Paul Pressler, a former Southern Baptist leader accused of sexual abuse, has died at the age of 94

Paul Pressler, the prominent Southern Baptist leader and Republican activist at the center of a massive sex scandal, died on June 7. He was 94 years old.

Pressler’s cause of death is unclear, but a memorial service was held for him in Houston on Saturday. Pressler was one of the most influential, if lesser-known, evangelical figures of the past half century. He helped lead a movement within the Southern Baptist Convention that pushed the country’s second-largest denomination to interpret the Bible literally, condemn homosexuality and align more closely with the Republican Party.

His death came barely six months after he confidentially settled a high-profile legal dispute with a former member of his youth group who had accused him of decades-long rape. As part of the lawsuit, at least six other men came forward to claim they were abused or solicited for sex by Pressler in a series of incidents between 1978 and 2016. Pressler denied the allegations and was never criminally charged.

As monumental as Pressler’s legacy was, his death was largely kept under wraps until Saturday, when a Baptist media outlet first reported the funeral. Last week, the Southern Baptist Convention held its annual meeting, and it appears that none of its leaders have commented on his death.

Herman Paul Pressler III was born in Houston in 1930 and attended the exclusive Phillips Exeter Academy in New Jersey before entering Princeton University. After graduating from Princeton in 1952, he attended law school at the University of Texas at Austin and was elected as a 27-year-old student to represent a Houston district in the Texas House of Representatives. He was later appointed by Texas Governor Dolph Briscoe to an influential seat on the 14th Texas Court of Appeals, where he served for 14 years.

During his tenure, Pressler helped plan and lead the SBC’s “conservative resurgence,” a twenty-year power struggle during which Pressler and his allies drove out more moderate Baptists, successfully pushed for a ban on women pastors, and secured Republican Party support among white evangelicals.

Pressler was also one of the first members of the Council For National Policy, a secret network of influential business, religious, and media elites that pushed Republicans to deregulate and further embed their conservative Christian views in public life. In 1989, Pressler was appointed head of the Office of Government Ethics under President George HW Bush, but his nomination was later withdrawn.

Beginning in 2000, and after winning the battle for the SBC, Pressler increasingly focused on Republican Party politics. In 2007, Louisiana College announced plans for the Judge Paul Pressler School of Law, but it never opened due to funding and accreditation problems. The school’s board of trustees included Tony Perkins, chairman of the Family Research Council, and David Barton, the Texas activist who has argued for years that the separation of church and state is a “myth.” The school’s dean was Mike Johnson, who was later elected speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

When Mormon Mitt Romney was leading in the Republican presidential primaries in 2012, Pressler gathered some of the country’s most influential Christians at his ranch in West Texas and called on them for two days to support his evangelical brother Rick Santorum. In 2013, the Texas House of Representatives recognized his services to the conservative Christian cause in a resolution that was presented in the House plenary. A year later, Pressler was part of the advisory team of the Texas Attorney General-elect Ken Paxton. And Pressler was one of the first and most important supporters of Ted Cruz in his Senate campaign and in his 2015 presidential candidacy.

While continuing to wield political influence, Pressler also allegedly raped, groped or harassed at least six men, including one who says he was 14 when he was first sexually assaulted while a member of Pressler’s youth group. Those allegations were laid out in a 2017 lawsuit that also accused prominent Southern Baptist leaders and churches of covering up or enabling Pressler’s behavior, which they deny.

The lawsuit sparked a major investigation by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News in 2019 that found that more than 400 Southern Baptist Church leaders or volunteers had been accused of sex crimes since 2000. The series sparked reforms in the SBC, as well as an ongoing Justice Department investigation into the denomination’s handling of sexual abuse complaints.

Pressler was a member of the First or Second Baptist Church in Houston for almost his entire adult life.