The dark legacy of Paul Pressler and the Southern Baptist Convention
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In 2015, when Sen. Ted Cruz was running for president (and before Donald Trump was seen as a viable candidate), he ran an ad featuring an endorsement from Paul Pressler.
Pressler said he had known Cruz since he was a teenager and “observed personally” Cruz’s integrity and principle. He went on to say, “I’ve dedicated my life to the conservative principles on which our country was founded, and I know Ted Cruz has done the same thing and that he will stand firm.”
That’s downright wild to watch in hindsight because, in the decade since, Cruz has proven to be nothing but a MAGA cultist who doesn’t give a damn about the Constitution. He’s a right-wing zealot who’s never seriously been considered a model for integrity. You knew that back in 2015. I knew that back in 2015. Why didn’t this guy know?
In fact, who the hell is he and why was his endorsement such a big deal at the time?
The video listed Pressler as a former Texas state representative, a retired district and appellate court judge, and leader of the “Conservative Baptist Resurgence.” But what the video didn’t mention is that Pressler was one of the most powerful Southern Baptist Convention leaders ever. He’s the guy who sidelined moderates in the fold and made the SBC an ultra-conservative powerhouse. The conservative “Resurgence” wasn’t just a theological correction either; it was an institutional takeover that rewarded loyalty, punished dissent, and trained SBC leaders to treat internal critics as existential threats.
He was a key reason that denomination became a major force in the Republican Party, shaping its policies and helping elect numerous candidates. (Everyone except Ted Cruz for president, really.)
What also went unmentioned in that video—because even Cruz couldn’t have known it at the time—is that Pressler was an unrepentant sexual predator whose worst abuses didn’t get much press until after he died in 2024.
The Texas Monthly’s Robert Downen just published a damning article (gift link) about Pressler’s legacy, and it’s really an overview of how badly the Southern Baptist Convention has failed its members. (Downen has spent years tracking abuse in the denomination. In 2019, he and his colleagues at the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News published the first of many articles resulting from a six-month-long investigation into Southern Baptist churches. They found that, over the previous decade, more than 250 staffers or volunteers had been charged with sex crimes against more than 700 victims.)
What do we learn in this new article? Every time the SBC had a chance to fix their own problems, they seemed to go in the other direction, and Pressler played a major role in that. He was arguably the reason so many predators, including himself, avoided accountability.
But before we can get to that, here’s how Downen frames Pressler’s impact on the political landscape:
You might not know Paul Pressler’s name. But your life has been profoundly affected by the fruits of his labor. Though he may not be as familiar as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, or other lions of the religious right, few have done more to shape our modern political and religious landscapes. Fueled by an unyielding belief in biblical inerrancy—the notion that Christian scripture is the perfect, literal word of God—Pressler in the eighties and nineties pushed the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s second-largest faith group, into a civil war that drove moderates from its ranks. As the architect of the SBC’s so-called conservative resurgence, Pressler—or the Judge, as many knew him—played a crucial role in the marriage of the Republican Party and the white evangelical voters who still sustain its power. For nearly four decades he served as a quiet GOP power broker, helping elevate generations of conservative Christians to the Texas Legislature, Capitol Hill, and the White House.
He was a behind-the-scenes force when it came to his political work, which helped shield his more private criminal actions. In 2017, a man sued Pressler “alleging that Pressler had raped him repeatedly over decades and that prominent Southern Baptist figures and churches had concealed or mishandled evidence that Pressler was a sexual predator.” The assaults, the man said, began when he was only 14 years old. After that lawsuit, others came forward with similar allegations. The first lawsuit was eventually settled out of court. The terms are confidential. The survivor died in 2025 of cardiac arrest.
Pressler’s personal life was no less disturbing, as his law office partner Jared Woodfill later testified under oath.
Instead of giving Pressler a salary, the firm paid a string of young, male personal assistants to work out of Pressler’s home, according to Woodfill’s testimony. The arrangement continued until at least 2017, when a personal assistant, in an email addressed to Pressler’s family, wrote that he had recently heard Pressler brag about being naked with young boys and saw him pressure a young, destitute man into giving him a nude massage for money while kissing him repeatedly. “He talks way more about nudity, the male body, being naked in spas in Europe [or] being naked in general than [he does] God, or his Baptist background,” the email read.
