Popular evangelical Beth Moore says she’s no longer a Southern Baptist
Beth Moore, a popular evangelical Christian and Bible teacher, says she is no longer a Southern Baptist and is parting ways with the denomination’s publishing arm.
Moore disclosed her departure during a recent interview with Religion News Service.
“I am still a Baptist, but I can no longer identify with Southern Baptists,” she told the news agency. “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.”
Moore retweeted a Religion News Service post about the article, and a spokesperson for Moore told CNN that her comments in that interview were all she had to say on the matter.
LifeWay Christian Resources, the publishing division of the Southern Baptist Convention, confirmed the break with Moore in a statement to CNN.
The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in the US.
Moore is the founder of Living Proof Ministries, a Bible study organization for women based in Houston, Texas. For decades, she has been teaching people to love Jesus and model their lives on the word of the Bible. Millions of evangelical Christian women have purchased her books and flocked to hear her speak before stadium-sized crowds across the country.
In recent years, though, she has been an outspoken advocate for sexual abuse victims and a critic of President Donald Trump — stances that have caused a rift between her and other Southern Baptist leaders, who have been among Trump’s most fervent supporters.
Days after the news about the now infamous “Access Hollywood” tape broke in 2016, which captured Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women, Moore revealed that she, too, had been sexually abused and harassed.
“Wake up, Sleepers, to what women have dealt with all along in environments of gross entitlement & power,” she tweeted at the time. “Are we sickened? Yes. Surprised? NO”
She told the Religion News Service that she was shocked at the time that fellow evangelicals rallied around Trump. As she watched his rise, she said in the interview that she couldn’t understand how Trump became “the banner, the poster child for the great white hope of evangelicalism, the salvation of the church in America.”
“I’m 63 1/2 years old & I have never seen anything in these United States of America I found more astonishingly seductive & dangerous to the saints of God than Trumpism,” Moore tweeted in December last year. “This Christian nationalism is not of God. Move back from it.”
Moore’s departure comes as the Southern Baptist Convention has been facing its own problems with allegations of sexual abuse and misconduct.
A series of scandals involving Southern Baptist leaders came to light in 2018. And in 2019, the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News published a sweeping investigation that found about 380 Southern Baptist leaders and volunteers had faced allegations of sexual misconduct and more than 700 victims had been abused over 20 years.
In 2018, Moore published a blog post titled “A Letter To My Brothers,” in which she wrote about being a female leader in the conservative evangelical sphere and described instances of misogyny that she had experienced personally.
