Waving a copy of the Ten Commandments and a 17th-century textbook, amateur historian David Barton recently argued that Christianity has always formed the basis of American morality and thus is essential to Texas classrooms.

“This is traditional, historical stuff,” he told a Texas Senate Education Committee last month. “It’s hard to say that anything is more traditional in American education than was the Ten Commandments.”

For nearly four decades, Barton has preached that message to politicians and pews across the country, arguing that church-state separation is a “myth” that is disproven by centuries-old texts, like the school book he showed senators, that reference the Ten Commandments and other religious texts.

Now, Barton’s once-fringe theories could be codified into Texas law.

Emboldened by recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions and the growing acceptance of Christian nationalism on the right, Barton and other conservative Christians could see monumental victories in the Texas Legislature this year.

Already this legislative session, the Texas Senate has approved bills that would require the Ten Commandments to be posted in all public school classrooms and allow unlicensed religious chaplains to supplant the role of school counselors. Meanwhile, there are numerous efforts to eliminate or weaken two state constitutional amendments that prohibit direct state support of religious schools and organizations, a key plank of the broader school-choice movement.

In legislative hearings, lawmakers have called church-state separation a “false doctrine," and bill supporters have blamed it for school shootings, crime and growing LGBTQ acceptance.

In Texas, they believe they can create a national model for infusing Christianity into the public sphere.

“We think there can be a restoration of faith in America, and we think getting Ten Commandments on these walls is a great way to do that,” former state Rep. Matt Krause testified last month. “We think we can really set a trend for the rest of the country.”

A new legal and political landscape

It's the latest battle in what Barton and other Christian leaders have framed as a long-running and existential war with the secular world, rhetoric that has helped fuel Republican movements to crack down on LGBTQ rights, ban books, push back against gun control and limit the teaching of American history in classrooms, among other oft-framed "culture war" issues.

And it comes amid growing acceptance on the right of Christian nationalism, the belief that the United States’ founding was ordained by God and, thus, its laws and institutions should favor Christians.

Bolstered by former President Donald Trump — who shored up evangelical support through his vow that “Christianity will have power” under his leadership — and animated by a rapidly secularizing and diversifying society, Christian nationalist movements have become mainstream among large factions of the Republican Party.

February polling from the Public Religion Research Institute found that more than half of Republicans adhere to or sympathize with pillars of Christian nationalism, including beliefs that the U.S. should be a strictly Christian nation. Of those respondents, PRRI found, roughly half supported having an authoritarian leader who maintains Christian dominance in society. Experts have also found strong correlations between Christian nationalist beliefs and opposition to immigration, racial justice and religious diversity.

Texans have been key drivers of that ideology, experts say.

“The nation has started to become conscious of Christian nationalism within the last handful of years,” said David Brockman, a nonresident scholar at the Religion and Public Policy Program at Rice University’s Baker Institute. “But we’ve been pretty much under the thumb of Christian nationalism here in Texas for at least a decade.”

He notes that Texas is home to a litany of well-known purveyors of Christian nationalism or related ideologies, including BlazeTV founder Glenn Beck; U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael Cruz; and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who has called the United States “a Christian nation” and said “there is no separation of church and state. It was not in the constitution.”

“We were a nation founded upon not the words of our founders, but the words of God because he wrote the Constitution,” Patrick said last year.

Such claims have been elevated by a cadre of far-right financiers who have shoveled small fortunes into political campaigns and institutions that seek to erode the wall between church and state, including through candidates for the State Board of Education and local school boards.

Those efforts have found an avid audience within the state’s massive evangelical — and mostly white — conservative voting bloc and have been routinely amplified by Texas megachurch pastors who’ve made no bones about politicking from the pulpit, even after others have said they’re running afoul of restrictions on political activity by tax-exempt nonprofits.

