For those readers who remember my mention of prominent Southern Baptist Beth Moore, it’s no longer Southern, just Baptist:
For conservative evangelical critics of former president Donald Trump, the past few years have been painful and isolating. But this week things got personal in a new way, with a dramatic announcement by celebrity Bible teacher Beth Moore that she no longer considers herself a Southern Baptist.
Moore, a joke-cracking Texan, runs a $15 million ministry that is wildly popular among conservative Christian women. She has for several years been raising concerns about what she sees as hypocrisy in evangelicalism. On Tuesday, she went further, ending her affiliation with the Southern Baptists and parting ways with the denomination’s publishing arm that distributed her Bible teaching.
While the Southern Baptist Convention has been losing members for years, it remains the country’s largest Protestant group, and Moore’s exit has fueled chaos for the denomination which has debated women’s roles in recent years. [WaPo]
It’s one thing when a few nondescript members of a religious organization leave it. It’s quite another when a celebrity for whom that membership led to celebrity and influence leaves the organization.
And in disgust, too.
Whether this will have a long term impact on the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is something we’ll see, or not see, in the near future. The moral repugnance inherent in her move is certainly important, but whether or not that will move people out of the SBC is not yet apparent. No doubt the SBC pastors will be throwing mud to cover up the failings of the SBC, like this guy:
Tom Buck, a Southern Baptist pastor from Texas who is part of a much more conservative wing of the denomination, in a blog post Wednesday suggested Moore’s departure should have been prompted by the denomination or by [her long-time publisher] Lifeway for what he called her “theologically unsound” teachings.
Notice that his plaint is about her purity. We’ll be seeing a lot of that if SBC begins to fragment.
