Book Review:
All My Knotted-up Life: A Memoir
Author:
Beth Moore is a best-selling author, Bible teacher, and public speaker. She founded Living Proof Ministries in Texas in 1994 when she was 37.
Publisher:
Tyndale House Publishers (February 2023)
304 pages
Genre:
Christian Women's issues, Inspirational Spirituality, women's biographies, memoirs.
Why I Chose it:
Beth Moore's memoir attracted my interest because she is a strong Christian speaker, leader, and evangelist despite being raised in a denomination that opposed women speaking or leading: the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). In March 2021, Moore left the Southern Baptist Convention and ended her relationship with the SBC-owned publisher, LifeWay Christian Resources. She and her husband, Keith, are now members of an Anglican Church. I listened to the audiobook on the Hoopla app.
Summary:
Beth Moore begins her story with a childhood memory of being caught in an undertow when their family was on a trip from Arkansas to Florida. The feeling of being in danger, pulled away, and lost, is a feeling she returns to throughout her memoir. Her poetic style of writing hints at events without providing all the details. Her story is one of resilience and courage as she and her family experienced multiple personal, physical, emotional, and spiritual challenges. The most recent controversy is her decision to leave the fundamentalist Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Not really her decision, since they rejected her as soon as she began to advocate against sexual abuse, coverups, racism, and Christian nationalism. This is a great read for anyone deconstructing or considering leaving the evangelical church.
Childhood and Youth
Her childhood was not easy. Her father harsh and abusive. There was a four-year period when her mother rarely woke from her depressed sleep. Her husband told her mother that she had lost her mind, accusing him of an affair. When their mother went to the river to drown herself, her husband brought her home. Beth and her siblings had little parental oversight during this time. Beth and her sister found evidence her father had been unfaithful. Their mother was not crazy, was vindicated, and recovered. Beth remains uncertain whether it was good that her mother and dad did not divorce. When she was still young, two of her best childhood friends were killed in a car accident. Her family moved to Texas for her father's new job, needing a fresh start in a place not covered in scars from past hurts.
Beth volunteered as a counsellor at a girls' camp and felt God's Spirit on her. When she told the camp supervisor, much to her credit, the camp supervisor took Beth seriously and said it sounded like Beth had received a vocational ministry. Incredibly, her male pastor at home also accepted her testimony and her calling. Beth soon was regularly teaching Sunday School.
Beth married Keith, her sweetheart from Texas State University, describing themselves as two matchsticks, each ready to flare up because of their individual childhood trauma. As newlyweds, they dealt with PTSD nightmares from a fire that killed his brother and injured Keith, and adjusting medications for his mental illness.
They had two wonderful little girls and Beth stayed home most of the time but loved teaching Bible classes to women at church. For a time, Beth and her husband became parental guardians for Keith's special needs nephew. They poured their love into making him whole. She loved being a mom and felt like a failure when her nephew continued to have trouble. but eventually, when the nephew's biological mom said she was ready to take care of her son, they let him go.
Beth Moore's Ministry
When Beth was in her 20s and the girls were young, Beth began to lead Christian aerobics for women. Held at a Christian Life Centre, with babysitting provided, the women would gather in tights and follow Beth's routines to the sound of Christian rock.
Over time, Beth began to give her talk about aerobics for Christ at various women's conferences. At one women's conference, a leading speaker suggested that public speaking was Beth's gift and calling. Beth began teaching a weekly Bible study class, and by the mid-90s that class had grown to 2,000 women. She prepared one series on the Jewish Tabernacle that she calls her Mount Everest. It brought her so close to Jesus it gave her a high. LifeWay, a media arm of the SBC, offered to edit, publish, and distribute it to SBC churches.
Beth shared several times when life was hard and the feeling of being in danger, again feeling pulled away from the safety of God's arms and needing to hold on. For several years in the 1980s, Beth suffered from dark thoughts as her body and mind processed childhood sexual abuse and trauma. When she was in her 40s, Keith caught a rare disease that was hard to treat and nullified his other medications. The treatment took all his energy, verbal communication, and love for a number of months, causing her to feel like God did not love Keith. He finally pulled through by the grace of God. When Beth was just 41, her mother, the centre of their family, passed away from cancer. Beth's father remarried a short eight weeks after her mother died, and Beth shared her difficulty in forgiving him when he barely acknowledged how his past behaviour had impacted her. However, she was able to give him grace before he passed away.
Beth had worked up several talks that she offered at women's conferences when LifeWay offered to arrange speaking tours for her, taking care of all the logistics. She had published a number of Bible studies with LifeWay and she could speak on the topic of her choice. She soon outgrew church spaces and spoke at ten thousand-seat arenas, peaking at a simulcast in 2008 watched by an estimated 70,000 people.
Beth worried about having a male spiritual oversight, a man covering her ministry, since she believed the Bible prohibited women from teaching men and from being pastors. Some complained that Beth's appeared to be the spiritual leader in her home, since Keith took some Sundays away from church for fishing or hunting. She avoided speaking at a church pulpit, and always deferred to the lead pastor and showed deference and respect to those who had more theological education or positions of power within the church. However, she started to notice that when she shared the stage at a conference, these men did not reciprocate with respect or affection towards her, and sometimes made fun of her as part of their speech.
Being a Public Advocate Against Abuse: 2016
The Access Hollywood tapes of Donald Trump in 2016 brought Moore into the limelight. She thought that talk of grabbing girls by the genitals was not acceptable but was criminal. She expected evangelicals to react with shock and dismay. But they laughed it off as a joke, excused it as a man being a man, diminished it as unimportant, and in so doing they diminished the experience of Moore and all the women who had shared their abuse stories with her. Moore felt she was in a position to speak for the many women who couldn't. She did not feel that silence would protect the church's interests.
