Straight White American Jesus - The Sunday Interview:  Paul Pressler, the SBC Takeover, and a Culture of Power and Abuse
Aired: 2026-05-10
Duration: 55:27


=== Welcome to Straight White American Jesus (02:06) ===

[00:00:07]  Axis Mundi.
[00:00:14]  What's up, everyone?
[00:00:15]  Brad Onishi here with the one and only Reza Aslan, and we've got something you do not want to miss.
[00:00:21]  That's right, Brad.
[00:00:22]  The brand new season of Our Seven Neighbors from the Interreligious Institute at Chicago Theological Seminary is live right now.
[00:00:30]  And this year, the United States marks its 250th anniversary.
[00:00:35]  We're stepping back to ask a big question What is the real story of religion in America?
[00:00:41]  This season, we're lifting up the deep history of spiritual diversity in the United States and revisiting the founders' very different visions.
[00:00:48]  For the role of religion in public life.
[00:00:50]  The truth is, there's never been just one religious story in this country.
[00:00:53]  There have always been many.
[00:00:54]  Exactly.
[00:00:55]  From the earliest days of the Republic, debates about faith, freedom, pluralism, and power shaped the nation.
[00:01:02]  Some founders imagined a country with strong protections for religious liberty, others had narrower visions.
[00:01:08]  And alongside them were native traditions, enslaved African spiritual practices, immigrant faith communities, all shaping America in ways that often go untold.
[00:01:18]  Instead of repeating, Tidy mythic narrative, this season tells a braver, more accurate story, one that honors the breathtaking diversity that's always been here.
[00:01:26]  If you care about how religion has shaped American democracy, if you want to understand how spiritual communities have fueled movements for justice, if you're ready for a fuller account of our shared history, this season is for you from the Axis Mundi Podcast Network and Chicago Theological Seminary.
[00:01:44]  The new season of Our Seven Neighbors is streaming now wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:02:04]  Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
[00:02:06]  Brad Onuschi here, author of American Caesar How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America into a Monarchy, founder of Axis Mundi Media.

=== The Southern Baptist Takeover (08:40) ===

[00:02:14]  Here today with a return guest, someone whose work I could not admire more, and that is Robert Downan, senior writer at Texas Monthly.
[00:02:21]  Thanks for coming back, Robert.
[00:02:22]  Thank you for having me back.
[00:02:24]  You're here to talk about your new bombshell 12,000 word feature about Paul Pressler, one of the architects of the Southern Baptist Conference.
[00:02:35]  The Southern Baptist Convention takeover decades ago, somebody who's had an outsized influence on our politics, on American religion, and yet somebody who a lot of people may not know all that much about.
[00:02:46]  We're here to talk about him because your report contains new info about the widespread abuse that he perpetrated against young men, how that tied into the recent sexual abuse crisis that the SBC has faced and leadership has tried to ignore, and what that portends for the country's largest Protestant denomination.
[00:03:08]  There's a great line in your piece.
[00:03:09]  You've been reporting on Pressler for a decade.
[00:03:11]  Let me just stop before I forget to say this.
[00:03:13]  There's a lot of people, Robert, who can report the news, and some people are able to write.
[00:03:18]  You're able to do both.
[00:03:20]  You're a great writer and a great reporter.
[00:03:22]  And this piece shows all of your talent on display because from the beginning to the end, it's vivid.
[00:03:29]  The characters are alive and it draws you into a history that is at times grotesque and hard to read, but is just incredibly essential for understanding the current moment.
[00:03:40]  Here's a line you have early on in the article.
[00:03:44]  You might not know Paul Pressler's name, but your life has been profoundly affected by the fruits of his labor.
[00:03:50]  For those who don't know, what are some basic outlines of Paul Pressler's life and how has he been so influential in people's lives, even if they don't know it?
[00:03:59]  So, Paul Pressler is best known as the architect of the SBC, the Southern Baptist Convention's conservative resurgence, this civil war that broke out in the SBC, the nation's second largest faith group.
[00:04:12]  Beginning in the early or in the late 70s and continuing really through the mid 90s ish.
[00:04:16]  And it was the time in which this denomination, you know, was a fight over biblical inerrancy, over scriptural views.
[00:04:24]  That I think over time also kind of, you know, the that was what kick started it.
[00:04:31]  But over time, it started to really change the denomination's stances on church state separation, on women pastors, on, you know, abortion, on really, and I think really was the moment that this once.
[00:04:45]  Comparatively, a political denomination really became hand in hand with the GOP and really solidified the GOP's white evangelical voting base.
[00:04:55]  And so, that is, you know, the first part of that, the theological views, is what Pressler is best known for.
[00:05:00]  But I think, you know, if you're a student of politics, it's really hard to miss his incredible influence in the religious right and kind of ordaining that marriage.
[00:05:10]  You might have heard, as you say in the piece of Jerry Falwell, you might know about Tim LaHaye or Paul Weirich.
[00:05:15]  Pat Robertson.
[00:05:17]  But Paul Pressler was a cohort of all of them and was really, in many ways, competing for influence in terms of his stranglehold over the Southern Baptist Convention, along with Paige Patterson.
