Baptist church SBC

so there's Mo Emanuel AA versions vs CNP SB Convention #1 Prot FRC Ralph Reed version

so baptist biggest evang?

CNP?

schism over maga?

SEE WM WOLFE

RWW

07/28/2026

Kyle Mantyla

Elisabeth Zerofsky @ The New York Times Magazine: What the Crackup of the Heritage Foundation Says About the Post-Trump Right
The bastion of American conservatism best known for Project 2025 has been consumed by an ideological — and generational — civil war.

Robert Kuttner @ The American Prospect: Yes, Trump Will Attempt a Coup
If we are vigilant, he won’t pull it off.

Nikki McCann Ramírez and Jack Crosbie @ Rolling Stone: MAGA Rep. Allegedly Assaulted Wife, Put Gun to Her Head. Republicans Don’t Care
Max Miller is the subject a string of disturbing allegations. His party doesn’t seem to mind.

GPAHE: The Inside Man: William Wolfe and the Capture of the Southern Baptist Convention
Wolfe is the Christian nationalist movement’s inside man. Others preach for converts or run for office. Wolfe captures institutions that already exist. When the first Trump administration ended, he took a fellowship at Russ Vought’s think tank, the Center for Renewing America, where the work was planning the next Trump term. In March 2024, he turned the same method on his own denomination, which keeps a pulpit in nearly every county in the South.

Editor’s note: This profile is part of a GPAHE series examining the people shaping American Christian nationalism in post–Project 2025 America. Christian nationalism is distinct from Christianity itself; mainstream churches have publicly rejected the movement as a distortion of the Christian faith. The figures profiled here are the architects of a theocratic, political project working to fuse American national identity with conservative Christian supremacist rule and dismantle democratic institutions.

He helped Project 2025 architect Russ Vought scope out “a sound Christian Nationalism,” and has pushed the 12.3 million members of the Southern Baptist Convention toward Christian nationalist policies. In June, the denomination elected the president he campaigned for.

Key Takeaways

Wolfe served in Trump’s Pentagon and State Department and calls himself a Christian nationalist. He helped draft the 2023 manifesto demanding that American law acknowledge “the Lordship of Christ.” That October, he made his case to the audience of white supremacist Stew Peters, who calls for executing Democratic officials.

His Center for Baptist Leadership launched in March 2024, telling the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the largest US Protestant denomination, to elect leaders willing to call its documented sexual abuse crisis a lie.

Wolfe endorsed Willy Rice and spent two years campaigning for him. Rice won the SBC presidency on June 9, 2026. A constitutional ban on women pastors cleared its first vote the next morning.

In April 2026, Wolfe campaigned for Rice on an all-male far-right club’s podcast, days after one of its hosts answered a comparison between the movement’s deportation politics and the Ku Klux Klan with a video celebrating the Klan: “Yes, and I’m tired of pretending it’s not.”

A few hours before the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) handed out presidential ballots in Orlando on June 9, 2026, Willy Rice stood at a lunchtime forum and told a room of young SBC pastors what he thought of their denomination’s decade. “I’m afraid … we’re going to hug ourselves to death,” he said. “We are going to wake up one day and be Kodak or Blockbuster.” That afternoon, the Clearwater, Fla. pastor, who had waved off the SBC’s sexual abuse crisis as closer to hoax than fact, took 5,217 votes — 57 percent — and the presidency of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

The man behind Rice’s talking points holds no office in the SBC. He has never pastored a church. Christian nationalist William Wolfe spent seven months as a deputy assistant secretary of defense in the first Trump administration, and the day Rice won, he told Religion News Service the election was “a major vindication of the issues we have addressed and fought for.” Three months earlier, on March 14, 2026, from the pulpit of Bethel Church in Petersburg, West Virginia, Wolfe had explained what those issues add up to: “Frankly, yes, we are going to impose it upon you.”

Wolfe is the Christian nationalist movement’s inside man. Others preach for converts or run for office. Wolfe captures institutions that already exist. When the first Trump administration ended, he took a fellowship at Russ Vought’s think tank, the Center for Renewing America, where the work was planning the next Trump term. In March 2024, he turned the same method on his own denomination, which keeps a pulpit in nearly every county in the South.

The Orlando convention gave Wolfe more than a president.

Southern Baptist churches govern themselves; what binds them is the annual meeting, where congregations send voting delegates, the denomination calls them messengers, and where amending the SBC constitution requires a two-thirds vote in two consecutive years. Proposed amendments are also supposed to spend a year under executive committee review before messengers ever see them. On the meeting’s first day, messengers voted to skip that waiting period for a proposal from Al Mohler, president of the denomination’s flagship seminary. His “Truth and Unity” amendment proposes to expel churches that let a woman preach to the assembled congregation, and the next morning, it cleared the first of its two required votes with nearly 75 percent in favor.

In February 2019, the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News counted more than 700 people abused in SBC churches since 1998 and roughly 380 church leaders and volunteers accused of sexual misconduct. At his June 10, 2026, press conference, Rice signaled where the denomination’s abuse reforms are headed. The movement to address abuse, he said, “absolutely was weaponized, just like the Me Too movement in the secular culture.” Christa Brown, a survivor of abuse by an SBC pastor and a longtime advocate for reform, told the AP that if anyone politicized the issue, it was the people fighting over SBC power.

The Center for Baptist Leadership titled its post-convention podcast recap “SBC Reformers Just Scored Their Biggest Win in Decades” and walked listeners through how the show had mobilized messengers to Orlando. Baptist News Global counted Rice as the first reform candidate to defeat an institutional candidate for the presidency in 35 years.

The Title He Sells

Wolfe grew up lower-middle-class outside Charlotte, North Carolina, shopping at Goodwill. By his own account, politics came before faith. He traces his politics to watching his friends’ fathers lose construction work to trade deals and to contractors paying undocumented workers cash under the table — an experience he says “put a fire in my bones.” His 15-year-old brother died in June 2011, and his life collapsed. He was 22 when the pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., shared the gospel with him, Wolfe recounted in a 2024 interview. He was baptized into a congregation at the center of the SBC’s establishment wing. He earned a degree in history from Covenant College and stayed in the capital for a decade, working in three congressional offices. From the Hill, he moved to Heritage Action for America, then to the State Department as a director of legislative affairs, and finally to the Pentagon.

That last title is the one he sells. Conference bios introduce him as “a Senior Official in the Trump Administration.” The job lasted from June 2020 to January 2021, through the election and through January 6.

Instead of cashing in as a lobbyist, Wolfe went to Louisville to finish a master of Divinity at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He already knew the school. Baptist News Global identified him as a former intern to its president, Al Mohler, whose amendment his group would one day whip votes for.

American Reformer takes its theology from the 16th-century Protestant reformer John Calvin and its politics from the hard right. The men behind the venture firm New Founding, a Project 2025 advisory board member, co-founded it. The magazine made Wolfe a fellow, and by September 2022, he was speaking at the National Conservatism Conference (NatCon) in Miami, where the transnational far right gathers. Three years later, he was back on the NatCon stage, in Washington this time, to lecture on “Recovering the Evangelical Political Voice.” To make America great again, he told the room, “We’re going to have to make it Christian again.” The talk was a call for “a Protestant Christian political Manhattan Project,” complete with a joke about rounding up Protestant pastors, putting them “in camps” for reeducation.

“A Sound Christian Nationalism”

Russell Vought was running the Center for Renewing America on January 25, 2023, when he tweeted that he was “proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism.” Vought now directs the federal budget.

Three months after Vought’s tweet, Wolfe made an appearance on Christian nationalist Joel Webbon’s podcast for an episode recorded April 19, 2023. He had traded complementarianism, the mainstream evangelical teaching that assigns men and women distinct roles, for “biblical patriarchy,” he said. White guilt, he argued, drove the failures of evangelical leaders. His sign-off urged Baptists to “beat your plowshare into a sword” and join him on the front lines.

The 2023 Statement on Christian Nationalism and the Gospel, which Wolfe drafted with Webbon and a third author, binds every nation, in every age, to the moral principle of each of the Ten Commandments. In October 2023, he went on the show of Stew Peters, a white supremacist who has urged the execution of Democratic officials, and told the audience that Christian nationalists in office must save America from “globo-homo nationalism.” That December, Wolfe posted part of the agenda and thought better of it; The New Republic preserved the deleted thread: end no-fault divorce, gestational surrogacy, and sex education in schools. Christian nationalism is “inevitable,” he argued, and young men disaffected by the secular order find the label appealing: “I want to work with those young men.”

Pulpits Money Can’t Rent

The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) holds roughly 47,000 congregations by veteran Nashville investigative reporter Phil Williams’s count, plus six seminaries, two mission boards, the Lifeway publishing house, and a policy office in Washington. In Orlando, messengers approved a $186 million budget to run it all, even as the denomination has shed 3.6 million members over two decades, down to 12.3 million.

The SBC’s right turn did not start with Wolfe. Dallas hosted the 1985 showdown that sealed the conservative takeover of the convention and drove out its moderates. Decades later, Russell Moore ran the denomination’s policy office in Washington, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), where he refused to endorse Trump and pressed the denomination to face its sexual abuse crisis. After years of fighting SBC leaders over Trump and over immigration, Moore quit on May 18, 2021.

Twenty-one months after he left, on February 21, 2023, the Executive Committee expelled Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, the SBC’s second-largest congregation, for naming women pastors. Rick Warren, who founded Saddleback and wrote The Purpose Driven Life, flew to New Orleans that June and asked the messengers to let his church back in. They voted 88 percent to keep it out. Hours later, the same messengers gave first-round approval to a constitutional amendment barring women from any pastoral title. The votes were not there in Indianapolis in 2024 or in Dallas in 2025. Al Mohler, the seminary president Wolfe once interned for, rewrote the ban for Orlando. His version reaches past the title to the act: a woman preaching.

