Southern Baptist leader Paige Patterson, under pressure, has decided not to give key sermon at upcoming convention. He was fired as a seminary president for mishandling rape allegations, and comments like advising a woman to return to her abusive husband. https://t.co/SUCRHOnaiG
— Laurie Goodstein (@lauriegnyt) June 8, 2018
Jerry Falwell once said that Paige Patterson was one of only a few preachers to his Right, and he has been for 40-years a driver of the Evangelical Right’s profoundly damaging, theocracy-leaning influence upon this country; his departure from public life is a good thing. The irony, of course, is that until recently he was untouchable. Though his squalid conduct during the co-called Conservative Resurgence was a well-documented and widely-known fact — I have more than a dozen books about the Resurgence — he enjoyed mythic stature amongst the browbeaten sheep who comprise the Southern Baptist Convention.
He had become an idol of sorts, and I mean that in the most Biblical way.
It is not a coincidence that Evangelicals have hastened to Donald Trump — another authoritarian with very bad values and, unhappily for the rest of us, a much larger podium. The Conservative Resurgence, like the election of Trump, was a reaction against modernity by the marginalized, the displaced, the left-behind. We should all do everything we can to assist Trump to the same ignominious end.