A 2022 Texas Tribune and ProPublica investigation found that at least 20 churches in Texas may have violated such rules. Among them was Mercy Culture Church in Fort Worth, which has hosted Kelly Shackelford — whose First Liberty Institute has been instrumental in legal challenges to the separation of church and state. Krause, the former Texas representative who testified last month in support of the Ten Commandments bill, recently took a job at First Liberty Institute after a decade in the Texas Legislature.

On Sunday, Krause’s successor, state Rep. Nate Schatzline, also spoke at the church.

“The devil is not afraid of a church that stays within the four walls,” Schatzline said before touting a wave of successful conservative candidates in Tarrant County and anti-LGBTQ bills he’s supporting in the Legislature. “That’s what happens when the church wakes up. That’s what happens when men and women of God get behind other men and women of God.”

Founding fathers: A wall of separation

But few figures have been as instrumental in the push to erode church-state separation as Barton, a self-taught historian who founded his group, WallBuilders, in 1988 with a mission to “present America’s forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on the moral, religious, and constitutional foundation on which America was built.”

Barton served as vice chair of the Texas GOP from 1997 to 2006 and has pushed back for decades against conventional interpretations of the First Amendment’s establishment clause, which prohibits the government from establishing a state religion. Barton argues the “wall of separation” that the Founding Fathers envisioned has been misconstrued. In his view, that separation was only meant to extend one way, protecting religion — ostensibly, Christianity — from the government, not vice versa.

“‘Separation of church and state’ currently means almost exactly the opposite of what it originally meant,” his group’s website claims.

Among Barton’s favorite tactics: citing centuries-old texts, such as the one he presented to the Texas Senate committee, that he says mention Christianity or the Ten Commandments. That, he says, suggests a longstanding Judeo-Christian influence on American education, law and morality. Abandoning those universal moral standards, he and other WallBuilders leaders claim, helps explain most of America’s ills — including the recent mass shooting at a Nashville, Tennessee, Christian school.

“Our young people are having a very hard time determining what’s right and wrong,” David Barton’s son, Timothy Barton, told the Senate committee last month. “We’re seeing people do what they think is right. But what they think is right is often things like what resulted in Nashville. … Instead we should be presenting those morals [in the Ten Commandments] in front of students so they know there is a basis of morality and killing is always wrong.”

Barton’s broader theories have been widely ridiculed and debunked by historians and other scholars who note that he has no formal historical training and that his 2012 book, “The Jefferson Lies,” was recalled by its Christian publisher because of factual errors.

Even so, he’s been courted by political hopefuls, including Cruz, and his theories have been routinely elevated by others in the Texas GOP.

In just one hearing last month, state Sen. Donna Campbell, R-New Braunfels, praised one of Barton’s books as “great”; Sen. Mayes Middleton, R-Galveston, called separation of church and state “not a real doctrine”; and Weatherford Republican Sen. Phil King brought forth Barton — an “esteemed” witness — to support King’s bill to post the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.

Such a proposal, King said, would not have been feasible a few years ago.

“However, the legal landscape has changed,” he added.

A “massive shift” in the law?

King has a point.

In 2022’s Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Washington state high school football coach who argued that his religious rights were violated because his employer, a public school, sought to limit his practice of silently praying in the middle of the football field immediately after games. The district had asked Kennedy to pray at a later time to avoid the appearance that the school was endorsing his beliefs, then declined to renew his contract after he refused to do so.

In a 6-3 ruling, the court’s conservative supermajority said Kennedy’s prayers were protected by the First Amendment, rejecting the district’s contention that allowing the prayers amounted to an official endorsement of religion.

The ruling dealt a substantial blow to the so-called Lemon test. Established by the court’s 1971 decision in Lemon v. Kurtzman, the Lemon test held that the government could interact with religion so long as it served a secular purpose, did not advance or inhibit religion, and did not create an excessive government entanglement with religion.

In the Kennedy decision, the Supreme Court also ruled that restrictions on religious expression must take into account historical context and practices — a directive that some have taken as a green light to put religion in the classroom, including Krause and First Liberty Institute, which represented Kennedy.

