For years we at Protestia have drawn the finger-wagging ire of many within the Southern Baptist convention over our criticism of their glorious jewel, Beth Moore. Both the well-meaning and miscreants have filled our inboxes with messages about what a nice lady she is, how much she’s taught them, and how why she doesn’t have an unkind bone in her body. From our perspective, that’s because they’re likely all calcified and fused into one big skeletal mass that frames and conceals her dark, dark heart within. We said this about her many times, and we’ll say it again:
If you can picture a crazed woman, who having managed to scuttle herself atop a Chick-fil-A rooftop, is now alternating between throwing rocks down upon irritated patrons below and urinating on them as they pass by, all while the police watch, sit back, and stand down, then congratulations, you’ve accurately comprhended the state of the Southern Baptist Convention when it comes to Beth Moore.
For years she’s been given free reign to pelt passers-by with impunity, a hollering harpy who remains unpunished and out on bail because her uncle is Russell Moo- the Police Chief and dad is the County Judge, and so long as she stays on this side of the complementarian vs. egalitarian debate, even if it’s straddling on a technicality, they’ll put up with their favorite little hellion and won’t even give her a citation.
As a result, we’ve been consistent in calling her out for varied scurrilous offenses, making eye-contact with other discerners who are watching the events unfold while making the “are you seeing this too?” connection of shared understanding.
Now, after nearly a decade of pointing the finger in her direction, documenting the shift from a bible-twisting occasional oddity to pervasively subversive spinstress, Beth Moore has finally left the SBC in worse shape than she found it, smashing all the windows on her way out. The fact that she actually had to announce that she left shows how little she thinks of everyone. Like we didn’t know she had departed years ago? We listed some of her many grievances here, but to say the SBC is better off without her is an understatement.
It would be an error to suppose though that this is somehow bad for her or that her notoriety will diminish, far from it! Right now Lifeway, the publishing arm of the SBC that is nearly bankrupt (and not just morally) is licking their chops and rubbing their greedy little paws together at all the sweet lucre they have coming their way – one last hurrah before their swiney bodies rush headlong off the cliff.
They’re still going to publish all her material. She’ll still be a vaunted “Lifeway Woman,” joining crazy-as-a-rat-in-a-coffee-can Christine Caine as an author they will push and promote. Only now, they don’t have to deal with the headache of her affiliations and association with the denomination. Now that she’s out, there is a lot more tolerance for her wayward and aberrant teaching, given that she’s no longer considered one of their own needing to be policed. This absolutely works for them.
For their part, you can basically think of Lifeway as a run-down mobile ice cream truck chugging along the highways and byways of the SBC. The kidlings come for something cold and refreshing, but all they get are a couple of half-frozen freeze pops injected with spiritual strychnine and renamed the “Beth Moore Bible Study.”
The rusting wheel wells and peeling paint known as Living Proof Ministries aside, now that Moore has broken free of the “systemically racist” SBC she will have the freedom to be more explicit in whatever little creepy heresy she has come up with in the deep recesses of that dark little mind, the controversy being a windfall for her distributor.
Within six months she will come out in full support of “women pastors” (unaffectionately called pastrixes), and another year after that she will making some sketchy softball comments about LGBT acceptance, joining Jen Hatmaker in hitching a ride to hate-Jesus town. This controversy will only add fuel to the fire, and Lifeway is there to suck in all the smoke.
Naturally, our SBC overlords and effete men will scroll through Twitter while they pass the time on the toilet, posting white knight defenses of her newly public positions as they pee sitting down. There will be no mea culpa by the ERLC elites who spend all their time hobnobbing with Democrats and polishing their monocles, acknowledging that she was getting squirrelly with the scriptures. Rather, these Top Men will emerge into the blogosphere after spending some time pinching their own cheeks so as to appear publicly flushed, sputtering, and harumphing while protesting that they weren’t there cheering her on, even as we watched them supply her rocks to hurl from their hidey-hole around back.
Beth Moore can go home, kick off her shoes, and set every room on fire for all we care. The SBC is already a smoldering building, burned over by BLM rhetoric, a sympathy for CRT, and a ruling class that wouldn’t know how to exegete 1 Timothy 2:11-15 if it were tattooed to their foreheads or carved into their arms. The SBC has a lot of problems, sure, but the last thing they need is “Auntie Beth” sticking around and kicking in all the windows.
Goodbye, good riddance, and get the hell out of here.
