“I am still a Baptist, but I can no longer identify with Southern Baptists,” she told the news agency. “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 didn’t last in the past.”
Moore
retweeted a report from the Religion News Service on the article, and a Moore spokesperson told CNN that her comments in that interview were all she had to say about the matter.
LifeWay Christian Resources, the publisher of the Southern Baptist Convention, confirmed the break with Moore in a statement to CNN.
The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in the US.
Moore is the founder of Living Proof Ministries, a Bible study organization for women in Houston, Texas. For decades she has been teaching people to love Jesus and to shape their lives based on the word of the Bible. Millions of Evangelical Christian women have bought her books and have gathered to hear her speak in front of stadium-sized crowds across the country.
In recent years, however, she has been an outspoken advocate for sexual abuse victims and a critic of President Donald Trump – views that have created a rift between her and other Southern Baptist leaders, who are among Trump’s most ardent supporters.
Days after news broke of the now infamous “Access Hollywood” tape in 2016, in which Trump was caught bragging about sexually assaulting women,
Moore revealed that she too had been sexually abused and harassed.
“Wake up, sleepers, to what women have always experienced in an environment of gross rights and power,”
she tweeted at the time. “Are we sick? Yes. Surprised? NO”
She told the Religion News Service that she was shocked the moment fellow evangelicals rallied around Trump. As she watched him rise, she said in the interview that she could not understand how Trump became “the banner, the poster child for the great white hope of evangelicalism, the salvation of the Church in America.”
“I am 63 1/2 years old and I have never seen anything in this United States of America that I found more amazingly tempting and dangerous to the Saints of God than Trumpism,”
Moore tweeted in December last year. This Christian nationalism is not of God. Get away from it. ‘
Moore’s departure is because the Southern Baptist Convention has run into its own problems with allegations of sexual abuse and misconduct.
A series of scandals involving Southern Baptist leaders came to light in 2018. And in 2019, the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News released a sweeping investigation that found approximately 380 Southern Baptist leaders and volunteers faced allegations of sexual misconduct and more than 700 victims had been abused for over 20 years.
In 2018, Moore published a blog post entitled “A Letter To My Brothers,” in which she wrote about being a female leader in the conservative evangelical sphere and described instances of misogyny that she had personally experienced.
CNN’s Gregory Lemos contributed to this report.
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