Now We Really Know How the Left Played the Southern Baptist Convention
Innuendo, “whispers,” and “abundant suspicions”, but essentially no evidence — plus an "investigation" that investigated nothing — demonized innocent people to pull off a giant power grab.
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by Mark Tapscott
May 17, 2026
Early in my newsroom career, my mentor, an old-school journalist and son of an Arkansas Methodist circuit preacher, taught me the most basic and essential lesson of credible news reporting, editing and analysis: “Get It First, But First Get It Right.”
Sadly, that rule is mostly forgotten in the Establishment Mainstream Media (MSM) these days, replaced by the endless manufacture of Leftist narratives intended to shape public understanding of events, policies, institutions, movements, and people in the public eye.
This dominant narrative that underlies and thus frames the vast majority of what passes for journalism in the MSM’s news and analysis precincts can be summarized thusly: America was founded on and remains forever a product of an enduringly virulent brand of White Racism. The country is thus epitomized, according to the Marxian Critical Race Theory that dominates academia, by politically conservative Republicans and their theologically conservative evangelical allies, especially those associated with the country’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).
Toss in what’s left of the conservatives in the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA) and the many independent fundamentalist/pentecostal congregations, plus fanatical anti-abortion Right-to-Lifers, gun-toting Second Amendment defenders, homophobes, and anti-immigrant Trumpian MAGA populists, and you have the bigoted, reactionary, boiling stew of Americans described by Barack Obama in 2008 as the frustrated, angry legions who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” For Hillary Clinton in 2016, they are a “basket of deplorables.”
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Two more recent media events focused on the SBC and several of its most prominent public figures provide vivid illustrations of this reality. The first event is the May edition of Texas Monthly (TM) magazine with a news and politics feature entitled “He Remade the Southern Baptist Convention in His Image. Then Came the Abuse Allegations.”
The second event is the release of the cinema-documentary produced by CrossPolitic.com and entitled “How the SBC Got Played.” Using the Five-Phases strategy first explained by Professor Gary North in his Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church, the cinematic-documentary describes how Woke activists and liberal academics within and without the SBC used the flood of abuse allegations referenced in the TM title, as well as a multitude of other similar allegations, to put the denomination’s future on an extremely dangerous footing.
Let’s look at the TM piece first. For those who don’t know, TM is an original voice on behalf of forever ending the Red dominance of the Lone Star State and converting it to an imitation of Deep Blue states like California and New York. Churches affiliated with the SBC have long been highly influential in Texas politics and culture, so it’s no surprise that those who seek to change the state fundamentally would put those congregations and their most prominent leaders in the crosshairs.
Paul Pressler is the primary subject of the TM headline, while almost equally prominent in the lengthy piece written by Robert Downen is Paige Patterson. To understand where Downen comes from, it is only necessary to read this from his TM biography: “Before joining TM in 2025, he covered politics and extremism for The Texas Tribune, where his work on the influence of far-right megadonors and white supremacists on the Texas GOP won or placed for numerous national investigative awards.”
In other words, Downen has made a career out of applying the White Racist Narrative and related indictments to conservative Republicans.
Pressler was a former Texas attorney, appellate judge, and conservative activist within the SBC who helped mastermind the “Conservative Resurgence” within the convention, beginning in the mid-1970s and continuing back and forth to this very day. Pressler died in 2024 at the age of 94.
Former Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS) President Paige Patterson was a close friend and associate of Pressler. The latter was accused of sexually abusing young men and boys, while the former was accused of covering up sexual abuse of women at the seminary. Thanks in great part to an avalanche of reports bearing Downen’s byline and those of other like-minded journos and columnists, Pressler and Patterson became in the minds of many disgusting symbols of the rot at the heart of the SBC.
Here’s Downen’s summary portrait of Pressler:
“You might not know Paul Pressler’s name. But your life has been profoundly affected by the fruits of his labor. Though he may not be as familiar as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, or other lions of the religious right, few have done more to shape our modern political and religious landscapes. Fueled by an unyielding belief in biblical inerrancy — the notion that Christian scripture is the perfect, literal word of God — Pressler in the eighties and nineties pushed the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s second-largest faith group, into a civil war that drove moderates from its ranks.