It was bad enough this was happening through his law office. But that mentality was amplified when it extended to the Southern Baptists. Pressler made sure abuse was considered a low priority for the denomination, at least compared to the acquisition of political power. When he and his colleagues assaulted others or at least fostered an environment where those acts were normalized, he turned a blind eye to it all until public pressure finally made that impossible.
Consider his SBC partner-in-crime Paige Patterson. Patterson was the sort of guy who encouraged women to stay with their abusive husbands because divorce would go against God’s will. When he was head of a theological seminary, he also told a woman who claimed she was raped not to tell the police and to forgive the rapist. He once described a 16-year-old child as sexually appealing. Patterson’s antics were so indefensible, he was kicked out of his seminary job. But that only happened after years of putting people in positions of power at the SBC to continue a culture that never taught him a damn thing.
All of this came to a boiling point in 2021. That’s when the SBC eventually had to hire an outside group called Guidepost Solutions to investigate sexual abuse allegations in the denomination. The eventual 288-page report covered roughly two decades of bad behavior. The conclusions were devastating. It’s not that they listed a set number of abusers or victims. It’s that the report showed a pattern of covering up or downplaying abuse and creating an environment where victims couldn’t get justice.
It’s impossible to choose just one excerpt from the report, because so much of it is jaw-dropping, but look at this one passage detailing how various SBC leaders acted—including Pressler and Patterson:
While stories of abuse were minimized, and survivors were ignored or even vilified, revelations came to light in recent years that some senior SBC leaders had protected or even supported abusers:
Former SBC President Steve Gaines admitted that, as senior pastor at Bellevue Baptist Church, he had delayed reporting a staff minister’s prior sexual abuse of a child of heartfelt concern and compassion for th[e] minister, while acknowledging that he should have brought it to the attention of our church leadership immediately;
Former SBC President Jack Graham, when he was pastor at Prestonwood Baptist Church, allegedly allowed an accused abuser of young boys to be dismissed quietly in 1989 without reporting the abuse to police. The accused abuser, John Langworthy, later was charged with abusing young boys in Mississippi in 2011;
Former SBC President Paige Patterson was terminated from his position at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2018 after it was revealed that he told a student not to report a rape in 2003 and, in 2015, emailed his intention to meet with another student who had reported an assault, with no other officials present, so he could “break her down;”
Former SBC Vice President Judge Paul Pressler is the defendant in a civil sexual abuse lawsuit alleging that he repeatedly sexually abused the plaintiff beginning when the plaintiff was 14 years old. Two other men submitted separate affidavits in the case also accusing Judge Pressler of sexual misconduct; and
Former EC Interim President and General Counsel Augie Boto testified as a character witness for Mark Schiefelbein, a gymnastics coach convicted of multiple counts of sexual assault against a minor. During his testimony at a post-conviction evidentiary hearing in September 2008, Mr. Boto identified himself as general trial counsel for the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention.
If those were the men heading up the organization, was it any wonder that so many pastors figured they could get away with abuse?
One way to minimize the number of predators in SBC ranks was to maintain some sort of database of offenders, so that they couldn’t just move from church to church if they ever got fired, but the SBC claimed that was impossible. They were lying.
Privately, in emails that were made public years later, they acknowledged that such a mechanism was both possible and effective, but it might open them up to lawsuits.
In fact, we later found out they did have a list of accused predators. It was just kept private.
The findings of nearly 300 pages include shocking new details about specific abuse cases and shine a light on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Evidence in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether they could maintain a database of offenders to prevent more abuse when top leaders were secretly keeping a private list for years.
The SBC claimed it couldn’t maintain a database of offenders… but kept a private list for years. They knew who the bad apples were but said nothing publicly. The report said: “The latest iteration of the table contains the name of 703 abusers, with 409 believed to be SBC-affiliated.” One of those bad apples was another former SBC President Johnny Hunt, who allegedly sexually assaulted a woman a month after stepping down from his post.