At that same 2025 Dallas meeting, a resolution went to the floor demanding the Supreme Court overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the ruling that legalized same-sex marriage, and calling for civil laws that “reflect the moral order revealed in Scripture and nature.” Nobody rose to argue. The SBC had condemned the ruling since it was issued in 2015, without ever asking the court to reverse it. The Southern Seminary professor who chaired the resolutions committee told reporters he was “clear-eyed about the difficulties” and has argued elsewhere that Christians are “called to play the long game.” Wolfe wasn’t playing anything that patient. Same-sex marriage, he said on a Liberty podcast that same month, “is fundamentally an impossibility. It doesn’t exist.” When SBC leaders drafted resolutions for Orlando warning against ethnonationalism and antisemitism on the dissident right, Wolfe grumbled that “The Ghost of Russell Moore stalks many of the SBC resolutions this year.”

A Clock, Not a Cudgel

Wolfe spent December 2023 calling the denomination’s most famous woman Bible teacher “an ungodly, even demonic, influence on the SBC.” He opened the Center for Baptist Leadership (CBL) — a pressure group with no official role in the SBC — three months later, on March 8, 2024, and the group announced its diagnosis on social media: “leaders in the SBC allowed CRT [Critical race theory], DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion], and feminism to infiltrate our seminaries, our entities, and our churches.” The CBL’s first published piece urged Southern Baptists to elect leaders who would say that the claim of systemic abuse in the SBC “is a lie.” The “lie” was that February 2019 investigation. Wolfe describes the CBL as a subset of American Reformer’s larger project of Protestant renewal — “kind of like a House Freedom Caucus for the Southern Baptist Convention” — and his stump line is that the SBC has “less financial transparency than Planned Parenthood.”

The CBL’s main target was the ERLC. The commission had angered the hard right by opposing criminal penalties for women who seek abortions and by defending immigrants. Four months after the CBL launched, the chair of the ERLC’s board announced that the commission’s president, Brent Leatherwood, had been fired. The rest of the board overruled him, and the chair resigned instead. Leatherwood kept the job for another year. Willy Rice stood up at the Dallas meeting on June 10, 2025 — 40 years after the takeover fight in the same city — and moved to abolish the agency. Wolfe posted the talking point within hours: the vote “is not a cudgel, it’s a clock.”

On June 11, nearly 43 percent of messengers voted to abolish the commission. Any pastor who lost the confidence of 40 percent of his congregation “would resign the next day,” Wolfe said afterward. Leatherwood resigned on July 31, 2025, seven weeks later, the third ERLC president in a row to leave under fire. Wolfe’s CBL issued a statement the same day: Leatherwood “was not the right Baptist for this job.” On April 13, 2026, the trustees installed a new president, the change of leadership that the CBL had demanded in writing. The clock Wolfe set ran out on schedule.

The Iron Fist

Wolfe’s co-authors on the Statement on Christian Nationalism have records of their own. Joel Webbon wants a “Christian Nationalist Caesar” to rule the United States with an iron fist, Constitution be damned. The third author, Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers, sits on the CBL’s advisory board and files bills to criminalize abortion as homicide. CBL’s roster includes a sitting ERLC trustee who was also strategizing for the group trying to kill it.

In June 2025, on a Liberty podcast episode billed as “America Was Made BY Christians FOR Christians,” Wolfe read the founders’ promise to “our posterity” as a bloodline. “When the founders of America wrote for our posterity, they did not mean millions of Indian immigrants. They did not mean millions of Muslim immigrants to America or millions of South American immigrants. Again, no offense, they have their own countries.”

At a Valentine’s Day gathering in 2026, Wolfe told a story about being “the only person in line speaking English” at a North Carolina DMV, and drew the conclusion himself: millions must be deported so his sons will not grow up as minorities. Right Wing Watch circulated the clip in March. Wolfe stood by the remarks (“I am actually not sorry”), called the group demons, then denied saying what the video showed him saying.

Southern Baptist messengers have gone the other way. In New Orleans in 2023, they affirmed the “inherent dignity and value” of immigrants regardless of legal status and asked the government to open legal pathways to permanent status. In 2011 and in 2018, they had called nativism inconsistent with the Gospel.

The Greene Tavern, an online talk show, comes out of the Nathanael Greene Society, the North Carolina chapter of the Old Glory Club, a nationwide network of men-only far-right clubs whose members, a 2025 Guardian investigation found, include “prominent antisemitic influencers.” One of its hosts posts under the name Kaiser von Lohengramm. On April 6, 2026, he answered a Phil Williams article titled “In Far Right’s Growing Remigration Talk, Echoes of KKK America.” “Yes, and I’m tired of pretending it’s not,” he posted over a video of an anime figure in the white robe and hood of the Klan, set to an anthem urging men to “go with the Ku Klux Klan.”

Days later, Wolfe joined the show. Rice “would very much be our guy,” he told the panel, and electing him was “really my main focus” in the run-up to Orlando. The campaign, he said, was transferable: for anyone “in another denomination that’s fighting with a leftist … what we’re doing is showing that you can win. You bring political grassroots organizing and activism and apply it to these denominational fights.” He gave the same advice about the Republican Party: show up at your local county GOP meetings with three or four friends, and “try to take these things over. I don’t mean it in a hostile sense.”

On air, Wolfe dismissed the Klan comparison as “completely laughable” and described the people who make such charges as “morally reprehensible troglodytes.” He called for “mass deportations, denaturalizations, and remigration” — “not out of hate for anybody,” he said, but “out of love for the American people.”

Messengers at the SBC’s 150th-anniversary meeting in Atlanta in 1995 repudiated “historic acts of evil such as slavery,” which the resolution tied to the convention’s 1845 founding, and resolved to “genuinely repent of racism of which we have been guilty.”

Laying Hands

In February 2025, Wolfe told a podcast that Trump was filling the government “with people who are our guys” and that the second term was “shock and awe.” Paula White-Cain runs Trump’s Faith Office, and on March 19, 2025, she gathered a group of religious-right leaders in the White House to pray over the president. Wolfe stood in the room with David Barton and laid hands on Trump. Barton’s WallBuilders operation supplies the movement’s version of American history. After the meeting, Wolfe posted a video in which he marveled at his access and explained that under a Harris administration, Christians like himself would have been shipped “to the gulags.” Three weeks later, on April 7, he described on a podcast what he had actually done with that access: urged the administration to accelerate deportations, because Southern Baptists and Christians “want to see mass deportations,” and the evangelical organizations objecting to Trump’s immigration crackdown were “astroturf.”

Per procedure, in June 2027, the convention meets again in Indianapolis. Mohler’s amendment comes back with it for its second and final vote, and the abuse reforms fall under Rice’s gavel. Wolfe will be there the way he was in Orlando: off the ballot, working the floor. At NatCon in Washington last September, he reminded the room that America “was essentially 98 percent Protestant at its founding.” “You’re very welcome here,” he said. “We’re glad to have you, but it is ours, and we would like at least some of it back.”

In His Own Words

“I want a Christian nation if only 5% of our population is Christians and somehow we’re the ones who control the reins of power and we pass good and just laws that will benefit the 95% of the population who aren’t converted. I still want that. That’s what I want.”

— April 19, 2023: his terms, offered on Joel Webbon’s podcast between calls to purge “loser theology.”

“If we have ever lived in a point in time in American history since then that we could argue that now is the time to arms again, I think we are getting close.”

— October 21, 2023: his warning at a “Jesus and Politics” conference, delivered while quoting a 1758 militia sermon.

“I don’t care how much they scream. I don’t care how much they cry.”

— January 2026: his defense of ICE deportation raids, given on a Liberty University show.

“I want my children to grow up in a country where they’re not minorities.”

— February 14, 2026: his case for mass deportations, made to a room of allies.

“I am going to enforce my morality on you, inasmuch as our morality is God’s morality.”

— March 14, 2026: his sermon at a West Virginia church, preached three months before his candidate won the SBC presidency.

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an 5 25

Southern Baptist pastor suspended by his own church over secret social media accounts

rww 1 24

Robert Downen @ The Texas Tribune: Email sheds new light on Texas House candidate Jared Woodfill’s role in Southern Baptist leader’s sex abuse scandal.

Woodfill has been endorsed by Attorney General Ken Paxton despite his connection to Paul Pressler, a prominent religious figure accused of rape.

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an 11 23 joe conason

House Speaker Mike Johnson, lately elevated to one of the most important posts in the federal government, is nothing if not a fervent culture warrior. If Johnson had his way, not only would abortion and homosexuality be absolutely outlawed, with severe criminal penalties as punishment for any infraction, but so would contraception and what he calls "no-fault" divorce.

It even seems likely that he would require everyone's children to pray to his deity in schools, where the teaching of evolution also might no longer be permitted, since Johnson says he believes that actual science leads people to devalue life and commit mass shootings. Both his extreme policy views and his absurd ideas about dinosaurs on Noah's Ark and other such superstitions have become notorious since his GOP colleagues unanimously chose him as their leader.

The hermetic world of far-right religion where Johnson has prospered is a very strange place, not well known to most Americans. It is a world where the homosexual behavior he considers "deviant" has often been concealed and protected, even or especially when that conduct involves the exploitation of minors -- just so long as the perpetrators are powerful white men. And there is no doubt that Johnson knows all about this sinister sanctimony.