[00:05:28]  Before we go further with Pressler, I want to say two things.
[00:05:31]  One is people don't realize the Southern Baptist Convention used to have actual debates about things like abortion.
[00:05:36]  Like in the 60s and 70s, there were many Texas Baptists that were in favor of abortion.
[00:05:41]  The SBC itself had documents saying that abortion in these circumstances was.
[00:05:46]  Was totally biblical.
[00:05:48]  And so, when you talk about this right wing takeover, the ways we get the hard line, patriarchal, anti choice politics of the second largest faith community in the United States is really a result of what we're talking about today.
[00:06:04]  He doesn't come out of nowhere.
[00:06:05]  This is not a rags to riches story.
[00:06:07]  This is not a grassroots story.
[00:06:08]  He's born into privilege.
[00:06:10]  Tell us about his lineage and his grandfather and the ways he found himself into power.
[00:06:15]  Sure.
[00:06:16]  And, you know, this is something that we get into a little bit in the piece, but.
[00:06:20]  Was something I spent a ton of time in this reporting process that I think a lot of it actually is new within the history of Southern Baptist.
[00:06:27]  I mean, I was finding stuff about Pressler's family that I think, even to some Baptist historians I brought it to, they were surprised by.
[00:06:35]  But Paul Pressler was born into kind of the closest thing that the South has to aristocracy.
[00:06:40]  I mean, his lineage of people, of secessionist lawmakers, of judges, of state lawmakers, and oilmen.
[00:06:51]  And I think.
[00:06:53]  Probably the most important person to Pressler's life was his grandfather, this man named Edgar Eggleston Towns, EE Towns.
[00:07:00]  And he is famous or he is known, and Pressler would talk about him as this guy who, you know, helped or was instrumental to the founding of what became ExxonMobil, has, you know, founded the South Texas College of Law, really was, you know, just a kind of incredibly important person to Texas politics at the time.
[00:07:25]  But one of the things I found.
[00:07:26]  Going through pressures sprawling, sprawling hundreds of thousands, if not million plus pages of archives, is that Towns was also the leader of this group in the 1940s called the Texas Regulars.
[00:07:38]  And what they really sought to do was use this is again back when the South was still Democratic or was reliably voted for the Democratic Party.
[00:07:49]  They sought to start using loopholes in the Democratic Party convention to fight against FDR's third and fourth term.
[00:07:56]  They saw You know, the New Deal as a massive betrayal of grassroots conservatives and the people that they felt were really emblematic of the Democratic Party's then base.
[00:08:08]  But also, as I started to go through the history of the Texas regulars, there were moments where they would, you know, be a little bit more clear about what they meant or one of the things that they feared.
[00:08:18]  And one of the things that Towne said, I think in the piece, I quote him as saying they're fighting for, quote, the great cause of Jeffersonian democracy, states' rights, and white supremacy.
[00:08:28]  And this was someone who, Pressler, throughout his life, He talked about his grandfather in his memoir constantly.
[00:08:34]  He talked about him, you know, throughout his life.
[00:08:36]  He is clearly probably the most influential person on his life.
[00:08:39]  And Pressler never really, except for in sparing instances, mentions his connection, his grandfather's lead role in the Texas Regulars.
[00:08:48]  And so what I found was that Pressler not only was influenced by this guy who was really at the front and center of this borderline explicitly white supremacist organization, but also that as an adolescent, he had spent a bunch of time with the Texas Regulars, really getting an early lesson in how to.
[00:09:06]  Politically mobilize in how to take an ostensibly grassroots movement, something that is framed as a grassroots movement, but is really has a ton of money and a ton of power behind it, and use that within the kind of rulemaking apparatus of a political body to try and affect it and trying to push it.
[00:09:28]  And what I think is so fascinating about, too, and we kind of briefly touch on this in the story, but the Texas regulars in the 40s, they lose that battle.
[00:09:36]  But his father, And the other leaders and the funders of the Texas regulars go on to be the fuel for the States' Rights Party.
[00:09:44]  They have a ton of ties to the John Birch Society.
[00:09:47]  And you start to see, you know, we'll get into the Council for National Policy of it all later in this conversation, I'm sure.
[00:09:53]  But if you actually look at like what, who the funders, you know, the John Birch Society and the States' Rights Party become the new right, which lays the groundwork for the religious right, which lays the groundwork for Council for National Policy, which is funded by the same oil money, the same, you know, it is basically the progeny of the Texas regulars go on to become the fuel for this much more expansive.
[00:10:18]  A movement in America that I think is still really redefining politics today.
[00:10:23]  I think of Ann Nelson's book, The Shadow Network.
[00:10:25]  And one of the things Ann argues in that book is that oil money cannot be ignored as one of the most important factors of the creation of the religious right, contemporary Christian nationalism.
[00:10:36]  And everything you're saying is that Paul Pressler's family was dead center in that whole succession of segregationist, white supremacist, oil men who created the conditions for what would become.
[00:10:50]  The religious right and contemporary Christian nationalist movements.

