Beth Moore’s departure isn’t enough to save Southern Baptist women.
Though I have read more than a handful of her bible studies, a decade down the road Beth Moore is distilled in my mind as “the bible study and Daniel fast woman.” The Daniel diet is one of hundreds of Christian takes on spiritual fasting wherein you eat only plant-based meals and skip meats and sweets and carbs. In a religion absolutely satiated with weird dieting ideals disguised as holiness I’m not sure why her connection to the Daniel fast in particular is one that’s so vivid to me. My best guess is that I did the Daniel bible study and couldn’t complete the fast and somewhere along the way my intense hangriness got pegged entirely on Beth. I’m certain she’s not the one who came up with it. It’s not fair, but the human mind is an enigma.
I’ve been contemplating who this blonde, beautiful, charismatic woman is to me in light of her decision to leave the Southern Baptist Church. I know I poured through a handful of her intense studies on books of the Bible with a fervor. I love research. At the time, her morning Bible studies were the closest I got to digging into “the literature.” Though Beth Moore is the picture of a southern sweetheart, groomed to big hair perfection in her tailored dresses, I sensed in her writing that she could be a bit of a nerd. In the absence of strong women in my life generally, she felt aspirational to me in my own position as a church leader and avid writer.
My impression whilst I was in the church was that Beth Moore modeled the absolute limits of what women could pursue in the SBC. Her teachings are prolific. Common knowledge among church leaders is that for every one man enrolled in a bible studies there are four to five women coming to a class. Men might be the heads of the house, but women usually take on the role of spiritual leader. Beth Moore has huge followings of these women who host her bible studies in their homes and in their churches. My mom still has some of her work upstairs. So, yes, I do think it is a big deal that she had enough of the misogyny in the SBC and finally decided to leave. But in many ways, I think her decision is too little, too late.
Moore spoke out against Trump in 2016 but didn’t part ways with the church before his reelection bid in 2020. When I think of the absolute havoc the Trump administration has wrecked on families like mine, wherein conservative ideologies have taken over what used to be Biblical ideals, I am curious as to whether Beth Moore understands the power this move could have had four years ago. I personally know so many women straining under the weight of their husband’s growing racism and isolationism fueled by the white supremacy laced into the Southern Baptist Church. Considering Moore’s standing among those women, would she not have given them comfort in their discomfort by parting ways sooner?
If Moore had left when she first saw the misogyny behind the SBC curtain, some women would have had the space to voice their own dissent before our democracy started to erode even further. Rather than unite behind common causes, church women are often taught to compete and distrust each other as they compete for what they’re told are limited amounts of affection and tolerance. Except for the few issues around which the church has coalesced like abortion (the change in stance is a sharp turn from the Southern Baptist Church’s public affirmation of abortion in 1976, three years after Roe v. Wade), the church actively discourages involvement in secular life in favor of evangelical practices emphasizing personal salvation.
In the face of this deep distrust among women in local branches, figureheads like Moore play a crucial role as role models with no attachment to the realities of female follower’s daily living. Her cultural cache in Southern Baptist households cannot be understated. She has a larger following than any one pastor or teacher in the entirety of modern day Southern Baptist teaching. It feels more than opportunistic for Beth Moore to wait until after the throes of the Trump administration to part ways. If she had truly been so disturbed by the lack of reaction in the church to the Access Hollywood tapes (revealed five years ago) — I believe she had the support network and the financial ability to leave the church when it would have allowed women to take a stand against the rising tide of hatred broken out to the surface in the last four years.
Accountability vs. Surveillance for Southern Baptist women
I am truly unhopeful that Beth Moore leaving the church will have any long-term effects on the fabric of the Southern Baptist Church. Large changes require a solidarity I don’t believe is possible in the women’s ministries of the south. Moore herself was only considered non-threatening as long as she followed the guidelines against women preaching in the church or leading studies over men. That culture of surveillance and enforcement does not stop at the religion’s highest rungs. A church steeped in patriarchy and paternalism repeats those patterns down through its lowest ranks.
