Up First from NPR - The Sunday Story: An evangelical superstar left her church but kept her faith

Episode Date: June 11, 2023

For almost three decades, Beth Moore was a committed evangelical Southern Baptist. She was also a superstar in the Southern Baptist Denomination. Moore shared her love of Jesus and the Bible with millions of evangelical women at Bible study gatherings across the country, events that often drew stadium-sized crowds. But when the infamous Donald Trump Access Hollywood tape surfaced, Moore was stunned. She's a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and felt Trump's comments bordered on criminality. When the Southern Baptist Denomination said nothing and continued to support Trump, Moore made the decision to walk away from the Church.Today on The Sunday Story our new host, Ayesha Rascoe, talks to Moore about her faith and childhood and why she felt it was time to share her experiences in a new memoir, All My Knotted Up Life.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey, it's Rachel, and this is The Sunday Story. And today, I want to introduce you to someone. But if you listen to NPR, you probably already know her. Hi, Aisha. Hello. How are you? Hello. I'm doing well. So this is Aisha Roscoe. She is, of course, former White House correspondent for NPR and for the last year, the host of Weekend Edition Sunday. And as of today, she is the host of this very program because you just did not have enough going on in your life, did you? Clearly, clearly. I just have a lot of free time. And so, you know, I just like to pick up, you know, some things here and there to do.

To round out your schedule. So I am leaving the Sunday story in your most capable hands because I'm doing this new project. And I know you know a little bit about it. Yeah, I've heard a little bit. Tell me more. Yeah. So we've called it Enlighten Me. And this is basically an excuse for me to talk to all kinds of people about the really deeply existential questions that do you build a meaningful life, especially come to people who use psychedelics for cancer treatment of all things. And that was a totally- I've heard of that. And you tell me, but is it kind of like what happens in your brain when you have a deeply spiritual experience, kind of similar to what happens when you take psychedelics? I don't know enough about the science to be able to equate the two, but what we do know for sure is that that kind of transcendent feeling you get when you have

a deeply spiritual moment is a part of what can happen in the brain when you are going through one of these guided psychedelic experiences. And for these cancer patients, what was really remarkable is that they would have these images come to their mind, these feelings while they were under the influence of these drugs. And the effects, like the calming effects, the release from anxiety and fear about their diagnosis, that just slipped away and it stayed away for many, many months. So this is the kind of stuff that we're going to do. And where is this project going to be? Because this sounds deep and I'm like, how can we get into this? Thank you for asking, my friend. So right now, these are segments that are airing on your radio or smart speaker or however you access your audio stories on weekend all things considered every

sunday and um and then we're going to see where it goes from there but we are really excited about what we've done thus far and and we're hoping that it resonates with a lot of people and it's not i mean we're trying to build something that's not for people who identify necessarily with a religious tradition or a faith tradition. I mean, these are existential questions that everybody has sort of, you know, let percolate in their mind at some point. Absolutely. Because wherever you land on it, right, you have, it's this is these are the facts and this is where I am. How do we as these human beings figure out how to look at the world?

Yeah. And for a lot of Americans, I mean, there is a spiritual framework that they look at the world through and and it's and it's nuanced, right? And even evangelical Christians can get nuanced as we're going to kind of see a bit today. Right. So let's talk about this. You're bringing us this conversation you had with a woman I followed for a long time, Beth Moore. Tell us about her. So Beth Moore is a Christian, and she's really a Christian teacher. For many years, she was an evangelical Southern Baptist Christian teacher and a superstar. She would do all of these events, women-centered Bible study events all around the country, sell them out. But over time, there was a reckoning in her life. She is someone who dealt with sexual abuse in her family. And so when Donald Trump, the infamous Access Hollywood tape came out, she spoke out against him. She said, this is abuse that he's describing.

