Duane Rollins died on Friday, May 23. I never met him, but his story met me when I needed to know I wasn’t crazy and I wasn’t alone.
While washing dishes on a December evening in 2017, I listened to a podcast in which one of Harvey Weinstein’s victims told her story of how the Hollywood producer, using his established reputation and influence, ended up naked with her in a hotel room. Those details recalled a memory of my own from 15 years earlier, when I traveled with Paul Pressler.
Judge Pressler was a legend in the “conservative resurgence” of the Southern Baptist Convention, in which I was raised, ordained, and serving. I was starstruck not only to meet the judge but also, within an hour, to be invited to assist him on a speaking tour. On the first morning of that tour, following Pressler’s explanation of how he took a “locker room” approach to showers, we both stood naked in a hotel room.
The parallels between the Weinstein survivor’s story and mine sent me reeling. I reached out to a friend who also knew Pressler and was a safe person to tell.
After listening, he sent me a link: Earlier that very day, The Texas Tribune had reported on a lawsuit brought against Paul Pressler by Duane Rollins. It shared many of the marks of my story—a hotel room, undesired nudity, verbal grooming—plus horrendous details farther down the dark path, with Rollins alleging that Pressler raped him repeatedly.
For years, I had searched the internet for “Paul Pressler … abuse … young men” every few months. And then, on the day when the wretchedness of how Pressler had abused his power hit me with visceral force, there was Rollins saying, “You’re not the only one.”
That initial article presaged the cost of abuse carried not only by Rollins but also by so many survivors who shared their stories in the wake of his revelation, both in the Houston Chronicle’s landmark “Abuse of Faith” exposé and in the coverage that followed.
Pressler’s legal team and colleagues called Rollins’s lawsuit “a bizarre and frivolous case” not even worth a news report. They denied the charges in the strongest terms and planned a countersuit for Rollins’s “harassing.”
Time would tell that this was all legal brinksmanship. Six years later, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) and the other parties named in the lawsuit settled out of court with Rollins. During the appeals process, the SBC’s attorney wrote an email opposing broad discovery because the denomination’s leaders feared it would make it impossible to deny that Pressler was an abuser.
A few months earlier, I was on the list of character witnesses ready to testify under oath to the veracity of the account I had shared with World magazine. The trial was postponed because Rollins’s poor health prevented him from being present.
His lawyer told me their case was given significant weight by the fact that a Southern Baptist pastor—whose integrity had been endorsed by the president of the SBC—was willing to testify to the predation of a Southern Baptist luminary. I’d like to think that telling the truth on the stand was the least I could do for the person who went first in exposing a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
The cost of abuse was articulated over 3,000 years ago by Tamar, who pleaded with her lecherous half brother Amnon, “Do not do this outrageous thing. As for me, where could I carry my shame?” (2 Sam. 13:12–13, ESV).
But Amnon did not listen. He violated Tamar. And when her father, King David, and her brother Absalom refused to give her justice at the time, the weight of Amnon’s heinous act fell on her. “So Tamar lived, a desolate woman, in her brother Absalom’s house” (v. 20, ESV).
As evangelicals, we love the good news that the weight of our sin was borne by Jesus on the cross. It is one of the most precious and vital truths to our faith. But the power of that gospel reality is in its honesty.
We look at Christ hanging in shame, beaten and humiliated for all to see, and we say, “This is the truth of what our sin deserves.” God does not minimize the cost of abuse. The price was paid by his own Son, whose abuse at the hand of Roman soldiers and Sanhedrin accusers killed him.
Predators want to strip the gospel for parts, keep the piece about forgiveness, and discard naming the weight of sin. In doing so, forgiveness is deformed and repurposed to deny the criminal and communal consequences of our sins. This faux forgiveness blasphemes the holiness and righteousness of God, refusing to honestly assess the cost of the harm we have caused.
Pressler did not confess his criminal, sinful actions against Rollins. Rather, he leveraged his spiritual influence to reframe the abuse as a special, sanctioned act. He put all the weight of the shame on his victims.
When I held a towel in front of me for modesty in that hotel room, he said, “Chris, you seem uncomfortable being naked in front of me.” He wanted me to bear the shame of what was entirely inappropriate for two men who had been around each other in person for no more than six hours.
The part of the gospel the church must reckon with is whether we will allow the sin of predation to be weighty. The cost of abuse is nearly always carried by those who are abused, because far too many local churches are not willing to bear the brunt of what happened when their flocks turned into hunting grounds for predators.
At the national level, following the horrific stories of abuse that Rollins and other survivors told, messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention voted in 2022 to create a database to track credibly accused predators. And the Executive Committee has told them no.
What kind of Jesus are we proclaiming when our refusal to hold predators accountable tells survivors they must carry the weight of both their sin and the sin of those who did shameful things to them? Pressler claimed to be bringing the Bible and the gospel it tells back to the SBC. Yet his actions preached a false gospel to those he abused, a message that now rings to the world more loudly than any sermon he preached.
Rollins’s life testified to the cost of abuse. A direct line from the trauma of his abuse to addictions and incarceration led to the health issues that eventually took his life before he reached 60.
After Pressler died last summer, Rollins told journalist Robert Downen—with whom he had entrusted his story—that for the first time in decades he felt hope. So severe was his trauma that the mere existence of a living, breathing Pressler on earth was enough to steal his peace.
If the church wants to preach a message of a Savior who bears the weight of our sin, we must show through our practices of care and accountability that we feel the cost as well.
Chris Davis is pastor of Groveton Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia, and author of Bright Hope for Tomorrow: How Anticipating Jesus’ Return Gives Strength for Today.
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