So the SBC mishandled abuse allegations, mistreated victims, intimidated victims or their advocates, and resisted attempts at reform. All the while, SBC leaders ignored the crisis, with one saying the focus on sexual abuse was “a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism.” The report summarized the response more honestly: “Survivors were always viewed through the lens of potential plaintiffs threatening lawsuits, rather than as individuals who had been harmed and were in need of care.”
And Pressler, who had the authority to do something about this, never did. He was insistent that the SBC should kick out churches for having female pastors or affirming same-sex relationships… but if they had abusers on their staff, he said nothing could be done about it. The SBC, he added, simply didn’t have the authority to do anything because the churches were all autonomous… even though that autonomy apparently didn’t apply to churches that dared to let a woman speak from the pulpit.
What’s shocking is that this man, with all this religious power, was very close to having even more political power himself. At one point, in 1989, he was on the verge of running the first Bush administration’s Office of Government Ethics, but Pressler abruptly bowed out before any confirmation hearings could take place because, we now know, there were allegations of “homosexual behavior” that he didn’t want publicized.
In 2007, he finally got some public recognition when Louisiana Christian University announced plans for a Judge Paul Pressler School of Law. But because of a lack of funding and accreditation, the school never opened. That almost-school is perhaps most famous now because its founding dean would have been Mike Johnson, now the Speaker of the House.
The point is: This man had power over the Republican Party. He had power over the Southern Baptist Convention. He used that authority to brush aside allegations of abuse. And he used that power himself to victimize boys as young as 14 because he knew his denials would always be louder than their complaints.
If anything, the SBC became structurally incapable of reform because Pressler’s movement taught generations of Christian leaders that preserving conservative control was the only value that mattered and everything else was secondary. Anything that got in the way of that power—whether victims of abuse or women speaking out about their treatment—needed to be destroyed. This crisis wasn’t some anomaly; it was a natural outgrowth of the culture he built. If anything, the moderates and dissenters who warned the SBC about these problems were treated as enemies by the machine Pressler built.
Pressler died in 2024, “days before the SBC announced that no major reforms were coming and months after he confidentially settled [the sexual abuse lawsuit] after a six-year legal battle.”
The SBC is just as corrupt as ever—and more conservative than it ever was. They haven’t changed their positions on homosexuality, abortion, victim-blaming, sex-shaming, or women with thoughts. But the same people who have built their careers on railing against feminism, LGBTQ people, secularism, and the collapse of “family values” have simultaneously enabled catastrophic abuse within their own institutions.
Maybe that helps explain why membership is currently at a 50-year low. (One recent SBC leader said 10% of SBC church members under the age of 35 have left the denomination specifically because “they believed sexual abuse was not being treated seriously.”)
That’s what Pressler accomplished: pretending to champion ethics and values while violating them privately, and allowing the organization he built up to become a hotbed of abuse.
That’s all spilled over into the Christian Nationalism we see today. The grievance politics, the rhetoric about purity, the institutional capture, and the unwavering partisan loyalty are all ingredients in the SBC culture he championed.
In that sense, maybe Pressler’s endorsement of Ted Cruz made sense. He’s one of the movement’s logical products.
Pressler’s real legacy isn’t just that he was a predator. It’s that he helped build a religious and political culture where public declarations of biblical morality became a shield for institutional corruption. If you praise Jesus loud enough, there’s nothing you can’t get away with. And once protecting the institution became synonymous with protecting God’s truth, victims of abuse never had a chance.
FFRF warns about appeals court ban on telehealth mifepristone
Tags:Freedom From Religion Foundation, Politics, Religion
The country now awaits Supreme Court action in a case that could ban telehealth abortion nationwide only four years after the Dobbs decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion.
While the Supreme Court today temporarily paused an appeals court ruling imposing an extraordinary restriction all across the United States on telehealth access to medication abortion, a constitutional showdown is in the offing.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in its ruling in State of Louisiana v. Food and Drug Administration, ordered the FDA to temporarily ban the use of telehealth medicine to prescribe mifepristone. Although Louisiana argued the use of telemedicine for abortion undermines its draconian state ban, the appeals court not only granted Louisiana’s request but also shockingly banned telehealth abortion care all over the country. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in a one-sentence order, briefly paused that ban until the parties file briefs by Thursday and the entire court can take up the issue.