This is wrong. And she's like, this is sinful. And she didn't back down. And not only did she get really attacked on that, they also began to attack her even more. People within the faith tradition, her faith tradition, because this whole idea of women should be in the background. It's called like, you know, basically it's this idea that men should be the head and women should not be the head. You know, I think it's so interesting about this conversation with Beth is that she basically says, I tried to be subservient in the way that I felt was right because I thought that all these people around me, it wasn't that they just wanted me to be subservient in the way that I felt was right, because I thought that all these people

around me, it wasn't that they just wanted me to be subservient. They just wanted to follow the Lord. And this is what the Lord wanted. But then in this process, she was like, I realized, oh no, they're just, you know, sexist. This is about power. And this is about sexism. And this isn't really about holiness. And so she eventually left the southern baptist denomination and i found that totally fascinating because there are very few people who will stand up for what they believe in that's right and that to the point of being shunned by their community there are very few people who will walk away from that even if they really believe it that you rarely see people walk away from what has

served them so well in the world and gotten the money and fame and what have you and these are your friends these are people you you kick it with and you left and so that's the story she has a memoir out talking about her leaving talking about about her growing up, surviving abuse. And her memoir is called All My Knotted Up Life. We talked recently about this, and I started by asking Beth why she decided to tell her story now. I am 65, and it was not wasted on me that it would come out when I was 65 years old. I think that's a very, very normal thing to look back over your shoulder. And so, you know, if you're a writer, then that involves

the way you're going to process looking back over the years is to write it down. But I think that the reason why I went public with it as a book is because I had a need and felt that the time was right to tell a little more of my story. And maybe it would help understand some things and put together some things that from afar could be confusing. In the book, you talk about growing up as a Baptist in Arkansas and the beginnings of your life in ministry, including what you felt like was an encounter with the Lord in a bathroom at a campsite. I grew up Pentecostal. I'm still in a Pentecostal church. I always found it amusing because you were kind of having these experiences that are a little more mystical.

They were seeming a little more Pentecostal, but you, you a Baptist. I got to tell you, Aisha, because you are on to something. I really have had trouble fitting because I have a very Pentecostal personality. was typically talked about in my particular circles, including just my church circles. So it was always sort of like that. It was like God had given me a taste of some different traditions before I even knew what I would call them. But for those who will listen, who maybe, you know, who are not a part of the faithful tradition or have different beliefs, I guess, can you break down to them the difference between like, say, a Baptist and a Pentecostal?

Because people may not understand. I'd love to. I'm about to stereotype this thing to a ridiculous degree, but let me do it for just for the sake of our listeners getting some kind of idea here. So in my world, we would have thought, and so I think in terms of an evangelical and lifelong, lifelong Southern Baptist, we would not have considered that we were what we would call the frozen chosen, which would be all the way to the other end that would, you know, there would never be any clapping in church. There would never be, it would be very, very solemn and very quiet, not demonstrative, very formal. So that, you know, we would have, that wouldn't have been our world at all. And we would have been to some degree critical and maybe even a little mocking of that world. Then there would have been the other end, which we would have

considered again in my world. They don't know the scriptures at all. It's all demonstration. It's all hype. It's all emotion. So it's people who are shouting, like in my church, shouting and falling out and doing all that stuff. That is too far for a Baptist. Oh, gosh, yes. And all the snake handling. And my people growing up, we would have thought that all of those people fell into the same category, anybody to the right or to the left of us, that we were right somehow in the middle of that. Not only in the middle of that, but when I say right in the middle of it, I, right as in also right with what we believed and expressed. And I knew no other world. I just knew that I was more demonstrative and more enthusiastic

than my world was accustomed to. I will tell you that. You talk about growing up in your faith and how that shaped you. But also the book talks a lot about some traumatic things that happened in your family and how that impacted you and how it continued to impact you throughout your life. And, you know, I want to say right here, if it wasn't already clear in my introduction, I want to warn listeners because we are about to talk about sexual abuse. You had said in the past you were sexually abused. You had been open about that, but you never revealed the identity of the abuser. That is right. Now, in this book, you identify your father. Yes. Who is now deceased as a person who abused you. How did you make that decision? And how are you feeling now that

this will be public? I have thought about this for a number of years and wondered if there would ever come a time that I would be comfortable telling it. And my biggest question was how my siblings would feel. And so for that period of time, until both my parents were gone, I would not have even considered it. We were raised in such a way to think under no circumstances would you shame anyone. And I wouldn't have wanted to of that story. But most of my ministry is behind me. And I have wanted to be able to go a bit deeper with women who have been traumatized in similar ways to my own trauma. And understand with me, there is no kind of abuse whatsoever that is not profoundly affecting, none, zero. But what I did feel is that incest is, it is its own,

I'm just, I have no better way to say it than it's just its own monster, especially when it is apparent. And I'm not saying that what happened to me is worse than what happened to others by any stretch of the imagination. But when your protector is your perpetrator, it's so messed me up. But I do long to be able to say, if you have been in this situation, I want you to know that I have too. And if you made every conceivable poor decision in the wake of it, I want you to know that I did too. If you have been prone to self-sabotage every single time something good was about to happen to you in your adolescence and young adulthood, I want you to know me as well.