We know that he knows because the new speaker's resume, which traces his rapid ascent from obscurity on a legislative backbench in Louisiana to the pinnacle of congressional leadership, omits a certain telling episode: his brief service as the dean of a scandal-ridden "Christian law school" that never opened. Envisioned as a competitor to the highly successful (and profitable) Liberty University law school, the Judge Paul Pressler School of Law at Louisiana College was named for a reactionary Texas jurist and far-right activist in the Southern Baptist Convention.

Its first dean was Mike Johnson, then a young lawyer pursuing the culture war in lawsuits against gay rights and marriage equality. He reportedly had been selected for the job with the approval of Pressler himself, who assisted Johnson in raising money for the law school.

Before it could enroll a single student, however, the law school disintegrated under murky circumstances that reportedly involved financial mismanagement, possible corruption, and failure to win accreditation. The college president was fired and Johnson resigned, going on to win election to the state legislature and then, only two years later, a safe Republican seat in Congress.

That was not the end of the Paul Pressler saga, however. In 2017, Pressler was sued in Texas courts in a civil case that eventually came to include allegations of rape and abuse by several men who say he repeatedly assaulted them, with some of the allegations dating back to their childhood. Subsequent revelations in court documents and press reports showed that the allegations against Pressler had emerged as early as 1978, when he was expelled from a Houston church for sexual misconduct. What also emerged was that Pressler's law partner, a Houston attorney who led the Harris County Republican Party for 12 years, had known of harassment and assault allegations against Pressler since 2004 -- and had lied publicly to cover up the scandal.

After all, Pressler was not only an eminent figure in the Southern Baptist Convention, where he served as national vice president, but in Texas Republican circles and in the secretive Council for National Policy, which has long functioned as a kind of central committee for the American far right. In other words, he was too important to expose -- even after he paid an enormous financial settlement to silence one of his accusers.

As Southern Baptists learned to their dismay a few years ago, during an investigation long resisted by its leaders, the kind of abuse that Pressler inflicted on young members of their congregation, both male and female, was far more widespread than anyone had suspected. It grew from the hierarchical, authoritarian, and hypocritical culture at the highest levels of their faith.

The most disturbing aspect of the scandals that have afflicted both the right-wing church and the Republican right is how little Mike Johnson and his ilk have learned from them. They might spend less effort persecuting Americans whose ideas about life and faith differ from theirs, and more time considering what the words of Christ really mean.

SBC former head, pal on ginni? cleta?

shadow net:

ch 1 texas: scc broke civil war slavery, n and am // prot N nat cncl churhes; paige p and paul pressler houston arist judges humble oil --> exxon; hippie 60's ~ ; took over SBC; states rights

https://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Network-Media-Secret-Radical/dp/163557319X?asin=163557319X&revisionId=&format=4&depth=1

paige patterson

L. Paige Patterson (born October 19, 1942) served as the fifth president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C., from 1992 to 2003, as president of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) from 1998 to 2000, and as the eighth president of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, from 2003 until his firing in 2018. He played a major role in the Southern Baptist "conservative resurgence", called "Fundamentalist Takeover" by opponents. He has been alternately described as a fundamentalist and a conservative evangelical.

5 Views on women
- 5.1 Women faculty at SWBTS
- 5.2 Abuse cover-up

6 Removal as president of SWBTS and firing

Education

B.A. – Hardin-Simmons University, Abilene, Texas
Th.M. – New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary
Th.D. – New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary^[1]

Career

Patterson started preaching while still in his teens. He held several pastorates before becoming president of the Criswell Center for Biblical Studies (now Criswell College) in Dallas, Texas, a position from which he was eventually fired.^[2] Patterson formed a strong connection with W.A. Criswell of the First Baptist Church of Dallas while in this position. After 17 years he became president of the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina (1992–2003). Patterson was elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) in both 1998 and 1999. He has lectured and preached extensively and authored and edited many books and journals. In 2003, he became the 8th president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.^[3] He was removed as president in May 2018 over his past advice to women concerning marital abuse and rape,^[4] then stripped of his positions of emeritus president and theologian-in-residence for his handling of several rape investigations.^[5] He served on the board of trustees of Cedarville University until he resigned on May 31, 2018.^[6][7]

Paige Patterson (left) with a Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary student

Proponent of expository preaching

Patterson began preaching as a teenager, and continues to preach in churches and seminaries around the world. He is a strong proponent of expository preaching, once saying, "There is no genuinely good preaching except exposition".^[8] He has written on the topic of preaching, including the introduction to the 2010 publication Text-Driven Preaching: God’s Word at the Heart of Every Sermon.^[9]

Role in the SBC conservative resurgence

Southern Baptists

Background

Beliefs

People

Related organizations

Seminaries

Patterson is best known for his prominent role in the Southern Baptist Convention conservative resurgence starting in 1979 with the election of Adrian Rogers as Convention President. Believing SBC seminaries and other SBC institutions had drifted away from their conservative Biblical roots, Patterson joined with Judge Paul Pressler of Houston, TX to carry out a plan that included exposing the theology taught and practiced by the leadership in SBC institutions, which Patterson and Pressler described as liberal theology. The main issue that divided the SBC was the nature of scripture, particularly, whether or not it is inerrant. Patterson, Pressler, and a host of self-described conservative pastors and laymen began to spread the word that the teaching of SBC leadership was not reflective of their constituents, who were paying their salaries. Patterson and the conservatives won the support of hundreds of like-minded churches, and as many as 40,000 messengers (church members willing to travel to the annual Southern Baptist Convention to vote) by using the inerrancy argument as the issue to gather support.

In 1998, Patterson was elected as president of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Patterson's influence has been felt at all levels of Southern Baptist life. The seminaries have for the most part become conservative institutions. Local churches have been hiring pastors educated at schools led by conservatives. Missionaries have also been influenced by Patterson's leadership. By the time Patterson was appointed president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, in 2003, the conservative leadership required that all faculty sign documents stating their allegiance to Southern Baptist doctrine, most notably, the Baptist Faith and Message.

Patterson has been associated with the Council for National Policy, an umbrella organization and networking group for social conservative activists in the United States.^[10]

Seminary president

Patterson served as the president of Criswell College in Dallas, Texas from 1975 to 1992.

Following his time at Criswell College, Patterson became president of two prominent Southern Baptist seminaries: first Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (SEBTS) in Wake Forest, N.C., from 1992 to 2003, and then Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS) from 2003 to 2018.^[11]

Views on women

Patterson has attracted interest because of his stance on the role of women in church and his opposition to ordaining women as ministers.According to Patterson, the "highest and noblest calling of God" for women is that of "mother and grandmother". Additionally, Patterson's interpretation of the Bible includes "an assignment from God, in this case that a woman not be involved in a teaching or ruling capacity over men".^[12]

In an interview taped in 2000, Patterson recounted how he counseled a woman, who told him about being abused by her husband, that she should pray for God's intervention. When the woman "came to him later with two black eyes" and said "I hope you're happy", Patterson said he was "very happy" because the next day the husband had come to church for the first time.^[13][14] As reported in The Washington Post, in April 2018 Patterson wrote on the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary website that:

"I have also said that I have never recommended or prescribed divorce. How could I as a minister of the Gospel? The Bible makes clear the way in which God views divorce ... I do not apologize for my stand for the family and for seeking to mend a marriage through forgiveness rather than divorce."^[14]

Patterson explains a wife's submission to her husband as voluntary rather than coerced: "It means voluntarily to line up in the right order that God has given, and the husband is loving his wife sacrificially as much as Jesus Christ loved the church and gave Himself for it, so that all the husband can think of is, 'Honey, what can I do for you? What can I do to serve you? How can I make your life better?' And all the time she is submitting herself to her husband and saying, 'You just lead and, honey, I'll follow.'"^[12] "It depends on the level of abuse, to some degree. … I have never in my ministry counseled anyone to seek a divorce and that's always wrong counsel".^[14] Instead of divorce he recommended temporary separation in cases of extreme spousal abuse.^[14]

He has also compared female submissiveness to submissiveness to a police officer. Although the officer and Patterson would be equal before God, "He is above me," Patterson wrote. Just as "God gave him an assignment that affects me and made him a minister of God to correct my evil ways," so he believed women should submit to men.^[12]

Women faculty at SWBTS

While Patterson was president of SWBTS, there were two female faculty members in the School of Theology: his wife, Dorothy, and Candi Finch, a loyal ally of the Pattersons.^[15] Both Dorothy Patterson and Finch were fired in 2018 following Paige Patterson's ouster.^[16]

Abuse cover-up

Patterson was a defendant in a 2018 suit which alleged he assisted in covering up sexual abuse by fellow Southern Baptist Paul Pressler.^[13] The claims against Patterson were dismissed as they exceeded the statute of limitations.^[17]

Removal as president of SWBTS and firing

From president to president emeritus and theologian-in-residence

On May 22, 2018, the board of trustees of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS) met to discuss "new leadership for the benefit of the future mission of the Seminary".^[18][19] They removed Patterson as President^[4] and conferred the title of President Emeritus upon him, with compensation, and provided for him and his wife to live in the seminary's Baptist Heritage Center as the school's first theologians-in-residence.^[18]

Fired from all positions at SWBTS

However, on May 30, 2018, the seminary's executive committee made an abrupt change:

[N]ew information confirmed this morning was presented regarding the handling of an allegation of sexual abuse against a student during Dr. Paige Patterson’s presidency at another institution and resulting issues connected with statements to the Board of Trustees that are inconsistent with SWBTS’s biblically informed core values.^[5][20]

