New Church Home Has Blessed Beth Moore’s Marriage
When Lecrae asked Beth Moore about the tensions of ministry and marriage, she said she has “fought so hard to stay married” to Keith, her husband of 46 years. Both of them experienced childhood trauma, leaving Moore “overwhelmed by the miracle…that we have grown old together under the hardest circumstances.”
At the peak of her split with the SBC, Moore explained, Keith was very ill with a staph infection. After an extended hospital stay, he didn’t remember entire time periods, including much of the criticism she faced. As a result, her husband had a “delayed reaction” and later wanted to “kick everybody’s tail.”
The couple landed at an Anglican church, Moore said, because other denominations were too familiar with her, and she didn’t want to be “the center of attention.” Although Keith—who was raised Catholic—had never “enjoyed church,” Beth said he felt at home with the liturgy of Anglican worship. He knew when to kneel and “sobbed when we said the creed,” she said.
Beth Moore said they “nearly dove at [the Eucharist] like people in a desert finding water.” When Keith said he hadn’t realized “how much I missed it,” that was “one of the most amazing moments of our marriage,” Beth said.
Beth Moore on Evangelicalism’s ‘Catastrophic’ Ties to Trump
Lecrae and Beth Moore concluded by talking about politics, which Moore had always viewed as private and separate from ministry. But when evangelical leaders began embracing presidential candidate Donald Trump ahead of the 2016 election, she felt compelled to sound the alarm. “The only reason I ever spoke out in the first place was because of what I felt was going to be catastrophic to the church,” she said.
Moore, an Arkansas native, had felt “scandalized by Bill Clinton,” she said, and Trump was “the first person that reminds me so much of that era and that individual.” But the scandal this time, she told Lecrae, was that “some of my fellow leaders in the church are not scandalized and, in fact, seem to be just gung-ho” about Trump.
Moore recalled feeling concerned that Christian leaders were huddling with “what I felt like was one of the most dangerous, self-centered, egomaniacs, power-driven people I had ever seen on the large stage.” Because the evangelical devotion to Trump felt so “perverse,” Moore said, “there was nothing else to do for me but to just keep speaking out.”
By the 2024 election cycle, Moore realized that faith leaders weren’t engaging in “blind allegiance,” because by now they knew who Trump was. She said she felt that Trump “would be dangerous to people…and would not be good for our nation and would certainly not be good for the church.”
Moore hasn’t criticized Trump specifically since then, she noted. Instead, she’s returned to her calling to minister and disciple “as faithfully amid many flaws as I know how.” Moore feels peace about speaking out when she did, though. “I did what I believed the Spirit was leading me to do,” she said, “for the protection of people and the protection of the glory of Christ.”
An important takeaway, according to Moore, is that Christians can’t devote our hearts so completely “to a political party or…even a denomination” that we don’t compromise. She concluded:
We stand with Christ. We stand at the cross, and that is it. That is the only thing that is a non-negotiable. And I can tell you this to the death. I believe in the singularity of Jesus Christ. There is no other way. There is no other means of getting to the Father. And that I will take to my last breath. And that is where my loyalty lies.
