When The Right Ignores or Erases Its Own Sex Scandals

Holly Meyer/Associated Press

 By David French

The New York Times

Let me share with you one of the worst and most important recent news stories that you’ve probably never heard about. Late last month, the Southern Baptist Convention settled a sex abuse lawsuit brought against a man named Paul Pressler for an undisclosed sum. The lawsuit was filed in 2017 and alleged that Pressler had raped a man named Duane Rollins for decades, with the rapes beginning when Rollins was only 14 years old.

The story would be terrible enough if Pressler were simply an ordinary predator. But while relatively unknown outside of evangelical circles, Pressler is one of the most important American religious figures of the 20th century. He and his friend Paige Patterson, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, are two of the key architects of the so-called conservative resurgence within the S.B.C.

The conservative resurgence was a movement conceived in the 1960s and launched in the 1970s that sought to wrest control of the S.B.C. from more theologically liberal and moderate voices. It was a remarkable success. While many established denominations were liberalizing, the S.B.C. lurched to the right and exploded in growth, ultimately becoming the largest Protestant denomination in the United States.

Pressler and Patterson were heroes within the movement. Patterson led Baptist seminaries and became president of the convention. Pressler was a Texas state judge and a former president of the Council for National Policy, a powerful conservative Christian activist organization. 

Both men are now disgraced. In 2018, the board of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary fired Patterson after it found that he’d grossly mishandled rape allegations — including writing in an email that he wanted to meet alone with a woman who had reported being raped to “break her down” — at both Southwestern and another Baptist seminary.

Pressler’s story is even worse. The evidence that people were aware of allegations against him stretches back decades. To take just two examples, in 1989, Pressler failed an F.B.I. background check after President George H.W. Bush tapped him to lead the Office of Government Ethics. In 2004, First Baptist Church of Houston investigated accusations that Pressler had groped and undressed a college student, deemed his behavior “morally and spiritually inappropriate” and warned him, but took no other action.

Pressler’s story is in some ways eerily similar to that of Harvey Weinstein. Both were powerful men so brazen about their misconduct that it was an “open secret” in their respective worlds. Yet they were also so powerful that an army of enablers coalesced around them, protecting them from the consequences of their actions. A single individual can be a predator, but it takes a village to protect him from exposure and punishment.

Ultimately, it took Rollins’s lawsuit to expose Pressler’s actions. (Pressler, now 93, has not admitted guilt.) The suit set off a sprawling investigation into S.B.C. sexual misconduct by The Houston Chronicle and The San Antonio Express-News. Their report, called “Abuse of Faith,” documented hundreds of sex abuse cases in the S.B.C. and led to the denomination commissioning an independent investigation of its handling of abuse.

There isn’t space in a single column to recount all the investigation’s findings. But the bottom line is clear: For decades, survivors of sex abuse “were ignored, disbelieved or met with the constant refrain that the S.B.C. could take no action due to its polity regarding church autonomy — even if it meant that convicted molesters continued in ministry with no notice or warning to their current church or congregation.”

 

All of these facts are terrible enough, and it’s important to write about them even if we can only bear witness to the injustice. But the coverage, or lack thereof, of Pressler’s fall, also helps explain why we’re so very polarized as a nation.

The American right exists in a news environment that reports misconduct on the left or in left-wing institutions loudly and with granular detail. When Weinstein fell and that fall prompted the cascade of revelations that created the #MeToo moment, the right was overrun with commentary on the larger lessons of the episode, including scathing indictments of a Hollywood culture that permitted so much abuse for so very long.

Much of this commentary was good and necessary. Hollywood deserved the indictment. But the coverage on the right also fit a cherished conservative narrative: that liberal sexual values such as those in Hollywood invariably lead to abuse. In Christian America, it was more ammunition for the sense that a righteous “us” was taking on a villainous “them.”

But stories such as Pressler’s complicate this narrative immensely. If both the advocates and enemies of the sexual revolution have their Harvey Weinsteins — that is, if both progressive and conservative institutions can enable abuse — then all that partisan moral clarity starts to disappear. We’re all left with the disturbing and humbling reality that whatever our ideology or theology, it doesn’t make us good people. The allegedly virtuous “us” commits the same sins as the presumptively villainous “them.”

How does a typical conservative activist deal with this reality? By pretending it doesn’t exist. Shortly after the Pressler settlement was announced, I looked for statements or commentary or articles by the conservative stalwarts who cover left-wing misconduct with such zeal. The silence was deafening. If you mainly receive your information from right-wing sources, the odds are good that you haven’t seen this news at all. 

I’m reminded of the minimal right-wing coverage of Fox News’s historic defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, the largest known media defamation settlement of all time. I consistently meet conservatives who might know chapter and verse of any second-tier scandal in the “liberal media” but to this day have no clue that the right’s favorite news outlet broadcast some of the most expensive lies in history.

This isn’t the kind of selective ignorance in which news consumers choose or pretend not to know something they are well aware of. Rather, it’s more like a cultivated ignorance, in which news outlets and influencers and their audiences tacitly agree not to share facts that might complicate their partisan narratives.

Of course, the dynamic is even worse when stories of conservative abuse and misconduct break in the mainstream media. Conservative partisans can simply cry “media bias!” and rely on their followers to tune it all out. To those followers, a scandal isn’t real until people they trust say it’s real.

But the truth — the whole truth — is indispensable. I’m telling Pressler’s story here both to honor the courage of the men who confronted Pressler and to perhaps contribute to a necessary conversation in at least some precincts of Christian America. When our own institutional and individual sins are so appalling, humble repentance and reform should replace our partisan rage.

 

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David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).