"...a family that provides a safe space for abusive people to remain unrepentant, unchanged, and unaccountable is already shattered."
Friends told her to stay silent, not make the church or the church's chosen political candidate look bad. They said the most important thing to God was to reverse Roe V Wade and save all those unborn babies. That was why it was right to support Trump. Moore is not a feminist nor a liberal and she does not support abortion. However, she says
"When pro-Christian starts to look less and less like Christ, something's gone off the rails."
People called her a baby killer online and on the phone. Coworkers at Living Proof were demoralized. Moore's Bible studies were pulled out of church libraries and burned. Women said that Moore had betrayed their trust. Decades of ministry and writing were made void.
But Moore had spent years being obedient to God, not crossing the line going into the men's lane, not following the feminist agenda, esteeming men, not trying to seduce men nor reduce them. For decades, she excused the men. She believed the sexist system wasn't their fault; they were just following the Bible.
Her views of these evangelical men changed when she saw their reaction to her criticism of Trump's apparent sexual immorality.
"All this time I'd accepted the rampant sexism because I thought it was about Scripture... [Their reactions to the Access Hollywood tape} "did not appear to be a whit about Scripture. Nor did it evidence fruit of the Holy Spirit.... the thing playing out in front of the world was about power. This was about control. This was about the boy's club. And what I thought to myself about them was this: you lied."
As Beth Moore advocated against abusers, and said that those who supported abusers were not pleasing God, she also voiced alarm about racism and white nationalism.
"Racism and sexism have an uncanny way of showing up together like two fists on one body. The common denominator was clear as a bell... it was superiority."
Being Pulled Under, 2019
The memoir references the Conservative Resurgence of the SBC, so I looked into it and found that Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson met in 1978 to strategize about electing conservative leadership in the SBC. Throughout the 1980s, the SBC became increasingly fundamentalist, enforcing conservative views in theological seminaries and SBC agencies. It was such a dramatic turn that 1900 churches left the SBC to form the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a moderate Baptist group which affirms women in ordained ministry.
Back to Beth's story, in 2018 news broke that two primary architects of the Conservative Resurgence were involved in sexual misconduct or mishandled allegations of sexual abuse. Then in 2019, news broke of sexual abuse of over 700 victims in SBC churches. Journalists were:
"...shining a flashlight Not only abuse cases but also on multiple coverups. The most prominent commonality was that the predatory wolves were sheltered and the victimized sheep were left wounded and wandering."
Moore advocated for the victims. She wasn't trying to move her church to liberalism but towards Christlikeness. When John MacArthur, a conservative evangelical, was asked about Moore's ministry, he replied she should "Go Home".
In May 2019, Moore tweeted speaking in church on Mother's Day and suddenly SBC said the biggest threat to the denomination was women trying to get to the pulpit and supplant their pastors. They had four decades of history as proof to the contrary. The Baptist church had been her safe place, her sanctuary. She had loved her years of partnership with LifeWay Publishing. But this time, it was personal. She had been turned on by people she knew and loved: her church family. She no longer had the support of her church denomination to write or sell Bible Studies.
"All that time I'd obsessed over having a male covering, a mind-boggling number of male leaders were providing a covering all right - They were covering up sexual abuse. But because I'd been so outspoken and had already annoyed them, a horde of southern Baptist brethren came for me."
Beth felt in danger, again feeling pulled away from the safety of God's arms and needing to hold on. She didn't know who she was outside of the Baptist church. She didn't want to leave the house, she wanted the Holy Spirit to come in. She tried to hold on, but like an undertow does, it pulled her under and swept her out to sea.
New Church Family
Reflecting on this image, I am reminded that many Exvangelicals say that when they leave their home church, they wander in the wilderness. Like Sarah McCammon reports in her book, The Exvangelicals, those who leave their home denomination find new accepting and loving communities.
Beth and her husband had been watching online services during the pandemic but were starved for corporate worship. When they went to Baptist or other nearby evangelical churches, her fame brought controversy and triggered divisive reactions. It seems to me that the disapproval affected Beth's self-esteem as a negative controversial religious rebel as opposed to a woman fulfilling her call to vocational ministry .
She yearned to belong in a Christian community but felt like she was radioactive. They had to go somewhere off the beaten path. For many years, Keith had maintained a low profile in their Baptist church life. When they attended an Anglican church in 2021, his childhood love for the familiar formal liturgy returned to him. They were welcomed, accepted and loved.
Keith had a retirement house built in the woods in the style of an old-fashioned church in honour of her lifelong ministry. Then, they found the old church that Keith had attended when he was staying with his grandparents. It was the exact style of the retirement house they had designed. It was God's sign that God loved Keith. And Beth. And all of us.
It turns out there is not much difference between a knotted-up mess of troubles and traumas, and a neat, tight bow.
Elaine Ricker Kelly Author is empowering women with historical fiction about women in the Bible and early church and Christian blogs about women in leadership, church history and doctrine. Her books include:
Forgotten Followers from Broken to Bold, Book 1 (2022)
The Sword A Fun Way to Engage in Healthy Debate on What the Bible Says About a Woman's Role (2023)
Because She Was Called: from Broken to Bold, Book 2, A Novel of the Early Church, imagines Mary Magdalene's trip to testify before the emperor (2024)
Walk with Mara on Her Healing Journey: 21 Steps to Emotional Resilience (2024)
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