The Day They Tried to Trap My Father

And the eulogy for someone else... that didn't happen.

Source unknown.

Cassidy Steele Dale forecasts and contextualizes the present to equip us to make a better, kinder future…

… and one of those ways to tell you a story from long ago.

This is a story my friends don’t know. I’m not sure I’ve ever told my wife.

It’s not even occurred to me to tell this story for maybe 30 years but Father’s Day just happened and the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) annual meeting just took place, and somebody just died a few days before that happened, and the SBC didn’t eulogize that guy, and that was conspicuous by its absence. 

But all of that together reminded me of the time a group of fundamentalist “learned men” tried to theologically trap my Daddy in an effort to ruin his ministry — or to try to just take him off the board.  

Or rather… one of the times.

So, here’s the parts my friends and family already know — but you may not know.

• I grew up during the takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention by its fundamentalist wing. (Southern Baptists of today aren’t what Southern Baptists used to be.) The takeover was engineered by two fundamentalist strategists: Paige Patterson and former appeals court judge Paul Pressler. Remember their names for later.

• My father, Bob Dale, taught pastoral leadership at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, one of the Southern Baptist Convention’s six seminaries. I grew up in church and seminary life.

• Southeastern was the first seminary that SBC fundamentalists took over. Once they got a one-seat majority on the Board of Trustees in 1987 they fired the president — the dean resigned on the spot in protest — and the Board then engineered a near-total purge of the faculty and staff over the next 2-3 years in an academic and theological bloodbath so severe it received nationwide attention. The New York Times assigned a reporter to it. A few books and a few dissertations have been written since about that 2-3 year period of the seminary’s history. It was bad.

• The Board failed to anticipate the dean’s resignation so the faculty — before anyone could stop the unruly, angry professors — elected my dad the interim dean for a year or so.

It was then and there — in the late 1980s in North Carolina — that I witnessed the theological dawn of the Trump era. I have borne witness all along the way since. Which is a story for another day but I condensed what you need to know in Combat Theology: How to Weaponize and De-Weaponize a Religion which you can find for free here.

Here’s the part my friends (and my wife) don’t know:

The faculty — again, before anyone could stop them — also set the agenda a few years in advance for a speaker series on pastoral leadership, invited my dad to be the speaker for 1992, and he accepted. Daddy took a new job with the Baptist General Association of Virginia (BGAV) in the interim, though, and we moved away.

• (For non-Baptists: the BGAV is a state-sized judicatory, about 1400 churches, sort of like a Catholic diocese. When Daddy retired from the BGAV he was sorta a vice-bishop equivalent, if that’s a thing. Daddy was a heavy hitter in Baptist life. He was a Missouri farm boy who grew up so far back in the Ozarks he didn’t learn to read until he was eight years old and then he refused to stop learning and he earned a Ph.D. in Christian ethics. And later he wrote two-dozen-plus books on pastoral leadership and trained half a generation of Baptist pastors in Virginia and everywhere else.)

Cut to 1992, the purge completed by a couple of years, and Paige Patterson had just become the new (fundamentalist) seminary president. Daddy and I drove back down to campus for Daddy to speak in Binkley Chapel. He did great, of course, but the batch of students present that day — mostly fundamentalists — seemed confused why this untrustworthy liberal was permitted to speak on campus after they’d all been safely purged.

After Daddy had finished speaking, Patterson climbed to the pulpit and thanked him for his words and invited him and me back to the President’s House for tea and conversation. And I saw the students sorta let out a sigh of relief. Like OK, whew, our strongman is going to handle the threat. Put on the spot in public, Daddy accepted the invitation.

So Daddy and I walked across campus to the President’s House and as we got to the mailbox at the end of the driveway I busted out the Star Wars classic line I’ve got a bad feeling about this.

And Daddy said Yes, this is a trap. It’s not going to be just him — it’s going to be a group of his favorite professors and they’re going to grill me. The fundamentalists couldn’t charge me with heresy when we were still here because I wasn’t committing heresy and they knew it. They may try to get me now. Assume they’ll be recording us. 

I asked what I should do — and should I help — because by that point I’d already sent a smattering of fundamentalists home-crying-to-their-pastors and I knew what to do. And I figured, you know, we could take ‘em. And Daddy said Don’t say anything and hold your body and your face very still. These guys prey upon people’s fears and uncertainty and if they detect any in you they’ll start trying to drive a wedge. 

So a few minutes later in the long narrow parlor, they’d arranged the seats in power positions meant to intimidate. They sat my dad with his back to the bay window (cornered), me on his immediate left on the wall (also cornered), and with Patterson on the middle of the right hand wall (opposite from the door over in a command position) and five professors scattered in a loose circle. Patterson’s wife, Dorothy, sat in Daddy’s mirror position on the far end of the room. 