You're listening to The Sunday Story. We'll be right back. Now, our change will honor 100 years of the Royal Canadian Air Force and their dedicated service to communities at home and abroad. From the skies to our change, this $2 commemorative circulation coin marks their storied past and promising future. Find the limited edition Royal Canadian Air Force $2 coin today. I'm Aisha Roscoe, and we are talking to Beth Moore about her memoir, All My Knotted Up Life. Her book talks about why she left the Evangelical Southern Baptist denomination and the role childhood sexual abuse played in the decision. I asked Beth to explain the connection.

See what the reporting about the Southern Baptist Convention, sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention, it being covered up. How did these things shape your reaction to learning what was going on in your own denomination? You are so right in using the word shape or shaping, because what I attempted to do, the book is a memoir as opposed to an autobiography. I don't start at one point and go all the way through and skip nothing. What I sought to do was go through a handful of the most shaping experiences in my life, the things that were, whether for the good or the bad, that these are the things that made me. Aisha, I don't remember a time in my life that I did not feel an inexplicable shame,

even prior to when I remember. I've got so many blackouts in my early childhood, but even before I remember actually being abused in that car that I tell about, I already had a strong sense of shame, unshakable shame. So now fast forward, go through many years of then really seeking what the Bible would call the renewing of my mind, of trying to face it and get to a healthy place, of going through counseling and then the best we understood to do it, and then going through actual therapy and all the things that I could reach for that would be of help to me in my journey. So we get then to 2016 and I start there because of the Access Hollywood tapes and why it was just outrageous to me.

I mean outrageous to me, is because the kinds of things he described. And I've had so many people say to me, and I'm talking about Donald Trump right now. So many people say, but he probably was just kidding. Or he was just, all the locker room talk, all the things that they called it, in whatever terms you want to place it in, I'm still going to say that what he is describing when it comes to assaulting someone, we're not even talking about sexual immorality there. We are talking about sexual criminality. And the fact that it would be downplayed, I felt at that time, Aisha, that to me, it felt clear that women were just expendable in it. We had a goal, and that was that we needed our man in the White House, and somehow he was going to save

Christianity. Were you shocked by that? Were you shocked that that was the position? I was flabbergasted. Flabbergasted. It was like waking up on Mars. It was like, what are we doing? When you are talking about grabbing someone's genitals, let me put it that way, you have no idea the impact that action, that one action has had on innumerable people, children, boys and girls, adults, that when

something is forced on you, there is nothing about that, nothing about that, that is acceptable. Absolutely nothing. And so at the same time, so I'm watching so much of my world. Of course, there were many exceptions to this, but I'm just saying, if you look at the public outcry, it was all pro-Trump, get over it. Everything's worth it to meet our goals. So it was, yes, it was flooring. And then on top of that, so very quickly now, you have the expose on the Southern Baptist churches where there have been serious allegations or there is legal documentation of abuses, et cetera. And what happens is that I watch a very odd thing occur. It becomes, instead of dealing with the actual sexual abuse crisis, for many in the public eye, it turns.

And there is this thing, it is this way that I have seen in a number of different circumstances where there's this diversion instead of dealing with the actual problem, there's this diversion. But I could never have guessed what was going to happen next. And I guess I'll break this down. What happened is that, so while all of this is happening, you had talked about Donald Trump and you had gotten in trouble for that with people saying, you know, on the Internet and things like that. You have these exposés going on in the Southern Baptist Convention about abuse happening and cover-ups of abuse. And then at the same time, I guess you, in the Southern Baptist Convention, women are not supposed to preach. They're not supposed to be in the same place as a man preaching. And you joked about talking at a service, teaching at a service on Mother's Day. And then there was a firestorm. I read the stuff about you. I read they was

