From the presidency of Ronald Reagan through that of Donald Trump, Southern Baptist leaders played influential roles in blessing Republican presidential candidacies, vetting Supreme Court justices, and shaping policy. Just as the SBC’s conservatives seized control of their own denomination, purging moderate pastors and churches, the religious right took over the GOP, playing a key role in turning it into today’s Trumpian party of white Christian nationalism.
The history of the conservative resurgence begins in Texas, where Paul Pressler, a Southern Baptist layman and state appellate court judge, and his friend Paige Patterson, the president of Criswell College, part of the influential First Baptist Church in Dallas, set out to cleanse the denomination of attempts by liberals to dilute the dogma of “biblical inerrancy.” As Pressler told the journalist Bill Moyers in 1987, he became aware of the alleged drift of Southern Baptist theology via a medium strikingly familiar to any observer of the contemporary right’s backlash against pluralism: textbooks. Pressler told Moyers that a student in his Bible study group who attended Baylor University, a Southern Baptist school in Waco, Tex., had told him that the freshman religion textbook said there were errors in the Book of Daniel.
After investigating this supposed transgression, Pressler said, he resolved to ensure that no one at the helm of any Southern Baptist institution would ever again allow any suggestion that the Bible was not 100 percent true. He traveled the country, urging Southern Baptists to attend the denomination’s annual meeting and elect leaders who would “make the proper appointments to change the trustees so that the trustees could properly function in correcting the problems at their institutions.”
Pressler’s plan, executed with Patterson, would alter the course of American politics. Pledges to respect “biblical inerrancy” became the litmus test for leadership positions within the denomination. The SBC also enforced traditional gender roles and barred women from preaching. In 1979, Pressler advocated for the election of the anti-gay crusader Anita Bryant to a top leadership position within the denomination. This was two years after Bryant had founded the organization Save Our Children to force the repeal of a gay rights ordinance in Miami. (Her slogan “Homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit” has been revived in the form of Florida’s current “Don’t Say Gay” law, also rooted in homophobic tropes that queer people “groom” children.) Bryant lost the SBC race, which Pressler attributed to the unwillingness of Southern Baptists to elect a woman to the post. But Bryant’s anti-gay politics would become the cornerstone of the religious right’s strategy for seizing power within the GOP.