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Hey, it's John Dixon. We have a great interview with Beth Moore coming up. Can't wait for you to hear it. But I do need to let you know, we discuss her experience of sexual abuse as a child. And that's going to be confronting. Be safe. Dear Brothers in Christ.
A few years ago, I told my friend Ed Stetzer that whenever he hears the news that I'm on my deathbed, he's to elbow his way through my family members to interview me about what it's been like to be a female leader in the conservative evangelical world. He responded, "Why can't we do it before then?" "Because you know good and well what will happen," I answered. "I'll get fried like a chicken." After recent events following on the heels of a harrowing 18 months, I've decided fried chicken doesn't sound so bad.
In 2018, Beth Moore, arguably the most prominent Christian woman in America, wrote an open letter to the men of her denomination.
In it, she called out the sexism and misogyny that she says she's experienced within the evangelical world in her 40-year career. Now at 65, Beth feels it's time to lay it all out there with a no-holds-barred memoir that offers an intimate glimpse into the life of a person who's influenced millions of women.
and men around the world. She has an extraordinary stage presence. She's able to hold an audience of thousands in the palm of her hand, and I've experienced that firsthand. But really, it's her words, her thoughts that are the most captivating. Beth has written half a dozen books and over 20 Bible studies, which have sold over 17 million copies.
She's been called an exegetical powerhouse. For those of you who don't know what that is, it is a compliment, I promise. She doesn't just offer personal anecdotes or Bible inspiration, though she does a bit of that. What she offers is a deep dive into the biblical texts themselves. She shows how passages that might look dry or complicated are actually life-giving. She's a Bible nerd.
and a Bible lover, and she feels called to pass on to other women a knowledge and love of Christian scripture. What follows is a wide-ranging and intimate conversation with a woman who is just as warm, comfortable, and open one-on-one as she is on a platform in front of 10,000 people.
I got to spend an hour with Beth Moore. So let me get out of the way. I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions
This season of Undeceptions is sponsored by Zondervan Academic. Get discounts on master lectures, video courses and exclusive samples of their books at zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions. Each episode we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, philosophy, science, culture or ethics that's either much misunderstood or
or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth...
This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today. He's a
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I would recommend the process, even if you had no thought whatsoever of publishing, whether you were a writer or not, just to somehow lay out before you on a sheet of paper the most shaping events or times of your life, shaping both in negative ways and in positive ways, and looking at it because I don't, really, to me, as I glance over my shoulder, it just looked like
someone had taken, well, it looked like a train wreck, or in terms of a puzzle, it looked like someone had taken puzzle pieces and just thrown them all over the floor. But it's an odd thing after you begin to consider it, particularly if God is your guide and you're seeing it through the lens of faith, you do see some coherence to it. I think
Beth's talking about her new memoir, My Knotted Up Life, which was published earlier in the year. It's a thoughtful, funny and vulnerable glimpse into her life, from the abuse she experienced as a child to the beginnings of her uber-successful living-proof ministries to her famous break with the Southern Baptist movement.
I think that for those of us who are of the Christian faith, that the themes of our faith are death and resurrection. That's everything. That's the gospel to us. And I think...
When we are looking at our stories, I remember the Apostle Paul who said, I'm thinking in 2 Corinthians chapter 4, and there are certainly other places where he talks about that we are, well, Romans chapter 8 is another one, where it's like we're given over to death over and over again, but so that the life of Christ is.
may be found in us. And so I want to say this in different terms, in just very simple terms. There are things in life that we think either nearly killed us, or I want to be, I want to go further than that and say, maybe did kill the person that we thought we were, the one that we thought had the capacity to do the things that we dreamed of doing. I think that our life
For all of us, we can look back and see times that we thought it's over. It's over. When you're in childhood and something like that happens, imagine because, I mean, you're what, eight, nine, ten years old, maybe five, maybe a toddler in the tragedy that hit their lives. And you think it's over. My life is over. And then in time to be able to see that,
the sustaining grace of God. And if I may be so bold, and I'm talking about this conceptually, John, and I would talk this through with you if I'm confusing at all to our listeners, that you realize that he has just, I mean, like resurrected your life and brought you back from what you, figuratively speaking, was the grave.