Patterson was terminated "effective immediately"^[21] in response to mishandling the investigation of the alleged rape of a student at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2003, based on their internal review reported to SWBTS.^[5]During that investigation, Patterson had sent an email "to the Chief of Campus Security in which Dr. Patterson discussed meeting with the student alone so that he could ‘break her down’ and that he preferred no officials be present";^[5] the SWBTS Executive Committee stated that the "attitude expressed by Dr. Patterson in that email is antithetical to the core values of our faith and to SWBTS".^[5] The executive committee also found "undeniable" evidence that "contradicts a statement previously provided by Dr. Patterson in response to a direct question by a board member".^[5] Patterson has denied any mishandling of any investigation.^[22]

The SWBTS Executive Committee removed "all the benefits, rights and privileges provided by the May 22–23 board meeting, including the title of President Emeritus, the invitation to reside at the Baptist Heritage Center as theologian-in-residence and ongoing compensation".^[5] The SWBTS trustees voted on October 17, 2018, to uphold the decision to fire Patterson, though 4 of the 34 trustees present voted against and claimed that the process of his firing was flawed.^[23] At that same meeting, trustees voting by a similar margin to fire an SWBTS faculty member, apparently for voicing opposition to Patterson's firing.^[24]

The firing also led to the termination of Dorothy Patterson's pet project of installing over 60 stained glass windows on the SWBTS campus to honor leaders in the conservative resurgence. The project was begun in 2013 as a 12-year project, and some 32 windows had been installed by April 2019, at which time the trustees decided to remove the windows in the best interests of the seminary. Two of the windows depicted Paige and Dorothy Patterson.^[25]

Impact beyond SWBTS

Patterson's firing affected his standing in Baptist circles more broadly. Since 2003, Patterson had served on the board of trustees of Cedarville University, a Baptist institution. On May 30, 2018, Cedarville's president, Thomas White, who had worked with Patterson at both SEBTS and SWBTS, issued a statement that emphasized Cedarville's policies for reporting abuse and his uncertainty as to whether Patterson would continue to serve on the board.^[7] By May 31, 1,300 people had signed a petition for Patterson's resignation from Cedarville's board of trustees, which Patterson submitted that day.^[7]

Patterson's standing in the SBC was also affected by his firing. After receiving pressure from various Southern Baptist leaders, including SBC president Steve Gaines, Patterson announced in a letter to Gaines on June 8, 2018, that he was declining to give the keynote sermon at the annual meeting of the SBC the following week.^[26] Patterson said his decision came from his desires "to protect my family as much as I can", "to contribute to harmony within the Southern Baptist Convention", and "to respond to the request that has come especially from you and other Southern Baptist leadership".^[26]

Although Patterson did not attend the SBC annual meeting in June 2018, the scandal prompted a greater focus on gender for attendees, who passed two resolutions on gender. One of those resolutions affirmed roles for women in the church, while the other condemned all forms of abuse against women and insisted that Baptist leaders report alleged sexual abuse to police.^[27]

Patterson is still revered in some Baptist circles. During a chapel service on March 12, 2019, Truett McConnell University (TMU), an SBC school in Georgia, the school's dean and president presented Dr. and Mrs. Patterson with a plaque that renamed TMU's annual spring lecture series after them and claimed that they "provide an exemplary role model of Christian living."^[28]

Backlash to Patterson's firing

About two dozen SBC donors attempted to return Patterson to his positions of president emeritus and theologian-in-residence at SWBTS and to punish those who fired him. At the SBC's annual meeting in June 2018, they brought a resolution to the floor to fire all the trustees of SWBTS who voted to fire Patterson; that resolution was "soundly defeated".^[29] Then in early July 2018, several donors to SWBTS signed a public letter threatening to withhold funding from the seminary unless the SWBTS board reconsidered Patterson's firing.^[29] Their letter called the SWBTS Executive Committee's firing of Patterson a "travesty" and stated: "Dr. and Mrs. Patterson continue to have our absolute and unwavering support. They are both esteemed scholars and were stately ambassadors for the Seminary".^[29] Karen Swallow Prior, then a professor at Liberty University, said, "What we’re seeing is people who are committed to a person rather than to an institution or to the convention, putting their loyalty to a person ahead of their adherence to the principles of the institution".^[29]

Patterson's public ministry since firing

Since his firing, Patterson has received public criticism for two sermons at a revival in September 2018. In the first sermon, he repeatedly highlighted the weight of a "fat" female parishioner, which led to charges that he was "body-shaming women".^[30] His second sermon referenced the biblical story of Joseph, who was falsely accused by a woman of sexual abuse, to criticize some women in the Me Too movement.^[30] Some Baptists who had previously called for Patterson's removal from SWBTS argued that his sermons showed a lack of repentance for his previous comments about women.^[31]

In mid-October 2018, Patterson accepted the opportunity to co-teach an ethics course at Southern Evangelical Seminary (SES). His co-teacher for the course was Richard Land, the former head of the SBC's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and presently the president of SES.^[32] Richard Mouw, president emeritus of Fuller Theological Seminary, noted that Patterson was an odd choice to teach the class because he was not a specialist in ethics and suggested that Patterson's hire was "a political statement" by the very conservative SES that "He's one of us. We want to keep his voice strong."^[33]

In October 2021, Patterson was elected to a three-year term on the board of trustees of Yellowstone Christian College in Kalispell, Montana.^[34]

Lawsuit for handling of rape allegations

In May 2019, an SWBTS former student, named "Jane Roe" in legal papers, filed a lawsuit against Paige Patterson for threatening, intimidating, and humiliating her when she told him that she had been repeatedly raped at gunpoint in 2014 and 2015 by another seminary student, named "John Doe". According to the lawsuit, Patterson told Roe to recount "lurid and graphic details" of her rape before a group of men, told her that the rape was a "good thing", and "seemed to enjoy making Roe even more uncomfortable with his questions". Patterson also reportedly said he was "too busy" to deal with the allegations, "callously rejected" her requests for prayers and financial assistance, and told seminary faculty members about the alleged rape without her consent. Doe was expelled after Fort Worth police searched his room and found nine firearms, which violated the seminary's weapon's policy.^[35][36]

The suit claims Roe is the same student about whom Patterson had promised to "break her down". Patterson allegedly later met with Roe and said that Doe has supplied him with nude photos that proved they had a consensual sexual relationship; Roe said the photos were taken while Doe was raping her at gunpoint. When Roe's mother asked Patterson how Doe had been allowed to attend SWBTS with his violent criminal past, Patterson reportedly "lunged across the table, firmly pointed his finger in her face and threatened to 'unleash' lawyers on her if she dared question his leadership".^[35][36]

When the wife of a U.S. Supreme Court justice is trying to help a president stay in power even though he has been voted out of office, it is painfully obvious that American democracy is in trouble. It has been well-documented that Ginni Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, tried to help keep former President Donald Trump in the White House even after he lost the 2020 election — from a series of text messages exchanged with former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to her communications with pro-Trump attorney John C. Eastman. And according to reporting in the Washington Post, Ginni Thomas continued to associate with “Stop the Steal” extremists even after Joe Biden was sworn in as president on January 20, 2021.

In a report published on June 20, Post journalists Emma Brown, Isaac Stanley-Becker and Rosalind S. Helderman explain, “Two months after rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to help President Donald Trump stay in office, Virginia ‘Ginni’ Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, attended a gathering of right-wing activists where a speaker declared to roaring applause that Trump was still the ‘legitimate president,’ a video recording of the event shows.”

That event, which took place in Orlando, Florida on March 6, 2021, was a meeting of the group Frontliners for Liberty — and the speaker was the Rev. C.L. Bryant, a Baptist minister and far-right radio host who has also been active in FreedomWorks.Although Bryant endorsed Sen. Ted Cruz in the 2016 GOP presidential primary, he later became an ardent supporter of Trump and the MAGA movement.

A video of the March 6, 2021 event posted on Facebook, according to the Post, shows Bryant saying, “There is a robbery that is going on in this country right now. In fact, I say it to you, and I’ll say it loud and clear — and I’m not ashamed to say it. I won’t bite my tongue. I do believe that Donald John Trump is the only legitimate president.”

Brown, Stanley-Becker and Helderman note that Frontliners for Liberty “vaulted from obscurity to national attention last week with the disclosure that Thomas had invited pro-Trump lawyer John Eastman to speak to its members in December 2020.”

“While text messages and e-mails unearthed in recent weeks have shown that Thomas was involved in those efforts before January 6,” the Post reporters note, “her attendance at the Orlando gathering indicates that her alliance with election deniers continued even after Joe Biden was inaugurated. Frontliners has hosted hard-right lawmakers, insisted on strict secrecy and proclaimed that the nation’s top enemy is the ‘radical fascist left,’ according to social media posts, court filings and interviews with several people involved in the group.”

The reporters add, “One photograph from the Orlando event shows Bryant posing with Thomas. Others show Thomas wearing a name tag decorated with a yellow ribbon she and others wore saying ‘Trouble Maker.’”

Frontliners for Liberty, according to the Post, has made a point of being secretive. Eastman, in a filing in May, said the group operates in a “cone of silence” — which is a “Get Smart” reference from the 1960s. The “cone of silence” was a fictional device on the 1960s television comedy “Get Smart,” which famously blended slapstick humor with the espionage/secret agent genre.

Eastman quoted an e-mail from Frontliners for Liberty, which read, “We are careful about who is on the phone and who is in the room and we do not leak what happens, what is said or who is in the meeting — ever!”

Although Ginni Thomas has claimed that she keeps her work as a MAGA activist separate from her husband’s work on the U.S. Supreme Court, critics of the Thomases believe that Justice Thomas is guilty of some major conflicts of interest. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York City has called for Justice Thomas to either resign or be impeached, although her recommendation hasn’t gotten much support from fellow Democrats.

