In Defense of Beth Moore

In my Bible reading recently, I revisited the story of Dinah, whose rape was essentially ignored by her father Jacob and ultimately avenged in an extreme fashion by her brothers.

There are so many parallels between her story and the story of King David’s daughter Tamar. In both situations, these great patriarchs of the Bible went AWOL when their daughters were raped, leaving their sons to pursue the justice they should have demanded themselves at the detriment of their households.

Their choice to withhold justice led to the destruction of their families.

I feel like we have still not fully learned this lesson.

When you ask the average Christian about David’s great sin, 9 times out of 10, they will probably reference the murder of Uriah and subsequent sexual conquest of Bathsheba. And let’s be honest; that’s a heavy hitter. Horrible decision making on David’s part.

But it’s always been his apathy and neglect of the dignity of his own daughter that’s caused me the most turmoil. I mean, come on dude. Your daughter just got brutally raped by her own brother. Do something about it. Who the heck else is going to? Is she worth nothing to you? She’s waiting for you to intervene!

Nope. Nothing. No accountability for the rapist. No justice for Tamar. Theories abound as to why. Maybe David felt like a hypocrite. Maybe his own history of sexual perversion made him feel unqualified to punish someone else’s. Maybe he didn’t want to have his own shame resurrected. Maybe he just didn’t feel like cleaning up the mess. Whatever the case, the message was clear to Tamar: You don’t matter enough to defend.

It’s not an unfamiliar message to women worldwide. Everyone knows that justice for sexual crimes is notoriously hard to achieve, and we’ve all heard story after heartbreaking story both inside and outside the church of those who turned a blind eye to the obvious injustice in front of them.

How many A-list celebrities did it take to bring down Weinstein? How many pedophile priests were redistributed throughout the Catholic church before their literally hundreds of thousands of victims were believed? How many years were women crying out about Ravi Zacharias before the truth was finally made known? The history of the world is rife with examples of people who would rather neglect victims than deal with the carnage of the truth. When this happens inside the church, it can drive the wounded straight into the welcoming arms of ideologies that promise to supply them with the dignity and value they never could manage to find in Christian churches.

Some of us are more sensitive to this than others, and I think that’s probably a good thing. Lord knows SOMEONE has to care. And in the Protestant church, one of the women who has cared the very most and done the lion’s share of the heavy lifting is Beth Moore, who has stood bravely in the gap and said, “Church! We must learn to bind these wounds and pursue justice for the hurting.”

But the church keeps kicking her in the teeth for saying it. I’ve honestly never seen another Christian endure so much mudslinging, vitriol, and contempt from her own camp in my entire life. They call her a Jezebel, a false teacher, a harlot, a cancer. The relentlessly vicious blowhard William Wolfe just used his massive platform this past week to invite other Christians to call her demonic. Other influencers like Babylon Bee’s Joel Berry joined the pile-on. They make cartoon caricatures of her. They put her name in headlines like “The Moore of Babylon.” They claim she’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing, though half the people making these claims can’t even tell you exactly what she’s done that’s this horrific. Some dude on Twitter today told me the Bible commands us to drive women like her out of the church. I asked why.

“Women shouldn’t preach” came the triumphant reply. I didn’t even have the bandwidth to explain to him that Beth does not inhabit a pulpit, nor did she ever set out to preach to men. Her target audience has always been women, and enough men found value in her words that some of them stuck around to hear what she was saying. Should she have kicked them out? Returned their man cards to them and diminutively encouraged them to only listen to male wisdom?

And let’s be honest; even if you DO think this constitutes preaching, and even if you are of the conviction that the pulpit is reserved for men, this is a tertiary issue, and there are a great many faithful, orthodox Christians who disagree about it. I don’t see any of these guys chasing NT Wright down with a pitchfork on Twitter just because he thinks women should be able to preach.

So far Beth’s crimes seem to be that she’s a woman with a voice, she said true things about Donald Trump, and she thinks we need to improve our communications about racism. And these are damnable offenses apparently. Remember, according to Wolfe, the woman is downright demonic.

It shouldn’t be hard for anyone to understand why a woman who’s spent her entire career walking alongside victims of sexual trauma would be hesitant to vote for a man who openly brags about grabbing women by the pussy. I don’t care if that was a long time ago. Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. And it’s not the only thing he’s said. He’s a sexually perverse dude. Can the argument be made that he was the lesser of two evils? Probably. I plugged my nose and voted for him twice. I won’t do it a third time, but these situations are fraught, and her insistence on telling the truth about why this is a struggle for assault victims shouldn’t land her in the stocks. But it has.

Meanwhile, not a single one of these influencers seems to bat an eye when John MacArthur or Doug Wilson wreak havoc on the women in their care. I mean, imagine actually believing that Beth Moore is a bigger threat to Christianity than a pastor who writes soft core porn about sex robots and calls women cunts. Imagine thinking Beth Moore is more of a threat to the church than a man who publicly excommunicates women for leaving their violent husbands. The world has gone mad!

I think one of the saddest parts of observing all of this is the near silence of men with influence when they see a sister in Christ abused this badly. Crickets. No one has the balls to do the right thing and go to bat for her. Like David, they’re mostly all choosing to sweep it under the carpet and hope it will just go away.

Well it won’t. There are consequences to denying people justice. “You have dressed the wounds of my daughters lightly, crying ‘Peace! Peace!’ when there is no peace.”

Come on brothers. Care enough to stop this.