“The law has undergone a massive shift,” Krause said during his testimony in support of the Ten Commandments bill. “It’s not too much to say that the Kennedy case for religious liberty was much like the Dobbs case was for the pro-life movement. It was a fundamental shift.”

Experts aren’t yet sold on that claim.

“Anyone who tells you that the law in this area is clear, or has ever been clear, is probably trying to sell you something,” said professor Steven Collis, director of both the First Amendment Center and the Law and Religion Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin.

While Collis added that the Lemon test was often ignored or disputed by courts because of its vague language, he said the Kennedy ruling neutered much of it, as well as the government’s ability to limit religious expression based on claims that doing so amounts to a state-sanctioned endorsement of religion.

But Collis noted that part of the Kennedy ruling was predicated on the idea that the coach was not forcing players to pray with him, an important distinction to the court’s majority. He said there’s a case to be made that posting the Ten Commandments or other religious texts in a classroom — where children are required to remain — is far different. And he expects such legislation would face court challenges in which opponents say that it amounts to a “coercion of religion upon students.”

“There has been a long tradition in the United States of saying, whatever government is doing, it has to do neutrally between religions — it can’t treat one religion differently than another. And certainly, it can’t favor one religion over another,” he said. “One of the challenges with having something like the Ten Commandments up in a public school — or really any religious texts up on the wall in a public school — is you immediately have to ask the question, whose religion is it going to be?”

Non-Christian Texans are voicing similar concerns. In the Ten Commandments bill, they see a backlash to the growing diversity and religious plurality of Texans, and say it’s discriminatory for the state to elevate one faith while ignoring many others.

“We are extremely disappointed,” said Rish Oberoi, Texas director for the civic group Indian American Impact. “Texas has an incredibly diverse population that includes Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and others. We’ve created an environment that has drawn people from all over the world to places like Houston, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio. And it’s depressing to see that our leaders and our legislators do not seem to acknowledge how much we contribute culturally, politically and civically to this state.”

Rulings embraced by school choice advocates

A potential legal challenge to the Ten Commandments or a similar bill would come amid a broader shift in how the U.S. Supreme Court and some state legislatures treat religious expression.

The series of moves has deeply concerned advocates for church-state separation. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, Congress made the historic decision to let religious organizations — including some of the nation’s largest and most influential congregations — receive forgivable federal disaster loans.

In 2021, Texas lawmakers passed legislation that required donated “In God We Trust” signs to be placed in public classrooms. Not long after, a North Texas school district rejected signs in Arabic that were donated by a local parent while allowing English versions that were provided by Patriot Mobile, a Grapevine-based conservative cellphone company that has funded numerous Christian nationalist campaigns in the state, including anti-LGBTQ school board candidates.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court, driven by its conservative majority, has handed down a series of consequential rulings that have raised questions about so-called Blaine amendments in 37 state constitutions, including Texas’, that prohibit or limit state funding of religious institutions, including schools:

• In 2020, the court ruled 5-4 in favor of a Montana woman, Kendra Espinoza, who argued that her state’s Department of Revenue improperly barred her from using a tax-credit scholarship at a Christian school.
• In 2022, justices similarly ruled that Maine could not bar religious institutions from public funding, a significant decision to ongoing debates over public education financing in Texas.

Those rulings have been embraced by the broader school choice movement.

The same week that state Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, filed Senate Bill 8 — a massive overhaul of the Texas educational system that would allow religious schools to receive state funding via educational savings accounts — he requested an expedited opinion from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton about whether the state’s Blaine amendments were unconstitutional.

Days prior, state Sen. Angela Paxton — a McKinney Republican who is married to the attorney general — filed legislation that would repeal “the constitutional provision that prohibits the appropriation of state money or property for the benefit of any sect, religious society, or theological or religious seminary.”

The next week, the attorney general released an opinion that said Texas’ Blaine amendments violated the U.S. Constitution’s free-exercise clause.

There are also two bills, one in the House and one in the Senate, that similarly challenge the state’s Blaine amendments.