Clarence Thomas hasn’t recused himself from cases involving the 2020 election. And even though his wife has been a major anti-abortion activist, he is among the justices who joined Justice Samuel Alito in a majority draft opinion that called for overturning Roe v. Wade.

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/southern-baptist-convention/

On Tuesday, June 15, some supporters of former President Donald Trump were bitterly disappointed when the Southern Baptist Convention chose the Rev. Ed Litton, an Alabama pastor, as its president and rejected some of the more extreme Trumpians who were competing for the position — including the Rev. Mike Stone, who was supported by the far-right Conservative Baptist Network. Journalist Molly Olmstead analyzes this development in an article published by Slate on June 17. As Olmstead sees it, Litton's narrow victory shows a move away from Trumpism among Baptists.

"The SBC has been going through something like an identity crisis this year," Olmsted explains. "Southern Baptists, like most White evangelicals, voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, but in the run-up to the 2020 election, critics began to chafe at the frequently conspiracy theory-laden partisan politics within their churches. After last summer's racial unrest, many of the denomination's Black pastors — actively courted by a Convention uncomfortably aware of its overwhelming whiteness and deeply racist history — began to protest the SBC's unwillingness to recognize the extent of modern-day racism. At the same time, an organized group of Southern Baptists has pushed for a second conservative resurgence to correct what it sees as a loosening of the core Southern Baptist identity."

Baptists who believe that the Southern Baptist Convention should be MAGA through and through favored Stone, a Georgia-based pastor. But 52% of the vote went to Litton, who is White and politically conservative but believes that Baptists should have at least have a conversation about race. The Trumpians at the 2021 Southern Baptist Convention were pushing for things like an official position against critical race theory, which has become a boogieman in right-wing media. Critical race theory is a field of study that examines the history of racism in the U.S. and the ways in which racism of the past has an effect on institutions of the present.

"Critical race theory has been a contentious topic within the SBC for months longer than its more recent turn in the media spotlight," Olmstead observes. "When Donald Trump was nearing the end of his presidency this fall, he launched a sudden attack on the teaching of critical race theory, an academic approach to analyzing the systems that have created and perpetuated racial inequality. As the anti-CRT sentiments quietly percolated in certain circles thanks to the president's comments, the conservatives of the SBC seized on the issue."

Although many Baptists identify with the far-right White evangelical movement, some African-American Baptists are outspoken supporters of liberal and progressive causes — the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, for example. The far-right Rev. Jerry Falwell, Sr., the late founder of the Moral Majority and a one-time segregationist and supporter of Jim Crow laws, was a Baptist — but so was Dr. Martin Luther, King, Jr., a civil rights icon. There were heated debates among Baptists during the 1950s and 1960s, and there are still heated debates among Baptists in 2021.

Olmstead notes, "In November, well ahead of the Republican Party's current uproar over CRT, the seminary presidents put out a joint statement calling the framework 'incompatible' with the Baptist Faith and Message, the SBC's central doctrinal statement. Critical race theory, they argued, was counter to their faith because the Bible, which evangelicals view as the literal and unerring word of God, should be the only tool for addressing the evils of the world. These comments essentially reversed a previous position the SBC had taken back in 2019, when the convention passed a resolution allowing critical race theory and intersectionality to be used as analytical tools as long as they were second to scripture."

And in 2021, Olmstead adds, "most observers came out of the meeting with a sense that the delegates had put the brakes on the convention's careening path toward the right."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

tool/site:

http://www.politicalresearch.org/research/christian-right

eg FRC

http://www.politicalresearch.org/2020/07/01/crumbling-cornerstone-christian-right

no lnx

The Family Research Council (FRC), a leading organization of the Christian Right has long featured Christian nationalist ideology in its materials and events — including speakers at its annual political conference, the Values Voter Summit. But those days may be over.

FRC’s new 2020 election resource, authored by David Closser, Biblical Principles for Political Engagement: Worldview, Issues, and Voting drops the claim that America was founded as a Christian Nation, and relies solely on an open ended Dominionist argument — which it also casts as non-partisan. But one could be forgiven, if after a close reading, one were to think that in the FRC worldview, biblical means Republican.

The guide takes 31 pages (plus notes) to conclude that Christians are “biblically obliged” to vote; that they should vote primarily according a candidate’s views on “abortion and human sexuality,” and that there is no room for disagreement.

“The Republican party,” Closser declares, “has generally embraced policy positions on abortion and human sexuality that are consistent with Scripture, while the Democratic Party has embraced positions on these issues that are at odds with Scripture.”

He says, however, that there may be “room for disagreement,” on matters of race and poverty.

“For our purposes,” Closson continued, “it will suffice to note that the need to care for the poor and marginalized is evident in the Bible. However, the Bible does not outline a specific remedy.” But he insists that it’s unfair to think that Republicans are “against the poor” just because “conservatives believe in the efficacy of limited government and free markets in addressing poverty.”

He declares that “church leaders” should do more than address moral questions in sermons and pray “for those in positions of authority.” He demands that they “carry ideas to their logical conclusion” and “describe practical action steps… and the reality of our two-party system.”

Closson goes on to compare evangelicals who prefer to be apolitical, to those who were complicit in the horrors of Nazi Germany and South African apartheid. He uses these loaded analogies to try to manipulate fellow Christians into political participation under the direction of FRC.

“[I]t is not enough,” he declares, “to acknowledge that various policy positions are profoundly evil and yet not encourage action.”

It is striking that an organization that was once so unambiguously Christian Nationalist makes no appeal to Christian nationalism in their 2020 election year resource.

In any case, old habits of mind die hard. Closson managed to shoehorn-in the strawman argument on which so much of the Christian Nationalist argument depends. Buried in the third endnote he claims that “progressive secular elites” are telling conservative Christians that they are violating the idea of separation of church and state “by bringing their beliefs into the public square.” The Founders, he claims, “did not intend to erect a “wall of separation” between all expressions of faith in God and all aspects of public life.”

As is de rigeur in the knocking down of this strawman, Closson offers no examples of anyone who says that Christians should be banned from the public square.In any case, Jefferson did not intend his metaphorical wall of separation to limit public expressions of faith and no responsible person makes any such claim. The wall of separation is intended to protect the rights of all citizens by at once preventing government coopting of religious institutions, and by thwarting religious factions as a matter of constitutional proscription, from enshrining their religious views in laws and public policy. These are of course, the very aims of Donald Trump and his Christian Right allies. And that is why it is significant that the most important political formation of the Christian Right has demonstrated that it is terrified of non-theocratic Christians and opponents of Christian Nationalism, who believe in religious freedom, pluralism, and separation of church and state.

I wrote an article in The Public Eye in January 2018, titled A Manual to Restore a Christian Nation that Never Was, about the FRC’s grassroots political organizing manual I had picked up at the 2017 Values Voter Summit. The manual sought to justify conservative Christian political action and government by fusing the Christian nationalist ideal with the Dominionist notion of Biblical Principles informed by a Biblical Worldview. A significantly revised edition, published later in 2018, an election year, elided almost all of the Christian nationalist material, relying instead on the Dominionist argument. (Among other things, it encouraged pastors to urge their “congregation to vote their Biblical values.”) But it is striking that an organization that was once so unambiguously Christian Nationalist makes no appeal to Christian nationalism in their 2020 election year resource, issued by FRC and 21 state affiliates.

All this suggests that what the Christian Right has long treated as a strength was actually, or has become, a weakness.

Christian Nationalism Inside Out

The Christian nationalist idea has long been challenged by activists, scholars and journalists, and has been followed by a surge of critical writing and political action in the past year alone. A number of books, have, for example, gained wide attention. These include The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, by Katherine Stewart; The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American by Andrew Seidel; Taking Back America for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States by Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry; and Revolution of Values: Reclaiming Public Faith for the Common Good, by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove.

There has also been considerable media coverage of the Christian nationalism of the secretive state legislative campaign, Project Blitz, including a statewide controversy in Minnesota that gained national attention. Simultaneously, a wide range of religious, secular and civil rights organizations have actively opposed Project Blitz’s overt and covert activities.

Christians who are opposed to Christian Nationalism are notably visible. William Barber and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove of the Poor People’s Campaign have called out Christian Nationalism and denounced it as “heresy.” Barber and Wilson-Hartgrove, joined by Katherine Stewart, all say that the contemporary Christian nationalism and antiabortionism, are a continuation of the politics of White Supremacy since the successes of the Civil Rights movement that made overt racial politics much less palatable.

The BJC (Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Liberty) launched a campaign in 2019, called Christians Against Christian Nationalism. They called it “a persistent threat to both our religious communities and our democracy.” They warned, “Christian nationalism seeks to merge Christian and American identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America’s constitutional democracy;” and that “It often overlaps with and provides cover for white supremacy and racial subjugation.”

And the BJC and others have continued the Campaign.

Amanda Tyler, executive director of BJC, wrote, in response to Donald Trump’s now infamous June 1st stunt – in which he wielded an upside down bible for a photo-op in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church across Lafayette Park from the White House after clearing away protestors with mounted police and tear gas: “For many, the display had nothing to do with Christianity,” she said, “but instead was an egregious example of Christian nationalism with its attempted merging of religious authority and political authority…. that merging of authority is ‘idolatrous and often leads to oppression of minority and other marginalized groups as well as the spiritual impoverishment of religion.’”

Barber, Tyler, and the thousands of endorsers of the Campaign show that there is a religious and not just an historical, secular, or political argument to be made about Christian nationalism. Their high profile entry into this struggle may someday be seen as a turning point in the battle for the narrative of American history, and perhaps the story of Christianity as well.

Retreat or Retrench?

