Baptist seminary head apologizes for admitting Muslim to Ph.D. program

The head of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary offered an emotional apology to Southern Baptists meeting in Baltimore for accepting a Muslim student into his school’s Ph.D. program—an unusual step for an evangelical seminary but one other schools have taken for years.

“I made an exception to a rule that I assumed, probably wrongly, the president has the right to make if he feels that it is that important,” Paige Patterson told Southern Baptist delegates June 11 at the denomination’s annual gathering. “He was admitted as a special student in the Ph.D. program.”

Patterson, an architect of the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention a generation ago and one of the church’s most revered figures, faced heavy criticism from some Baptists who accused him of violating the standards of his school in Fort Worth, Texas.