So Alfred, what is it that you do for a living? Oh, I'm an anthropologist. I study ancient peoples and cultures. My goodness, so all the way back to the flood. Don't laugh. She wasn't joking. Well, on that note, there are many cultures that have an apocalyptic flood as part of their mythology. I don't have a mythology. I have the unerring word of God.
That's a clip from the long-running sitcom The Big Bang Theory. Director Mark knows every episode backwards. Mary Cooper, the mother of the brilliant scientist Sheldon Cooper, is the stereotypical Southern Baptist woman. She's white, sheltered, uncompromising, peppering her sentences with Bible verses. Mary Cooper is a character with real faith, unquestioning faith.
Mary Cooper, or characters like her, are who you might be thinking of when we say Southern Baptist. But she's the type of character I'm pretty sure most Southern Baptists would roll their eyes at. So I asked Beth to sort us all out. What really is a Southern Baptist? I want to sort of wind back because a lot of my listeners aren't Americans.
And they won't understand what a Southern Baptist is. And you were a Southern Baptist from the get-go. Can you describe what that is? Because I don't want my Aussie listeners to just think of Southern Baptist as they've heard it in the movies. That might not be the most accurate.
Yes, yes. And I don't even know how many movies there would be out there that I would be able to say, well, now that's a good depiction. But I do think I can answer that. And I don't think I have to take long to do it. I come from a very conservative part of the evangelical world. And that when I say Southern Baptist, what that would have said to someone with any knowledge of it, there are certain
pillar beliefs that Southern Baptists would have that are very much also considered to be the pillars of conservative evangelicalism in general, and that is a very high value of Scripture. That is belief in the fundamentals and first things, the sinless life, crucifixion and death, and resurrection of Christ.
We are evangelical in nature in that we share the gospel and missions are very important to us. And there is this devotion of the life. If I had told someone, it would have been the way, Lister, if this makes any sense to you, that I could have used the least amount of words to say the most to anyone who asked me who I was.
So in places where they would have been familiar with the term, if I would have said, they said, Beth, who are you? And if I would have said, well, I am a Southern Baptist woman, those words would have, they would have understood very, very devoted to church, very, very devoted to scripture to the degree that
that we in my part of the world might have thought was very positive, and then those outside our world might have thought was very negative. These are just things that are very associated with what could also be considered the more literal interpretations of Scripture. Very, very, very conservative. However, I would not have told you that we were the only ones who were right.
But I would have told you and believed to my bones that we were the rightest of the right, that we weren't the only ones. But I was fairly, even when I could see a lot of the negatives, I would still have told you in my mind, our belief system, the way we approached our faith was still in the midst of all its ills. It was still the most sound approach ever.
to scripture and faith. That's what I was raised to believe and that's what I very much did believe. Any of us would feel for a child who had been abused, but we who have also been abused don't just feel for them. We feel with them. It is like, it's like we can feel it happening all over again. Am I telling you the truth? I mean, it's just,
It's just something you never do forget the sense of. And so everything in me would have wanted to throw my arms around this precious little child and just hold her head on my shoulder and just pat her back and just bawl and say, I'm so sorry.
I'm so sorry. So many people have asked me along the way, what should someone say when someone says that they have an abuse background or they've been abused? And I've always said, you know, it's just a really simple, you don't have to come up with all the answers. You can just go, I'm so sorry that happened to you.
And that would be my usual thing. But something in me right this second told me that that was not the thing to do. I was not to get hold of that child, tell her how sorry I was for her, and ball on her shoulder like something terrible had happened to her even though it had. The prompting of the Holy Spirit told me to also throw back my shoulders and also put my chin up.
and look down at Eliana and go, "Finn, you and I both know what God can do with a girl who's been through a lot." Because we know that no matter what anybody has done to us, God can raise us up and He can make us mighty. We know that we can be around people and they'll never... That's a clip from a talk Beth gave in the 1990s.
telling of her response to a little girl who approached her after one of her talks with something important to share. I've been abused too, she said. Beth Moore has always been upfront about her experience of abuse as a child, but in her new memoir, she really opens up and she names her abuser as her father.
