Misogyny, the SBC, and Beth Moore

On becoming a heretic in patriarchal spaces

Photo by Joel Muniz on Unsplash

Part 1: What Did Beth Do?

Anyone with a phone knows that Beth Moore is astonishingly unpopular among many Christian conservatives. But why is that? 

You might think that the trigger point for this evangelical superstar (who enjoyed decades of uncontroversial work in conservative evangelical spaces) was Beth Moore deciding she was an egalitarian (believing women can be pastors) and leaving the SBC and Lifeway in 2021. It wasn’t. 

Opposition to Beth Moore actually began in earnest in October 2016 with the release of the infamous Access Hollywood Trump tape. 

In the midst of pastors and figures from the Religious Right beginning to perform damage control on Trump’s behalf and minimize the contents of the tape, Beth instead called it an example of “what women have dealt with all along in environments of gross entitlement and power.” She cited her own experience as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, and refused to accept this language or behavior from a president. 

To be clear, Beth Moore didn’t stump for Hillary Clinton. According to Beth she didn’t even vote for her. All Beth did was refuse to agree that Trump’s record of sexual offenses against women wasn’t a big deal. And for that, she was absolutely throttled, labeled a liberal, labeled a feminist (all functionally heresiology terms in the SBC), and even asked to recant her criticism of Trump. 

Almost halfway through the Trump presidency, Beth-hate from male-dominated conservative spaces was still going strong and Beth’s exhaustion was getting palpable. In 2018 she posted a blog article documenting her years of struggling to be deferential enough to men to succeed in the evangelical churches – smiling through years of being mocked, ignored, condescended to, and even sexually harassed by putative male Christians even decades younger than her. She asked them – incredibly politely – to change. And things stayed the same.

It wasn’t until 2021 that Beth Moore actually left the SBC and ended her relationship with Lifeway. To this day she is not even close to what reasonable individuals might consider a liberal. She’s a member of an evangelical denomination and her religious convictions are thoroughly conservative.  However, Beth had become an enemy of male-centered evangelicalism long before this, and she remains one today. Beth’s sin wasn’t a changing view of the authority of scripture, or the divinity of Christ, or any other doctrinal mainstay for traditionalist Christianity. It was calling herself a survivor of sexual abuse and then refusing to tolerate abusive, sexist behavior from an important man. 

Why did this happen? The obvious answer is misogyny, but some of you will balk at the use of this term. Do we really mean that a critical mass of evangelical men hate women qua women, and this includes Beth? If this was the case, why did hate towards her get so intense in 2016, instead of before? Besides, many of the men who are outspoken attackers of Beth surely don't hate all women. We don't know what's in their hearts. Is the problem really misogyny?

To this I say: maybe we’re not defining misogyny very well.

Part 2: What is Misogyny? 

In the book Down Girl, Kate Manne denies that it is useful to think of misogyny as primarily a psychological phenomenon. Misogyny is not simply identified when a man concedes to hating women as a class because they are women. For one thing, this definition of misogyny depends on the self-awareness of the perpetrator to detect, but more importantly, this can erase the presence of misogyny from intensely sexist, violent spaces. As an example for why this psychological definition does not work, Manne quotes a series of ridiculous columns that denied Elliot Rodger – the infamous “incel” perpetrator of the 2014 Isla Vista murders – was a misogynist, because he actually wanted to sleep with women, and in addition to hating “hot” women (only a subset of women, not all women) he also felt hatred for sexually active men. 

So if misogyny is not hatred for women qua women, then what is it? Manne argues that misogyny is better understood as “a property of social environments in which women are liable to encounter hostility due to the enforcement… of patriarchal norms and expectations” (pg 19).

Women are not uniformly vulnerable to facing this hostility based on their behavior. As Manne notes,

This is how social control generally works: via incentives and disincentives… She can escape aversive consequences by being ‘good’ by the relevant ideals or standards, if indeed any such way is open to her. Sometimes, there will not be. Double binds – and worse — are common (pgs 19-20). 

Readers will likely have no trouble thinking of examples of patriarchal norms and expectations – to say nothing of double-binds. We do this to women all the time with food – for example being fat is a grave cultural sin, but women who worry about their weight and count calories are treated as uptight and exhausting. 

But the standard I particularly want to focus on is Manne’s: the “economy of moral goods. This is the exchange of “attention, care, sympathy, respect, admiration, and nurturing,” among other things. 