=== Redefining Politics Today (15:49) ===

[00:10:54]  He's an interesting guy.
[00:10:55]  Can we just stop for a minute?
[00:10:56]  Like, this guy is Southern aristocracy, but he went to Phillips Exeter Academy, like the name brand boarding school for boys in New Hampshire.
[00:11:04]  Like, that's not a Southern.
[00:11:05]  New Hampshire is not in the South, the last time I looked.
[00:11:08]  So that's interesting to me.
[00:11:10]  Spent a lot of time in the Adirondacks, which is closer to Canada than it is to anywhere in Dixie, and also went to, is an Ivy Leaguer.
[00:11:18]  So, you know, there's a lot of bona fides here that are not Texas based, which, I'm not sure.
[00:11:25]  Yeah.
[00:11:25]  Yeah.
[00:11:26]  And one of the fascinating things about Pressler is he is such an unreliable narrator, to put it kindly.
[00:11:34]  And just to back the track, like when I mentioned his archives, and I think that it is worth pointing out, the finding guide alone for his archives is 57,000 Microsoft Excel rows.
[00:11:46]  So that's just the list of every single correspondence in there.
[00:11:51]  And some of those correspondences are 10, 15 pages long.
[00:11:54]  Like, It is 63 cubic feet of the old kind of carbon copy paper that they used to use when sending letters often.
[00:12:04]  So it is one of the most expansive archives I've ever heard of.
[00:12:08]  And it is one of those things that, as I've been reporting on him for over the last eight years and just kind of thinking about him, it's one of those things where I think that the archive itself is almost as instructive into him as a person as any of its individual components.
[00:12:27]  This is a man who.
[00:12:29]  From the earliest age, I think he really saw himself as heir to a kind of lost cause Southern aristocracy, someone who really saw himself as destined for greatness in line with his ancestors, and someone who also was, you know, going back to your comment about him being up north, like if you read his memoir, if you read his letters, like he is constantly myth making about himself.
[00:12:55]  He is constantly like, even at the age of 10, after he becomes a believer, he writes that he was so zealous in his.
[00:13:02]  In his views, that his parents were concerned about it.
[00:13:05]  And, like, it's just from the earliest age, he is putting himself in situations in the North, in particular, at that age, where he is this lone crusader fighting for biblical truth.
[00:13:17]  And I think it is such a helpful lens into the kind of way that he ended up, you know, the mythology of the conservative resurgence as it became over time.
[00:13:26]  Well, and he's just one more man who grows up with this enormous privilege, enormous.
[00:13:33]  Power and yet a correspondent victimhood identity and myth that he is fighting against, right?
[00:13:40]  So, on one hand, he grows up with this lineage of politicians and preachers and oil men, enormous amounts of wealth, aristocratic to the core in a Southern sense, and yet somehow by age 10 is convinced that it's him against the world and that he has to lead the charge for the South to rise again.
[00:14:00]  Going back to the white supremacist nature of his grandfather's views, Pressler said when it came to the Southern Baptist Convention and fighting for this conservative takeover, it was like Gettysburg.
[00:14:10]  But this time the right side won.
[00:14:12]  So it seems as if he did inherit his father's understanding of, or grandfather's understanding of the Civil War and so on.
[00:14:18]  Yeah.
[00:14:19]  I mean, this was, you know, that is a quote we have in the piece.
[00:14:22]  But to be clear, that's something he said in 2004.
[00:14:24]  So this is not, yeah.
[00:14:26]  He said that in 2004.
[00:14:28]  So this was, you know, throughout his life, there are all these kind of signposts of where, you know, one of the things I found in his archives is his resignation letter to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which is a neo Confederate group.
[00:14:39]  And then I, from everything I can tell, and this is something that didn't make it in the piece either, but The last time that he appeared in any kind of meaningful capacity at a Southern Baptist event was in 2016, where there's a video of him furiously dressing down the leaders of the SBC because he felt that he was not allowed to speak in favor or speak against a resolution that was condemning use of the Confederate flag.
[00:15:02]  So, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:15:05]  It's not something that stopped for him in childhood or when his granddaddy passed away.
[00:15:09]  He goes on to spend some time, a short amount of time in the Texas legislature, if I'm not wrong.
[00:15:14]  He becomes a judge, but he eventually says, No, I, you know, I'm going to leave some of that behind and basically go into a role where I am wielding great influence and power over the Southern Baptist Convention and eventually the Council for National Policy.
[00:15:29]  What leads to that kind of course or that path that he chose that in many ways might have been seen as an aberration from what others expected of him?
[00:15:38]  Yeah.
[00:15:39]  And I think that when I first really started looking into Pressler's life, and again, this is eight years ago, he is the reason why we started reporting on Southern Baptist sexual abuse.
[00:15:52]  So He has kind of been the kind of looming figure in my life for almost a decade now.
[00:15:57]  But when I first started really looking into his life, I had, you know, the moderate Baptist retelling of the conservative resurgence is often couched in this idea that it was like a naked political ploy.
[00:16:09]  And I think that there's often that goes hand in hand with a certain doubt about the sincerity of Pressler's beliefs on biblical inerrancy.
[00:16:16]  But if you go through his archives, I mean, there are, you know, dating back to the early 60s and the 50s, like this was a man who was fully committed to that cause and who.
[00:16:26]  Spent 20, almost 20 years of his life fighting for biblical, fighting people he accused of being biblical liberals and heretics, effectively, in his mind, before he even really saw his movement starting to get any kind of real support beginning in 1979.
[00:16:47]  So I think that that is really important in the context of everything we've discussed about how kind of the kind of grandiose way that he saw himself as an almost great man of history.
[00:16:58]  But, you know, this was someone who from the earliest age was convinced of, you know, that there was a liberal takeover of the denomination.
[00:17:08]  And he often does it, you know, so often when he writes about his motivations, it is about children.
[00:17:14]  He is concerned about, you know, what people are learning.
[00:17:17]  You know, people from his Sunday school class will go to Baylor and he'll check in with them and they'll tell them that they're being led, you know, theologically astray.
[00:17:26]  And it's, as I get into the piece, you.
[00:17:30]  Up until when he is starting to formulate the final plans for what becomes the conservative resurgence, when the plan is really starting to come much more into shape around 1978, he's also chased out of a Presbyterian church in Houston for allegedly at least one incident of, or at least one allegation involving sexual abuse of a young man from his youth group.
[00:17:53]  And so I just think it's, you know, I want to be very careful when I talk about the piece and in the piece to like, Make it clear that we are not, this piece is not an indictment of the conservative resurgence or any of the countless people who sincerely believed in its cause.
[00:18:11]  But I do think that, especially the culture that it created within the SBC, this mythology around the conservative resurgence, it is something that I hope people are kind of looking at the nuance of now, especially given what we now know of its two leaders in Paul Preston and Paige Patterson.
[00:18:30]  Let's pause and talk about that.
[00:18:32]  So basically, we need to go back just.
[00:18:35]  Quickly here for a few minutes to the late 1970s in what becomes known as the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention.
[00:18:44]  It's led by Paul Pressler, this guy that we've been talking about here for 15 minutes, and he has a kind of partner in crime, and that's Paige Patterson.