“The appeals court ban is an example of practicing medicine without a license,” says Annie Laurie Gaylor, FFRF co-president. “An ideologically driven court is overriding evidence-based medicine, federal authority and the rights of patients nationwide to impose a religious agenda.”
About two-thirds of abortions in the United States are via medication and about a quarter are via telemedicine. Millions of U.S. women have used mifepristone, in combination with misoprostol, to safely end pregnancies in the last 26 years, with a serious complication rate of less than 1 percent. The FDA approved mifepristone for use in 2000. In early 2023, the FDA permanently lifted restrictions preventing patients from obtaining medication abortion pills at a retail pharmacy or requiring them to visit a medical provider in person.
Three years ago, an obscure Christian nationalist federal judge in Texas presumed to ban mifepristone nationwide, a ban that the 5th Circuit upheld with modifications, limiting use of the medication to seven weeks of gestation, also banning telemedicine and mail-order shipments. The Biden administration, along with major pharmaceuticals, appealed, with the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s brief in the case noting the plaintiff anti-abortion groups lacked standing to sue. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed with FFRF on the standing question and tossed the case in 2024. FFRF warned at the time that the crusade against medication abortion was only beginning.
The stakes are enormous. Some 100,000 patients per year living in states with abortion bans have received abortion pills through the mail from physicians living in states that have passed shield laws protecting such prescriptions. FFRF honored Dr. Maggie Carpenter with its 2025 Forward Award for co-founding Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, after the states of Texas and Louisiana prosecuted her for prescribing and mailing medication abortion to Texas. New York’s shield law has protected her, so far, from extradition.
“The same Christian nationalist movement that pushed Dobbs is now targeting medication abortion and telehealth access nationwide,” Gaylor adds. “This ruling underscores the urgent need to defend the separation of church and state, because these bans are rooted in religious ideology, not medicine or public health.”
FFRF is calling on the U.S. Supreme Court to swiftly overturn the 5th Circuit’s ruling and on state lawmakers to enact and strengthen shield laws explicitly protecting telehealth abortion care.
“This is a wake-up call,” Gaylor concludes. “Lawmakers who support reproductive freedom must act now to protect patients and providers from escalating judicial overreach.”
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to defending the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters relating to nontheism. With about 42,000 members, FFRF is the largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics and humanists) in North America. For more information, visit ffrf.org.
The post FFRF warns about appeals court ban on telehealth mifepristone appeared first on Freedom From Religion Foundation.
A Christian phone network aims to purify the internet by blocking reality
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A Christian-owned company is launching a new cellphone service that will block users from accessing any kind of adult content deemed inappropriate. While porn sites will be banned for all customers, other sites (like those discussing LGBTQ issues) will be blocked by default though that switched can be flipped by an adult.
The goal is to create a “Jesus-centric” network for all clients, according to Radiant Mobile founder Paul Fisher. MIT Technology Review explained how all this will work:
The network, which is currently being tested ahead of its May 5 launch date, will be run by Radiant Mobile, a newly launched mobile virtual network operator (MVNO). These operators don’t own cell towers but buy bandwidth from the big providers (in this case, T-Mobile) and sell to specific demographics (President Trump announced his own MVNO last year called Trump Mobile; CREDOMobile sends donations to progressive causes).
… He says Radiant is working with the Israeli cybersecurity company Allot to block categories of content, such as material about violence or self-harm. Some categories are banned by default and cannot be allowed even for adult users.
…
The technology to do this blocking is a blunt instrument: Allot groups website domains into more than a hundred categories, which include pornography but also violence, malware, gaming, and in Radiant Mobile’s case “sects,” which includes websites about Satanism. If one of its users tries to visit a website that belongs to a blocked category, the page won’t load.
So there’s basically a filter this company manages that blocks access to anything they perceive as un-Christian, including perfectly normal websites that simply talk about things they are too immature to handle. Adults can unblock those sites if they want to, but the assumption is that sex education websites are off-limits. Parents can also block their kids from visiting (or downloading) TikTok and YouTube. (Which is ridiculous given how much thoughtful, useful content is on those platforms if you know where to look!)