• A few minutes earlier she’d served me hot tea. I’d never had tea hot before. I’m not sure I’d ever even heard of hot tea before that. I’d never had tea that wasn’t Southern sweet tea with ice. I remember looking down into the cup — at the steam — and I didn’t understand it. And then I feared maybe they knew something I didn’t. And that Daddy didn’t. And that maybe we were outclassed.

And then Patterson and his five professors asked Daddy a set of theological questions — and asked them extremely slowly and thoughtfully. It appeared to me at first like they might have only been crafting them on the spot. And Daddy answered very slowly — the slowest I ever heard him speak in my (and his) entire life. He slowly and thoroughly deflected the first question. Then a very long pause before the next professor asked his. And Daddy deflected again. 

This went on for nine very slow exchanges over an incredibly tense 45 minutes. They weren’t laying a glove on him — or getting anything they could use against him — and they were running out of ideas and getting quietly-but-politely frustrated with him and with themselves. I thought we were almost safely into the clear when Daddy said If, however, you would like to talk about… 

At which point I freaked out — but I kept it on the inside. Barely. Sorta.

Why on Earth was he giving them an opportunity to attack him after we were almost out of there? These were very dangerous people.

Why on Earth was he talking so slowly?

Why on Earth was he leaving dead air in their long pauses between questions when I knew that they’d already asked him questions that suggested they believed something he COULD NEVER ABIDE BY — that theological correctness could ever be spiritually greater than abject Christian compassion? I can see he’s livid but he’s hiding it.

Then it hit me: He’s been willingly sitting in this trap for 45 minutes. He’s been thinking and he’s been watching these six guys closely. He’s been LEARNING THEM. He’s mapped their minds by listening to how they crafted their questions and how they responded to his answers. He’s figured them out. HE HAS THEIR NUMBER. And he just offered them bait they can’t resist.

He just laid a trap for THEM within their own dumbass trap.

And once they take the bait, he’s gonna out-Bible all six of them, he’s gonna do it fast, and he’s not even gonna pause to reload. He’s going to beat them — and beat them so badly they’ll be haunted in the night for the rest of their lives. And if anyone later hears the tape...

I snapped my eyes at Patterson and saw Patterson suddenly figure it out two seconds later. He looked at his guys quickly and clearly thought Oh no, they don’t see it coming. So he popped straight up out of his chair, said Thank you, Dr. Dale, for this spirited discussion and for speaking to the students today. And the five professors all kinda blinked and thought Oh, we’re done? I guess we’re done. And they stood up and engaged Daddy in some innocuous small talk while Patterson and his wife carved me off and tried to impress me with his “extensive library” and his objects d’art and generally try to buffalo me with the unimpressive as if I were just another rube. And we left as soon as I could round up Daddy, point at a few books “perhaps we should read,” thank Patterson and his wife, and get out the “library” door.

• (Looking back I should have picked up his Scofield Reference Bible, opened it, and rendered unto him some Proverbs 26 and some Psalms 35. If you know, you know.)

That’s the last time I saw Patterson in person. He later became president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary — another of the six SBC seminaries and the one it was his lifelong dream to run — and then later president of the entire Southern Baptist Convention. Later, on top of the rest of his ‘righteousness,’ it came out that he wittingly and deliberately covered up the rape-at-gunpoint of a female seminary student by a male one and did a series of other reprehensible things and he got fired from his dream job for doing them. 

And Paul Pressler, the other co-architect (its Steve Bannon) of the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention? Pressler died a few weeks ago — a few days before the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting took place this year — and the SBC never mentioned it. They didn’t eulogize him at all. (Thanks to Mark Wingfield of Baptist News Global, who broke the story, and for the Steve Bannon parallel.) Because the FBI and a bunch of everyone else figured out that Pressler had been sexually abusing boys and young men for decades.

And now Pressler is dead and Patterson is wandering the backwoods unable to become the pastor of a hot dog stand. 

Some of you are here reading this newsletter right now because of what Patterson and Pressler hath wrought even if you never knew it was them. 

• The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest religious entity in the United States after the Catholic Church. When and who the SBC loves, much of the rest of American Christendom follows its lead. And when and who it hates… well…

What Patterson and Pressler did came to light in time and they were held to account, at least in some measure. Albeit far too late but still. Because when the victims’ stories finally hit oxygen in the middle of a giant collection of moral agents (pastors) not even “God’s heroes” or “heroes of the conservative cause” could withstand that moral critical mass. 

Because on some days, if only a few — all conservative and liberal things aside — none of us are as good as all of us. 

And for one far simpler reason. When we got in the car after the trap and got on the road I asked Daddy was he was going to say to them back there. And Daddy didn’t tell me. He never, ever did. He was just quiet for a while at the wheel because I could tell he was still angry and he was trying to knock the horns off an uncharitable disparaging remark (even though he was raised by a mama who once punched out an armed man), one of only maybe six disparaging remarks I heard him utter about anyone ever. 

Then he simply said They’re not as smart as they think they are.