[00:18:52]  Would you give us the one minute download on Paige Patterson so we can understand Batman and Robin here?
[00:18:59]  You know, it's fascinating.
[00:19:04]  There are so many different versions of the history of the conservative resurgence once you really start talking to people.
[00:19:09]  You know, there are a lot of people even today who will say that Paige Patterson, you know, was actually far less of a player in the kind of strategy of the conservative resurgence and really Pressler was the singular architect.
[00:19:21]  But as far as the general history goes, is yeah, Paige Patterson is this, you know, young, born into a Texas Baptist family.
[00:19:30]  His father ran the Texas State Association for Southern Baptists for, you know, I think more than a decade at least.
[00:19:38]  He claims, there's reporting that he claimed by The time he goes to college to have manned 400 plus pulpits around the country and world.
[00:19:48]  And then he gets to New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, by which time he is fully as charged, fully as worried about the direction of the SBC as Pressler.
[00:20:05]  And as the lore goes, in 1967, Paul Pressler knocks on Paige Patterson's door in New Orleans.
[00:20:11]  They two quickly bond and go to Cafe du Monde, where They stayed late into the hours over hot coffee and beignets, kind of.
[00:20:20]  Again, the moderate Baptist version of this history is that they sketched it out on napkins, sketched out on napkins their plan to take over the denomination.
[00:20:27]  Pressler, you know, challenges that idea.
[00:20:31]  But either way, this becomes like a Martin Luther nailing his thesis to a church door moment for the Southern Baptist Convention in the history, in its current history.
[00:20:39]  It's something that is imbued into the mythology of the denominations, you know, into the conservative resurgence, and therefore, Too many to a large extent into the denomination itself, and so they meet in 67, kind of break and spend the next 12 ish years writing letters to one another, trying to you know figure out ways to exert control until 1978, where they really start to see more and more of a concerted you know, there's more and more fuel behind their movement.
[00:21:09]  And I think also one of the other important things to talk about too is that you know, we we again going back to my quote what I was saying earlier about like I want to be very careful to like.
[00:21:18]  Not impart motives on the actual grassroots Southern Baptists who are involved in this.
[00:21:22]  But that is such a crucial moment in American history and politics.
[00:21:26]  You have, you know, for we are starting to see the kind of urbanization is taking away some of the power of the Southern agrarian class.
[00:21:35]  You have, there is, you know, two decades of the free love movement, anti war movement.
[00:21:40]  So many things are happening that are really kind of anathema, I think, to the, you know, typical Southern, white Southern Christian conservative.
[00:21:47]  And so this movement just happens to come along at the same time that all of those kind of political and cultural forces are coalescing into, you know, for the first time, a real, I guess, Forceful political movement.
[00:22:00]  And those two things really kind of quickly merge with one another.
[00:22:04]  Again, I think that in the same way that if you were to talk to someone like Paul Pressler or some of the people who were in the movement about their views on church state separation, it's not an A or a B question.
[00:22:16]  These two things become almost indistinguishable to them.
[00:22:21]  What was driving the conservative resurgence, and there's also Nancy Amherst, the famous Baptist historian who covered a lot of this at the time, has a lot of research on this showing about how biblical inerrancy.
[00:22:32]  Became a stand in for the loss of power, the loss of status, which meant it could be kind of used as the lens through which you view the feminist movement, the Equal Rights Amendments, gay rights, abortion, all of these things.
[00:22:45]  So let's hover there.
[00:22:48]  So, you know, these two guys meet in 1967 over beignets.
[00:22:52]  I want to just point out that in an age of warrior Christian masculinity and crusades, the plan was hatched over beignets, which I'll take beignets anytime over guns, over war.
[00:23:04]  Let's have beignets.
[00:23:06]  In another era, they'd be smoking cigars and drinking black coffee.
[00:23:10]  They would.
[00:23:11]  They'd be smoking.
[00:23:11]  Yes, they would.
[00:23:12]  There'd be mahogany.
[00:23:13]  There'd be black coffee.
[00:23:14]  And they would be both very bearded.
[00:23:16]  Yes.
[00:23:17]  They'd be, yeah, the beards would be curled.
[00:23:20]  The mustaches would be curled.
[00:23:21]  It would be a whole thing.
[00:23:23]  We bonded over a podcast.
[00:23:24]  It doesn't have the same lore as that.
[00:23:28]  Yeah.
[00:23:29]  I went on Michael Knowles' podcast.
[00:23:31]  And anyway, all right.
[00:23:32]  So, you know, things don't take off until 1978.
[00:23:36]  And as you say, there's all these social issues.
[00:23:38]  That are changing the country.
[00:23:39]  The South is changing, but also 1978 and 1979 are the years where the GOP and the religious right turn against Jimmy Carter.
[00:23:47]  And Jimmy Carter is seen as the wrong kind of Southern Christian Baptist.
[00:23:51]  And they organize against one of their own to elect someone like Ronald Reagan.
[00:23:56]  So the Southern Baptist Convention's conservative takeover is taking place in concert with a kind of national revolution or counter revolution in our politics and in the ways that religion and the GOP were aligned.
[00:24:10]  So that's there.
[00:24:11]  And then let's just make sure everybody understands what happened.
[00:24:14]  So, you have a GOP takeover, or excuse me, you have a conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention.
[00:24:19]  And tell me what I'm missing from this list.
[00:24:22]  At the forefront of this is an inerrantist approach to the Bible, an unflinching, unbending idea that there is no error in the Bible.
[00:24:30]  And if you question that and you question that authority, you are a heretic.
[00:24:35]  There is a strong stance against any gender norms being transgressed.
[00:24:40]  There are men, there are women, men are in leadership, women are submissive.
[00:24:44]  Women are wives, women are domestic, men lead the church, men lead society, men lead the family.
[00:24:51]  There is no sense of a kind of any ability to discuss abortion as anything but murder and as sinful.
[00:25:04]  So, family, gender, little kids, and the Bible, these are the hallmarks of the kind of Southern Baptist conventions like uncrossables.
[00:25:13]  You cannot cross these lines and still be a Baptist.
[00:25:16]  Still be a Christian.
[00:25:17]  I'm sure I missed it.
[00:25:18]  I'm sure I reduced it.
[00:25:20]  What do you want to add to that sort of portfolio or quiver of the conservative takeovers, you know, really important points?
[00:25:28]  I mean, I think that that's generally correct.
[00:25:31]  I would add, you know, I would add that church state separation becomes a bigger and bigger thing.
[00:25:39]  There is a prolonged battle in the 80s for over the SBC's ties to the Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Liberty, which is, you know, as I'm sure your listeners know, Baptists for the longest time have generally speaking.
[00:25:52]  Had been very ardent supporters of church state separation owing to the persecution faced by their forefathers.
[00:25:59]  And in the 80s, there is on issues like abortion, on issues like school tuition or vouchers, on prayer and school, kind of all of the same, I guess, blowbacks that really were the fuel for the religious right.
[00:26:14]  These become issues on which the SBC is breaking with the BJC, of which it was the most prominent member for a long, long time.
[00:26:22]  And they are starting to kind of You know, maybe not as spoken out, you know, maybe not as overtly making this case often, but going through the kind of ways that they were talking about is like they are starting to really see politics and religion as two parts of a broader battle for the culture, if you will, a culture war, perhaps.

