There’s a downside to going someplace where everyone knows your name.Author and Bible teacher Beth Moore discovered that reality in the months after making a public break with the Southern Baptist Convention, which had been her spiritual home since childhood.
Whenever she and her husband, Keith, would visit a new church, the results were the same. People were welcoming. But they knew who she was—and would probably prefer if she went elsewhere. Once the very model of the modern evangelical woman, she was now a reminder of the denomination’s controversies surrounding Donald Trump, sexism, racism, and the mistreatment of sexual abuse survivors.
When Moore would no longer remain silent about such things, she became too much trouble to have around. Even in church.
“I was a loaded presence,” she told RNS in a recent interview.
In her memoir, All My Knotted-Up Life, out this week from Tyndale, Moore recounts how the couple ended up at an Anglican church in Houston, largely at the suggestion of Keith Moore, who’d grown up Catholic and felt more at home in a liturgical tradition. When they walked in, the rector greeted them and asked their names.
When she told him who she was, the rector brightened up.
“Oh,” he said, with a smile, “Like Beth Moore.” Then, having no idea who he was talking to, he added, “Come right in. We’re glad to have you.”
After the service, a handful of women who had gone through one of Moore’s best-selling Bible studies, gathered around her. They knew who she was and wanted Moore to know she was safe in that place and that there was plenty of room for her in the community.
“Can I simply ask if you’re OK,” Moore recalls one of the women saying.
In that moment of kindness, Moore says she felt seen and at home in the small congregation, which became her new church. She could just be herself, not defined by the controversies she’d been through.
“Never underestimate the power of a welcome,” she said.
The kindness of ordinary church people has long sustained Moore — providing a refuge and believing in her, even when she did not believe in herself.
Raised by an abusive father and a mother who struggled with mental illness, Moore has long said that church was a safe haven from the chaos of her home life. In her new memoir, Moore gives a glimpse into that troubled childhood and the faith—and people—who rescued her.
Displaying the skills that made her a bestselling author, Moore tells her story with grace and humor and with charity toward the family that raised her, despite their many flaws and the pain they all experienced.
Moore introduces her late mother, a lifelong chain smoker, with: “I was raised by a cloudy pillar by day and a lighter by night.”
She sums up her late father’s abusive behavior in a simple but heartbreaking sentence: “No kind of good dad does what my dad did to me.”
Moore also tells the story of how she and her sister Gay saved their parents’ marriage when their whole world was falling apart. Moore’s mother had long suspected her father of infidelity. He had always denied it and claimed Moore’s mother, who suffered from severe depression, was crazy and unstable.
Then Gay found a love letter from her dad’s mistress taped to the underside of a drawer in his desk. The two girls sprang into action, calling their father’s lover and telling her to stay away. It was an act of desperation, Moore told Religion News Service, born out of fear that the family would break apart and they’d be left homeless.
“More than anything it was a way to exercise what little power we had,” Moore said, who dedicated her memoir to her husband and siblings, including Gay and her older brother Wayne, a retired composer who passed away two weeks before the memoir was due to be published.
That call, which Moore credits to her “fearless” sister Gay, changed the course of the family’s life. Knowing the truth about her father’s infidelity gave her mom confidence after doubting herself for years.
Moore said her mother’s story resonates with people who have experienced abuse in church—or know that something is not right in their congregation—and have faced opposition. In many cases, their suspicions were correct, she said.
“But they were told they were unspiritual—that they were trying to destroy (the church),” she said. “It’s what we know now as gaslighting.”
One of the most gracious parts of her memoir comes when Moore gives thanks to two of her mentors. The first was Marge Caldwell, a legendary women’s Bible teacher and speaker. Caldwell met her when Moore was first starting out—giving devotions while also teaching an aerobics class at First Baptist Church in Houston.
Caldwell told Moore that God was going to raise her up to teach the Bible and have an influential ministry. For years, Moore said Caldwell attended her classes, even though her style was very different from her mentor.
“I would read the expression on her face—wondering, how on earth did this happen?” Moore said, laughing at the memory. “I knew she loved me so much.”
The other mentor was Buddy Walters, a former college football player who taught no-nonsense, in-depth Bible studies in Texas for years and who instilled in Moore a love for biblical scholarship. When she met Walters, Moore was filling in for a women’s Bible study teacher at her church who had gone on maternity leave. Under Walters’s tutelage, what started as a temporary assignment became a lifelong passion for Moore.
“I don’t think he would have picked me as a student,” she said. “It just was that I could not get enough.”
In the memoir, Moore, who has historically been very private about her family life, also opens up about the struggles she and her husband have faced. In the past, Moore had made comments about getting married young, and that they had struggled, but gave few details.
With Keith’s permission, she shared more in this memoir, in particular about a family crisis that was going on behind the scenes as her public ministry imploded. In 2014, two years before his wife clashed with Southern Baptist leaders over Donald Trump, Keith had been saltwater fishing, near the border of Texas and Louisiana.
While hauling in a redfish—also known as a red drum—Keith cut his hand on the fish’s spine. What seemed like a minor injury led to a life-threatening infection. As part of his treatment, Keith had to go off all other medications, including ones he had taken to manage mental illness and PTSD from a traumatic childhood accident in which his younger brother was killed.
That sent him into a tailspin that lasted for years, one the Moores have kept private until now. They decided to disclose it in the memoir, she said, because discussing mental illness remains taboo in churches.