In the patriarchal relation between the sexes, 

Women are obligated to give to him, not to ask, and expected to feel indebted and grateful, rather than entitled…the flipside of this is his being entitled to take much in the way of these moral goods…. He may love her and value her intrinsically – that is, for her own sake – but far too conditionally, that is, not on her identity as a person (whatever that amounts to) but her second-personal attitude of good will toward him (page 22).

Care, attention, support, and service flow as an obligation from women to men. They flow less reliably, and at the giver’s discretion, from men to women. 

This particularly becomes a problem when women, instead of giving support and care to men, instead give it to themselves or to each other: 

Her humanity may hence be held to be owed to other human beings, and her value contingent on her giving moral goods to them: life, love, pleasure, nurture, sustenance, and comfort. This helps to explain why she is so often understood perfectly well to have a mind of her own, yet punished in brutal and inhumane ways when that mind appears to be oriented to the wrong things, in the wrong ways, to the wrong people – including herself and other women (pg 22-23).

In this economy, “masculine-coded” abstract goods – leadership, influence, authority, status – by default belong to men, though not all men. These goods are often in short supply, and men must compete for them. Women are thus vulnerable to misogyny when they attempt to compete with men for these goods, unless the specific authority or influence she seeks is not desirable to men or furthers patriarchal interests (pg 114). To compete with men, though, would reveal the woman as a rival, and not a support, which is her designated location. 

So what does this mean for women in patriarchal churches? The obvious starting point is that women who feel a calling to lead or teach in Christian spaces need to be very careful not to fall into a few traps. The first trap is that they need to occupy positions of leadership that men don’t want. The second trap is that any authority the woman holds will only be tolerated as long as it is consistent with patriarchal interests. It’s one thing to teach Bible stories to kids. It’s another thing to teach wives to demand pleasure during sex that is commensurate with their husbands (shout out to the good people at Bare Marriage). 

The third trap is that the suspicion of failing in feminine-coded work while succeeding in masculine-coded work is always present. This is the infamous second-shift problem: even when women work more or make more money than their husbands, they are still expected to serve as primary parents and housekeepers at home. Care flows out from women towards men. Succeeding or contributing in some other capacity does not absolve women of the responsibility of feminine-coded work. As Kate Bowler has noted, successful women leaders in church constantly insist on their status as wives and mothers. I believe Bowler explains this as the need to assure Christian audiences that they are not subverting a gendered social order, but I’d propose that the problem even goes beyond this. If we can see you, you’re not home taking care of a man or his children. So how do we know you’re a good woman?

That all sounds exhausting. And yet there is a greater danger. It is incredibly dicey for a woman, in a patriarchal space, to accuse a man of something. Accusations against men disrupt patriarchal spaces. If women owe men admiration and respect – if men desire support for their comforting belief that they are good people doing a good job – then a woman saying that a man has done something wrong is a serious problem. She is not providing the goods and services that men expect from her.

This is even worse in a situation where a woman accuses a man of serious wrongdoing against her. By claiming to have been wronged, a woman is actually insisting on her own right to moral care and attention. She is asking for people – usually men – to give her attention, empathy, a redress of wrongs, and justice to be done on her behalf. Not only is she not providing care for men anymore – she is demanding it for herself. 

These feelings are not necessarily conscious. But these beliefs about what women owe men (particularly powerful men) cannot be separated from the consequences women can expect if they don’t provide. This logic - that women owe non-competition to men, owe men support in patriarchal causes, owe admiration and care, must affirm men’s assessment of themselves as decent individuals, and if women don’t do it, we’ll attack them – is shot through not just abuse cases in the church, but even just prominent women’s stories. And it is misogyny. 

Part 3: Why Did Evangelicals Turn on Beth Moore?

Misogyny in the SBC (and in evangelicalism more broadly) is detectable and explicable in virtually every state of Beth’s career. Even before so many turned on her, Beth was not free from the pains of misogyny – and this is not limited to her interactions with open chauvinists, as documented in her 2018 blog/open letter. Even her successes are completely compatible with her having operated in misogynist spaces.

To get through this section I had to read a lot of really ugly content about Beth Moore. I’m not going to quote them or link to them or use critics’ names, because honestly, screw ‘em. I’m not going to give any more attention to these cut-rate semi-Nicean wannabee prophets who write like concussed possums and can’t cut the crusts off their own sandwiches. If you want to know who I’m talking about, it’s not exactly a secret. Please Google them yourself.

Back to the original question of Beth Moore and her history with misogyny in the church. Why was Beth Moore as a female evangelical teacher tolerated for as long as she was? 