Why would anyone pay for a special network when they could simply avoid adult websites already? Presumably because they know they can’t handle the temptation. Or they just don’t trust their children. But if certain URLs are blocked, it’s generally easy to work around those filters. Just ask any tech-savvy kid. (The Radiant Mobile website insists kids will not be able to bypass the filter with a VPN because their system “intercepts traffic before other VPNs can override it.” But that assumes you’re using their network at all times.) And it’s not like you have to go directly to a porn site to watch adult content.
The more important question is how far this self-imposed censorship goes. What about Wikipedia articles on “adult” topics? What about medical websites that discuss health care for trans kids? What if I want to read a news story about what a Christian pastor just did to unsuspecting children? Or about Donald Trump’s affairs and assaults? Why choose this over programs like the Mike Johnson-approved “Covenant Eyes,” which alerts someone else if you visit an adult site (unless you’re Joshua Duggar and you work around the system)?
And if the goal is to censor certain kinds of websites from your children—like websites explaining what’s happening with their bodies during puberty because you believe ignorance is bliss—why on earth would you be so naïve to think they won’t learn that information some other way?
Indeed, even news sites might be blocked in this network:
… if a news site starts hosting enough gender-related content, Fisher might not just label it as “press,” which is allowed, but also “sexuality,” thus blocking the whole domain to any phone with that category blocked.
It’s unclear if gambling or prediction market apps will also be banned for everyone. What about Rumble and right-wing conspiracy theories? What about Roblox with all of its problems? What about museum websites that teach evolution and the Big Bang instead of Young Earth Creationism?
The irony is that your brain is arguably more likely to be damaged by listening to sermons from right-wing zealots, not accessing information about sex.
As conservative Christians would know from their efforts to censor banned books, using a blunt instrument to block people from accessing information rarely works. If anything, it just instills an urgency to get around the wall.
And if this sales pitch isn’t already enough, don’t worry. The company also plans to offer AI-created Bible slop.
To fill the gap left by all the sites being blocked, the company intends to offer access to a library of religious content, including AI-generated Bible videos. It plans to use characters like Cinderella, Tinker Bell, and others (it has obtained rights from the entertainment and media company Elf Labs, which has been amassing rights to hundreds of children’s characters). “Those characters were originally constructed with a conservative perspective,” Klimis says. They’ll be used in AI-generated content alongside testimonials and devotionals.
If you’ve ever wanted to listen to Snow White talk about Noah’s Ark and how happy every was to watch God’s genocide of the rest of humanity, enjoy, I guess…
In that video, the bunnies are bigger than the lions, the zebras are as tall as the children, and the giraffes barely make it above Noah’s head. (Fundamentalists call that history.) There’s another video about Adam and Eve, two naked white people in a garden, but because that story has a Christian stamp of approval, it’s marketed as a children’s video.
No word yet on how Snow White plans to explain the story involving Lot and his two daughters… but maybe that won’t matter, according to these Redditors:
So if you’ve ever said to yourself, “I hate my current phone company and I wish it was shittier in every way,” this is the plan for you. It’s like the mobile version of a Christian movie: Worse by every conceivable metric despite the company having access to all the money they’d ever need.
At that point, why even get a phone with internet access at all? Get one of those old flip phones and call it a day.
What Radiant Mobile is really selling isn’t a phone plan. It’s just control. They control adults, and adults get to control kids, and kids are smart enough to get around both sets of censors. Which is something they’re going to have to do given that the Christian adults are effectively isolating them from the information required to function in the real world. The only people meaningfully affected by all this are the ones who don’t realize what’s being withheld from them—and that’s exactly the point. It’s not going to stop bad behavior; it’s just going to keep some people more ignorant a little longer.
This will eventually backfire. Information suppression rarely eliminates curiosity. It only intensifies it. Children and sheltered adults will want to know what’s being kept from them. And some people are going to find answers without useful context or guidance to help them process it, which is even worse than the alternative. Bubbles eventually pop.