I asked her why, after 40 years, she felt it was important to be so open and specific. From the very beginning of my writing and really even public speaking, it would have been early on. I'm thinking in terms of the very first thing I ever self-published. And already I was telling that I had come from a background of abuse, of sexual abuse, right?
And so I was transparent about that much of it from the beginning. And I'm going to tell you why. Talking about a few minutes ago, the things that shape us, I could not have been more profoundly shaped than by the abuse of my childhood.
This kind of stuff, especially in those fundamental years when you are putting together your approach to life, you are developing either what your boundaries will be or your lack of boundaries will be. You are learning how to do relationships and you're defining what the world is like. And this is already happening. It is such a powerful negative influence. And
Then, of course, at the same time, when I say shaping things, then, of course, I was also being taken into what for me was the safest harbor of my life, and that was our local church. So these terrible things happening when also these very positive things were happening, but both of them profoundly shaping. And so I felt like from the beginning, if I could not tell that piece of my story, I
that I would not be able to minister with authenticity because it made too much difference in the way I saw rescue, in the way I saw the role of the scriptures,
I've said so many times that I probably will maintain this to the death. I can't imagine that I wouldn't. And that's that the Son of God saved my soul and the Word of God saved my mind. I was just so tormented and had such self-loathing. I was going to say such low self-esteem. That's not strong enough, John. I'm talking about self-loathing, that kind of shame that just keeps you cloaked in self
Such darkness. And so I just felt like, how do I testify to what Jesus has done for me and what having faith has meant to me? That I wasn't just what I saw or perceived in the mirror. I wasn't just the sum total of my poor decisions, which were many, but that I was who God said I was. How do I do that and show faith?
the depths of how transformative that was to me. If they don't know that piece, I feel I can't, I don't have any, I don't know how to be, to be authentic in the ministry that I think. So over time, then years pass and I get more specific that it happened within my home and,
But I wait and wait on that. And I could reason a number of different ways. For one thing, because my parents' generation has long since passed away, and so have most of their peers. The other reason being, you know, I'm toward the end of my life. I don't know how many more years I have. Most of my vocational life is behind me. And it's like,
I said to my husband, we sat down face to face, what do we have to lose to just lay our lives out there for whatever good it might do? In whatever way to say to someone who feels so alone in their shame or in their very, very personal challenges within their home,
To just say, you know, we have been in some of those places. We get it. We get it. And I just wanted them, and so did Keith, to feel seen, even though I don't approach it from, I'm not a therapist and I don't approach it from a therapeutic standpoint, but to say to someone, yeah, I get it. Yes. Yes.
It sounds like your faith as a child and as a grown woman has been a source of comfort and nourishment despite that abuse. But can I ask you just for a moment to speak to...
My listener, who isn't sure what to make of Christianity... Yes. ..and yet has been abused. Yes. What can you say to them to help them navigate their experience? Gladly. Gladly, John, gladly. Because what I would...
tell you, if you're listening and you're thinking, you know, I'm not a person of faith, I'm going to tell you what I believe and what I am convinced of by way of the scriptures. And I'm convinced of by what I've experienced in the things of faith. What I'm going to tell you is that whether or not you believe in God or further than that, believe in his son, Jesus Christ, this I'm going to tell you, you were created in the image of God, precious,
and valuable and deeply loved by God. And you have the right to know that regardless of what steps you may take further than that in your belief system, you need to know you still have value and dignity. You are still a person of tremendous worth and that what happened to you was not your fault.
