As a fifty year old, cynical GenX male, I suspect I am not the primary audience for a Beth Moore book. Before I picked up her new memoir, I knew only that she was a very popular Southern Baptist Bible teacher/speaker and that she had left the Southern Baptist Convention recently under some controversy.
All My Knotted-Up Life (promoted link) lives up to its title: there are a lot of knots to sort out including a beloved grandmother who was nonetheless a malignant racist, a father who was an abuser, and a cherished husband who struggles with PTSD. But the knot I want to focus on in this article concerns her relationship to the SBC and evangelicalism more generally.
Moore first received the call to ministry when she was a teenager in a bathroom under conditions that the great German theologian Rudolf Otto would have likely classed as a brush with the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. In other words, a mystical experience, an encounter with liminal transcendence more in keeping with Pentecostalism than proper Southern Baptist sensibilities.
Moore’s ministry launched in the early 1980s with headbands and leg warmers as she brought a baptized version of Jane Fonda’s workout to the huddled masses of conservative Baptist women yearning to be fit. From there she expanded into teaching Sunday school at her large Baptist church, eventually graduating to increasingly popular speaking events across the country and a growing list of Bible studies published by Lifeway (the SBC publishing arm).
But there were in-built tensions in the works. For starters, Moore was not academically trained and as she wryly observed, “there is no scrutiny on earth like that which proceedeth from the mouth of a first-year seminary student” (209). As Moore would discover, tenured professors can be pretty snarky, too.
Then there was the “problem” of Moore’s gender. She was, after all, a woman attempting to minister in the context of a complementarian denomination, one defined by stained-glass ceilings. (It didn’t make things any easier that Moore’s ministry corresponds over the last forty years with a growing conservatism within the SBC.)
Moore’s response has been to work as diplomatically as possible within the contraints of her ecclesial culture. When men began to attend her classes in growing numbers, she fretted “I’m going to need a male Sunday school director. That’s the only way we can do this. I’ll have to have a male covering” (223, emphasis added). Moore’s continual concern to ensure she has a man’s authority to teach captures the impossible mental gymnastics that a complementarian theological crucible forces on gifted female teachers.
Then along came Donald Trump’s 2016 candidacy for president. After the Access Hollywood recording went viral on a Friday in October, Moore watched in disgust and disappointment as Southern Baptist leaders she respected proceeded to defend and deflect the bloviating misogynist (my words). So she posted a series of tweets–incredibly modest and diplomatic, it must be said–in which she simply called her fellow evangelicals to denounce unequivocally Trump’s bragging about sexual assault.
Poor Ms. Moore, it turns out she didn’t really understand the depth of moral rot within the denomination and subculture in which she had been immersed her whole life. Within twelve hours, the internet (or at least the conservative evangelical wing of it) was on fire. People were saying Moore had defected to Hillary Clinton (gasp!).
Soon the phone was ringing. When Moore tried to explain how it was important to denounce sexual assault unequivocally, one preacher’s wife responded, “I know, Beth. But all the babies” (242).
All the babies.
In other words, shut your mouth about Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women because Hillary Clinton believes in elective access to abortion.
Soon after this, Moore was receiving “hundreds and hundreds of emails” screaming “Baby killer!” (242). Moore had said nothing about voting for Hillary Clinton let alone “killing babies.” All she ever asked was that evangelicals denounce Trump’s misogynistic braggadocio. Yet, these shrill verbal assaults were just the beginning. People called Moore’s ministry incessantly, verbally harassing the employees, her speaking events were canceled, publishing deals disappeared.
All because she had dared denounce a cretin who bragged about sexually assaulting women.
As an aside, the moral rot Moore encountered is so pervasive among evangelicals that after Trump was found liable in a court in 2023 for having sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll (the judge later explained that the finding meant Trump raped Carroll), that fact didn’t even register among evangelicals. Nobody cared. In fact, a day after he was found liable, Trump the rapist was mocking the woman he raped on national television. And the evangelicals continued to rally behind him as their champion.
If Trump has any social value, it is in revealing the true moral fibre of people. Like a blacklight shone on a “clean” hotel room, Trump reveals deep stains of racism and misogyny that were always present in the good evangelicals to whom Moore had been ministering.
Moore addresses the chronic coverups of sexual abuse within the SBC denomination that were uncovered by journalists at the Houston Chronicle beginning in 2018. It turns out the SBC had been protecting male abusers for decades. Trump was merely the most high profile example. As Moore muses, “All that time I’d obsessed over having a male covering, a mind boggling number of male leaders were providing a covering, all right. They were covering up sexual abuse” (247).
That’s a key insight. It wasn’t just that the SBC, and evangelicals more widely, made a faustian pact to overlook Trump’s moral debasedness so they could “save babies.” It was that they never cared that much about women in the first place.
Eventually, Moore and her husband find themselves in a small Anglican church in the Houston suburbs, far from the teeming masses of First Baptist, Houston and “three thousand seat worship centers” (269). It doesn’t take long for the female congregants to realize that the Beth Moore is in their midst. In one of the most moving scenes in the book, Moore describes being surrounded by a small group of women after the service:
“Beth,” one of them voiced with palpable tenderness, “we don’t know what brought you and your husband here today, but we want you to know–”
All of them noded their heads like they knew exactly what she was about to say.
“We’re so glad you came. You are welcome here, Beth.”
God smote the rock, and water gushed forth from my eyes like waterfalls. I can’t think of a time I’ve ever cried with less retraint in a public place. (275)
All My Knotted-Up Life was not intended as a sweeping moral indictment of the moral rot that infects mainstream American evangelicalism. That theme is merely one big knot in the story of Moore’s life. But it is arguably the most important knot, the one that millions of evangelicals need to come to terms with. This is not a polemic, it is not a screed. It is an honest memoir, equal parts pastoral and prophetic. I only hope those who truly need to hear these words are open to receiving them.
