Moore introduces her late mother, a lifelong chain smoker, with: “I was raised by a cloudy pillar by day and a lighter by night.”
A panel on sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention takes place at the Birmingham-Jefferson Convention Complex in Birmingham, Ala. on June 10, 2019. The panel was moderated by the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission executive vice president, Philip Betancourt, and included Rachael Denhollander, an American lawyer and former gymnast who was the first woman to publicly accuse former Michigan State University and USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar of sexual assault, SBC President J.D. Greear, Southern Baptist author and Bible teacher Beth Moore, abuse survivor and Birmingham native Susan Codone, and ERLC President Russell Moore. RNS photo by Adelle M. Banks
She sums up her late father’s abusive behavior in a simple but heartbreaking sentence: “No kind of good dad does what my dad did to me.”
Moore also tells the story of how she and her sister Gay saved their parents’ marriage when their whole world was falling apart. Moore’s mother had long suspected her father of infidelity. He had always denied it and claimed Moore’s mother, who suffered from severe depression, was crazy and unstable.
Then Gay found a love letter from her dad’s mistress taped to the underside of a drawer in his desk. The two girls sprang into action, calling their father’s lover and telling her to stay away. It was an act of desperation, Moore told Religion News Service, born out of fear that the family would break apart and they’d be left homeless.
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“More than anything it was a way to exercise what little power we had,” Moore said, who dedicated her memoir to her husband and siblings, including Gay and her older brother Wayne, a retired composer who passed away two weeks before the memoir was due to be published.
That call, which Moore credits to her “fearless” sister Gay, changed the course of the family’s life. Knowing the truth about her father’s infidelity gave her mom confidence after doubting herself for years.
Moore said her mother’s story resonates with people who have experienced abuse in church — or know that something is not right in their congregation — and have faced opposition. In many cases, their suspicions were correct, she said.
“But they were told they were unspiritual — that they were trying to destroy (the church),” she said. “It’s what we know now as gaslighting.”
One of the most gracious parts of her memoir comes when Moore gives thanks to two of her mentors. The first was Marge Caldwell, a legendary women’s Bible teacher and speaker. Caldwell met her when Moore was first starting out — giving devotions while also teaching an aerobics class at First Baptist Church in Houston.
Caldwell told Moore that God was going to raise her up to teach the Bible and have an influential ministry. For years, Moore said Caldwell attended her classes, even though her style was very different from her mentor.
“I would read the expression on her face — wondering, how on earth did this happen?” Moore said, laughing at the memory. “I knew she loved me so much.”
The other mentor was Buddy Walters, a former college football player who taught no-nonsense, in-depth Bible studies in Texas for years and who instilled in Moore a love for biblical scholarship. When she met Walter, Moore was filling in for a women’s Bible study teacher at her church who had gone on maternity leave. Under Walter’s tutelage, what started as a temporary assignment became a lifelong passion for Moore.
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“I don’t think he would have picked me as a student,” she said. “It just was that I could not get enough.”
