Paul Pressler, Disgraced Christian Conservative Leader, Dies at 94

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.