=== Breaking with the BJC (08:51) ===

[00:26:43]  And I think that that's really, you know, that is one of the things that I think is so important to this story is that like this, all of these things become not indistinguishable from one another per se, but become.
[00:26:57]  Part of this much broader existential fight for American culture.
[00:27:02]  And that fight for American culture, because it is couched in biblical inerrancy to start, it takes on a certain theological existentialism that really imbues it with stakes that set a culture in the SBC that kind of lays the groundwork for so much of what I get into the piece about how Pressler was able to continue escaping accountability for repeated abuse allegations.
[00:27:26]  So when we say takeover, We're not just saying that Pressler and Patterson and their allies got up at the Southern Baptist Convention meetings, went to churches, and really persuaded their Baptist brethren to see it their way.
[00:27:40]  And they were great negotiators, great orators, people that were able to somehow woo audiences into seeing things theologically through their own eyes.
[00:27:50]  Instead, as you report, they were doing a lot of incredibly sketchy, shady, manipulative, and In many ways, authoritarian tactics.
[00:28:01]  Can you talk about the ways that they tracked people, spied on them, and just basically used any trick in the book to get the Southern Baptist Convention churches to agree with their hardline theology and political stances?
[00:28:14]  Yeah, I think that one of the things that becomes more and more apparent the more you study the early days of the conservative resurgence is the degree to which most moderates, the liberals as Preston would call them, the Southern Baptist Convention had four.
[00:28:30]  More than a century by then, really avoided a lot of the schisms that other larger Protestant denominations had faced, in part because their kind of central ethos was we are hyper focused on evangelism.
[00:28:42]  That is what we exist to do more than anything.
[00:28:44]  We exist, you know, we are 47 or now 47,000 cooperating, voluntarily cooperating churches.
[00:28:50]  And for a long time, up until really the 60s and then increasing afterwards, there was a kind of that ethos of the SBC.
[00:29:01]  Tampered insurgent movements.
[00:29:04]  I'm thinking of someone like J. Frank Norris in the 40s.
[00:29:06]  Like, there were people who tried to kind of seize control of the levers of the SBC, but they were often, those movements were often kind of defeated by this hyper commitment to evangelism above all else.
[00:29:21]  And so, what you start to see is, as in, you know, at the same time that Southern culture is starting to kind of adapt the kind of culture, what becomes, I would say, like the mentality that leads to the broader culture war, the SBC, the Patterson and Pressler wing are able to.
[00:29:38]  Really gain a lot of power quickly, in part because the moderate wings are so of the mind that this movement will peter out.
[00:29:49]  Our cooperative nature will be an effective enough antidote for our disgruntled brothers.
[00:29:56]  And that alone was such a huge upper hand to the Pressler and Patterson wing.
[00:30:02]  But at the same time, also, you have Pressler, who is incredibly adept at studying how the convention worked.
[00:30:10]  At figuring out where the kind of power centers were to push.
[00:30:14]  I mean, they had databases allegedly that they were using to track open pastorates that they could staff.
[00:30:21]  They had paid seminarians to spy on professors at the seminaries, which was kind of the ground zero of the fight and report back inklings of theological liberalism.
[00:30:33]  Pressler faced allegations.
[00:30:36]  Well, I guess not face allegations.
[00:30:38]  He would tape phone calls.
[00:30:40]  I mean, It really runs the gamut of just how sophisticated of an operation this was.
[00:30:45]  And when you compare it to kind of like the moderate wing, that it took them probably five plus years to really understand just how strategic and controlled, you know, not controlled per se, but how strategic this movement was, it was kind of already too late.
[00:30:59]  So.
[00:31:01]  One of the things that for me I learned, you know, I've thought about in terms of your writing here is this is really a kind of a prototype of the kind of politics we see nationally now.
[00:31:11]  You know, Pressler and Patterson are not engaging the moderate wing.
[00:31:15]  Their Baptist brethren, their Baptist siblings in good faith.
[00:31:19]  There's not a sense here of like, hey, why don't we work out the ideas, really hash it out in a public debate, and get a sense of cooperation among where these 47,000 churches want to go.
[00:31:30]  Instead, it is we're going to spy on professors.
[00:31:33]  We're going to have data sheets that show us churches with open pastorates so we can make sure that we get somebody in that position who is a hardline inerrantist like us.
[00:31:44]  We're going to use every dirty trick we have.
[00:31:46]  Control the purse strings, control the flow, like.
[00:31:49]  Like, apply pressure on the financial side.
[00:31:51]  Yeah, I mean, really, Pressler was, to his credit, he kind of, you know, he knew what he was doing.
[00:32:01]  I'll say that much.
[00:32:03]  I mean, it's a total institutional takeover.
[00:32:05]  And they're not doing this, as I said, in a sort of open debate forum, hoping their ideas are the best ones.
[00:32:11]  They're pressing on every soft tissue in the Baptist body in order to get control of it.
[00:32:18]  And, you know, this eventually leads to Pressler having just enormous political clout.
[00:32:22]  He's He's a big player at the Council for National Policy, which is started by Paul Weirich, among others, and is perhaps the pantheon of kind of conservative think tanks that really connects all the various nodes in the network of conservative activism across the country.
[00:32:42]  He's connected to the Bush family, Bush number one, Bush number two.
[00:32:45]  He's an early supporter of Ted Cruz.
[00:32:47]  He's tied to Ken Paxton.
[00:32:50]  I mean, we can go on and on in terms of how Pressler becomes.
[00:32:53]  One of the most influential men in Texas politics, but he does so on the foundation of this takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention.
[00:33:04]  I mean, what else do we need to add there before we go into the ways that all of this public persona as a political powerhouse was shielding a man who, for decades, was a systematic sexual predator?
[00:33:16]  Yeah.
[00:33:17]  I mean, again, going back to Pressler's archives, what I found fascinating is that, and granted, maybe I missed something.
[00:33:25]  I'm sure I only got a small sliver of it because there's just so much there, but he really was very good about not.
[00:33:35]  At least in his archives or at least in his letters, talking about the political things that he was kind of maneuvering, the political realms he was maneuvering at the time.
[00:33:42]  You know, a lot of what I found on that front came from, you know, Jerry Falwell Jr., or Jerry Falwell's archives, you know, other archives of the religious rights.
[00:33:52]  And what I started to find though is that really throughout the duration of the conservative resurgence, Pressler, who always maintained that his, you know, SBC and GOP lives were two distinct projects, Horse trading his influence in both circles to accumulate power in both.
[00:34:09]  So, you know, he is.
[00:34:10]  There are letters that I found where he is talking about sending, you know, lists of pastors for get out the vote registration purposes to the moral majority.
[00:34:19]  He's meeting with Howard Phillips of the conservative caucus to strategize on a church per congressional political strategy.
[00:34:26]  And that's in the mid 80s.
[00:34:27]  But by 1988, he is running Council for National Policy.
[00:34:30]  He's the president.
[00:34:31]  And, you know, he.
[00:34:35]  Sees that his old friend George H.W. Bush kind of has meager support or lukewarm support from conservative Christians who were once enamored by the Reagan administration, but over time it kind of had a fall.
[00:34:48]  It felt that he had not delivered on all the things that they were promised.
[00:34:51]  And he writes this letter to George H.W. Bush along with four or five other CNP evangelical leaders and says basically, in exchange for direct access to the White House, we will use, wink, wink, nod, nod.
[00:35:06]  If you give us direct access to the White House, we can assure you that white evangelical voters will.
[00:35:10]  Will come to your rescue.
[00:35:12]  And now, of course, I think that to caveat that, like, white evangelical voters were probably going to vote for George H.W. Bush by and large in that election, anyways.
[00:35:19]  But the fact that these men are, you know, openly saying to the vice president, hey, like, we have enough power to decide this election, and it's up to you if you want us to kind of activate that power in a way that can make the difference.