Bible studies like Moore’s are excuses for women to gather and discuss spiritual matters and potentially to open up to one another. Gatherings such as these could be healing and even community building, but the paternalism of the leadership leeches its way into the soil of women’s culture in many of these circles. For example, many women’s ministries emphasize “accountability partners,” a rather innocuous sounding term for the absolute state of surveillance one lives in while a devoted member of the SBC. Groups of two to four to six women in accountability groups that can also be Bible studies but oftentimes are just components of the larger ministry schedule meet once a week to “check in” on each other’s spiritual progress. Questions range from “How often have you been praying this week?” to “Have you had sex with your boyfriend or are have you been having thoughts around sex?” to “Do you think you’re eating too much because you’re spiritually out of sync?” Justifications are required for every benign decision and should boil down to “God asked this of me” or risk being verbally flagged as concerning behavior.
This “culture of accountability” gets in the way of true bonding between so many women because it discourages the act of showing up as one’s “messy self.” Beth Moore’s studies are filled with references to her own messy past, but the arc women are taught to believe in and strive for is more and more holiness. More and more knowledge. More and more perfection. This tension between the call for “messy selves” and the need to self-report sin creates a space where full humanity can’t be seen with an open mind or shared with a sense of safety.
How can one share a piece of themselves knowing so much of their truest selves are off limits? Never mind that the church has no room for queerness and no space for social justice warriors (especially female ones), for women in the church, even the parts of ourselves that want normal things like affection, pleasure and physical closeness are to be monitored and feared. “We’re here to help,” the groups often say. The small disclaimer reads: Our support is limited to your ability to fall within the moral boundaries strictly written into the fabric of women’s conservative Christian culture.
Beth Moore’s Bible studies serve as a campfire around which women can gather. Until they can truly connect with one another and see women who don’t believe as they do as fully human and fully deserving of love and care, the power of these spaces will be limited. The values spreading in even these female spaces protect the status quo. I would argue that’s by design. There is danger in allowing women a separate space to vent grievances, grafting onto them standards of holiness prevents the embers of self-realization from sparking. These groups are places where women can monitor each other and perhaps even learn about the Bible but not places where change can happen.
Calling each other to account is not an inherently bad idea — especially for white people who’ve historically used oppression as our world-making tool. We need accountability in our lives. We need people to remind us of what matters to us and hold us to those values. My quarrel is not with accountability but with surveillance dressed up as accountability. If anything, Beth Moore’s decision to leave the SBC just reaffirms that the accountability white evangelicals want from their women doesn’t extend to their leaders.
Rather than reckon with the monster they created rising up and striking on January 6th, conservative papers in my home region of Southeastern New Mexico printed completely fabricated news stories of “Antifa infiltration” into an otherwise peaceful protest. In response to Beth Moore speaking out about sexual assault and protecting women, “woke” accusations rang out from pulpits across the South. When presented with the racial reality of Black people in America, I had relatives tell me that I was racist myself and that the reality is racism just doesn’t exist anymore.
These ideas leak out of the southern evangelical churches that serve as the community backbone in mostly white, small towns like those in the area I grew up in. Accountability has been co-opted as the shadow figure of “cancel culture” for all of the white men who lead our country and especially for many who lead our Southern Baptist churches. A ray of hope exists in the truth that many of these sermons are live-streamed online, and pastors like this one in Missouri are subject to their own surveillance from the wider culture. His suspension make it seem possible that letting these ideas come into the sunlight may produce change from without if not within.
Yet despite the conservative culture’s larger movement away from accountability, I know there will still be Bible study members and mentors just “checking in” on the women they lead. The men in charge taught us how to surveil one another and it is not a faucet we can just turn off. From experience I can say it takes years of unlearning to be able just to love and care for the women in our lives without demanding they strive for a perfect, unreachable ideal. But once we get to a space of mutual peace we can develop the shared values that allow for actual accountability to those values.
We learn that sometimes loving each other means using our power to demand protection for the women less privileged than us. Beth Moore has finally made that move. I’m hoping she moves further down the road from giving women self-improvement lessons to focusing her heart on making the world a safer, more equitable place. Leaving the SBC is not enough. Now is the time for the hard work of changing the sexist reality and material circumstances for the millions of women followers she claims to love.