Catholic groups have decried the Blaine amendments as discriminatory because they were often rooted in anti-Catholic bigotry. And they reject the notion that removing them — or allowing public funding for religious schools — would erode church-state separation.

“There’s nothing in these bills where the state is establishing religion. And there’s no separation of church and state issue because the state [already] funds religious ministries and religious organizations,” said Jennifer Allmon, executive director of the Texas Catholic Conference of Bishops.

“If you have a Catholic hospital or a Baptist hospital, they can bill Medicaid for their health care services, even though their health care services are an extension of the healing ministry of Jesus Christ,” Allmon said.

Church-state separation groups disagree.

Amanda Tyler is executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, a Washington, D.C.-based group that advocates for a strong wall between government and religion. While Tyler agrees that some Blaine amendments can be traced to an 1875 proposal by U.S. Rep. James G. Blaine — who was clearly anti-Catholic — she argued that other provisions, which she calls “no-aid” clauses, predate Blaine’s tenure and preserve, instead of diminish, religious freedom.

Removing those restrictions — particularly as the United States continues to diversify and secularize — would be disastrous, she said.

“The principle behind the original ‘no-aid’ principle was not picking and choosing among different religious groups, as it applies equally,” Tyler said. “We can shun bigotry without throwing away that principle, which has served religion well in this country for centuries, leading to greater religious flourishing and pluralism.”

In 2016, former Harris County GOP chair Jared Woodfill received an urgent warning about Paul Pressler, his longtime law partner and a Southern Baptist leader. In an email, a 25-year-old attorney from Woodfill’s Houston firm said he’d recently gone to lunch with Pressler, who told him “lewd stories about being naked on beaches with young men” and then invited him to skinny-dip at his ranch.

Woodfill — an outspoken anti-gay politician and prominent conservative activist who’d just played a key role defeating an equal rights ordinance for LGBTQ Houstonians — responded to the young man’s request for help with shock and indignation. “This 85-year-old man has never made any inappropriate comments or actions toward me or any one I know of,” he wrote of Pressler at the time.

But new court records show that wasn’t true.

In recent sworn testimony, Woodfill said he’d known since 2004 of an allegation that Pressler had sexually abused a child. Woodfill learned of those claims, he said, during mediation of an assault lawsuit filed against Pressler that he helped quietly settle for nearly a half-million dollars at the time. Despite his knowledge of the accusation, Woodfill continued to work with Pressler for nearly a decade — leaning on Pressler’s name and reputation to bolster their firm, Woodfill & Pressler LLP.

Rather than pay him a salary, Woodfill testified, the firm provided Pressler a string of employees to serve as personal assistants, most of them young men who typically worked out of his River Oaks mansion. Two have accused Pressler of sexual assault or misconduct.

Woodfill led the Harris County Republican Party from 2002 to 2014 and has for years been at the helm of anti-LGBTQ and other hardline conservative movements in Houston and Texas. In 2015, amid tense debate over a Houston equal rights ordinance that would have made LGBTQ workplace discrimination illegal, he and well-known GOP power broker Steven Hotze co-led a campaign that, among other things, said the measure would allow children to be sexually groomed and abused in bathrooms, paid for hundreds of thousands of dollars in opposition advertisements and compared the gay rights movement to Nazis.

Since then, Woodfill has remained a fixture in Texas GOP politics: During the height of the pandemic, he and Hotze filed numerous lawsuits challenging COVID-19 mandates, and he’s currently representing conservative political candidates challenging the 2022 election results in Harris County. Woodfill is also representing Hotze in a criminal investigation stemming from a 2020 incident in which a private investigator, allegedly acting at Hotze’s behest, held at gunpoint an A/C repairman who he believed was transporting fake ballots.

Woodfill’s deposition came as part of an ongoing, six-year-old lawsuit in which a former member of Pressler’s church youth group accuses him of decades of rape beginning when he was 14. The suit also accuses Woodfill and others, including leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, of concealing and enabling Pressler’s behavior — claims that prompted a 2019 Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News investigation into widespread sexual abuse in the SBC, the nation’s second-largest faith group.

