She believed in Jesus. And she also believed in the SBC. Instead, she said, they rallied around Trump. Still, she could not comprehend how he became a champion of the faith. When Moore spoke out about Trump, the pushback was fierce.
Book sales plummeted as did ticket sales to her events. Her criticism of Trump was seen as an act of betrayal. She also began to speak out about her own experience of abuse, especially after a February report from the Houston Chronicle , her hometown newspaper, detailed more than cases of sexual abuse among Southern Baptists over a year period.
Her social media feeds, especially Twitter, where she has nearly a million followers, became filled with righteous anger and dismay over what she saw as a toxic mix of misogyny, nationalism, and partisan politics taking over the evangelical world she loved — along with good-natured banter with friends and supporters to encourage them. The tweet immediately sparked a national debate among Southern Baptists and other evangelical leaders over whether women should be allowed to preach in church.
Things have only gotten worse since then, said Moore. The SBC has been roiled by debates over critical race theory, causing a number of high-profile Black pastors to leave the denomination.
Politics and Christian nationalism have crowded out the gospel, she said. That phrase, she said, resonated with her. It described what she and other concerned Southern Baptists were seeing as being wrong in their denomination.
Barr, the author of The Making of Biblical Womanhood , a forthcoming book on gender roles among evangelicals, grew up a Southern Baptist. Her mother was a huge fan of Moore, as were many women in her church.
Anthea Butler, associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of a forthcoming book on evangelicals and racism , said that Moore could become a more conservative version of the late Rachel Held Evans, who rallied progressive Christians who had tired of evangelicalism but not of Christianity. The religion professor believes Moore will be better off leaving the SBC, despite the pain of breaking away.
Unwinding her life from the Southern Baptist Convention and from Lifeway was difficult. She still loves the things that Southern Baptists believe, she said, and is determined to stay connected with a local church. Moore hopes that at some point, the public witness of Southern Baptists will return to those core values and away from the nationalism, sexism, and racial divides that seem to define its public witness. So far that has not happened.
Moore had formed long-term friendships with her editing and marketing team at Lifeway and saying goodbye was painful, though amicable. Lifeway does have a cruise featuring Moore still on its schedule. Those events will likely be smaller, attracting a few hundred people rather than thousands, said Moore, at least in the beginning. And she is looking forward to beginning anew.
Sections Home. Bible Coronavirus Prayer. Subscribe Member Benefits Give a Gift. In tiny church social halls, she laid the cornerstone of an evangelical empire. To them, she was a revelation: a petite bottle blonde from Arkadelphia, Arkansas, who could talk seriously about Jesus one moment and the impossibility of finding decent child care the next.
As charismatic as her male peers, she was also earnest and charmingly self-deprecating. Friends call her Beth La Ham. In one of her most famous talks, Moore describes an encounter with a haggard, elderly man in an airport terminal. Moore describes her embarrassment, recounting her inner dialogue with God, in which she tries to talk her way out of the divine directive.
Ultimately, however, she obeys. What began as a comic set piece ends as a moving testament to faith and the power of intimate acts of kindness. The Lord knows what our need is, Moore says. He needed his hair brushed! She earned speaking slots at big-name churches, including Hillsong and Saddleback, whose pastor, Rick Warren, calls her a dear friend.
She was the first woman to have a Bible study published by LifeWay, the Christian retail giant, and has since reached 22 million women, the most among its female authors. Today, her Bible studies are ubiquitous, guiding readers through scriptural passages with group-discussion questions and fill-in-the-blank workbooks. She rarely spoke to the press and made a point of keeping her politics to herself.
Privately, however, Moore has never cared much for the delicate norms of Christian femininity. Her days are tightly scheduled and obsessively focused on writing. Though she often performs domestic femininity for her audience, in her own life she has balanced motherhood with demanding professional ambitions.
She traveled every other weekend while her two daughters were growing up—they told me they ate a lot of takeout. Like other Southern Baptists, Moore considers herself a complementarian: She believes the Bible teaches that men and women have distinctive roles and that men should hold positions of authority and leadership over women in the home and in the church.
Yet her husband, Keith, a retired plumber, sees his vocation as helping his wife succeed. For decades, Moore never broke stride.
In the past few years, however, she has felt out of step with the evangelical community. More recently, a series of high-profile pastors have been toppled by accusations of sexual misconduct. On a chilly Texas evening recently, Moore and I sat in rocking chairs on her porch. It was the first time she had invited a reporter to visit her home, on the outskirts of Houston. Moore, who is 61, was the consummate hostess, fussing about feeding me and making sure I was warm enough beside the mesquite-wood fire.
But as we settled into conversation, her demeanor changed. She fixed her perfectly mascaraed eyes on me. M oore was flying home from a ministry event in October when she decided to compose the tweets that changed her life. The next day, Moore wrote a few short messages to her nearly , followers. Moore did not support Clinton; she told me she voted for a third-party candidate in It becomes an attitude of gender superiority. And that has to be dealt with. This may seem like an uncontroversial stance.
Event attendance dropped. A number of male evangelical leaders asked Moore to recant. A few days later, she returned to Twitter to clarify that she was not making an endorsement in the election. But her reproachful tweets seem all the more apt today. In recent months, several high-profile pastors—including Bill Hybels, the founder of the Chicagoland mega-church Willow Creek—have stepped down following accusations of sexual harassment, misconduct, or assault.
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