=== A Systemic Plague on SBC (14:52) ===

[00:35:35]  And of course, H.W. Bush is elected, and in 1989, he immediately elects or nominates Pressler to be the Leader of the Office of Government Ethics, what could have been, what should have been kind of a crowning achievement for Pressler's life and movement?
[00:35:52]  And then, as I'm sure we'll get into, it quickly goes south.
[00:35:57]  It's a perfect, and the way you write it in the piece is perfect, just as the way you teed it up just now is perfect.
[00:36:02]  Here's a man from 1980 all the way until the Trump era is connected to every possible person in Texas politics as well as national politics, whether it's the president, whether it's folks running for Texas Senate.
[00:36:16]  And yet in 1989, he has a chance, as you just said, to really hold a national office with clout, forward facing, image forward in the national spotlight.
[00:36:29]  And he pulls out.
[00:36:30]  And that's really the second half of what we need to talk about today he pulls out because there were already in 1989 those whispering about, those accusing, those saying that he was a sexual predator.
[00:36:44]  How does this 1989 moment lead into the rest of his life and the allegations against him?
[00:36:49]  Sure.
[00:36:50]  So, you know.
[00:36:51]  Just to clarify, the allegations that scuttle his FBI background check for that job, from what I understand, were not.
[00:37:02]  I have no proof that they involved actual sexual predations.
[00:37:04]  It was more so about his sexuality.
[00:37:06]  But so as he's kind of going through the FBI background check of this, yes, go ahead.
[00:37:11]  So just the rumors that he was gay, is that what you're saying?
[00:37:14]  Right, 100%.
[00:37:14]  Yes.
[00:37:15]  And this was apparently, you know, and to be clear, there were rumors abounded by then about, you know, his sexuality, but also.
[00:37:23]  Within the moderate wing, as I found through archives, they are starting to, you know, there are questions being raised about, you know, why does this man always travel with a group of young men and boys and stay in hotel rooms with them?
[00:37:37]  Like there were all of these things that people, you know, could not come out and say that they believed he was a predator, but they started really looking into this.
[00:37:47]  And I think one of the things that's so fascinating about that period, too, is that Pressler, when he ends up, Declining the FBI or declining the White House job.
[00:37:56]  You know, he claims for years that it was because of ethical problems involving like his use of a copier at his old judge place, or like that he needed to be at home with his son who has a significant disability.
[00:38:09]  It kind of runs the gamut of reasons why he didn't take it.
[00:38:11]  But then in 1992, he watches Clarence Thomas survive a contentious hearing related to sexual misconduct.
[00:38:20]  And he sits down and he writes a letter to Clarence Thomas and basically says, This is exactly what happened to me.
[00:38:25]  The liberals will do this time and time again.
[00:38:27]  They try to destroy a God fearing man.
[00:38:29]  And it's so fascinating, too, that letter compared to what I can now see in the archives was actually going on with moderates.
[00:38:37]  Moderates had, you can see in the archives, in moderate Baptist archives, that they are starting to home in on what they appear to be serious allegations about him, you know, taking young members of churches to his ranch.
[00:38:53]  There's rumblings about, you know, whether this is just far more, far, you know, Beyond just asexuality.
[00:39:01]  And if you kind of look at the restraint that they held in not going forward with those, there's a Texas pastor who wrote not long ago after Pressler's death about, you know, we didn't have proof and a good Christian doesn't go to the press unless they have definitive proof.
[00:39:19]  And the amount of restraint that they showed, and then you compare it to the way that Pressler was framing them as these kind of like power hungry liberals who would stop at nothing to destroy God fearing men, it is really just a fascinating contrast between.
[00:39:33]  You know, how he was able to again perpetually make himself this victimized, you know, constantly being attacked, martyr for the cause almost.
[00:39:42]  And then you compare it to what was actually going on.
[00:39:44]  It's fascinating.
[00:39:47]  The piece to Clarence Thomas just stopped me in my tracks.
[00:39:51]  And we can get into that in a minute.
[00:39:53]  But here we have, starting in the late 80s, these sense of people around him that something's not right.
[00:40:01]  People are whispering about the idea that he might be gay.
[00:40:03]  Okay, so that's one.
[00:40:05]  Being gay is one thing, being a sexual predator is another.
[00:40:08]  And yet, in, you know, into the 90s and the aughts, these things really start to develop into public view and it comes to a head.
[00:40:17]  Tell us about that period because it's the period, I think it's the chapter in this story right before what will become the sex abuse crisis era of the SBC later.
[00:40:28]  And the two are intimately connected, at least in my mind.
[00:40:30]  And I'll see what you think about that.
[00:40:31]  So, a little bit more specifically, like what years are you referring to?
[00:40:35]  So, I'm thinking of like the after the new millennium, what is You know, in 2004, he's still talking about Gettysburg and the SBC and the right side one.
[00:40:46]  This is a man whose career, you know, every time you read your stuff, Robert, I'm like, oh, surely they got Pressler here and they didn't.
[00:40:53]  Surely they like some, this allegation will take him down and it won't.
[00:40:57]  Surely the fact that he got run out of a Presbyterian church because people said he was doing things that were disgusting to young boys in the youth group will get him and it won't.
[00:41:05]  And so he's still standing in 2004, 2007.
[00:41:09]  He still is wielding power.
[00:41:10]  Do I have all of that right?
[00:41:11]  100%.
[00:41:12]  I mean, there is, there are, I could not definitively find it, but if, you know, In 2003 and 2004, which is a really kind of pivotal moment in the kind of beginning of what eventually comes about about his abuse allegations, he is leading the SBC's charge against the Baptist World Alliance to get the SBC to pull out of the BWA over its ties to gay affirming churches overseas.
[00:41:36]  You know, he is post 2000s, he is kind of he slowly starts to step away from Southern Baptist life and really focus on Council for National Policy, Texas Republican politics, and GOP politics more broadly.
[00:41:48]  But I think that one of the things that happens really.
[00:41:50]  In the 90s and going into the 2000s, is that the conservative resurgence?
[00:41:56]  Again, I should backtrack here.
[00:41:58]  In one of his letters, Pressler in 81, he writes that only 5% of the SBC is out of step with his theological views.
[00:42:08]  Now, he sees that 5% as kind of like this cabal that has overtaken the SBC bureaucracy and is Trojan horsing their views into its bureaucracy.
[00:42:16]  But by the time you get to the turn of the century, the mythology of the conservative resurgence has become like that they.
[00:42:23]  It has become that they vanquished this just domineering force in Southern Baptist life.
[00:42:31]  And to their credit, there were plenty of people who were in that moderate camp who were in very powerful positions.
[00:42:36]  But the way that the mythology becomes, it becomes like this God ordained, they vanquished this grassroots movement that vanquished this gigantic menace, this cabal, and returned the SBC to its conservative theology.
[00:42:51]  And also became, again, because of all the things we talked about, almost turned the SBC and thus the fight for it.
[00:42:58]  Into, like, this vanguard between true American conservative Christianity and a culture that hated it.