Released over the last few weeks, the thousands of pages of new court records show how Woodfill leaned on his Pressler connections to bolster his political and legal career — despite warnings about his law partner’s behavior. And they shed new light on how Pressler, a former Texas Court of Appeals judge and one-time White House nominee under George H.W. Bush, allegedly used his prestige and influence to evade responsibility amid repeated accusations of sexual misconduct and assault dating back to at least 1978, when he was forced out of a Houston church for allegedly molesting a teenager in a sauna.

Pressler is best known for his work in the Southern Baptist Convention, where he was instrumental in pushing its 16 million members and 47,000 churches to adopt literal interpretations of the Bible, strongly denounce homosexuality and align more closely with the Republican Party. And for decades, he was a high-ranking member of the Council for National Policy, an uber-secretive network of conservative judges, mega donors, media figures and religious elites led by Tony Perkins, head of the anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council.

The new records show that in 2004, leaders of First Baptist Church of Houston, a massive Southern Baptist congregation, investigated claims that Pressler, then a deacon, had groped and undressed a college student at his Houston mansion. The church leaders deemed the behavior "morally and spiritually" inappropriate and warned Pressler but took no further action, citing differing accounts of the incident and Pressler’s stature in their church and the Southern Baptist Convention. In recent depositions, plaintiffs attorneys also briefly mention new complaints from two others about Pressler, though those documents remain sealed ahead of the looming civil trial in the case.

At least six men have now accused Pressler of sexual assault or misconduct, including two who say they were molested while minors and two who say they were solicited for sex in incidents after 2004, when Woodfill and First Baptist leaders were separately made aware of complaints about Pressler.

Pressler has not been criminally charged in any of the incidents. Neither Woodfill nor his attorney responded to a list of questions about Woodfill’s handling of the allegations against Pressler. In a Wednesday email, Woodfill’s lawyer David Oubre said they are “confident Mr. Woodfill will be successful in defeating these claims.”

“A big name”

The new allegations came as part of an ongoing lawsuit in which Duane Rollins accuses Pressler of decades of rape and molestation beginning when Rollins was 14 and a member of the church youth group led by Pressler, who was then in his late 40s. Those alleged attacks, Rollins says in court documents, pushed him into years of drug and alcohol addictions that kept him in prison for much of his adult life. While in prison therapy sessions in 2015, Rollins says he uncovered repressed memories of sexual abuse by Pressler. He was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress as a “direct result of the childhood sexual trauma he suffered,” according to medical records filed in court.

In 2017, Rollins sued Pressler, Woodfill and Southern Baptist figures and institutions that he says enabled and concealed Pressler’s behavior, arguing that, because of trauma and manipulation by Pressler, it took him decades to reconcile that he was sexually abused. Last year, after the defendants fought to have the suit tossed by arguing the assault claims were outside the statute of limitations, the Texas Supreme Court agreed with Rollins' arguments and allowed the lawsuit to go forward.

The new filings give insight into Woodfill’s long relationship with Pressler beginning in the mid-1990s. At the time, Pressler, then 65, was phasing out of years of work in the Southern Baptist Convention and focusing more on politics. Woodfill was still in his 20s and said Pressler’s conservative bona fides were a valuable asset.

Pressler’s support has long been sought and touted by Republican political hopefuls, including Sen. Ted Cruz, who has known Pressler since he was a teenager. In 2012, Pressler hosted a retreat at his Texas ranch, where a group of prominent conservative leaders agreed to support Rick Santorum over Mitt Romney in the upcoming presidential election.

“Obviously everybody knew who he was. He was a big name,” Woodfill said during his deposition. “A lot of people would come and ask for his endorsement.”

Over the course of their law partnership, Woodfill testified, Pressler did almost no work for the firm, but was provided numerous young, male assistants who tended to his and his family’s needs — including his son who has a physical disability.

