All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir

by Beth Moore

If God is love, then nothing is more blasphemous than hate.

All come to Jesus by faith. No one comes by formula.

He told me once, “Lizabeth, life is harder for some people than others.”

You were my lifelong dream come true, I’d write a few days later in her baby book. And she was.

We made some good decisions. We made some god-awful decisions. That we’re in one piece, that we’re still together, that we love one another beyond the confines of human language is the indelible mark of divine grace.

I’ve found that walking by faith is 50 percent hanging in there until you’re far enough down the road to develop hindsight.

Once you’ve broken to pieces, the luxury of imagining yourself unbreakable evaporates.

Falwell, a Baptist minister, founded the Moral Majority in 1979, the year after Keith and I married, in order to mobilize Christian conservatives to take political action on issues they deemed of chief concern. Though the organization would remain intact for only a decade, it normalized a way of talking, thinking, and politicizing in my part of the evangelical world that became almost synonymous with godliness. The message could not have been clearer in the white evangelical church world: if you’re a good Christian, you think this way. If you’re a bad Christian—or more likely no Christian at all—you think another way.

Also, if we women would do our part, God would see to it that the men would be won over and do their part. We took these to be guarantees. I would not recognize for years that my devotion was, in part, dealmaking with God.

A man’s boldness with the gospel was seen as godly passion. A woman’s boldness with the very same gospel was ungodly impertinence.

In my admittedly limited understanding, boys being boys who grab girls by their genitals are boys being boys committing acts that are criminal.

Wake up, Sleepers, to what women have dealt with all along in environments of gross entitlement & power. Are we sickened? Yes. Surprised? NO. Try to absorb how acceptable the disesteem and objectifying of women has been when some Christian leaders don’t think it’s that big a deal. I’m one among many women sexually abused, misused, stared down, heckled, talked naughty to. Like we liked it. We didn’t. We’re tired of it. “Keep your mouth shut or something worse will happen.” Yes. I’m familiar with the concept. Sometimes it’s terrifyingly true. Still, we speak.

All this time, I’d accepted the rampant sexism because I thought it was about Scripture. What I was watching in the wake of the Access Hollywood report, however, did not appear to be a whit about Scripture, nor did it evidence fruit of the Holy Spirit, as far as I could discern. In my estimation, this thing playing out in front of the world was about power. This was about control. This was about the boys’ club. You lied.

Part of a shift—not toward liberalism, for crying out loud. Toward Christlikeness.

The Baptist church had been my safe place. My sanctuary. These were my people. I loved them. But something was happening to us. Something bad. Maybe it had been happening all along and I was too blind to see it. Too busy in my own world. Too privileged. Too partial. Too immersed.

After my ill-advised tweet about speaking in my church on Mother’s Day, suddenly the biggest threat to the denomination was publicly portrayed as women trying to get to the pulpit and supplant their pastors. I did not know one. Permit me to say that again, I did not know a single one. But whether or not a woman could stand at the pulpit of a Southern Baptist church and give a message somehow became all we could talk about.

Every inch of this harrowing journey, in all the bruising and bleeding and sobbing and pleading, my hand has been tightly knotted, safe and warm, with the hand of Jesus. In all the letting go, he has held me fast. He will hold me still. And he will lead me home. Blest be the tie that binds.