Any network that blocks sex education but pipes in AI-generated Bible cartoons isn’t elevating discourse. It’s just harming people in a different way. There are definitely harmful sites online. But people who understand what they’re looking at and have the maturity to handle it are bound to be better prepared to deal with the real world. Not the people trapped in an even smaller, more fragile ecosystem.
California: Tell lawmakers religious belief doesn’t trump the law
Tags:American Atheists, Politics, Religion
Lawmakers in California are considering AB 1881, an extreme piece of legislation that would create a two-tiered legal system that privileges religion over everyone else. This bill is a “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” (RFRA) that would allow individuals and organizations to avoid following the law solely because of their professed religious beliefs. Although this bill is…
The post California: Tell lawmakers religious belief doesn’t trump the law appeared first on American Atheists.
‘Great American Freethought Songbook’ May 11 livestream Irving Berlin special
Tags:Freedom From Religion Foundation, Politics, Religion
The Freedom From Religion Foundation continues its unique monthly concert series, “The Great American Freethought Songbook with Dan & Darcie,” with its second installment on Monday, May 11, at 7 p.m. Central.
The one-hour concert before a live local audience in Madison, Wis., will be livestreamed on FFRF’s Facebook page, YouTube channel and Freethought TV, FFRF’s free app for smart TVs and other devices. (It’s easy and free to download this app.) The show will be available to watch afterward on YouTube and Freethought TV at your convenience.
The seven-month concert series celebrates major figures of the Great American Songbook and their secular viewpoints. This month’s concert celebrates the music, life and freethinking views of Irving Berlin, one of the most influential composers of the genre, known even today for his song “White Christmas” and many others.
“The Great American Freethought Songbook with Dan & Darcie” features FFRF Co-President Dan Barker, an accomplished jazz pianist and music history enthusiast, alongside Madison vocalist Darcie Johnston. The series explores not only timeless standards but also the often-overlooked freethinking perspectives of many classic American songwriters.
Upcoming performances will feature George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin (June 8), Yip Harburg (July 13), Cole Porter (Aug. 24), Richard Rodgers (with Mary Rodgers) (Sept. 21) and a finale on Nov. 9 featuring a medley of nonreligious 20th-century songwriters, including Jay Gorney, Burton Lane, Tom Lehrer, Frank Loesser, Thelonious Monk, Stephen Sondheim and Charles Strouse.
If you missed the debut, you may catch it now on YouTube or look for it in Freethought TV’s archive.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to defending the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters relating to nontheism. With nearly 42,000 members, FFRF is the largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics and humanists) in North America. For more information, visit ffrf.org.
The post ‘Great American Freethought Songbook’ May 11 livestream Irving Berlin special appeared first on Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Florida pastor resigns after adult son, a youth pastor, caught in child predator sting
This newsletter is free and goes out to over 24,000 subscribers, but it’s only able to sustain itself due to the support I receive from a small percentage of regular readers. Would you please consider becoming one of those supporters? You can subscribe via Patreon or the Subscribe button below! You can also make one-time donations through Venmo or PayPal.
A recently hired pastor and his wife have stepped down from Victory Church in East Palatka, Florida after their 25-year-old son was caught on camera trying to meet someone he believed was a 14-year-old child whom he had sent sexually explicit photos to.
Turns out that child was a decoy (in the vein of To Catch a Predator). The sting was the work of a vigilante group called Operation 17:2, named after the Bible verse that reads, “It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble.” They posed as the child online and ended up in a conversation with youth pastor Caleb Roberts, where the chats grew increasingly explicit. When Roberts walked into a Florida CVS to meet the child he believed he was talking to, he was instead greeted by former MMA fighter Garrett Gross and his crew.
Within a span of a few minutes, Roberts went from saying he was there to meet a male friend… to confessing that he intended to sexually assault a girl. Along the way, he admitted he was a virgin, that he was a youth pastor, and that he was really a “good guy” who just “sometimes [gets] these thoughts in my head,” And that’s before he called his pastor/father on speakerphone: “Hey, dad. How you doing? So, um, listen, I made a mistake…”
Roberts is whisked away by police at the end of the video.