“I can think of one or two cases that he brought in,” Woodfill testified. “He may have gone to one hearing in his entire time with us, two at the most. Really, it was his name. … He got an employee that worked for him. So he didn’t get a salary. He didn’t get a draw. He didn’t get a bonus. We paid for someone to come and assist him. That’s how he got compensated.”

The latest lawsuit marks the second time Rollins has sued Pressler over allegations of assault.

In 2004, Woodfill represented Pressler in a lawsuit in which Rollins accused him of assault stemming from a 2003 incident in a Dallas hotel room, during which Rollins says Pressler injured him during a physical altercation and, citing his stature as a former Texas judge, threatened him if he came forward. In order to avoid publicity, Woodfill helped settle the suit for $450,000 in a one-day mediation that also included a confidentiality agreement, he said in testimony last month.

Copies of the lawsuit did not refer to the incident as sexual assault. But as the case was being mediated, Woodfill said under oath last month, he was told by Rollins’ then-attorney that Pressler had “been sexually inappropriate” with Rollins, had “done some things to him when he was a child” and “sexually abused (Rollins) ... when he was a child or in a youth group or something.”

During his deposition, Woodfill declined to discuss most other details of the 2004 lawsuit, citing the confidentiality agreement. Even so, Woodfill’s testimony directly contradicts his previous assertions that he had no knowledge of Pressler’s alleged grooming and sexual misconduct toward young men — claims that he has repeated since at least 2016, when he denied any knowledge of such behavior after the young attorney detailed Pressler’s alleged invitation to hot tub naked, as well as in subsequent media interviews and court filings.

Rollins’ attorneys say Woodfill “had an incentive to turn a blind eye to Mr. Pressler’s abuse.”

“As a former state judge and prominent religious figure, the Pressler name was too important to lose or see tarnished,” lawyers for the law firm Baker Botts wrote in a recent filing. “Thus, when allegations of inappropriate sexual conduct surfaced, they were quietly swept under the rug to avoid the risk of losing a business partner.”

Records show that Pressler remained a limited partner at the firm until around 2012, when Woodfill said Pressler retired. The firm was renamed Woodfill Law Firm and has been involved in numerous lawsuits involving conservative causes over the years. The firm has also faced accusations of impropriety, including money laundering allegations that sparked a 2018 raid and investigation by the Harris County District Attorney’s office, though no charges were ever filed in the matter.

“If brought to light”

Rollins’ latest lawsuit also brought to light other sexual misconduct allegations against Pressler, including an affidavit that was submitted as part of the 2004 lawsuit. Woodfill declined to comment on the affidavit while under oath, citing confidentiality rules.

In the affidavit, which was made public this year, another college student says Pressler pressured him to get naked and then groped him at his Houston mansion. According to court records, the young man met Pressler through First Baptist Church of Houston and then was hired by Woodfill’s law firm as Pressler’s assistant. The Texas Tribune does not identify victims of alleged sexual assault without their consent.

In the newly-surfaced affidavit, the young man said he was invited to live with the Presslers. “Moving into the Pressler home was in the fashion of being invited to be a member of the family which, by that time and owing to the church relationship, I had become,” he wrote in his affidavit.

One night in May 2004, he was asked by Pressler to give him a neck massage on his bed, he said in the affidavit. Pressler then removed his pants and began to give the young man a massage, the man said. Pressler later invited him on a trip to Europe, and the college student said he was “non-committal." When he went outside after, Pressler followed him and suggested they undress to get him “adjusted to traveling in Europe,” where he said nudity among men was common, according to the affidavit.

The young man said he declined multiple times but eventually gave in to Pressler’s requests and briefly undressed. Pressler later suggested they pray together naked, he said in the affidavit, after which the college student got dressed and hurried into the home. Pressler followed him inside, he said, and “reached to hug me goodnight.”

He said Pressler then “quickly and without warning or invitation, grabbed my swim trunks and pulled them down far enough to expose my genitals and buttocks.”