Several Christian Right leaders, led by Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council were alarmed by the Baptists’ campaign in the summer of 2019. They went so far as to deny that there was any such thing as Christian Nationalism. Perkins was joined in this by David Closser, FRC’s Director of Christian Ethics and Biblical Worldview, Mark Tooley of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, and even Christian nationalist author David Barton himself.

This seemed like an odd overreaction at the time, but now that Tony Perkins and the Family Research Council are close political and governing partners with Donald Trump’s Republican Party, their roles have changed, sometimes awkwardly. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell appointed Perkins to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom in May 2018 – a few months after the publication of my essay “A Christian Manual that Never Was,” related reporting by Paul Rosenberg in Salon, and a frantic response from Perkins in his national Washington Watch newsletter. Since then, the FRC has largely eliminated expressions of Christian nationalism from its public profile. Perkins now chairs the Commission.

Here’s the rub.

Religious nationalism of any variety, and all of the attendant bigotries that go with it –– runs against the grain of the mission of the USCIRF –– which by statute seeks to advance the values of religious freedom as a human right recognized in international law and treaties, notably Article 18 of theUniversal Declaration of Human Rights. The Declaration affirms that:

“Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”

The USCIRF asserts that “The freedom of religion or belief is an expansive right that includes the freedoms of thought and conscience, and is intertwined with the freedoms of expression, association, and assembly.”

In religious nationalist ideologies, the favored group seeks governmental power to enforce its views and, as the Christian Right has shown, treating anyone other than the favored faction as second-class citizens at best. And this is the paradox of Perkins’ role: Downplaying the overt Christian nationalist rhetoric that helped propel his movement to political power, while continuing to advance the theocratic goals of the Christian Right.

That’s why some of the avatars of Christian Nationalism are in retreat. The anti-democratic Christian supremacist ideology, and distorted historical narrative of Christian nationalism stands exposed, and its crumbling foundation that may no longer be able to support the movement on which it was built.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/council-for-national-policy/

Welcome to Moyers on Democracy. What is the shadow network behind the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court? Who selected and groomed her for this moment? Who's financing the campaign to get her confirmed? Who's counting on her to side with President Trump if he's losing the election and wants the Supreme Court to declare him the winner? For the answers, Bill Moyers talks to journalist and investigator Anne Nelson about her book: SHADOW NETWORK: MEDIA, MONEY, AND THE SECRET HUB OF THE RADICAL RIGHT. In it, she exposes the powerful and little-known Council for National Policy, the organization behind the conservative movement of the past 40 years – from Ronald Reagan's secret war in Central America to their success in turning the Supreme Court into the Trump Court. Ms. Nelson has received the Livingston Award for her journalism and a Guggenheim Fellowship for historical research. Here to talk with her is Bill Moyers[vid]

MOYERS: Let me begin with the most current part of the story, which comes just a little bit after your book is published when the conservative movement is facing a very decisive encounter with the very forces it's been trying to defeat now for 40 years. How do you think the shadow network reads the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court? What are they making of it?

ANNE NELSON: Well, I think that they consider it a great triumph and a kind of culmination of 40 years of effort. And I demure a bit at the term conservative because this is, for me, the radical right. It is so far to the right of mainstream American public opinion that I feel that it's in a different category both in terms of its ideology and its tactics. But they decided way back in the day of Paul Weyrich, one of the architects of the movement that they–

BILL MOYERS: In the early 1970s, right?

Read an excerpt]

ANNE NELSON: We're going back to the '70s and even earlier, because he was active on the Barry Goldwater campaign. And he was frustrated time and again by moderates in the Republican Party and people who were willing to work with Democrats to advance policy and solutions to public problems. And he created organizations and tactics that he openly declared should destroy the regime, as he called it, which would be the U.S. government as we've known it for the last century.

BILL MOYERS: Paul Weyrich is the man I remember saying–

PAUL WEYRICH: I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populous goes down.

BILL MOYERS: He was essentially saying, as a newly anointed leader of the religious right, what their philosophy was. The fewer people vote, the better their chance.

ANNE NELSON: That's right. And from the beginning, in terms of their electoral tactics, it has been a matter of weaponizing certain churches and pastors and really exerting tremendous pressure on them to use churches as instruments of a radical right ideology. And then using similar tactics to suppress votes for Democrats, especially in key battleground states.

BILL MOYERS: So that's why you conclude in your book they were to the right of the Republican Party. They were not just an offshoot of the Republican Party. They were not just fundraisers for the Republican Party, but they were ideologically and organizationally taking the Republican Party far to the right.

ANNE NELSON: Absolutely, and somewhat to my surprise, I found that their prototype was the Southern Baptist Convention, where they decided that in order to move it to the right, they had to use questionable tactics to elevate their supporters to key positions of influence and purge the Southern Baptist Convention of moderates in the seminaries and in the colleges and among the pastors. And it was a fairly ruthless process, and once these tactics were developed, they applied it to the Republican Party. And you had the same kind of tactics going on of purging moderates, some of whom had been in office for years.

BILL MOYERS: I should point out to some of our younger listeners and readers that the Southern Baptist Convention at the time and still today was the largest Protestant denomination in America. You know, something like it eventually reached 16 and a half million members scattered throughout the South and the West. We'll come back to them in a moment. What do you think about the NEW YORK TIMES' assessment that Amy Coney Barrett represents a new conservativism rooted in faith. That's how their headline described a three-page portrait of her life and career. Does that make sense to you?

ANNE NELSON: Not entirely, because as a conservative Catholic, she follows in the footsteps of others such as Brett Kavanaugh and Antonin Scalia. So that's not very new. And what I look at in my book SHADOW NETWORK is how these interlocking organizations support each other. The book is about the Council for National Policy– a radical right-wing organization that is very secretive, and it brings together big donors like the DeVos family and oil interests from Texas and Oklahoma and political operatives. And, for example, members include the leadership of the Federalist Society. Well, Amy Coney Barrett was a member of the Federalist Society for a number of years and is still a speaker at their events. It includes the head of Hillsdale College, which is one of their campus partners. Amy ConeyBarrett was commencement speaker for Hillsdale College this year.So, there are all of these organizations that have been turning their wheels to promote her really for several years going back. She appeared on previous lists of potential nominees for the Supreme Court, and I don't believe she would have been included in those lists had she not confirmed to their traditional idea of an activist judge.

BILL MOYERS: They knew what they were looking for.

ANNE NELSON: And I should add thatone of the most powerful components in the Council for National Policy is the anti-abortion movement.Organizations such as the Susan B. Anthony List and Concerned Women for America and other interests, which are anti-environmentalist interests from the fossil fuels industry. So, I think that we've seen a roadmap of what to expect moving forward.

BILL MOYERS: Tell me, who does make up the Council for National Policy?

ANNE NELSON: So, theCouncil for National Policyhas traditionally been around 400 members. From the beginning, it's included people with big money, a lot of them from the Texas and Oklahoma oil industries, but also the DeVos family of Michigan from the Amway fortune, and Betsy DeVos, of course. So, it has the big money to pay for things. It's got the leaders of so-called grassroots organizations. Now, I say so-called, because they do not spring from the grassroots the way that you would expect from the name. They are organized with a great deal of money from the top down. So, for example, the National Rifle Association– their leadership is part of the CNP. They get money from the donors, they organize their millions of members, and you combine these with the strategists and the media owners. And I spend a lot of time in my book talking about thepower of fundamentalist and conservative radio in swing states. Things that people on the East Coast overlook to a terrible degree. And the same thing with fundamentalist broadcasting, which has really several of these broadcasters — the Christian Broadcasting Network, the Trinity Broadcasting Network have really turned into outlets replicating the messaging from this organization. So, you have them interlocking and interacting and each supporting each other's function. And I should explain something here, which is that they represent historically a white, Protestant, I'm sorry, but male-dominated patriarchy–

BILL MOYERS: No, that's okay.

ANNE NELSON: And I have to say that demographically its time has passed. The United States has become more diverse religiously, ethnically, and racially. And they recognize that their core positions are not supported by the majority of Americans. So, they went to the limit, pulled out all the stops to get Trump elected by a tiny margin, but they doubt that they can do that again. The signs are not good. What they can do is make their hold on the federal courts concrete through the Supreme Court, and therefore, get majorities in cases like gerrymandering, voter suppression, and their political activation of the churches with tax-exempt status. And further their hold on power through the courts.

BILL MOYERS: So which part of the shadow network do you think chose, mentored, and groomed Amy Coney Barrett for this moment?

ANNE NELSON: Well, I have to speculate here. But I would see a fairly straight line from her position toLeonard Leo's. Now, Leonard Leo is a very conservative Catholic. He was the operational figure of the Federalist Society for a number of years, and recently he shifted from that position to an even more activist position. Amy Coney Barrett was already a member of the Federalist Society. The Federalist Society has a pipeline through the lower federal courts, which she benefited from. So, in terms of this Catholic interaction they would be quite close to each other. Another key figure is Carrie Severino, who is from the Judicial Crisis Network, which was co-founded by Leonard Leo. And again, very right-wing Catholics who have tended to be overlooked while people focus on the fundamentalist Protestants.But Ralph Reed, who has been somebody who's been active with the fundamentalist politicization for decades declared openly years ago that the next step to their campaign was to enlist the Catholic vote. And they've been aggressively doing that in recent years.

BILL MOYERS: And then there's Don McGahn who was for three years Donald Trump's chief White House counsel, graduate of Notre Dame, admirer of Amy Coney Barrett, who was scouting himself for recruits to bring up, train, groom, and put into the mix for potential Supreme Court justices. And I read that he was highly enthusiastic about her, had talked to Leo and that they had you had both these White House and legal forces behind her, knowing that she was one of them.