And the shame that is on you is misplaced. That if you operate out of it, if it's what empowers your decisions, you really do have the right to say, this was something placed on me that is not me. We can have a shame, a cloak of shame on us that is
affects so many of the profound decisions and small decisions, but life-changing decisions. We'll get ourselves into very hurtful relationships. We who have been abused in childhood will often pick out people that will be, if not abusive in the same way, abusive in some way. It just sets us up for so many disastrous decisions. And I want you to know you are worthy of
as being created in the image of God to be able to live out from under that kind of shame and to seek good, solid therapy that has, you know, it's reputable that you've looked into and, and you can see what the, what kind of ratings that they have and are they trustworthy. So I would want you to know that no matter what, that you are,
worth loving. Your life is worth living and you are not hopeless.
Beth tells me she never set out to be a prominent Christian speaker. She married at 21, had her daughters pretty quickly in close succession. While her second daughter was still a baby, Beth started an aerobics class to Christian worship music, which became so popular she was asked to do bigger and bigger events, making fitness count for Christ.
You're already thinking it, and Beth absolutely knows it. In her book, she writes this, The gift our young selves give to our old selves, if we're lucky, is pure absurdity. I have hated the young woman I used to be many times for many reasons, but I can only love a woman who takes herself seriously reading from a Bible while wearing a sweatband. Give me this.
Many, many women loved her for it too. It was the start of something much bigger than aerobics. I'm pretty sure as an 18-year-old you weren't sitting around going, I'm going to be speaking to tens of thousands of people on stage one day. So tell me, when did you feel that strong pull, that call, and what did it feel like? I was 18 years old at that time and all I really knew of cosmetology
calling. And I love that we're going to, I love that we get to think on this podcast of how many might be listening that don't use these same kind of terms. I think it's so important not to assume that everybody's defining words the same way. And so what I'm going to say is a sense, let me put it like this, even though they're not equals, but a sense of destiny. And in my case, not something in concrete that I
could begin to think, to picture as far as a role. I've said so many times for me, what I was called to was a person. And that was, is if Jesus had said to me, Beth,
follow me. I didn't feel called to a position. You have to understand from my background, I've described a little bit about the conservative ways of dealing with women's roles in the church, in the Southern Baptist Convention. And so for me, having a sense of what we'll then just call calling or destiny in ministry or in Christ, it didn't include
positions because I couldn't have thought what that was going to be. The only thing I would have thought is perhaps a missionary or a singer. And I was not a singer. And I thought, well, maybe a missionary, but I didn't have any sense of that. I just had this sense. And it really was
Rather sudden, like it was a moment in time I was serving at a girls camp, a sixth grade girls, a whole whole group of them at this church camp when I just sensed that God was the best way I would know how to put it. If I had to put vocabulary with it is that he was just basically going, your future is mine.
I will lay it out. You follow Jesus. You're mine and I am going to do with your life what I please. And that I was surrendering to that. And so the fact that I can't describe it
And what gives it any believability whatsoever is that all I can tell you, since I did not see a vision, I did not hear anything audible. It was just such a sense of ownership, of God owning my future and calling me just to surrender to it. The only thing I have to prove to you at all that it even happened is that all of these years later,
I'm still in it. The power of that moment never has broken. I never have doubted it. I have had a lot of doubts in my life, but none of them have been that moment of calling. By the late 1990s, women were packing sports arenas to hear Beth speak. She was invited all over the place, and she began publishing her hugely successful Bible studies.
But she walked a fine line. In an Atlantic article about Beth's rise to the top, the journalist writes this, Moore's success was possible because she spent her career carefully mapping the boundaries of acceptability for female evangelical leaders.
So I asked Beth what she felt those boundaries were. What rules did she have to play by as a woman with a big profile in the Southern Baptist movement?