talking about you. They were calling you everything but a child of God. Yes. And you know what? The reason why this one hit me even harder was because this was my own world. And what I knew, and will believe to the death, they knew better. So you've got to understand the peak of the sexual abuse crisis. What becomes most important is to talk about whether or not a woman could speak on a Sunday at a Southern Baptist church. And it was just over. And you feel like that was the distraction. You've got all these other issues going on with actual abuse and you're talking about a very powerful contingent of people, that there is this missing the point, not dealing with the actual problem, but finding

another diversion, something to look away from it and get distracted with something else so that we can consider that to be the crisis and not what the actual problem is. And yeah, it was over and nearly killed me, but it was completely necessary. It was unavoidable. You know when it's done and God's going, you're out. And what people may not understand, and I did grow up in a church where the church that I grew up in, women were not allowed to preach in the pulpit. And there was this idea that a woman could not be a pastor. Basically, the idea is that a woman cannot be over a man and that men have to be the head. And that's the way the even though I was put across the same sorts of things somehow in the same place.

And I just wonder about how limiting that is. You know, I will never know because I'll never have the chance to live it over and see what might've been different. But you know, I'll never know the answer to those questions. And I'll only know that to the degree that I understood my opportunities and perimeters, I tried my hardest to serve at the full measure. I will tell you that God has been faithful to me and that in all of the disappointment and in all of the shattered naivety, and that as much as anything, just that what I cooperated with to come to grips with the idea that some of what had been imposed on me had been out of motives other than those in scripture. It was misogyny, that it wasn't just, it was misogyny. Right. I mean, it's just, it's devastating. It's just devastating. But I will

tell you in all the shaking of it and disappointing myself, looking back over it and thinking, oh my gosh, it's not just them that taught these things. I taught them. I helped with this. I was part of this. But I can tell you that I will never again just take things to believe that the interpretations of man are as, what shall we say, as true and as voracious and as authentic as the actual scriptures themselves. That I will never be caught into again. I hope. You go to an Anglican church now, which is about as different as you can get from Baptist. I know you've kept your faith. Has this made you reconsider any other parts of your faith, like maybe anti-LGBTQ rhetoric or purity culture. What it has caused me to do is to look down

into the differences of what I find to be unshakable in the scriptures when all, you know, all considered to the degree that I can look at, say, for instance, the New Testament from the very first of Matthew to the very end of Revelation, that I'm not making assumptions that I'm looking at the actual scriptures and what the plain reading of it might be or what is being taught in those passages instead of all that has been interpreted to me. I guess I'm going to wrap up, but I got one more question. Has it made you more sympathetic to other people who are looking on the outside and say, I am hated by the church. I am not accepted because of who I am, because of who I love, where I dress, whatever I

say. Has it made you more sympathetic? Absolutely. And I will tell you something, because I'm very tender-hearted and just because of the circumstances of my childhood and all, I had that built-in compassion early on. I was always going to look out for the underdog. I was going to look out for the kid in school that was made fun of. Those kinds of things were, I knew, I knew right from wrong there, but I know as a full grown adult, what it is like to be made to feel like you are no longer wanted and you are cut off and you are, you know, outcast. And so, yes, certain or do you think he will be embraced again? It seems like it. And what does that then, what then do you feel about that? You know, I have no idea what's going to happen and I have no idea what it would come down to, but I say this with a smile on my

face. Don't you think maybe it would be refreshing to just have some younger candidates? Can I just say that much without offense? Well, we will see. What is next for you? Do you plan to do more biblical teaching, writing, maybe preaching? Do you plan to preach? Anybody, you know, I'll serve anybody who will let me. So the numbers have changed. These are not arenas anymore. Those days are all over. But oh my goodness, I do dearly love to serve. So I'm just going to keep doing what God's called me to do. And then He'll worry about who listens to it or receives it. And I'm going to keep writing as long as God is willing.

And, you know, I'm in the Jesus thing until the death because he's just my whole life. That's Beth Moore. Her new memoir is called All My Knotted Up Life. Thank you so much for joining us. I had a blast with you, Aisha. Thank you so much. This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Andrew Mambo and edited by Jenny Schmidt.

We also had production support from Henry Hottie. Our supervising producer is Liana Simstrom and our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. We'd love to hear from you. Send us an email at thesundaystoryatnpr.org. I'm Aisha Roscoe. Up first, we'll be back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your day.