“As the architect of the SBC’s so-called conservative resurgence, Pressler — or ‘the Judge,’ as many knew him — played a crucial role in the marriage of the Republican Party and the white evangelical voters who still sustain its power. For nearly four decades he served as a quiet GOP power broker, helping elevate generations of conservative Christians to the Texas Legislature, Capitol Hill, and the White House.”
Note the sequential linking of the “lions of the religious right,” “unyielding belief in biblical inerrancy,’ and “moderates” driven out of the SBC, with “the marriage of the Republican Party and white evangelical voters who still sustain its power” and the “GOP power broker” who elevated “generations of conservative Christians to the Texas Legislature, Capitol Hill and the White House.”
Now add what Downen describes as “four decades’ worth of sexual abuse and misconduct allegations” creating Pressler the Sexual Predator Avatar and you have closed the powerful guilt-by-association lock at the heart of Downen’s narrative about “the effete young man with a high-pitched, nasal drawl” who became a momentous power-broker from the live oaks on the campus of Pressler’s beloved University of Texas at Austin all the way to Congress and the Oval Office.
And then there is Patterson, who joined with Pressler in a New Orleans French Quarter bar in 1967 where, according to Downen, “in the early-morning hours, over hot chocolate and powdered beignets, the two resolved to rescue the SBC from liberalism. They left without a formal plan, Pressler wrote in his memoir. But they spent the next decade quietly plotting.” And winning, over and over.
Once their victory within the SBC was won, Downen describes Patterson heading to Fort Worth where he took over the SWBTS:
“As their allies killed meaningful abuse-related reforms[within the SBC], the heroes of the conservative resurgence enjoyed the spoils of their conquest. Patterson was named president of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Fort Worth, in 2003. He had ornate stained glass depictions of Pressler, himself, and other conservative-movement heroes installed in the school’s chapel.
“He banned female professors in the school of theology, citing his belief that women should not teach or have authority over men in spiritual life. And as enrollment plummeted, employees were laid off, and the school’s deficit reached $100 million, the seminary provided Patterson with a private chef and began building an on-campus facility that included a nearly six-thousand-square-foot apartment and library to serve as his residence for life.”
Given such luxurious predilections, it was probably inevitable that Patterson’s tenure on the Cow Town seminary campus would be marked by controversy. And then came allegations that Patterson approved violence against women and pressured several who claimed to have been raped to keep quiet about their ordeals.
And then there was Jen Lyell.
Downen explains:
“A former student from the SBC’s North Carolina seminary told The Washington Post that after she was raped in 2003, Patterson, who was then the school’s president, pressured her to forgive her assailant and not contact police. Trustees at the SBC’s Fort Worth seminary learned of a similar allegation from 2015, in which Patterson wrote in an email to campus security that he wanted to meet with a rape victim so that he could ‘break her down.’”
“Suddenly the #ChurchToo movement was national news, bolstered by thousands of evangelical women who signed an open letter condemning Patterson and demanding that the SBC confront its mistreatment of abuse survivors. Few knew who had penned much of the letter: Jen Lyell.”
In the weeks following, Patterson was ousted, then sued by Jane Roe, who accused him of gross negligence in his handling of her case in which she reported being raped on campus by a gun-carrying male who had stalked her. All of this and more broke as the SBC was convulsed amid a flood of allegations reported by Downen and others of sexual abuses of young men and women that were covered up by church leaders. And, ironically enough, a young man named J.D. Greear, who told Downen that Patterson was his “spiritual father,” became President of the SBC.
Downen presents a massive case against Pressler and Patterson, all of it presented as cogs in the sequential linking that are locked in as the defining narrative of his analysis.
But here’s something Downen ignored completely: In a March 25, 2023, decision of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Sherman Division, Judge Sean D. Jordan ordered that “all of Plaintiff Jane Doe’s negligence and gross negligence claims against defendants Patterson and SWBTS are dismissed with prejudice.”