“It’s such a common challenge and a crisis and yet we are all scared to talk about it,” Moore said. “We asked each other, what do we have to lose at this point?”
Despite the challenges of the past few years, Moore said she has not given up on the church, because it had for so long been her refuge. She knows other people have different experiences and have suffered abuse or mistreatment at the hands of fellow Christians, something she remains all too aware of.
Yet, she can’t let go.
“I can’t answer how it was that even as a child, I was able to discern the difference between the Jesus who is trustworthy with children, and my church-going, prancing-around father who was not,” she said. “There were enough people that loved me well, and in a trustworthy way, that it just won out. I can’t imagine not having a community of faith. That was too important to me to let any crisis take it away.”
Now is not a happy time to be an Episcopalian, or an Anglican, or an Anglican who was until recently an Episcopalian, or any permutation thereof. After agreeing to a temporary moratorium on ordaining homosexual bishops, the Episcopal Church – the American branch of the Anglican Communion, so named because Anglican sounded treasonously English during the Revolutionary War – voted last week to lift the moratorium and begin developing a liturgy to bless same-sex unions. (Though the Episcopal Church’s presiding bishop is, after the fact, claiming the vote didn’t actually mean that.)
The exodus of conservative members and parishes already underway is sure to continue, along with an increase in expressions of anger, chagrin, and sadness on all sides. Oh, and there will be plenty of valuable church properties to wrestle over, too.
Although several other Protestant denominations have been agonizing over homosexuality for years now, Episcopalians seem to be tied in the tightest knots, an impression created in part because they make such great news.
I once asked an Associated Press religion reporter about what seemed to me excessive coverage of the Episcopal Church, and she pointed out that stories about that church usually involve sex, money, and power (Episcopalians make up 7 percent of the U.S. Senate, for example, though less than 2 percent of the American population), plus, just as important, Episcopalians helpfully tell reporters when and where to show up. Local dioceses have annual conventions. The General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the United States, the group that met last week, convenes every three years. Bishops from the entire Anglican Communion meet every ten years at Lambeth Palace in England. To get a sense of how handy this is for religion reporters, who are lucky these days to have jobs, let alone generous travel budgets, imagine trying to cover all the major developments in America’s vast non-denominational universe. Where would you go? Whom would you interview? How would you know when you had done enough work to file the story? It’s a whole lot easier to plan a trip to the next big church convention and report on whatever happens there.
An unfortunate consequence of the Episcopal Church’s media-friendliness, and of its famously slow and involved deliberative process, is that a casual observer might easily conclude that all Episcopalians ever do is fight. Episcopalians themselves might feel this way; not being one, I will not presume to speak for them. But the Episcopal Church is not uniquely tormented by internal tensions, nor are such tensions necessarily malignant. According to philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre, any institution that hopes to last must contend with conflict.
In his landmark book After Virtue (1981), MacIntyre defined a living tradition as “an historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition.”
This is probably not the definition most of us would use. Family traditions – annual vacation spots, holiday foods, and so on – evoke warm, fuzzy thoughts. Vacations and holidays can occasion spats, or worse, but these are (one hopes) aberrations, not essential aspects of the traditions. Institutions, including churches, that promote their traditions usually do so to communicate stability, dignity, aesthetic richness, and monetary richness, certainly nothing so unseemly as squabbling. Think of the soothing voice on television, intoning, “A tradition unlike any other … The Master’s on CBS.” Soft music, verdant putting greens, smiling champions – no conflict there. The scene is placid enough to make the viewer forget the Master’s is a fierce competition that every contestant save one will lose.
The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion of which it is a part (at least for now) bear all the marks of dictionary-defined tradition. The Church of England is the oldest Protestant denomination in the English-speaking world, ancestor and antagonist of Methodists, English Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Quakers. The Episcopal establishment in Virginia and surrounding colonies was every bit as old and firmly rooted as the Congregational establishment in New England. From stately signs out front to elegant windows behind the priest, countless Episcopal churches exude nobility, with the overtones of high ideals and high status intended. And yet the church is embroiled in an ugly, messy, knock-down drag-out fight. As MacIntyre would have it, this, too, is a hallmark of tradition.
If that is the case, if a living tradition not only must weather arguments but in fact is a sprawling argument, then who needs tradition? Haven’t Americans, with their penchant for leaving behind Old World identities, denominational ties, and boring hometowns chosen the wiser course? Not so fast. MacIntyre posits that traditions provide context and meaning for human practices while also identifying goals – goods – toward which to strive. These are things worth thinking about, and worth arguing about. People who shrink the circle of their connections until it is scarcely larger than themselves still have to find satisfying answers to these questions, but they have to do it alone.
I find it very useful to think of churches, institutions, and traditions of all sorts as historically extended, socially embodied arguments. I like any interpretive lens that incorporates history, of course, and I also like the way this formula embraces real people and their often angular opinions. I am not a theologian or a philosopher, and my brain doesn’t process abstractions well. But I certainly notice a brawl, on the evening news or in the archives of the periodicals I study, and I’m driven to figure out who is arguing what, and why, and what they believe is at stake. Conflict makes institutions flex muscles they would otherwise lose to atrophy, and it forces individuals to articulate beliefs that can turn to mush beneath presumed consensus. The saying goes, “It’s all over but the shouting,” but as I observe history unfolding, the shouting proves that “it,” the living tradition, has a ways to go.
Image of Episcopal presiding bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori in Portland, Oregon, June 6, 2009, via Wikimedia Commons.
