit for $450,000 in a mediation that also included a confidentiality agreement.
The 2004 settlement became public in 2017, when Mr. Rollins filed another lawsuit, this one accusing Judge Pressler of decades of rape, beginning when Mr. Rollins was a 14-year-old member of the judge’s church youth group in Houston.
The allegations were investigated by denomination officials as part of a larger investigation into how the Southern Baptist Convention had mishandled sex-abuse cases in the past. The convention, which was also named in the 2017 lawsuit, settled with Mr. Rollins out of court for an undisclosed sum in 2023.
By 2024, Judge Pressler had been accused by at least seven men of sexual abuse or sexual misconduct, according to The Texas Tribune. He was never criminally charged and denied any wrongdoing, but the allegations prompted the convention’s lawyer Gene Besen to express outrage, writing on the social media site X this year that Judge Pressler was a “dangerous predator who exploited boys based on his power and his false piety.” He added, “The man’s actions are of the devil.”
As the allegations emerged, Southern Baptist leaders distanced themselves from Judge Pressler but few denounced him publicly. That muted response reflected a challenge they faced: How to show their revulsion over the allegations while finding a way to celebrate what Judge Pressler had championed through the conservative resurgence, said Nathan Finn, a Southern Baptist historian who cataloged Judge Pressler’s papers at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in North Carolina.
“I’m not sure there’s a conservative resurgence if he wasn’t there to channel it into a movement,” Mr. Finn said. “It needed at least one person in the room who was a strategic thinker who understands grass-roots movements.”
But Mr. Finn said questions remain about whether the convention’s leadership understood Judge Pressler’s darker side.
“Were there rumors? Were there red flags?” he said. “When did people know? I wonder that.”
Herman Paul Pressler III was born in Houston on June 4, 1930, to Herman P. Pressler Jr., who was a vice president of what would become Exxon Mobil, and Elsie Pressler, who was active in community organizations and helped found their family’s Baptist church.
He went to Phillips Exeter when he was 16 and earned an undergraduate degree in government 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 surprised that a preacher would consume alcohol.
After his Princeton graduation, the Navy ROTC commissioned him as an ensign at the Navy Supply Corps School at Bayonne, N.J. In 1957, he received a law degree from the University of Texas, where Townes Hall, the law school building, is named for his great-grandfather Judge John C. Townes. Judge Pressler served as a Democrat in the Texas House of Representatives from 1957 to 1959.
In 1959, he married Nancy Avery, who had just graduated from Smith College in Massachusetts and who shared his concern about liberalism in the churches she had attended.
Kirkus Reviews, the gold-standard for independent & accurate reviews, has this to say about
What Goes Around Comes Around:
A successful guide that uses anecdotes to reveal powerful truths about life.
The stable, positive, non-preachy and objective voice makes the book stand apart from others in the genre.
~ Kirkus Reviews
“I’ve read a number of books that focus on sharing a similar message, including “The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne, “The Answer” by John Assaraf & Murray Smith, “The Celestine Prophecy” by James Redfield, “Think and Grow Rich,” by Napoleon Hill, and I must say that I find Rob’s to be my favorite.” – Sheryl Woodhouse, founder of Livelihood Matters LLC
Sean Combs Charged with Sex Trafficking
Sean Combs Charged with Sex Trafficking
U.S. Coast Guard Academy, in New London, Connecticut between 1988 and 2006, including the revelation of leaders who discouraged disclosure. Those cases do not include at least 42 more that have been identified as not having been properly investigated. That is not to mention new Pentagon published statistics showing student-reported assaults at West Point, the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy.
So after all the accusations and denials, the truth is finally revealed about Bill Cosby’s lifetime of raping young women, who were unfortunate enough to cross his path. The answer as to how he got away with it for so long, lies in his skill of slipping a Methaquolone pill, otherwise known as a Quaalude, into a drink he would give them. It would render them helpless to escape his subsequent sexual assault. Of course, he had also built a persona of America’s Grandpa, that was the ultimate deception.I first heard about quaaludes (‘ludes) in college in the 60’s. Apparently, he did as well! The word was that if you could slip one into a girl’s drink, she would be more compliant than otherwise. The records show that Cosby had multiple prescriptions filled at least throughout the 70’s, then apparently, subsequently found other sources. It became his “MO” and many women his victim. But that game is over now, most likely for the duration of his life! As with most abusers, Cosby felt he had a way to evade the light from shining on what he was up to. He thought he was safe and would never get caught, but If accused, he could claim it was consensual. It is what all abusers think, regardless of the form that abuse takes, and sometimes it can work for a long while. But when the light finally does shine and reveals the truth, the rule is that the longer the perpetrator got away with their nasty deceptions, the deeper the hole they will have dug for themselves. Epstein escaped via suicide. I think they’ll be keeping a close eye on Bill!