I’ll pause here to say there are a number of ethical concerns about groups like these that try to capture predators on their own either because they believe it’s the right thing to do or because they know videos like these will go viral. They are often so obsessed with footage of the “capture,” that they sometimes screw up procedural steps that ultimately allow the alleged predators to go free. Groups like these are also often accused of entrapment: baiting someone into committing a crime they wouldn’t have otherwise committed. And there’s always the possibility of violence when the two sides come face-to-face, when the alleged predator doesn’t see any way out of the situation. I wanted to ask Gross about these concerns, but he didn’t respond to my request for comment.
In this case, two things happened in rapid succession.
First, even though police took over investigation of this particular case, a local judge apparently denied them a warrant to search Roberts’ phone because there was a possibility the chats were the result of artificial intelligence.
Gross reacted on Facebook:
… We have reached the point where a grown man can show up, on video, admit he came to meet a 14 year old for sex, and instead of action we get “AI might make this unreliable”? Thats a complete collapse of common sense. If real time video, a direct confession, and a physical encounter aren’t enough to even justify a warrant, then the standard isn’t higher….it’s nonexistent. All you’ve done is create a loophole big enough for every predator to hide behind. This isn’t protecting justice, it’s protecting offenders…. Its cowardice.
It’s not clear if the on-camera admission will count for anything but local police are apparently still working on this case, so a prosecution is still a possibility. The Christian Post confirmed an investigation was ongoing:
Matt Newcomb, assistant chief of the Palatka Police Department, confirmed with CP on Wednesday that the case is still under investigation.
“We are currently investigating the incident and are working with the State Attorney’s Office on the case,” Newcomb said.
Second, the fallout at the church was immediate, especially since Caleb worked as a youth pastor with access to children. His father Steve Roberts was a relatively recent hire at Victory Church, having started there in April of 2025. Now, a year later, Victory Church announced that Steve and his wife would no longer be associated with them:
After much prayer and careful consideration, we want to share that Pastor Steve and Angie Roberts have stepped down from their roles at Victory Church, effective immediately.
Recent circumstances have brought deep sorrow to many within our church and our community. While we are limited in what we can share at this time, we want to speak clearly about our hearts. We grieve whenever trust is broken and when people are hurt, and we take these matters with the utmost seriousness.
We want to state plainly that there is no place in the Body of Christ for sexual misconduct or the abuse of trust in any form. Such actions are contrary to the character of Christ and inconsistent with the values we are called to uphold as His church.
Nowhere in their message did they say if they were investigating Caleb’s interactions with kids at the church, or where people could go if they had concerns, or whether they would have a counselor available for anyone who needed to talk. It also didn’t mention what the hell happened. If you didn’t know any of the details beforehand, you could walk away with the impression that Steve Roberts himself committed an act of sexual misconduct, which isn’t the case at all. (A local news station was also confused, saying, “There are still major questions, including who, if anyone, is facing these allegations.” That can be blamed directly on the church for being vague to the point of useless. The news report made no mention of Caleb or the video.)
The church’s “Leadership” page is now empty, except for a single sentence that reads “We are currently praying and beginning the search for a new pastor.”
Incidentally, while there’s not a lot of video of Steve Roberts preaching at this church, a few sermons are available, including this one where he mocked the very existence of transgender people:
If I remember in Genesis, God made men—a man—then God made woman. And then he stopped making people.
But I looked up gender identities, and I said, “How how many do you think there are?” I hit it in Google and one site said there’s 57. The next one said 98. And the next one said 107 different identities, not just man and woman.
So being a man is harder today in many ways…
Don’t ask me to Christsplain that one. It makes no sense. But even though he doesn’t say in that sermon that trans people are predators, we’ve seen this kind of rhetoric used by pastors to insist LGBTQ people in general are threats to children’s safety—in schools, in bathrooms, and everywhere else.
Turns out his own son was the real danger to kids. It raises a lot of questions about what these churches and parents were teaching their children about consent, and sex education, and “purity.” While a lot of questions remain unanswered right now, this appears to be yet another story about how Christian churches that claim to be a safe harbor for everyone are sometimes the most irresponsible places to send your kids. If only they would admit that they’re no better than all the people they routinely condemn.