The only world I knew, the only world of faith I really knew was the Southern Baptist world. I had never, I'm trying to think how old I would have been before I would even be in another denomination's church service and why that would have been. When I surrendered to ministry, I knew pretty early on that I wanted to be an interdenominational speaker and minister.
servant of God that I knew. I love diversity. I love being around people that share my faith in Christ, but that have different ways, perhaps, of expressing that faith in worship or in liturgy or whatever it may be. I love that. I love being unified in diversity. But in my own world, operating in my own world and in serving as what be it a Sunday school teacher, a missions teacher,
leader, whatever it might be. There were certain perimeters for women. And I was even raised in a part of it where we had a fair amount of freedom. I did not realize. I would have told you growing up that my church and my churches, I probably have only been a member of, say, seven, eight churches in my life. And I'm, you know, in my middle and heading into my late 60s. So
So this is quite a long time. I would have told you until I got into the broader field
evangelical world in the United States, that we were as conservative as it got. But boy, was I wrong, because then I became very aware of a part of the Southern Baptist world that didn't have any approval whatsoever of women doing even what I did. And John, you need to understand, one of the reasons why all the trouble I've been in
woman, a Southern Baptist woman in areas of leadership and speaking, one reason why to me, in my opinion, so much of it was madness was because I never went after a ministry to men. I never, I wouldn't have been the pastor of a church if someone had paid me $10 million. This was phenomenal.
flagrantly a women's ministry from the very start. I wouldn't have known there was anything else for it to be. And so it was just crazy to me because it's like, you guys know good and well. I have never been after your pulpit. Now this I've got to say to you, John, because I'm
I knew when I wrote this book, I knew there were going to be people that were going to read my story. I thought, Beth, how real are you going to get with this? And I did it about my abuse. I got very specific that it was in my home and that it was my father. I went to that step. So I also did this where women, where my role as a woman in the church was concerned, knowing, John, that people were going to read that that didn't have any
any exposure to this part of the faith world. And we're going to think that woman was out of her ever loving mind because I realized that
how crazy it looks looking back on it, not trying to be, you know, not, not just trying to submit to what is the obvious system. You know, I mean, I've said so many times, if you blame me for playing by the rules, then you need to understand that the, the alternative was not to serve at all. That's, that's what this came down to. And I had given my life to serve.
So, of course, you know, I was going to submit and play by the rules. But are you saying it just so happened that churches started to invite you to things where you'd look at the audience and it was half men. And then you started to get into trouble because not because you had crafted this ministry to men, but just because the people who wanted you wanted you. I'm so happy to tell you that I can't think of a single time it was half men until the
the most recent days where I would be asked to speak at a service. And I say this to you because I need you to understand the madness of it, because I am telling you, I was overwhelmingly a servant to women. But yes, what would happen is that men would come in class. Men would come in my Sunday school class. And at first we were like, because I'm
I knew the trouble I was going to get in. It was like, they need to sit in the back. And then we tell them on Tuesday nights, you know, you need to sit at the top. If you're going to come, you need to sit at the top. It just, just crazy, just crazy. Because, you know, it was like, I'm not seeking them out, but now do I throw them out?
when they come in. So it just, it's exhausting. It's absolutely exhausting. Sure. Hey, some of my listeners are, you know, no doubt listening to you going, hang on, is there something fatally misogynistic about conservative Christianity? The only reason I'm not a cynic is because I know so many people
brothers who do not think that way, who are in the very conservative ranks. So if I didn't have that, if I hadn't had pastors, listen, I never would have gotten to do the things I got to do had it not been that I had the favor of my pastors and then many other leaders.
It's that there is a contingent and a powerful one, a powerful one of what I felt, John, and I'll still stand by this. There'll be people that disagree with me.
And I get that they probably are sitting in a chair that's at a different angle. But from my point of view, what was very much happening is that it was pulling harder in toward the direction of hyper fundamentalism, especially in regard to women and in regard to people of color. To me, it was moving in.
into a further extreme and what became very important to me as a woman in ministry and as a woman who had called
other women into the active ministry of the gospel was, wait a second, in what world would Christ Jesus send us out in the Great Commission to take the witness of his life, death, and resurrection to this entire globe, and he would knock out half the gospel force by completely obliterating the service of women to the gospel? I know
And so it became, listen, I'm so late in, why would I have done all this to save my own neck? I'm almost done. What was important to me is that we've got
10 year old, 16 year old, 26 year old, 36 year old, 46 year old, 56 year old women who love Jesus, who are developing a hunger and thirst for the scriptures. And what is to come of them? If they're of conservative belief, they have a very, very high value of scripture. And now are they to believe that they have no place whatsoever in the gospel work? No, I cannot accept that.