And there was also something Downen fails to mention regarding Pressler, despite his having examined, he claimed, thousands of pages from the man’s archives and conducted interviews with countless accusers. Downen notes one such interview, with a former Pressler judicial colleague, who told the FBI Pressler was guilty of homosexual acts:
“As a longtime Baylor regent and SBC moderate, [Jaclanel McFarland] was on the front lines of the battle against Pressler and knew him personally from her career as a judge in Harris County. Far more than whispers about Pressler’s sexuality, she told me, there were abundant suspicions about his relationships with boys and young men, including the personal assistants and mentees with whom he often shared hotel rooms.”
Not just “whispers,” but “abundant suspicions”? Having covered Congress for four decades, I cannot count how many ‘abundant suspicions” I have heard about generations of senators and representatives in both parties, but which I never reported because honest journalists report facts, not suspicions or whispers. And now perhaps you know why Downen never mentions the fact that Pressler was never charged with a single criminal sexual act.
Which brings us to the second recent media event here in focus, the release of the cinema-documentary “How the SBC Got Played.” Another journalism maxim I learned early on in my career was this: “Sometimes, what they don’t tell you is more important than what they do tell you.”
Downen’s failure to disclose that 2023 federal district court decision exonerating Patterson’s handling the Roe case is a key fact about the Pressler/Patterson saga in order to reach an informed judgment about those men, as well as the trustworthiness of Downen’s TM article.
But it is essential to understand how decisions and actions taken by key players on both sides of the sexual abuse issue in the SBC during and following the Pressler/Patterson saga reflected the underlying strategy employed by opponents of the conservative leadership of the denomination. That strategy is the five-phase operation dramatically exposed in the impressively documented “How the SBC Got Played” cinedoc, a “masterclass on institutional capture.”
“Most people think the abuse crisis in the SBC was straightforward; there were predators in the pulpit, a denomination that looked the other way, and survivors who finally got justice. But that’s not the story. That’s the story you’ve heard, but that’s not what happened,” as narrator David Shannon (aka “Chocolate Knox”) explains at the outset of the video.
There is far more factual detail and incisive analysis in the video than there is space here to cover in a reasonable reading time, so allow me to focus on two crucial facts: First, the five phases include these:
Phase One: Exploit the Moral Vulnerability — No person or institution is perfect, so there is always a moral weak spot that can be elevated and redefined as a sin so evil that every person even remotely linked to its presence or perpetuation must be removed.
For the SBC, there was a contextually prefacing evil and a present-defining evil; the former being the denomination’s Antebellum support of Southern slavery; while the latter was the sexual abuse scandal. Because it took the denomination so many postbellum decades to repent of the former, that delay became the sequential link to the latter.
Phase Two: Redefine the Threat — This is how the delay became the sequential link. Defending the procedural responses of the conservative SBC leadership to the cascading abuse allegations was cast as analogous to the long-delayed repentance of slavery support.
Those who uphold procedural and scriptural safeguards and requirements are thus recast as villains using their power and position to obstruct the saintly efforts of those defending the alleged victims of sexual abuse. The convenient and destructive result is that the Saints are presumed to be truthful, while their institutional opponents — the Villains — are assumed to be at fault and serving morally illegitimate purposes.
Phase Three: Force the Procedural Surrender — As the video so vividly demonstrates, the forced surrender came on Oct. 5, 2021, when the SBC Executive Committee voted 44-31 to cave to the demand of the Saints that the denomination waive attorney-client privilege and cooperate with an outside investigative entity without questioning any of its requests or actions.
In the debate on the committee, the waiver became the litmus test for demonstrating whether one was on the side of the Saints or of the defenders and protectors of the sexual predators in the pulpits and churches. “If you’ve got nothing to hide, why won’t you waive attorney-client privilege to prove it?” was the defining argument.