“I was horrified and froze,” he said. “Apparently, in response to my reaction, he backed away and went upstairs.”

Court records show that, after the college student mentioned the incident to a church leader, a small group of top First Baptist leaders briefly looked into the matter but determined it was a “he said, she said” type of ordeal that would be damaging to Pressler if made public. Pressler was beloved by many at the church and had just served on a search committee that brought the church’s new pastor on around the same time.

“Given your stature and various leadership roles in our church, the Southern Baptist Convention and other Christian organizations, it is our considered opinion that this kind of behavior, if brought to light, might distort your testimony or cause others to stumble,” First Baptist leaders wrote in a 2004 letter to Pressler that was recently made public as part of Rollins’ lawsuit. “We desire neither, but, rather, pray that God continues to use your gifts and talents to accomplish His will and purpose.”

In an interview, a lawyer for First Baptist defended the church’s actions, saying leaders immediately looked into the allegations and, after interviewing both Pressler and the college student, found nothing that was conclusive or criminal.

“The church acted promptly when we heard this alleged behavior,” Houston attorney Barry Flynn said. “Remember: We didn’t know if this was true or untrue.”

Flynn said the church has strict rules on background checks for anyone who works with children — but noted that Pressler primarily taught adult Bible study classes. And, he added, even if the church had checked his background, they would not have found anything criminal.

In a deposition, a top church leader reiterated that stance and compared Pressler’s behavior to boys who playfully “depants” one another. He said Pressler’s defense — that he was readying the young man for a trip to Europe — was believable.

Pressler remained a deacon at the church, First Baptist leaders testified, but significantly curtailed his involvement there until around 2007, when he transferred to Second Baptist Church of Houston, a massive network of Houston-area churches that’s led by former SBC President Ed Young, and has been previously accused of concealing other sexual abuses. Flynn, the First Baptist attorney, said there was “no communication” between the two churches about the allegations against Pressler.

Woodfill is also a member of Second Baptist.

A pattern of behavior

In the years after leaving First Baptist, Pressler was accused of sexual misconduct by at least two other young men — including a young Houston Baptist University student who testified that, as a result of Pressler’s sexual advances, he stopped pursuing a career in ministry, frequently had panic attacks and attempted suicide.

That man’s allegations are similar in detail to those described by the 25-year-old attorney who wrote to Woodfill in 2016. The attorney, whom the Tribune is not naming, was a recent law school graduate who said in an affidavit that he moved to Texas in 2016 for a job at Woodfill’s law firm. During that time, he said, Woodfill introduced him to Pressler, calling him his “mentor for over 25 years,” a “hero of the faith” and a “great man.”

Two months later, the young attorney said he ran into Pressler at a political fundraiser at the home of Hotze, and was encouraged by Woodfill to go to lunch with Pressler. The following week, he said, he arrived at Pressler’s home to pick him up. Pressler answered the door without pants on and invited him inside, after which he showed him pictures of “important people” he knew and talked about swimming naked in Europe numerous times, the attorney wrote in his 2018 sworn affidavit.

At lunch, Pressler told the attorney about a 10-person hot tub at his Dripping Springs ranch and invited him there, saying “when the ladies are not around, us boys all go in the hot tub completely naked,” he said.

Horrified, the attorney addressed the incident with a longtime employee of Woodfill’s law firm, who made it clear that this was not the first time he’d heard such allegations, the attorney said in the affidavit.

“I discovered that this was not unusual behavior for Pressler, and that he had a long history of lecherous behavior towards young men. Even going as far as bringing scantily clad men and parading them through the office,” he wrote in his affidavit.

Emails show that the attorney reached out to Woodfill, who claimed it was the first time he’d heard of such alleged behavior by Pressler. Woodfill later offered the attorney a $10,000 raise, court records show, and said he’d talk to Pressler and keep him away.

“However,” the attorney wrote, “within two weeks Pressler was at a political luncheon that Woodfill required me to attend.”