Sexual abuse allegations against Paul Pressler are “so horrifying that it’s actually very hard to imagine that they could be real,” said Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.
Mohler spoke Feb. 16 at Kenwood Baptist Church in Louisville at a forum sponsored by the Kenwood Institute. The topic for the hour-long interview with Colin Smothers and Denny Burk was the state of the Southern Baptist Convention.
In a session chocked full of pertinent topics, toward the end of the session Burk — who is pastor of the church in addition to being president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and a professor at Southern Seminary — asked Mohler about the recent out-of-court settlement between Pressler and a man who accused Pressler of sexually abusing him for years, beginning when he was a minor.
Al Mohler posing with Paul Pressler two months after the Duane Rollins case against Pressler was made public in 2017. (Via X)
That man, Duane Rollins, is one of multiple accusers against Pressler, and documents filed in the case show church leaders in Houston and Pressler’s own law partner knew about allegations against him 20 years ago.
To date, no SBC leader has rebuked Pressler or spoken ill of him publicly, and Mohler did not become the first.
Burk asked: “In recent days, the SBC Executive Committee has settled out of court on allegations regarding Paul Pressler and abuse. Could you comment on the significance of that event?”
Mohler responded by saying the allegations against Pressler “are beyond horrifying.”
“At the very least, we have what I think amounts to a massive scandal related to someone who had a lot of influence on the Southern Baptist Convention at some time, and obviously much direct involvement in the Southern Baptist Convention and served on the Executive Committee and on the International Mission Board and was so involved in the conservative resurgence of the SBC that his name is a part of the two-name tandem,” he summarized.
Mohler admitted the allegations are “humiliating to the Southern Baptist Convention” and the situation is “clearly a scandal.” And he said someone guilty of such behavior does not meet biblical standards for church leadership.
“I can’t figure this issue out.”
“This is a reproach and it’s a horrifying reproach,” he said. “And I think most of us who’ve been in leadership in the SBC are feeling the pressure and kind of the nausea of that reproach and trying to figure all this out. And I’ll say more, I can’t figure this issue out, and I’ll admit it because you’re talking about a man, Paul Pressler, who’s lived a very public life and who had many enemies.
“So I’m just old enough to remember that during the conservative resurgence and the great battles in the SBC, there were very prominent people who were very much opposed to Paul Pressler and his agenda in the Southern Baptist Convention, who were pastors of major moderate churches.”
He specifically named Ken Chafin, who at the time was pastor of South Main Baptist Church in Houston and among the most prominent moderate Baptist opponents of Pressler and the conservative movement.
“So I just want to state, here’s my assumption, they didn’t have a clue,” Mohler continued. “They didn’t know, because it’s hard for me to believe that someone like a Ken Chafin … it’s just hard for me to imagine that if he knew or had heard a rumor or anything that it just wouldn’t have been addressed. I just find that implausible. Just also knowing some of the people I know in the SBC and have known for many years, I find it implausible that they knew anything like the truth of anything, like the allegations made in this report, in this lawsuit and just continued to do business as usual. I find that implausible.”
“I find it implausible that they knew anything like the truth of anything, like the allegations made in this report, in this lawsuit and just continued to do business as usual.”
In March 2023, BNG and other outlets reported on court documents saying leaders at First Baptist Church of Houston confronted Pressler about such allegations in 2004. Yet Mohler told the Louisville crowd, “I did not know about that Houston document until just a few weeks ago when it was brought to my attention by a colleague in the SBC who had not been aware of it until then.”
Then Mohler appeared to shift blame to the SBC for not having a mechanism to track and report sexual abuse — the very task that has stymied SBC leaders for years. He said: “Something’s broken in an SBC in which you can have someone fulfilling a public role when they have evidently some credible accusation that is known by people in a local church. … So if we need any evidence that we need some kind of structural system in the SBC, that won’t solve all the problems, but somebody’s got to be able to call somewhere and say, ‘Here’s a problem.’”
Burk responded: “Most of the people that I’ve talked to, including myself, I didn’t know about any of this until the allegations became public in 2017. I mean, that’s been the story that I’ve heard from most folks.”
Al Mohler
Mohler reiterated his belief that he and others didn’t know anything about Pressler’s alleged activities earlier: “I think probably to most of us, it wasn’t known to me that there was a background of some previous documentation. And so look, I mean we’re never going to resolve this in terms of having a perfect SBC made up of perfect churches with perfect policies, but clearly we’ve got some issues that genuinely do need to be addressed and hope and pray that’s what we do.”
Earlier in the session, Mohler addressed the future of the SBC Executive Committee, the upcoming second vote on the Law Amendment forbidding female pastors in the SBC, and the currently working “cooperation” study group, which he finds unnecessary.
On the Law Amendment, Mohler said: “I’m for the amendment. I see it not only as something that we need to pass, but we need to just have it as a part of our bylaws in such a way that it settles a question.”
If the second reading of the constitutional amendment were to fail at this summer’s SBC annual meeting, “I don’t think the issue would go away at all. I think it would continue. And then every single year there will be some call to action on this to clarify this. And I don’t see that as healthy for the convention.”
The Law Amendment “is the logic of complementarianism.”
The Law Amendment “is the logic of complementarianism,” he declared. “I think this is the actual logic of our cooperation, especially since the conservative resurgence because this is such a crucial issue.”
Mohler then outlined his view of how the conservative resurgence and its resulting revision to the Baptist Faith and Message corrected errors that date to the 1963 doctrinal statement.
“If you go back to the ’60s and ’70s, that’s when in Southern Baptist life, all of a sudden you have feminist arguments for women to serve as pastors. And theologically it’s not misidentified as egalitarianism,” he said. “And so it’s true that a lot of people hadn’t thought this through comprehensively, but the fact is it was a movement. And when I arrived at Southern Seminary (in 1980) as a student, it was a major theme of the institution.”
The 1963 revision of the Baptist Faith and Message “weakened it and made it worse trying to avoid a stronger confessionalism.”
That 1963 revision of the doctrinal statement “weakened it and made it worse trying to avoid a stronger confessionalism,” Mohler said. “And guess what? That resulted in the conservative resurgence in the SBC and total reformation throughout the SBC. In other words, that did not work. That does not work.”
Just as he led a doctrinal transformation at his alma mater to return to the vision of the institution’s founders, so the 2000 revision of the Baptist Faith and Message returned to the historic intent of the SBC’s founders, he said.
He explained: “What happened at Southern Seminary in the reformation of just one institution, and as you know it was pretty comprehensive. We had a tenured elected faculty that was not teaching in accordance with and not contrary to the confession of faith. So we had to take action to remove one faculty and hire another that was confessionally committed. OK, so notice how I said that. How in the world could I have taken this action if there was not an objective document that said this is what we believe?”
The SBC is a voluntary association of churches, but the denomination has the right to set its confessional beliefs and deny affiliation to churches that disagree with those, he said. That does not violate local church autonomy, he added, because any church is free to believe what it wants, but only churches that fully affirm the Baptist Faith and Message should be included in the denomination.
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