[00:43:04]  So, he is by then, like, you know, I, he is as close to sanctified in the Southern Baptist Convention as one could be.
[00:43:12]  I mean, he is, they've put him and Patterson are in stained glass windows in a chapel.
[00:43:16]  I mean, they have almost a free pass to do whatever they want, for they were the ones who led the war that returned God's, you know, that saved the Southern Baptist Convention.
[00:43:27]  And so, he really starts to use that credential.
[00:43:32]  To be a kingmaker in GOP and politics in the CNP.
[00:43:36]  And time and time again, really beginning in 2004 is the earliest definitive example.
[00:43:40]  When people do come forward with allegations against him, it is at best he is giving a lot of plausible deniability, like, oh, that's just an old man who, yeah, he invited you to go skinny dipping, but he's just an old man and that's just how he is.
[00:43:57]  The amount of times I've heard that the amount of times you would hear the phrase, oh, that's just how the judge is, it's like, well, how the judge is seems.
[00:44:04]  Anathema to who he is in public.
[00:44:06]  So that's a whole other thing.
[00:44:07]  But you start to see really all of these places where he is using that power and influence, not just to ingratiate himself into the lives of the young men who he tries to sexually groom, but also when they do come forward, people are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt or just look away entirely because there's a letter that First Baptist Church of Houston wrote to him in 2004 after a young member of the church came forward about Pressler allegedly forcibly undressing and groping him.
[00:44:36]  And they basically write Pressler a letter saying, you know, what your behavior was morally and spiritually inappropriate, but we fear that because of your stature in the SBC and, you know, your stature, publicizing it will cause others to stumble.
[00:44:51]  And so that is kind of, you know, beginning with the FBI background check and continuing all the way through really 2017, there is a deference.
[00:44:59]  There is a Pressler is either too valuable to the SBC and the movement more broadly, or the allegations against him are easily just swept away as part of a kind of, Satanic liberal scheme to destroy him because he is so important to the movement.
[00:45:13]  And, you know, there are a lot of people who I think are going to read this story and think it's a story about Paul Pressler, but I think that's really what this story is about.
[00:45:23]  I was just going to go there.
[00:45:24]  And, you know, if you read the piece, folks, what you're going to find are allegation after allegation, survivor after survivor coming forward to talk about Pressler doing just what Robert just said.
[00:45:36]  You know, we were in a sauna, we went skinny dipping, we were on a trip and we had to share a hotel room and this happened and that happened.
[00:45:43]  And, He's always talking about being nude, or hey, maybe this or that.
[00:45:47]  And there's just a lot in there.
[00:45:50]  And so I think that we could spend the next 15 minutes, hour and a half, whatever we wanted, talking about Paul Pressler, the individual.
[00:45:58]  To me, the real import of your piece is that Pressler as an individual represents a systemic plague on the Southern Baptist Convention, that by the time we get from 2007 all the way to 2021, there's a full blown sex abuse scandal in the SBC.
[00:46:16]  There are survivors coming forward to say that across the denomination, in churches and youth groups, there are pastors and others in leadership who are abusing women, boys, girls, so on.
[00:46:29]  How does Pressler, the individual, emblematize a larger culture of abuse, protection, and fear in the SBC?
[00:46:38]  That's such a great question.
[00:46:39]  And it's kind of, you know, that is what the second really, you know, I guess the back third of this story is about, is about really, you know, The kind of power struggle that broke out in the SBC in the wake of our years of reporting on the abuse crisis.
[00:46:55]  And it's so funny if you look at the parallels.
[00:47:00]  The kind of downfall of Pressler and Patterson, and those are, I mean, you cannot, it is hard to overstate how important those two men were to how Southern Baptists identified with their culture.
[00:47:15]  And go ahead.
[00:47:17]  Would you say it's the same as if MAGA actually admitted that Trump is in the SBC?
[00:47:21]  Epstein files because he might just be a, you know, like if, if I'm not saying you're saying that, I know you're reporter, you're gonna be careful.
[00:47:27]  What I'm saying here though is like if, if MAGA folks actually had to face the idea that Trump was in the Epstein files because he is a pedophile, it would so ruin MAGA that there's just gonna be no willingness to do that.
[00:47:40]  Like Patterson and Presto are so important that if they go down, it feels like the entire thing goes down.
[00:47:46]  Is that, I mean, that's what you're saying?
[00:47:48]  That's, I think that that was, I think that, It's hard to separate them from the mythology of the conservative resurgence and to separate the mythology.
[00:47:59]  And at the same time, it's also hard to separate the mythology of the conservative resurgence with the kind of culture that existed amongst.
[00:48:06]  And again, this is another thing where I want to be very clear like the culture amongst the kind of elite Southern Baptist class, the people who really held power in the denomination.
[00:48:16]  And for time and time again, I mean, we talk about Pressler's sexual abuse, but you know, they're.
[00:48:22]  Time and time again, Patterson is doing things over once he's in power that are like now people are starting to be critical of them.
[00:48:28]  But at the time, the idea of criticizing Paige Patterson, this guy who really just lorded over the SBC for decades and was willing to go to, you know, was someone who allegedly was keeping dossiers on his opponents.
[00:48:40]  I mean, running, I've had him compared to like a Baptist J.R. Grew Hoover type.
[00:48:44]  Like the amount of reverence that those two guys had or for what they kind of represented was so profound that to question them almost became to question the movement itself in some cohorts.
[00:48:59]  2018, you start to have the first real signs of Pressler's abuse are starting to come out via lawsuit.
[00:49:05]  And then Patterson is ousted as the longtime president of the SBC's Fort Worth Seminary for his handling of student rape claims.
[00:49:12]  There's a sermon that gets unearthed where he talks about coaching a domestic violence survivor to stay with her abusive husband and how she shows up to church one day with two black eyes, but Patterson is overjoyed because her husband was apparently so remorseful for beating her that he showed up to church that day.
[00:49:30]  And again, this is one of those things where he delivered that sermon years earlier and it was not, no one said anything.
[00:49:37]  But not dissimilar to what we're talking about, kind of like the cultural framework within which the conservative resurgence happened.
[00:49:44]  2018 is you're starting to see a lot of parallels to that in the kind of cultural winds of just America more broadly.
[00:49:53]  You're starting to see the Me Too movement, racial justice movements are starting to pop up.
[00:49:56]  These things that are really starting to challenge power structures, I think.
[00:50:01]  And so when the abuse crisis happens, there is a.
[00:50:05]  You know, there is a new generation of leaders, JD Greer, Russell Moore, who are coming in and saying, like, no, we need to seriously confront this.
[00:50:12]  And, you know, I, again, as someone who was living through the response to that crisis every hour of my life for four plus years, like, there were a ton of people in powerful SPC positions who were very serious about, you know, confronting the crisis.

