David French, a New York Times columnist, just read what he called “a remarkable article that helped me make sense of our times.” By this, he is referring to an astonishing 11,000-word report by Robert Downen for the Texas Monthly, May 2026 issue about the right-wing crusade within the Southern Baptist Convention that SBC members Paul Pressler and Duane Rollins started in the 1970s.
I will say the same about Mr. French’s essay about the Texas Monthly report. With the title “I Don’t Think You can Even Call This Hypocrisy” , Mr. French has written a wonderful description of how the Southern Baptist Convention turned into the Apostles of Herod under a phony conservatism. What began as a “conservative resurgence” within the SBC has metastasized into the heretical Christian nationalism of today, largely due to a few militant SBC members.
The main agitator in this, according to Mr. French and the Texas Monthly article, was Paul Pressler, an SBC member, who turned the traditional teachings of Jesus to pray, forgive and teach, into the practices of King Herod, accuse, attack and destroy.
Pressler and his allies turned the SBC into allies with Ronald Reagan and with Jerry Falwell of the Morality Majority they formed the political Christian right which . Forty years later, we have the Trump administration’s Christian nationalism, including the utterly incompetent clown, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the self-identified “Christian Trumpist” Paula White-Cain who blessed the crowd before Jan.6 and called for “holy boldness” and Russell Vought, director of Office of Management and Budget, known as the “Grim Reaper” for gutting federal services.
Mr. French’s article is very perceptive about what happens when people take religious and spiritual issues into their own hands instead of cooperating with God’s call for conversion and for “evangelization,” which seeks to persuade people to choose a better life but leaves people free to decide for themselves.
If these pastors thought liberals were misinterpreting the Bible and Christian teaching, they could study the liberal thought, point out the spiritual flaws or mistakes and propose why their way of seeing it is more faithful to true Christian teaching.
Instead, they turned to power and made religious differences political. Underneath the disguise of holiness, they went on a rampage of self-pride and arrogance, trying to force other church leaders to adopt their way of thinking.
This shows again how religious faith can fill immature believers into zealots and crucifiers. They become puffed up with self-righteous self-assertion and go on crusades, literally. This juggernaut of self crushes their natural human fellow-feeling for those they are now labeling enemies and they become inhuman, forming factions that purge and destroy.
They violate Jesus’ words:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor[a] and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.
If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? \ Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:43-48)
As Jesus points out, if you hate your enemy and only love your friends, you are no different than the tax collectors for the Romans, who were the reviled outcasts in Second Temple Jewish society.
And sure enough, these so-called “right-wing Christians” have unleashed a scourge of blame, accusation and factionalism for the last 60 years that have destroyed the credibility of Christianity. They’ve become that repels non-believers. No wonder young people are “nones.”
In 2022, a survey by the Religion in Public Life reported that for the first time ever, the young Gen Z generation who have no religious affiliation, the “nones,” outnumber Protestants: 48% to 39%. Perhaps it’s no wonder that the traditional seven mainline Protestant denominations are disappearing.
In his book, The Vanishing Church, Ryan P. Burge documents this decline both as a sociologist and a Baptist pastor. His church, the First Baptist Church in Mt. Vernon, Ill., closed in 2024 after struggling for over 17 years, until the church closed in the summer of 2024. He is an American Baptist Churches USA pastor and a political science professor who analyzes religious data
In his review of Burge’s book in Christianity Today, Michael Wear writes:
“What Burge mourns is not just the decline of his church but the “hollowing out” of American religious life as a place to belong before believing. Forty years ago, he observes, “there was a place to feel welcomed and embraced no matter how much or how little one believed in Jesus Christ that particular Sunday—or how one cast their ballot on Election Day. But that’s no longer the case.
“Instead, Burge argues that “American religion has become an ‘all or none’ proposition—conservative evangelical religion or none at all.” This, then, “leaves tens of millions of theological and political moderates with no place to find community and spiritual edification, or to work collectively to solve societal problems”—effectively religiously homeless.”
Later, Wear writes:
While the Religious Right polarized religion—not just politics—in a way that favored evangelicalism, this polarization harmed Christianity overall, demographically speaking. According to Burge, the Religious Right “absolutely led to a surge in the share of Americans who aligned with an evangelical tradition, but it also led to a rapid weakening of other major Protestant denominations, and it pushed a growing number of Americans, especially young adults, to no longer align with any religious tradition at all.” (See: January/February 2026 issue of Christianity Today.)
It will be theologians and historians who write the full story of how the “conservative” Christians rejected evangelization, persuasion and argument, so they could adopt the anti-Christian tactics of power politics to coerce others to distort church beliefs to their own opinions. This will reveal the rise of the Apostles of Herod in the churches of America, founded on religious liberty and separation of church and state.
FYI: Paul Pressler was accused of rape and molestation by several young men, was never criminally charged, always denied the allegations but paid up to $450,000 in settlements and died on June 15, 2024, at that age 94.
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