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 oversaw a faculty purge of anyone who held moderate views on gender, inerrancy, or Calvinist theology. In 2018 Patterson was fired from Southwestern after reporting emerged that he had discouraged a rape victim from going to police and had made 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.

Documented themes

• Christian Nationalism
• Patriarchy
• Gender & Patriarchy
• politics-and-the-pulpit

Connections from Paige Patterson

• opposed → Beth Moore (2018) — Paige Patterson's April 2018 remarks at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary — advising female students not to report sexual abuse to police but only to their pastor, and stating that a battered woman should have stayed and prayed rather than leaving — 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 — the trustee capture had preceded him — but his thirteen-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, following documentation that he had intervened in a rape case at the seminary to discourage police contact, illustrated the institutional consequence of the theology he had embedded there.
• influenced → Baptist Faith & Message 2000 (2000) — Patterson was the primary theological architect of the 2000 BFM revisions, particularly the female submission language.

Sources

• Jesus and John Wayne — Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020), pp. 144-165