ANNE NELSON: Yes. And I would guess that they suffered enough embarrassment over the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and the discussion of possible sexual harassment that was involved, that it was a convenient moment to bring a female to the top of the list to avoid that. So, there were a number of elements in her favor. I should add that in the process of these nominationsTrump cut a deal in 2016 with this movement, and it was publicly reported that he was going to accept lists of nominees from three organizations run by Council for National Policy members: the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and the National Rifle Association, believe it or not. And he has actually followed suit with that. The Federalist Society has taken the leadon this, but you will find the Heritage Foundation in the background of all of these proceedings, as well as the NRA.

BILL MOYERS: Did you see anybody from the shadow network at the White House when President Trump announced her nomination? Could you identify any there as members of the Council for National Policy?

ANNE NELSON: Why, as a matter of fact, I could. I've got the September 2020 membership list. So, I went through U.S.A. Today's publication of who was present at that event, which has been called the COVID superspreader event on September 29th. And what I found was that they had six members of the White House staff, nine members of congress, and 14 current members of the Council for National Policy.

BILL MOYERS: Fourteen?

The moment of truth in those hearings came when she [Amy Coney Barrett] was asked if it was against the law to interfere with the vote in a federal election. And she couldn't answer that. Which to me demonstrated either an ignorance of the law or a disregard for the law that is truly alarming on the eve of an election.

ANNE NELSON: Fourteen, and 12 of them were from the leadership bodies, the board of governors, and the gold circle elite members.So, they were there in force. They were having a victory dance this was a culmination of plans that had been in the works for decades.

BILL MOYERS: But if she is willing to put people at risk that way, to go along with the president in ignoring guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control, are we okay in asking questions about her judgment? I mean, could she not have said, “Mr. President, I'm honored by this nomination, but can you wait until there's better days for us to do this?"

ANNE NELSON: I think that statement would have required someone who could restrain their ambition. And for me, the moment of truth in those hearings came when she was asked if it was against the law to interfere with the vote in a federal election. And she couldn't answer that either. Which to me demonstrated either an ignorance of the law or a disregard for the law that is truly alarming on the eve of an election.

BILL MOYERS: I was noticing in a story in THE WASHINGTON POST that the Council for National Policy had a three-day meeting in Southern California. And one member — a woman named Rachel Bovard — described Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Thomas as a crucial link to the White House. “She is one of the most powerful and fierce women in Washington. She is really the tip of the spear in these efforts." Did you come across Ginni Thomas in your book?

ANNE NELSON: I came across her repeatedly, and she has risen to the rank of the executive committee of CNP Action, which is their lobbying arm. She also is very active with another CNP member named Charlie Kirk who runs something called Turning Point U.S.A. She's also a so-called correspondent for a right-wing media platform called The Daily Caller, which is owned by members of the Council for National Policy. So, Ginni Thomas, who is from Omaha is married to a Supreme Court justice and is both a public and behind-the-scenes radical right-wing activist across the country. I don't know what the protocol is for spouses of Supreme Court justices, but I find it difficult to believe that people think this is appropriate.

BILL MOYERS: But what struck me about that is that so many of the characters that are now on stage in the third and fourth year of Trump's administration are clearly linked by the Council for National Policy, something few Americans have heard of. How did you come upon it?

ANNE NELSON: In my early 20s, I was a reporter in El Salvador. And from there, I joined the staff of Human Rights Watch. And so, I knew a lot about death squads in El Salvador, and learned in writing this book that the Council for National Policy and its partners had hosted death squad leader, Roberto d'Aubuisson,in Washington. An idea that was just shocking to me. They were heavily involved in the Contras during the Reagan administration. The support for the extreme right wing in El Salvador. I didn't know that at the time. I circled back to them decades later. I was in my hometown of Stillwater, Oklahoma, driving to Walmart and had the radio on. And started hearing some radio accusations against John Kerry who was running for president at the time, that shocked me, because the local preacher was claiming thatJohn Kerry would make heterosexual marriages unsanctified by promoting marriage equality. And it was a very strange statement. So later I started tracking who owned that radio station, and then I found out it belonged to a group of radio stations owned by members of the Council for National Policy. And then I said, “Well, what's that?" And, as you know, an investigative reporter just keeps pulling at the thread until something emerges.They were incredibly secretive, and I think it's only thanks to the internet and things that they've inadvertently published online that's made this research even possible.

BILL MOYERS: Let me summarize what I take away from your book the SHADOW NETWORK. You say that, for thesepast four decades, it's been a strategic nerve center for channeling money and mobilizing votes out of sight, correct?

ANNE NELSON: Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: How did they get away with that?

ANNE NELSON: Well, I say a few times in the book that I think the Democrats have been asleep at the wheel. But part of the problem is rooted in our crisis in journalism. Because when I was growing up, you had lots of vibrant local newspapers that published AP and New York Times syndicate stories on international and national news, as well as the local news and the basketball scores. And you had a population across the country that was working from the same page, as it were. These newspapers have been dying off. They have lost their business model due to the digital revolution and the economic crises. And nature abhors a vacuum. In their place, these fundamentalist radio stations and this engine for misinformation has taken their place. And it makes me angry. When you lose the local professional news organizations, the substitutes can lead people down a terribly damaging path. TIMPONE LOVAL LABS

BILL MOYERS: How do you connect that to the growth of the Council for National Policy.

ANNE NELSON: They use a lot of stalking horses in terms of their organizations. So, I think most people wouldn't think of the National Rifle Association as primarily a political organization. Certainly, they didn't in the 1970s. It was kind of a shooting club. It's been converted into a political organization. And that has happened with tens of thousands of churches. And I grew up in those communities. I don't think my friends and neighbors and family members went to church thinking, “We're going to go get told how to vote." That's not what they went for. But now that's what they get. And they are given voting guides in the sanctuaries inserted into the church bulletin, right? You turn the page from thehymn, and there you get the voting guide basically telling you to vote for a Republican. But it doesn't have the signature of the Council for National Policy. It just says, iVoterGuide produced by the Family Research Council,whose president has been the president of the Council for National Policy. So, you've got t0 connect the dots, but the dots are all there and highly connectable. You have people who are identifying with organizations, and they're looking at news media such as The Daily Caller, such as the Christian Broadcasting Network, such as Salem Media, which are tied into this system.And it's not about journalism. It's about messaging: we're going to tell you what to think.

BILL MOYERS: But this organization started, with a handful of people. How did they multiply their effect so thoroughly throughout our political system that they now dominate. How did that happen?

ANNE NELSON: Well, I think that what you had is this odd element of our electoral system where theelectoral collegecarries this weight. And a lot of candidates for national office focus on the popular vote, but the strategists like Paul Weyrich and others realize that the popular vote is actually irrelevant. The electoral college is what elects our president. So, what they figured out how to do was identify critical bands of voters who were corresponding to these mostly religious organizations in critical states. If you could reach these millions of voters, many of whom were not engaged, and convince them that it was a sin to vote for a Democrat, then you could win the state. And if you won the right states, you'd win the electoral college. And they worked on this approach over various decades. And they kept going to various Republican candidates and bringing their voters to them and trying to cut a deal where they would deliver the response in terms of power.

And I have to say that, a number of presidents including Reagan and the first President Bush had those conversations and reneged on the deal, right? They did not deliver the cabinet appointments. They did not deliver the reactionary social policies. And what they found with Trump was a transactional president who didn't really care about abortion or gay marriage or any of the rest of it. He just wanted the office. So, he cut a deal and he honored it. And he gave the former president of the Council for National Policy, Tony Perkins, carte blanche to write elements of the Republican Party platform in 2016, which have been just renewed for 2020 without amendment. So, they worked behind the scenes. It's been influence peddling, and it's been big, big money. The book traces hundreds of millions of dollars that have sloshed around in this circular way where the DeVoses fund the Koch brothers' operations. And the Koch brothers fund the DeVoses and Foster Friess funds The Daily Caller. And when you have the Democrats not paying sufficient attention to the swing states, when you have the local media in a state of collapse, that is the window of opportunity.

Strategists like Paul Weyrich and others realize that the popular vote is actually irrelevant. The electoral college is what elects our president. So, what they figured out how to do was identify critical bands of voters.]

BILL MOYERS: So, we have the pastors on one side and the plutocrats on the other side. You have this alliance between very dogmatic, religious zealots and men of huge wealth whose interest is not in piety. What joins them?

ANNE NELSON: Well, I think that, in religious terms, it's all about mammon.

BILL MOYERS: Mammon being the biblical term for money.

ANNE NELSON: That's right.

BILL MOYERS: The biblical metaphor for money.

ANNE NELSON: Yes. I keep looking at their so-called positions of principle. And, you know, you scratch at them and they don't go very deep. But what you do have with the Kochs' and the DeVoses and the various fossil fuel interests are people who've made immense fortunes and are terrified of losing their economic power. But also, these people don't want to pay taxes, and so pushing through a tax bill that favored the fraction of a 1% was a priority. And Donald Trump and the Republican Senate delivered it.

BILL MOYERS: The Washington Post last week released some video of the August meeting of the Council for National Policy. Let me just read a few things that were said at that meeting. Videos provided to the Post covering dozens of hours of CNP meetings over three days in February and three in August offer an inside view of participants' obsessions. Here are some of the things that were said:

BILL WALTON: This is a spiritual battle we're in. This is good versus evil. We have to do everything we can to win.

