BETH MOORE, ABUSE VICTIM
During the media outrage caused by the fake allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, Beth Moore came forward as a victim of sexual abuse. Using the #whyididn’treport hashtag, Moore said, “He lived in my house.”
Immediately, Moore began to receive the positive accolades of the evangelical leftist elite who would have been content to see Kavanaugh’s nomination scuttled. For Beth Moore, the origins of the hashtag movement (designed to destroy an innocent man’s reputation and thwart a conservative Supreme Court nominee) didn’t matter. The vain and notoriously self-important woman weaponized her abuse story as a part of a political movement, and leftists like Russell Moore were eager to encourage her.
Beth Moore injected herself into a raging political battle, which I doubt she cognitively understood or could intellectually grasp. All Moore knew, I presume, is that her tales of victimhood (reported decades after they allegedly occurred) got her attention from a whole class of people who previously considered her a pariah.
Moore was already popular among evangelicalism’s Desperate Housewives, a demographic of women who are theologically neglected by their husbands and pastors and who rely on Moore’s mostly incoherent girl-power ramblings to spiritually sustain them. Among “serious” theologians and scholars in the Evangelical Intelligentsia, however, Moore has largely been a leper, considered to be beneath serious attention. Moore was, for Thom Rainer and Ed Stetzer at Lifeway, a powerful commodity to be marketed as a pimp would hustle a prostitute. Moore could make these men money, selling her goods to doctrine-starved women, but rarely would more-respected evangelical leaders give her a second notice.
In fact, Beth Moore has been a joke in evangelicalism for years. She’s been a punchline of sorts and has been used as an example in seminaries and Bible colleges for decades as an example of the shallow teaching of doctrinal creampuffery that accompanies female preachers. Even Ron Burns (who goes by his Black Nationalist name, Thabiti Anyabwile) acknowledged this fact in his open letter of apology to Beth Moore. One of the most glaringly obvious evangelical change agents working for the Democratic Party, Burns recounts the many times he had been in rooms with preachers and seminarians where her “name was mentioned with a disparaging tone.” He then lamented proverbially in sackcloth and ashes for even taking part.
For lack of a better way of phrasing it, men like Thom Rainer and Ed Stetzer made millions from selling Beth Moore like a commodity to the infamously shallow evangelical women’s market, but men among the Intelligentsia largely mocked her because, well…she really is as ignorant of the Bible as she seems. Her teaching is sub-par, she has grown increasingly wild-eyed and charismatic, and she seems to be emotionally unstable.
BETH MOORE, ACCIDENTAL SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIOR
However, when Moore came forward as a victim, those promoting Cultural Marxism (which includes all the ‘woke’ segment of American evangelicalism) saw her as an important ally to accomplish their political goals. Cultural Marxism in all of its various strata – Liberation Theology, Black Liberation Theology, Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, Social Justice, and Rauschenbuschism (Social Gospel) – all rely heavily upon victimization and victim-identity. The entire Marxist house of cards relies upon people identifying as victims who demand justice by overthrowing the current “power structure.”
The problem is that the Evangelical Intelligentsia are largely old white men whose parachurch ministries are getting cash slid them by James Riady, George Soros, and the Kern Foundation. White men are the ones pushing evangelicalism to the left. It’s hard to imagine someone with less skin pigment than Russell Moore and his ERLC staff (you’ve never seen so many white people in one place), Ligon Duncan, and Tim Keller. It’s hard to promote the oppressed-oppression dynamic of Cultural Marxism when you’re white and rich, living in a gated community. And while the white men of the Intelligentsia have engaged in tokenism to add a few black men to their rosters, and even while they’ve been able to find some intersectional mascots like Jackie Hill Perry (female, black, gay), they haven’t been terribly successful at reaching the Desperate Housewives demographic with their political message (because Desperate Housewives aren’t ordinarily interested in evangelical political skirmishes, due to being busy with Contemplative Prayer and coloring in their Bible journals).
However, when Beth Moore signaled herself a victim, she suddenly found herself flanked on all sides by the very same Evangelical Intelligentsia snobs that have snubbed her these many years. Suddenly, Moore’s triteness and shallow vapidity could be a useful tool in their mission to ‘woke’ the church.