Beth says with visibility comes scrutiny. The more popular she became, the more criticism she received, particularly from male leaders within the Southern Baptist movement, telling her that she had no place on stage. One very well-known leader told her simply to go home. I won't name the leader because I like to imagine he regretted saying it.
But Beth was about to face much louder criticism. In 2016, she sent out a tweet and her world exploded. Stay with us. 68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.
It pushed his family into financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.
There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Tarat.
and make a tax-deductible donation to help this wonderful organisation give people like Turat a second chance. That's anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Undeceptions.
I said it, I was wrong, and I apologize. Donald Trump did not apologize at first, though. Instead, saying his 2005 videotaped comments about groping and kissing women amounted to little more than locker room banter. But under withering criticism from a disgusted Republican Party hierarchy, Trump relented.
We're listening to a 2016 news report from America's CBS News about the now infamous Access Hollywood tapes released during the 2016 presidential campaign that would eventually usher in the presidency of Donald Trump.
The videotape obtained by the Washington Post showed Trump, recorded without his knowledge, during a studio-laught bus ride with Access Hollywood personality Billy Bush. Trump, who had recently married his current wife Melania, also freely discussed his physically aggressive moves on women and the supposed license that came with celebrity. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Whatever you want. Grab them by the p***y.
I can do anything. But Trump's apology was defiant. In her book, Beth writes about reading the news that day and seeing almost immediately the rationalizations that came from evangelical leaders who were loyal supporters of Donald Trump's presidential campaign. She wanted to ask those leaders if they knew any women who'd had hands forced on them.
Because she certainly did. She knew many such women. In fact, she was one of them. To Beth, this wasn't a small matter, and she didn't think it was something that you could explain away. What Donald Trump said, writes Beth, calls for public shock and deep dismay among evangelicals across the board.
When she didn't see that shock and dismay from Christian leaders, she decided to speak and tweet for herself. I want to talk about the slow motion explosion. Was it slow motion? No.
I don't know, John. Okay, so it's 2016. I'm in Australia. I'm watching all this from the beach in Sydney. And, you know, Donald Trump is in the news. He's even in the Australian news every night. And eventually the very well-known, lovely Beth Moore tweets criticism. Can I ask why you did this?
Why you sort of publicly distance yourself from that whole, what seemed to be an evangelical move to gather around Donald Trump? You can ask why. Yes. But I want to suggest to you that the better question would be if anyone knew anything about Donald
the ministry that God had called me to, why on earth would I have ever considered keeping my mouth shut? If you have been called to women's ministry and you have advocated for women for 40 solid years, in what world would I have kept my mouth shut?
hundred times over. I just, I know, I don't understand how that came as a surprise to anyone. This is my life. It is my calling to help women understand the dignity in the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, how Jesus was forthright in
in bringing women into places where they could know the dignity that they had. Mary and Bethany into Bible study, where they could see the calling on the women at the tomb to go and tell this, tell this, take this news. I entrust it in this form, first of all, to you. Now take it, take it and go. That I would keep my mouth shut
at a time like that, would have been unspeakably irresponsible. And you know, I will stand by it forever. Wake up, sleepers, to what women have dealt with all along in environments of gross entitlement and 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. Maybe there was something different you might think I should have said earlier.
But I don't know how on earth I would ever have remained silent or been able to respect myself if I had. I was, I don't know another way to put it. I was just like, my mind was, you might as well have dropped a grenade in my head. It was like, oh no.
No. You're right. I should have asked a different question. I'm sorry. Thank you. Tell me about the response. I want to know the response. Well, it was terrible. And it was immediate. And if you look, I can't say it off the top of my head what the tweet said, but I said toward the end of it. And yes, I know what's going to happen now. But, Sean...
