House Speaker Mike Johnson Served as Dean of a Law School Named After Baptist Denominational Leader and Alleged Sexual Predator

 Baptist Press: Abuse Allegations a Blight on Pressler Legacy

AP story on Johnson's Failed Term as Dean of the Pressler School of Law at Louisiana College

Current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is an Evangelical Christian from Louisiana, a member of o Cypress Baptist Church, a large congregation in Benton, Lousiana.  In August of 2010, he was named the founding dean of the Pressler School of Law at Louisiana College, a school owned by Louisiana Southern Baptists.  The school never opened, and Johnson resigned in 2012.  The college's president, Joe Aguillard, blamed the school's failure on Johnson's resignation.  

But there's a little bit of a back story here.  The Pressler School of Law is named for Paul Pressler, a now-retired Texas appeals court judge, known as one of the "architects" of the Conservative Resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention, a ten-year denominational political effort to "restore" the denomination to its "conservative roots" by political maneuvering to elect a series of presidents with appointive powers to ensure that only theological conservatives who believed in the inerrancy and infallibility of the Bible would be appointed as trustees to the denomination's entities and seminaries.  This would ensure that the professors who were hired, and the missionaries who were appointed, all held the doctrinal belief in biblical inerrancy and infallibility.  

The Conservative Resurgence considered itself crusaders against liberalism in the denomination.  The other "architect," Paige Patterson, was President of the tiny Criswell Bible College in Dallas, belonging to the First Baptist Church there.  Eventually, as a result of his work on behalf of the "resurgence," he was rewarded with being elected President of the SBC, and as President of two of the denomination's theological seminaries, Southeastern in Wake Forest, North Carolina, and Southwestern, in Ft. Worth, Texas.  For his part, Pressler was given a seat for eight years on the powerful Executive Committee of the SBC, and then, for eight more years, as a trustee of the International Mission Board.  

I'm not aware of a direct connection between Johnson and Pressler, though Johnson served as a trustee of the SBC's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission at the same time Pressler was active in denominational bureaucracy.   Southern Baptist leaders are finally coming to accept evidence from at least two lawsuits pointing to Pressler having been involved in incidents of sexual abuse of young men, including from the youth group of the church that he had once led, and associates from the law firm in which he was a partner with an attorney named Jared Woodfill.  

Johnson has kept silence on his tenure at the Baptist law school, and hasn't commented on the evidence of sexual abuse coming from the settled lawsuits against Pressler.  That seems strange, for a high profile politician like Johnson, whose conservative views are far right hard line, especially against LGBTQ persons.  I would think he'd want to clear his record of any possible association with the Pressler name, especially considering the nature of the allegations, the evidence which includes the leadership of Pressler's church, First Baptist of Houston, acknowledging his inappropriate behavior and taking disciplinary action which eventually caused him to join a different church.  

Southern Baptist leaders have been very reluctant, and very slow, in acknowledging the allegations against Pressler.  The lawsuit brought against him also named the Southern Baptist Convention as a defendant, as well as Paige Patterson, the other architect of the Conservative Resurgence.  Patterson was eventually dismissed as a defendant, but the SBC executive committee was a contributor to the settlement, along with Pressler's law partner, Jared Woodfill.  Woodfill recently lost a primary election for a state senate seat, even though he had the endorsement of some high powered Texas Republicans, including attorney general Ken Paxton.  Johnson might have need to be somewhat concerned about the political fallout that can potentially come from situations such as this.  Voters, even in conservative Texas, don't appear to like, or want to endorse, hypocrisy.  

But we see this sort of thing from Republicans all the time.  They're hard liners against LGBTQ persons, and want to deny them the same rights as other Americans.  But when one of their own is involved in a sexual abuse scandal like this one, they go into radio silence, and won't let integrity get the best of them.  The speaker missed an opportunity here.  And while he may not have had any association with Pressler, his name will be associated with the failed law school at Lousiana College.