 that she is "no longer a Southern Baptist."){kind=link}
New York Times bestselling author, speaker, teacher, and Living Proof Ministries founder Beth Moore told Religion News Service (RNS) that she is “no longer a Southern Baptist.” The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC0 is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States with more than 14.5 million members in a little over 47,500 churches.
Moore says that she is “still a Baptist, but I can no longer identify with Southern Baptists. “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.”
“I still love the things Southern Baptists believe,” she said and hopes the SBC will turn away from what she calls the nationalism, sexism, and racial divides the public is witnessing and return to core values she partnered with for the last 25 years when LifeWay published A Woman’s Heart: God’s Dwelling Place.
Beth Moore’s Views Conflict With Those of the SBC
The Houston based Moore has been a predominant female voice speaking out against misogyny and sexism within the church. She has shared her story of sexual abuse in the hopes of helping others tell their story as she seeks to not just expose the abuse, but for healing as well. She once shared her story at Saddleback Church saying, “The truth will set you free, but it will make you miserable first.”
Moore told The Atlantic in 2018 that she believes “that an evangelical culture that demeans women, promotes sexism, and disregards accusations of sexual abuse enabled Trump’s rise.”
She sparked a controversial debate within the SBC and evangelical church about whether women should be allowed to preach in church in May of 2019 when she tweeted that she was preaching at a SBC church on Mother’s Day, something that she now says was “really dumb.”
Explaining why she called it “dumb” and how much the reaction affected her, she said, “We were in the middle of the biggest sexual abuse scandal that has ever hit our denomination…and suddenly, the most important thing to talk about was whether or not a woman could stand at the pulpit and give a message.”
At the Southern Baptist Convention’s Caring Well Conference in 2019, Moore addressed complementarian theology saying “Complementarian theology became such a high, core value that it inadvertently…became elevated above the safety and wellbeing of many women. So high a core value has it become, that in much of our [Southern Baptist] world, complementarian theology is now conflated with inerrancy.”