Beth Moore: Celebrity Bible teacher quits Southern Baptists over evangelical support of Trump

‘I don’t identify with some of the things in our heritage that haven’t remained in the past’

Renowned Baptist leader Beth Moore has quit the Southern Baptist church after long-running opposition to its embrace of Donald Trump.

After three decades of selling out stadiums, Ms Moore finally had enough of being labelled as either a liberal, woke or heretic for her opposition to the ex-president, according to Religion News Service.

“I am still a Baptist, but I can no longer identify with Southern Baptists,” Ms Moore said in an interview with the news service.

“I love so many Southern Baptist people, so many Southern Baptist churches, but I don’t identify with some of the things in our heritage that haven’t remained in the past.”

Millions of evangelical Christians have followed Ms Moore's teachings of the Bible, despite not holding the office of pastor that the Southern Baptist church maintains exclusively for men.

While the religious right was quick to support the 45th president, Ms Moore criticised his behaviour from the beginning of his presidential campaign in 2016, especially toward women.

"Wake up, Sleepers, to what women have dealt with all along in environments of gross entitlement & power. Are we sickened? Yes. Surprised? NO," she wrote in a tweet shortly before Mr Trump's election.

The tweet came amid the infamous "Access Hollywood" tapes showing Mr Trump boast about how he could grab women "by the p****".

“This wasn’t just immorality,” she told RNS. “This smacked of sexual assault.”

While she expected Southern Baptist leaders to be equally outraged, they instead rallied around Mr Trump. As a result, book sales and tickets to her events plummeted. Her Ministries, Living Proof, lost more than $1.8m from 2017 to 2019 compared to running six-figure annual surpluses in the 15 years prior.

“The disorientation of this was staggering,” she said of the church's embrace of Mr Trump.

“He became the banner, the poster child for the great white hope of evangelicalism, the salvation of the church in America,” she added. “Nothing could have prepared me for that.”

In addition to leaving the Southern Baptists, Ms Moore ended a longtime publishing partnership with Nashville-based Lifeway Christian as she looks to carve a new path, she told RNS.

“I am going to serve whoever God puts in front of me,” she said.

Ms Moore began her career on the way to celebrity Bible teacher in the 1980s at the First Baptist Church in Houston, where she currently lives.

She wrote a Bible study manuscript in the 1990s that she sent to the Baptist Sunday School Board, which later became Lifeway, and her first hit, "A Woman’s Heart: God’s Dwelling Place” was published in 1995.

Additional reporting by Religious News Service via Associated Press