Moore may be one of the most unlikely celebrity Bible teachers in recent memory.
“The Southern Baptists have lost a powerful champion in a time in which their public witness has already been significantly weakened.” Moore is a deeply trusted voice across the liberal-conservative divide, and has always been able to communicate a deep faithfulness to her tradition without having to follow the Southern Baptist’s scramble to make Trump spiritually respectable,” Bowler said. (Moore’s husband is a plumber by trade.) She also appealed to a wide audience outside her denomination. Moore, she said, is one of the denomination’s few stand-alone women leaders, whose platform was based on her own “charisma, leadership and incredible work ethic” and not her marriage to a famed pastor.
Kate Bowler, a historian at Duke Divinity School who has studied evangelical women celebrities, said Moore’s departure is a significant loss for the Southern Baptist Convention.
(Full disclosure: The author of this article is a former Lifeway employee.) While Lifeway will still distribute her books, it will no longer publish them or administer her live events. Moore told RNS that she recently ended her longtime publishing partnership with Nashville-based Lifeway Christian. “I love so many Southern Baptist people, so many Southern Baptist churches, but I don’t identify with some of the things in our heritage that haven’t remained in the past.” “I am still a Baptist, but I can no longer identify with Southern Baptists,” Moore said in the phone interview. She told Religion News Service in an interview Friday that she is “no longer a Southern Baptist.” “Wake up, Sleepers, to what women have dealt with all along in environments of gross entitlement & power,” Moore once wrote about Trump, riffing on a passage from the New Testament Book of Ephesians.īecause of her opposition to Trump and her outspokenness in confronting sexism and nationalism in the evangelical world, Moore has been labeled as “liberal” and “woke” and even as being a heretic for daring to give a message during a Sunday morning church service.įinally, Moore had had enough. Moore’s criticism of the 45th president’s abusive behavior toward women and her advocacy for sexual abuse victims turned her from a beloved icon to a pariah in the denomination she loved all her life. “And when all is said and done, the impact of Beth Moore can only be measured in eternity’s grasp.” “She has been a stalwart for the Word of God, never compromising,” former Lifeway Christian Resources President Thom Rainer said in 2015, during a celebration at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center in Nashville that honored 20 years of partnership between the Southern Baptist publishing house and Moore. Moore’s outsize influence and role in teaching the Bible have always made some evangelical power brokers uneasy, because of their belief only men should be allowed to preach.īut Moore was above reproach, supporting Southern Baptist teaching that limits the office of pastor to men alone and cheerleading for the missions and evangelistic work that the denomination holds dear. Millions of evangelical Christian women have read her Bible studies and flocked to hear her speak at stadium-style events where Moore delves deeply into biblical passages. She loves Jesus and the Bible and has dedicated her life to teaching others why they need both of them in their lives. For nearly three decades, Beth Moore has been the very model of a modern Southern Baptist.
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