No, I didn't. I thought I knew what was going to happen. I thought there would be a backlash, but I had no thought. And can we be honest? I'm not sure we had ever seen the power of social media like we saw it. I think we entered a whole different era of mob activity.
mentality. And what we know now is that some of it also was trolling were accounts that were created for that very purpose. But it was truly, it was standing in front of a firing squad. And one of the worst parts of it was the trouble I caused my own ministry. It will be what I, at times when
I feel the need to speak out about something. Those are the times when I wish so much no one else was associated with me so that I could just be held responsible and be the only one held responsible for the words out of my mouth. And, you know, because we were very much, we had many who were very, very devout people.
Not only Republicans, but, you know, that were pro-Trump on staff. And I put them in a terrible position. Terrible position.
And so it was, John, it was immediate. I said those words on a Sunday and Monday, my office, they couldn't put down the phone. As soon as they put it down, it rang. All of our, all the lines at the ministry, days and days of it, days and days of it, emails. I just can't even tell you.
So it was quite something. It was quite something, but it just, I don't know any other way to put it. It was what it was beyond what I did to my staff, which I hate so much, the pain that I caused them and the position I put them in. But for me, it was, well, what it does, it does. If it ends all of it, it just does because I don't,
I don't know where else I would have to have been a different, I had a totally different brain, a totally different mind, a totally different life experience.
to have landed any different place. I asked you earlier if there was something fatally misogynistic about conservative Christianity, but the other question, particularly where I come from in Australia, that might emerge is, is there something fatally political about conservative Christianity, in your view? No, I don't believe so. And I'm going to tell you, this is where we have to differentiate. And I'm really going to ask your listeners to...
make a distinction between what, let's say, where American Christianity is concerned. And so I know, you know, you guys are outside the country looking, you know, you're observers looking in. But here's what I need you to understand, that where I am voicing objection to
where there is a differentiation between what is considered politically pro-Christian and what is actually Christ-like. And the only way somebody's going to know what I'm talking about is that you need, is that you, I would challenge you, not you need or you, but I would challenge you to read the Gospels and see what Christ is like. And so my understanding
My objection is that when what is pro-Christian in our politics looks less and less like Christ himself, and I'll say this about women too, when in Christian communities we are treating women less and less like Christ treated them in the gospel, then I have an objection about
Because those two things can't be. And what's happened in what you're seeing, and I'm talking to our listeners, what you're seeing, what you're observing, that is looking like this is pro-Christian politics, that some of it does not look at all Christian.
at all like Christ. And some parts of it are also just incomplete. For instance, I believe that pro-life, for it to be, that we have a responsibility to be consistent for the unborn and the born.
that we care about both the woman and the child, that we don't, there are no such choices that have to be made in Christ. There is the care for all. But what it just is, when our faith system looks altogether different than the Savior system,
we have given our lives to in our faith, something has gone terribly awry. Something very strange is happening in America. As an observer who's been coming here years, and now I live in Chicago, there's a rapid secularization going on in America. I mean, 20 years ago, over 80% of people identified as Christian. Now it's about 60%. On that trajectory,
In less than 10 years, this will be a minority Christian nation. Can I just ask you to reflect, why do you think this is? And can you imagine a renaissance of the Christian faith? Oh, yes, I can. I'll say a couple of things. To the degree that those statistics are reflective of people of authentic faith in Christ, yes, it is true.
It is very, very troubling and there are all sorts of contributors to that. Media, not the least of them. Also the very troubling witness of Christianity in places like the States, all of those things. So there's that and that is terrifying.
But I also will tell you, I think we are less and less inclined today to just call ourselves something by classification. In other words, I do. I think I'm not sure that when we saw X X percentage of Americans saying,
believe in God meant the same thing as that they were of authentic Christian faith. So, I mean, in the days that I was raised, John, Australia is so different in this regard, but in the town of my upbringing, I did not know. I went to public schools. I did not know a single person who did not go to church. Not one. Not one. I'm sure they existed.
But they wouldn't have told it because you wouldn't have told that. Now, they might have gone to the Methodist church that morning. I had friends that went to the Church of Christ. I had friends that were Presbyterian. I had friends that were, you know, that were all over the spectrum. But everybody went because you were just supposed to. That was so I don't I don't know. I don't those two things are not the same. But here is what I do think. I do think that.