BILL MOYERS: –said the Council for National Policy's executive committee president, Bill Walton. Ralph Reed, chairman of the nonprofit, Faith and Freedom Coalition told the CNP audience that conservatives are going to be harvesting ballots in churches. “We're going to be specifically going in, not only to white evangelical churches, but into Hispanic and Asian churches and collecting those ballots.'" And then, here's the one that really stands out. At that meeting, J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department official and the president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a charity, described mail-in voting as the number one left-wing agenda. He urged the activists not to worry about the criticism that might come their way. Quote, “Be not afraid of the accusations that you're a voter suppressor." Any of that surprise you?

ANNE NELSON: Not in the least. On the contrary, you'll find the footprints of those statements in my book. One of the techniques that this movement has used is using data profiles and directing information to voters to either get them to vote for Republicans or to suppress the vote if they're not likely to. The Koch brothers brought state-of-the-art political data operations to the table with an organization called i360. And that was harnessed to organizations that were run by CNP members.

So, for example, one of them was the Susan B. Anthony List, which is anti-abortion. One of them was the NRA. They also combined data from churches and from political data and consumer data. So that allowed canvassers for these organizations to do their door-to-door canvassing having a huge amount of information about each individual voter, and a tailored individual script for them. So, for example, if you are canvassing in Springfield, Missouri, and you're working for the Susan B. Anthony List, you know that at such-and-such an address, there's a Catholic housewife with six kids there who watched an anti-abortion film on Netflix and ordered LIVES OF THE SAINTS from Amazon. You have all of that in your cell phone, and you also have a script that's been prepared and tailored for that voter, right? But you're going to have a totally different script based on the data for the next-door neighbor who's a gun owner who's all about the second amendment.

And the Democrats have lagged behind, not in terms of the data they have, but the way they've networked data across state lines and to organizations that are doing their political groundwork. So that's been a factor.The use of data has been very important in the last few campaigns, and not always well-understood. But there's also a really important matter of how data is used to suppress votes. And that's where I would direct people to a news story done by Channel Four in Britain. The Council for National Policy partners and the Koch brothers' data platform i360 used data from Cambridge Analyticawith several hundred million voters, with some2,000 data points for every voter. So that includes you and me, Bill, okay? They know a lot about us, and so what they did in this story documenting what happened with African Americans in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was find that if voters were not likely to vote for Republicans. If they leaned Democratic, they would target them with misinformation that would disincline them to vote at all. And in other cases, such as what's been documented in Michigan, some 90,000 African American voters were persuaded not to vote for the top of the ticket for Hillary Clinton by these methods. So, in these states, they always go by very, very narrow margins. So, I would argue that a lot of these data operations, some of them of questionable legality, have actually changed the course of electoral history.

BILL MOYERS: What do you think they're doing for this election in two weeks?

ANNE NELSON: Well, we know that the Trump 2020 app has highly questionable practices, in terms of its privacy and the way it accesses people's cell phone directories, all of their contacts, friends and family, and then sends messages out to them, often without the user knowing that they're doing it. They also combine that with consumer data. So, for example, if you downloaded their app on one phone that was a different account, they could trace your credit card records back to your own account. They also use geolocation, so once you download the app, they figure out where you are and what kind of messaging would appeal to you and leverage you to attract other voters. And they use this through beacons that are placed around areas like political rallies and churches, right, to locate the people with the apps and then engage them for political purpose. It has been recently revealed that thesebeacons had even been implanted in Trump yard signs. So, they're really, I would say, on the cutting edge of political technology. And it's in this very murky area of law where there are abusive practices involving privacy, but there's no clear legal framework to govern it.

BILL MOYERS: And what stuns me is their ability to connect this very sophisticated information gained by very up-to-date, modern technology to a lot of poor pastors in East Texas and Southern Alabama who are concerned about the state of the world. And here, they've been led into, one of the most sophisticated political campaigns that really has not their interest at heart. And they become soldiers in the crusade–

ANNE NELSON: Absolutely. And again, these are the people I grew up with, and I see a lot of cases where the pastors have been bullied into it. And they say, “Wait a minute, I want people to come to church and reflect on spirituality. We're not here to run a political campaign."

BILL MOYERS: Yet the fact remains, as you make clear in the book, that they have a very acute grasp of electoral college politics. How do you win the 270 votes of the electoral college, even if you lost the popular vote? How did they get there?

ANNE NELSON: Well, they work harder at it. I think they worked harder at it than the Democrats have. They've got a pollster named George Barna.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah.

ANNE NELSON: And he has paid a lot of attention to these voters. He has identified characteristics to them, and one of them is that older white evangelicals from largely rural areas have a 91% turnout at the polling places. That is powerful. And that's something where it's not exactly fashionable in Democratic circles to talk about that. And why we should have a dialogue with these voters. So, when you get that information, and when you work over and over again to refine messaging that will touch a nerve with these groups, some of it's misinformation, and some of it's just hard work and smart strategy.

BILL MOYERS: And they have enlisted these fundamentalist white churches to serve as their political proxies by doing smart things, like inviting them on junkets that the CNP pays for, writing sermons for them to download, producing their church bulletins for them, and delivering voter guidesto them for distribution to their congregations. That's down at the very grassroots. And they do it.

ANNE NELSON: They've even constructed a multi-million-dollar Museum of the Bible, steps from Capitol Hill. And it's really a kind of monument to conservative fundamentalist political ideology.

BILL MOYERS: It's really a remarkable turn of American politics in the last 40 years, and you have written a very smart, detailed, informative, and narratively-driven book on it. You say, in your epilogue, in the beginning, there were the Southern Baptists, and there were two of them in particular, Pastor Paige Patterson — who became president of the Baptist seminary I had attended long before him — and a state judge named Paul Pressler. In effect, you say, they started it all. The Southern Baptists were the core.

ANNE NELSON: They were kind of the godfathers, I would say, yeah.

BILL MOYERS: Southern Baptists had long believed in the inerrancy of the Bible, that the Bible is literally God's word. But my generation of Baptists were discovering historical criticism of the Bible and began to change the denomination. And what Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler did was to alarm the Baptists who still believed in the literal meaning of the Bible and said, “They're going to take it away from you if you're not careful." And so they were able to drive the moderate leaders out of the Southern Baptist Convention and replace them with literalist, fundamentalist pastors from churches around the country, including some very large churches. And before we knew it, the Southern Baptist Convention had become a radically conservative Republican denomination.

ANNE NELSON: Yeah, and I see that as tragic, because it divides families, it divides communities. It changes the nature of spirituality in these communities. But then you see those tactics, which are all about power, right? And they're replicated in the Republican Party. Same thing happens. You drive out the moderates, you defeat the moderates, and you replace them with ideologues or card-carrying members of the movement. And I think we can look at Amy Coney Barrett as another iteration of the same thing. What you're doing is weeding out the moderate and liberal judges and replacing them with people who will march to this beat. And traditionally, that's not been the principle for our court. People could say, “The courts need to have some kind of standard that's open to all Americans," not something that's driving a particular minority ideology. So, for me, that's the glaring danger that's facing our democracy.

BILL MOYERS: And you sum up the Council for National Policy as, “An elite club of high-powered fundamentalists, oligarchs, and their allies, deploying a media empire to flood the country with propaganda, bankrolling handpicked colleges to promote extremist Libertarian ideas, and to groom up and coming politicians," and I would say judges, “to advance its cause." And you say this is all aimed at the very heart of democracy.

ANNE NELSON: Well, democracy is the blind man and the elephant, because my democracy is an America where people from diverse religions and national backgrounds came together and chose to live together under the rule of law. It aspired to give everyone equal opportunity and rights as citizens. And I don't want another religion imposing its practice on me, that's not my idea of being an American or respecting my fellow Americans. If their idea of the American ideal is so different, I would think they'd have to show some evidence that the majority of Americans saw it their way. And the evidence is all to the contrary and moving in the opposite direction. So that's why we're seeing so many manifestations of questionable maneuvers for securing power, as opposed to winning it through the ballot box. We've got two weeks before the elections. Then we've got another period which is the interregnum until the inauguration. But then we're going to have this entire cohort in the judiciary which is going to be defining our public life for years, perhaps decades to come. So I'm afraid it's going to be no rest for the weary. The cliche is, “Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom." And I think that eternal vigilance is going to be very important for everyone who wants to defend other people's rights.

BILL MOYERS: Anne Nelson, thank you so much for SHADOW NETWORK: MEDIA, MONEY, AND THE SECRET HUB OF THE RADICAL RIGHT. And thank you for your time today.

ANNE NELSON: Thank you so much, Bill.

ANNOUNCER:Thanks for listening to Moyers on Democracy. On our website, you can read an excerpt from Anne Nelson's book. Until next time, you'll find all this and more at Billmoyers.com.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Baptist church SBC

Contents

Education

Career

Proponent of expository preaching

Role in the SBC conservative resurgence

Seminary president

Views on women

Women faculty at SWBTS

Abuse cover-up

Removal as president of SWBTS and firing

From president to president emeritus and theologian-in-residence

Fired from all positions at SWBTS

Impact beyond SWBTS

Backlash to Patterson's firing

Patterson's public ministry since firing

Lawsuit for handling of rape allegations

See also

Paige Patterson Fired by Southwestern, Stripped of ...

Why the SBC Published a Report Alleging Paige Patterson's ...

Southern Baptist seminary admitted sex offender under Paige ...

Paige Patterson - Wikipedia

Amid SBC's sexual abuse reckoning, a NAMB senior vice ...

First Baptist Dallas Stands By Paige Patterson As Scrutiny ...

SBC sources: Paige Patterson made 'black girl' comments ...

SWBTS: Paige Patterson terminated 'effective immediately'

Paige Patterson, SBC Leader Alleged To Have Mishandled ...

Bombshell statement: Why Paige Patterson was fired over his ...