Molly Worthen in her book The Apostles of Reason shows how the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC was on the wrong side of History on Inerrancy.
But Inerrancy was a ruse as Harold Blom concludes in his notable quote in the American Relibion that says it was a "tragedy, the result of a purely political conspiracy that continues to masquerade as a religious movement." Bloom rightly compares the fundy leadership to the Know Noghtings of the 1840s.
I am convinced history will show that Paul Pressler in particular was in many ways a lesser version of some odious historical personages whose personal grievances compelled him to be a dark figure in 20th Century America. Robert Wuthnow's Rough Country suggests as much.
Nowhere is that more evident than his association with Jesse Helms and their misgivings about Martin Luther King and Civil Rights. All indicators are as early as the late 50's when Pressler was in the Texas legislature the last two years of Carlyle Marney's tenure at FBC Austin, Pressler was on course in the shadows of the Texas Regulars, and White Citizens Councils. His lifelong affiliation with Jesse Helms and Albert Lee Smith, even Mississippi Curtis Caine's indicates how they were naturall drawn together.
For certain they were adversaries to the Texas trajectory of James Dunn in much more than Church State ideas. That was just a cover for something much more nefarious.
As I've said many times before, the Texas 1948 Senate Race, set Pressler and Bill Moyers at odds in more ways than has been explained to date.
And Tom Edsall in his 84 New Politics of Inequality outlines the reasons for the different worldviews and the wedge issue politics that emerged. As Paige Patterson said, It ought to go over as well as the "Inerrancy thing."
April 15 1984 New Republic tied Jesse Helms to the death squads of Roberto Daubuisson.
Abd here we are now with the beatification of Oscar Romero.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/24/world ... .html?_r=0As Stewart Newman wrote WA Criswell in 1968: "The Blood of many martyrs......"