The problem here is that attorney-client privilege is not a tool of coverup, it is rather a protector of fairness and equal justice in a legal proceeding seeking to determine the praise-and-blame determining facts of a controversy. Once the privilege is lost, the institution is all but defenseless against any and all charges.
Phase Four: Use the Surrendered Weapons — In this case, the outside investigation, which produced a 228-page Guidepost “report” termed by many in the MSM as “devastating” and a “bombshell” that left no doubt whatsoever that the SBC was shot-through with sexual predators who were protected by denominational leaders at all levels.
Phase Five: Inherit Everything — Having utterly discredited the conservative leadership of the SBC, those on the Executive Committee and in the “Woke” churches took over the denomination’s reins. End of story.
Actually, no, because, as the video demonstrates with awesome documentation, here’s what really happened:
The Guidepost Report was audited by Amy McDougal, a former Air Force attorney and certified compliance professional. McDougal’s conclusions were the genuinely devastating bombshells. The Guidepost investigation was not licensed by any state. Conducting such an investigation without a license is a crime in Tennessee, where the SBC was headquartered.
In the audit and other court documents, it turned out that the Guidepost “investigation” had investigated nothing. Rather, it accepted at face value the allegations of those claiming to be victims of sexual abuse at the hands of SBC-affiliated individuals and only sought “corroboration” from the attorneys for those claimants.
Chief among these was attorney Rachael Denhollander, who represented accuser Jennifer Lyell and played multiple behind-the-scenes roles in an effort to discredit the SBC’s conservative leadership. And multiple individuals who were either accused of committing sexual abuse or of possessing exculpatory or expository evidence were never interviewed by the Guidepost investigation.
Finally, a backgrounder prepared by the creators of the video focuses in on the crucial role of Denhollander, explaining that:
“Rachael Denhollander was simultaneously serving in four roles throughout the investigation. She was attorney for Jennifer Lyell, pursuing maximum settlement against the SBC. She was advisor to the Sexual Abuse Task Force overseeing the investigation. She operated the abuse hotline funneling survivor testimony into the investigation. And she edited the Guidepost report itself — in direct violation of Guidepost’s own engagement letter, which explicitly prohibited Task Force members from editing the report before publication.
“Any one of these roles would have required recusal under standard investigative ethics. The combination of all four constituted a comprehensive corruption of the investigative process. McDougal’s audit uncovered Denhollander’s edit requests from May 17, 2022, in which she described herself as the “driving force” behind the entire investigation:
“’This would absolutely not be happening if [Lyell’s case] had not happened. This has been the topic of conversation and the lynchpin for why we are here.’ She then specified what she wanted Guidepost to include. Guidepost’s recorded response: “I’m okay with this if you want to modify the language... I’ve always felt we didn’t add enough about the settlement.” The woman whose client stood to benefit financially from the report was editing the report about her own client. The lead investigator was taking direction from the lead plaintiff’s attorney.”
Hopefully, this column provides sufficient motivation for every reader to dig into the evidence presented herein and to watch the entirety of the “How the SBC Got Played” cinedoc. The sad reality is that for far too many Americans, what they were told about the SBC was anything but the whole story.
— Mark Tapscott is an award-winning senior congressional analyst at The Washington Stand. He is also the founder and editor at HillFaith (which you should support), the former Executive Editor and Chief of Investigative Reporting at the Daily Caller and Executive Editor of the Washington Examiner. He served as a consulting editor on the Colorado Springs Gazette’s Pulitzer Prize-winning series “Other Than Honorable” and being elected to the National Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame.
Wonder why so many (all?) institutions are no longer trusted (or so we are constantly informed)? Just a thought, putting on my Tin Foil Hat (Always use tin foil, aluminum will not provide complete protection!), could this be part of The Long March Though The Institutions? Now obviously many were/are ripe for this distrust.
My underlying theory is The Goal of the Progressives is the destruction of western civilization, and replacing it with some form of Marxism.
Unfortunately we as humans are fallible and Satan will use that to sow lies and distrust. Fortunately we serve a just God who will guide us to the truth, if we let him.