=== Challenging Power Structures (02:13) ===

[00:50:28]  But over time, you start to see the kind of like cultural milieu of this, like, the, the, this is a denomination that had for so long prided itself.
[00:50:40]  On vanquishing this liberal menace, that it's very easy to just tell some Southern Baptists that, like, no, this is all actually just a liberal Trojan horse.
[00:50:51]  Like, there's a two year period where there's a concerted effort by kind of the, I guess, for lack of a better term, like the far right wing of the Southern Baptist Convention to just talk about critical race theory.
[00:51:03]  Before it emerged as a major issue in US politics, it was something that was being, you know, It was an existential threat in the SBC.
[00:51:12]  There's, you know, sex abuse over time becomes this Trojan horse for feminism, for critical race theory, for, you know, really women pastors, you know, gay affirmation, all these things.
[00:51:25]  And I think that that is, again, you've asked about how Pressler emblematizes this problem.
[00:51:32]  I think that that is his true legacy, he created this culture in which the SBC, Viewed any outside critique as a satanic, you know, existential threat against them and was able to, again, not dissimilar to how abuse allegations were often handled with him, are able to just kind of go like this, wipe their hands clean of even, you know, documented problems that people are coming to them in good faith by just saying, like, oh, this is a part of a liberal attack on our faith.
[00:52:01]  You know, liberals tried to take over our faith once before, so why wouldn't they try again?
[00:52:05]  And that is kind of the kind of through line of what happens in the post abuse crisis era.
[00:52:13]  And, you know, I think is truly.
[00:52:17]  Of the many legacies that Pressler has on the SBC, I think that that culture is probably the most profound one.
[00:52:24]  Yeah, the way you summed it up there, that's his legacy.
[00:52:27]  And folks, some of you are deeply aware of the SBC sex abuse crisis and scandals and everything from Krista Brown's coming forward to Russell Moore and his excommunication, in essence, from the SBC and so on.

=== Profound Cultural Legacy (02:11) ===

[00:52:41]  I don't even get into Beth Moore in the story, but yeah.
[00:52:44]  I was going to say there's Beth Moore, and there's about three hours here to talk about.
[00:52:49]  If you're not familiar with that, you can find Robert's writing about this going back a decade.
[00:52:53]  You can at the Houston Chronicle and other places.
[00:52:56]  You can find my interviews with him about these things over the years on our feed.
[00:53:00]  And so that's all available.
[00:53:03]  I want to ask you if you have another couple minutes here about the effect on the SBC and the ways that things are going, because a lot of people are leaving the SBC every year.
[00:53:16]  And I want to get into some of that.
[00:53:17]  Before we do that, where can people find you?
[00:53:20]  Where are you writing?
[00:53:22]  And what's next?
[00:53:23]  Maybe something happy, like are you writing about daffodils?
[00:53:27]  Maybe a road trip.
[00:53:30]  To Whistler National Park?
[00:53:31]  I don't know, Robert.
[00:53:32]  It's something, you know, smiley.
[00:53:34]  I'm at Texas.
[00:53:35]  You can read my stuff at texasmonthly.com.
[00:53:37]  I'm on blue sky at Robert Downey and Twitter.
[00:53:39]  If you're still on there, Robert Downey underscore.
[00:53:41]  Yeah, I'm going to try to find something happy and nice, but knowing the way that my, knowing me, I'll probably end up finding a racist or a white supremacist in there or a sex offender.
[00:53:54]  I don't know.
[00:53:55]  It's all I've covered for almost a decade now.
[00:53:57]  And so, yeah, we'll throw something happy in there.
[00:54:00]  And maybe I'll go do the Houston Astros nine beers, nine hot dogs, nine innings challenge and write about that or something.
[00:54:07]  See?
[00:54:07]  Now, that is the kind of content we're looking for.
[00:54:11]  Okay.
[00:54:12]  That is what we need.
[00:54:13]  All right, folks.
[00:54:14]  If you're a subscriber, stick around.
[00:54:15]  I'm going to ask Robert two more questions about James Tallarico.
[00:54:19]  I want to ask about the SBC's numbers.
[00:54:21]  I want to ask about William Wolf, who seemed to respond to you on Twitter the other day.
[00:54:26]  Before we do that, this is the Sunday interview.
[00:54:28]  You can find us this week with great content coming on Tuesday for me.
[00:54:32]  It's in the code.
[00:54:33]  From Dan on Wednesday, the weekly roundup on Friday.
[00:54:36]  We have big kind of announcements coming, can't share them yet, but there are some innovations coming to our show and a new chapter for us.
[00:54:42]  So I hope you'll stick around for that.
[00:54:45]  If you're not a subscriber, today's a great day to do that.
[00:54:47]  You can catch the bonus content on the Sunday interview like today, ad free listening, invite to our Discord.

=== Stick Around for More (00:34) ===

[00:54:53]  And it's really that support that makes public media and public scholarship like this happen.
[00:54:58]  So please consider it.
[00:54:59]  Oh, can I say one thing real quick?
[00:55:01]  Of course.
[00:55:01]  For anyone watching on this video, I should mention that I'm in the Texas Monthly studio.
[00:55:05]  I don't have like A cork board.
[00:55:08]  I want to make sure that you guys don't think I live in the garage from season one of True Detective.
[00:55:12]  No, but that's what I needed from this.
[00:55:15]  I needed you to have that crazy Matthew McConaughey hair.
[00:55:18]  Yeah, I ran out of red strings.
[00:55:20]  Yeah, my lone stars are under the table.
[00:55:24]  Yeah, where's the 18 pack and why aren't you drinking them?
[00:55:27]  All right.