In the beginning there were the Southern Baptists. The architects of the Conservative Resurgence, pastor Paige Patterson and judge Paul Pressler, had developed tactics to take over the denomination and purge moderates, which would then be adopted, refreshed, and perfected by the Council for National Policy to apply to wider targets. If the CNP was a tree and each new partner a branch, the Southern Baptists were the core.
Over the ensuing four decades, Patterson and Pressler thrived, and pursued their campaign to roll back the clock. They inhabited the upper echelons of the Southern Baptist Convention, which accommodated their vision. In 1988 it passed a resolution calling homosexuality “a manifestation of a depraved nature” and “a deviant behavior that has wrought havoc in the lives of millions,” resolving that it is therefore “a perversion of divine standards” and an “abomination before the eyes of God.”1 Even after the 2003 Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas struck down sodomy laws in Texas, invalidated similar laws in thirteen states, and helped pave the way for marriage equality, the convention held fast to its doctrine. Some fundamentalist leaders sought to have homosexuality recriminalized; others focused on promoting conversion therapy.
All the while, Judge Pressler’s influence continued to grow. He and his wife, Nancy, were prominent members of the First Baptist Church in Houston, where Pressler served as deacon, messenger, and head of the pastoral search committee. In 2002 his protégé and fellow Princeton graduate Richard Land had nominated him as first vice president of the convention. He won without opposition.
Pressler and Patterson entered the realm of legend. In 2013 Pressler’s wife, Nancy, decided that Paige Patterson should pay special homage to giants of the Conservative Resurgence. A series of stained-glass windows was commissioned to honor Patterson, Pressler, their wives, and a gallery of other movement leaders, rimming the immersion baptismal basin outside the massive MacGorman Chapel. Their images loomed before a field of cobalt blue, adorned with Bible verses. The CNP was well represented, with Jerry Falwell and Richard Land as well as Pressler and Patterson. Also present was Ronnie Floyd, who would join Land on Donald Trump’s future evangelical advisory council. Patterson’s window included his dog.
But another drama unfolded in Houston. Almost four decades earlier, Paul Pressler had met a boy named Duane Rollins from the Bible class at his church. According to a lawsuit Rollins filed in 2018, Pressler told the fourteen-year-old’s mother that her son was a “special student” and instructed her to deliver him to Pressler’s sprawling ranch house a few times a month. There, sometimes with his wife present under the same roof, he allegedly sexually assaulted Rollins. For years the youth numbed himself with alcohol and drugs, and he was repeatedly imprisoned for drunk driving and burglary. The ordeal, he said, went on for thirty-five years.
Pressler had maintained an image of respectability over that period—with some lapses. In 1989—as Pressler was midway through his term as president of the Council for National Policy—George Bush tapped him as head of the Office on Government Ethics, but his name was withdrawn following an FBI background check. (The results were not published; a senior official would only tell the Washington Post, “Information was uncovered that we felt was disqualifying.”)
Rollins’s lawsuit revealed that Pressler had previously agreed to pay Rollins hush money, but eventually Pressler stopped making the payments.2 The new complaint added codefendants for their role in the cover-up: among them Pressler’s wife, Nancy, his Baptist church, and the pastor Paige Patterson.
The defendants denied the charges, but the lawsuit moved forward. In 2018 three more men filed affidavits accusing Pressler of molesting them over the same forty-year period. Duane Rollins’s attorney called Pressler’s abuses “the worst-kept secret in Houston.” In 2019 a Houston judge dismissed the sexual assault charges against Pressler, saying they were too old to pursue in court, but he upheld several charges based on the 2004 hush money for sexual misconduct.3
The #MeToo movement came for the Southern Baptists. In May 2018 Paige Patterson (who had taken to signing his letters “The Red Bishop”) was fired as head of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, charged with lying to the trustees about a student rape case. It got worse. On February 10, 2019, the Houston Chronicle published an exposé headlined “Abuse of Faith—20 Years, 700 Victims: Southern Baptist Sexual Abuse Spreads as Leaders Resist Reforms.”4 These events signaled the end of the Patterson-Pressler era, but the wounds would take years to heal.
At the same time, there were signs that the Southern Baptist Convention itself was in trouble. In 2019 the church press reported that while giving had risen to $11.8 billion, membership had fallen to its lowest level in thirty years, and that only half the children raised Southern Baptist remained in the church.
Perhaps they found the convention out of step with the times. But other changes were in the air. When Vice President Pence was invited to speak at the Southern Baptist Convention, a number of members objected. The new president, J. D. Greear, upheld the convention’s positions on same-sex marriage and abortion, but he promised to improve the standing of women in the church and steer the denomination away from partisan politics. “I never want us to endorse candidates, whether overtly or implicitly.”5
It wasn’t clear what effect the troubles would have on the Council for National Policy’s political strategy in the future. Much would depend on their opponents’ ability to learn from the past. It was a daunting challenge. Republican strategist Kevin Phillips foresaw the implications of the CNP-Koch alliance in his 2006 book American Theocracy: “The Republican party has slowly become the vehicle of … a fusion of petroleum-defined national security; a crusading, simplistic Christianity; and a reckless credit-feeding financial complex.” He added, “No leading world power in modern memory has become a captive, even a partial captive, of the sort of biblical inerrancy … that dismisses modern knowledge and science.”6 But not even Phillips could predict the momentum this movement would acquire—or its opponents’ resolve to prevent the coalition’s takeover of the American political system.
At the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, the problem of the stained-glass windows remained. Medieval princes and patrons often ordered artisans to place their glowing images next to saints and angels, but this went out of fashion in the modern world, colored with vainglory, now tinted with shame.
In April 2019 the Southwestern Seminary announced that it had removed the windows of Pressler, Patterson, and the other Conservative Resurgence leaders, for transport to a new site not yet determined. Thomas Wright, an alumnus from Alabama, dryly commented, “Perhaps some of the window subjects illustrate why institutes tend to memorialize those whom history has confirmed finished well.”7
In Fort Worth, the stained-glass pastors were replaced by clear windowpanes. On sunny days, the gallery is flooded with bright Texas light.