Some of what we're seeing is God's tremendous displeasure with our celebrity Christianity. And I do realize how the irony of someone like me saying that, but I have been right in the middle of it. And so I can speak from the inside of it, looking out.
I think that the great exploitation is the word I want to use. Exploiting God for power and money and going on with this facade. He did it. We see it over and over with the prophets to the time of Isaiah and Jeremiah and all the minor prophets. They were speaking to the same thing where God was going, you know what? Save yourself the trouble.
coming with all your worship and your sacrifices and all your fasting. Because I'm going to tell you something, what I see is you treating people like
like they are animals and like they are the filth beneath your sandals. And I want you to know, I have no interest in your worship with the way that you are treating people. None, none. So these are things that are so valuable to us today because we are still called to love of God and love of neighbor. We are, we are. And so I, I think that,
There are all sorts of forces at work here. I believe in demonic forces. I do. I think you don't see things like we've seen just here lately and all of the evil toward children that we get out of it without going. There's got to be even, even more of an explanation than what we know for this level of evil and hatefulness. But I do think that, yeah,
God can bring something powerful out of it. And I think to some degree, it was like he sent all of us home and then said, let's, to some degree, let's see if we can go at this a different way. Same Savior, same scriptures, but where we are not bringing our falsity and all of our performance into the sanctuary, but after treating people like filth all week long.
On February 10, 2019, the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express News published an in-depth expose of abuse in Southern Baptist churches. The headline read, Beth points out that she actually did see Southern Baptist leaders speak up for reform.
But even they were met with opposition from other leaders. Change looked very unlikely.
And then just three months after the first news reports rocked the Southern Baptist Convention, a new scandal emerged. And it proved the last straw for Beth. Again, it was the result of a tweet. That's a powerful platform when you've got a million followers, as Beth does. She tweeted that she was preaching at her church on Mother's Day. Pretty cool, right?
What followed was another barrage of disapproval, disdain and even mockery. The same leaders who might have been dealing with the abuse scandals in their midst were instead making Beth a target. 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, Beth writes. She no longer felt at home in the Southern Baptist movement.
And so in March 2021, she announced she was leaving the church movement that had once been her refuge. She still calls herself an evangelical Christian. She still believes all the same stuff as Southern Baptists, but she was no longer a Southern Baptist. In my final couple of minutes with you, can you tell us why after all that has been thrown at you, what keeps you holding on
to God and to Christ? Because some listeners will be saying, boy, I like that Beth Moore character. I don't know why she doesn't chuck the whole thing in. Yes. Oh, I can answer that so easily. And that is not spiritual talk. This is, I mean, this from the bottom of my heart. The reason why I just have stayed in it
has always, the reason why I'm a Christian is Christ, period. Truly, truly is Jesus that has it in me. I've said so many times, people have said, why haven't you quit? Why haven't you quit? Not once has it ever occurred to me to quit. It has occurred to me many, many times to drop out of the public eye and just, you know, do the thing on a local level and do that even quietly. Oh, those things occur to me a lot. But Jesus is so different than
from all the stuff that we're seeing so true and so trustworthy and good and faithful and holy. And he's not perverse. He doesn't have a dark side in him is no darkness at all. So he, he keeps me in it and to the death and keeps me, he doesn't just keep me in it. White knuckles and by the, by my fingernails, but he gives me joy. The best, the,
and brightest part of my life that enlightens anything else of value. He is, he's my joy. So I'm in it, I'm in it for him. Absolutely.
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Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed by Mark Hadley. Sophie Hawkshaw is on socials and membership. Alistair Belling is writer and researcher and drummer. Siobhan McGuinness is our online librarian. Lindy Leveston remains my wonderful assistant. Santino DiMarco is chief finance and operations consultant, editing by Richard Humwey. Special thanks to our series sponsor, Zondervan, for making this Undeception possible.
Undeceptions is the flagship podcast of Undeceptions.com. Letting the truth out. An Undeceptions Podcast.