Paige Patterson

Paige Patterson is the theological architect of what the SBC calls the Conservative Resurgence and critics call the Fundamentalist Takeover. In 1967, he and Judge Paul Pressler met in a New Orleans restaurant and began planning a coordinated multi-decade campaign to seize control of the denomination's institutions by electing a series of SBC presidents who would appoint like-minded trustees to seminaries and agencies. The strategy was explicitly political: leverage the SBC's democratic polity against itself by running a slate of conservative candidates for president every year until the entire apparatus turned. By 1990, it had worked. Every SBC seminary president, every agency head, every mission board was controlled by resurgence allies. Patterson pushed through the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message revision that added explicit female submission language. He was president of Southeastern and then Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he replaced faculty who held moderate views on gender and inerrancy. In 2018 Patterson was fired from Southwestern after trustees cited a 2003 rape report at Southeastern that was never taken to police (the former student, Megan Lively, says he urged her not to report; Patterson says he does not recall meeting her), a 2015 email in which he wrote of meeting a Southwestern student who had reported a rape alone to 'break her down,' and inappropriate comments about a 16-year-old girl's appearance. The story broke in part because the culture he built — authoritarian, male-dominated, women-silencing — had finally produced consequences.

Themes this entry appears in

• Christian Nationalism
• Patriarchy
• Gender & Patriarchy
• Politics & the Pulpit

Connections from Paige Patterson

• opposed → Beth Moore (2018) — Resurfaced audio from 2000, in which Paige Patterson described counseling an abused woman to stay with her husband and pray, prompted Beth Moore to publicly call him out by name on Twitter. Moore's response was significant because she was a major SBC institutional figure with a massive platform, not an outside critic. Patterson was forced to resign from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary within weeks. The exchange crystallized the cost of the SBC's patriarchal culture: the institution's abuse of women had finally found a witness with enough standing to make the defense untenable.
• influenced → SBC Conservative Resurgence (1979) — Patterson provided the theological vision and grassroots evangelical network that gave the resurgence its religious credibility.
• influenced → Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (2003) — Paige Patterson became president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2003 after a decade at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Southwestern was already under resurgence control when Patterson arrived — resurgence-aligned trustees had preceded him — but his fifteen-year presidency made Southwestern the flagship institution of his own theological project. Admission, faculty hiring, and ordination preparation all reflected the standards Patterson had championed: inerrancy as he defined it, complementarianism, and a conservative Baptist identity aligned with the post-resurgence denominational consensus. His firing in 2018, after trustees cited his handling of rape reports in 2003 (at Southeastern) and 2015 (at Southwestern), illustrated the institutional consequence of the theology he had embedded there.
• influenced → Baptist Faith & Message 2000 (2000) — As SBC president, Patterson appointed the committee that drafted the 2000 BFM (chaired by Adrian Rogers), which retained the wifely-submission language the convention had added in 1998.

Sources

• Statement by Kevin Ueckert, Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary — SWBTS Board of Trustees (2018)
• Jesus and John Wayne — Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020), pp. 144-165