Today, if you look at Beth Moore’s Twitter feed you will see that it has evolved from a daily montage of pithy and feminine inspirational one-liners to a constant Social Justice tweet machine. Moore is on Twitter incessantly, obsessively, compulsively, tweeting away the most extremist Social Justice rhetoric imaginable. No ally of Beth Moore should ever complain about President Trump’s Twitter volatility. If you look closely, you’ll see her most extremist tweets ‘liked’ by the very same Evangelical Intelligentsia men who treated her as persona non grata two years ago. In fact, after several days of angry feminist outbursts, Moore took a week off of Twitter, causing some blogs to wonder aloud if she was okay.
In the last few months alone, Moore has “come out of the closet” as a full egalitarian (she continues to claim she is a complementarian but embraces women preaching to men during Lord’s Day assemblies and embraces women at the highest levels of leadership in the church), an unashamed ecumenist, and a full-blown political leftist.
The above graphic is Beth Moore’s daughter, saying that she has “zero percent interest in an anti-ecumenical, anti-charismatic, anti-social justice kind of Christianity.”
Beth Moore’s response to her is, “Babe. Go ahead and get on out there. It’s about time” (Reformation Charlotte wrote about this here).
Moore has increasingly been caustic, hateful, argumentative, and rhetorically divisive. The once-sweet and affable Beth Moore is now as militant, butch, and hostile as any burn-your-bra type feminist. She now regularly wags her bony finger at male leaders, rebuking them for daring to question her anointed (but always ill-informed) opinions.
This is how she recently responded to Tom Ascol, the esteemed director of Founders’ Ministries…
Ascol’s concern was Moore’s tweeting a link advocating female preachers. Moore tweeted Roy Honeycutt, a liberal former president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (1982-1993) who was tossed from power at the tail-end of the Conservative Resurgence. When Honeycutt died in 2004 from a head injury, Ethics Daily (the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship counterpart to the ERLC, which just went completely gay-affirming) called Honeycutt a “women in ministry champion.”
This compelled Al Moher – the replacement for Honeycutt at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary – to lament Moore and her tweet. Even though Mohler personally promotes the most radical Social Justice Warriors in evangelicalism, he has a conservative legacy to protect.
Moore eventually deleted her tweet and had to issue a “clarification” about where she stands on complementarianism.
Embarrassingly, and upon chastisement of some of the very men who have promoted her for what she brings to the table in regards to ‘woking’ the evangelical church, Moore had to admit she has no idea what she’s talking about.
As though we didn’t already know that.
Moore’s “clarification” clarified nothing at all, except that she knows how to delete tweets. Danny Akin and other Social Justice Warriors in the SBC, whose job it is to walk the fine line between the Baptist Faith and Message (2000) and the leftward trajectory they prefer, congratulated Moore for the courage it took to ‘clarify’ herself. Nothing in Moore’s position has changed, and she’s as defiantly feminist as ever.
MEN SHOULD STOP ABUSING BETH MOORE
Assuming that Beth Moore’s testimony of early-life abuse is true (when it pays to be a victim, you never know), it is equally as tragic that white evangelical men are continuing to use and abuse Beth Moore as a tool in their political games.
It is very clear that Russell Moore, Danny Akin, and The Gospel Coalition, et al, don’t respect or value Beth Moore’s Bible teaching. They never have valued it. They have mocked it…for years. Moore has been the go-to example of doctrinal insipidity for nearly two decades, and they are only now championing her because of how she can reach a new demographic with the Social Gospel.
In short, these men are using Beth Moore. They are watching her ruin her reputation, “career,” and no doubt giving her all kinds of stress that she cannot properly handle as a weaker vessel, all because she can help bring along a sizable portion of evangelical women into their progressive camp.
I don’t see how these men who are using Beth Moore now for their perverse political ambitions are any better than the men who allegedly used Beth Moore for other kinds of carnal purposes earlier in her life. In both cases, the men who have surrounded Moore have cared more about the instant gratification she can provide them through her personal usefulness than they’ve really cared about her.
As shameful as it is to sexually abuse someone, it’s just as shameful to capitalize upon someone’s story of sexual abuse to market them as a political tool. That’s further victimization of a victim.
If these men surrounding and now championing Moore truly loved her, they would encourage her to go home to her husband, to stop preaching because she has no idea what she’s talking about, and to live a quiet and peaceable life. But these men do not love Beth Moore. They are using a poor, simple-minded woman to accomplish their political goals. It is embarrassing and humiliating for her.
It’s abuse. It should stop.