Long before 2016, Beth had influence, leadership, and authority. As Manne notes, these are values that we would expect, in a patriarchal society, to be the primary property of men. Does this mean the SBC was not misogynist? No. The reason Beth was able to get away with it for as long as she did was because she had influence and leadership that men didn’t want: specifically, the respect of a largely female audience. The seat Beth filled was not taken, so Beth was allowed it without significant blowback. If Beth had had a significant male or mixed-gender audience, her problems probably would have started much earlier. 

Things changed when she forfeited the safe ground of not speaking out against patriarchal interests. The breach was challenging Trump's presidential candidacy once his nomination in the GOP had been secured. 

This was a problem for the religious/political right: a popular evangelical author was expressing disapproval for a man who other evangelicals had already decided was their savior. Trump’s path towards being favored by evangelicals was bumpy, but by the late summer or early fall of 2016 conservative support was enthusiastic. Falwell Jr. and Jeffress had supported Trump for months, but once Trump had secured the nomination even evangelicals who style themselves as Christian intellectuals were on board. 

(This is covered in ch. 15 of Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez,  if you’d like to read more).

The playbook for the Access Hollywood tape was to express at most mild and temporary disappointment that the GOP candidate may be a rapist. Then most conservative Christians returned to enthusiastic support of his candidacy. Beth didn’t play along. This was a problem for a religious community that had already decided not only that Trump was their preferred presidential candidate, but specifically that Trump’s election would be an important victory against feminism. Trump’s frequently-insisted-upon “strength” and “manliness” were vaunted not only as white American evangelicalisms’s only hope against its enemies, and critically, he was the opponent of infamously female Hilary Clinton (remember that Piper publicly grappled over voting for female VP candidate Sarah Palin in 2008). Someone needed to restore the gendered order. This was Trump. Beth said no. 

This is the moment the attack starts. Beth’s permission to teach in SBC or evangelical spaces was always conditional. It was accepted as long as Beth did not compete with men, and as long as she did not oppose the patriarchal interests of her community. Once Beth stopped doing what many believed she owed them, people lost their minds.

Even worse for Beth was that Beth accused a man of something – namely, sexual violence. And she didn’t even stop there. Beth didn’t treat Trump as a shocking aberration of human behavior.  She said he sounded like a lot of entitled, powerful men – and other women would tell you the same. 

It doesn't look that extreme, does it? This tweet, and Beth’s subsequent criticisms of Trump, just aren’t that harsh. A plausible summary would be: he’s sexist, other powerful men act like him, and his followers’ devotion to him is creepy. 

 It doesn’t look like anything you’d be personally offended by unless you were someone who was actually close to Trump –  like his son, or a pile of cocaine. But they make sense as career-ending moves when you remember that Beth is in a patriarchal space. 

Beth is supposed to provide honor and admiration to men. Beth is supposed to uphold reputations.

She is not there to challenge men; she is there to boost them. She’s not there to make men feel convicted, she’s there to make them feel supported. After all, they generously gave Beth this opportunity to teach and haven’t tried to take it away from her even once. Shouldn’t Beth be grateful?

In patriarchy, not doing your job as a woman often feels very personal.

And then Beth just kept going. She never fell into the groove of ignoring the president, which would have been the safer option. More to the point, she never treated the problems of sexism and misogyny as the exclusive domain of Trump. It wasn’t just about Trump. 

According to Beth, this was a manifestation of a problem where evangelical men consistently mistreated evangelical women. This is when we get to the 2018 blog article where Beth calls upon “her brothers,” very humbly, to reevaluate the way they are used to treating women.

To demonstrate this problem, Beth uses many of her own stories of disrespect and even harassment to challenge Christian men on the way they treat women. Beth is insistent she is not asking for women to be called pastors, or to not have some bounded, gender-specific role in the Christian church. This is a conservative argument. All Beth really asked for was for men to not be cruel and dismissive to women. 

All Beth asked for was for men to not be cruel and dismissive to women. You wouldn't know that from the response.

When you look at answers to this letter, you do see many evangelicals taking these critiques on board. I love it. That’s great. But you also see claims that look pretty bonkers, until you start thinking about how they look like misogyny as a system that moderates who gets care and attention.

So for instance, the idea that “Beth made things all about her.”  What does that even mean? Who else would Beth’s experiences of sex discrimination have been about? Darth Vader? Of course they were about Beth. Same with the idea that Beth was using the opportunity of the Access Hollywood tape to selfishly talk about issues that mattered to her. Because Donald J. Trump, who between 2015-2021 was filmed like the inside of a gorilla enclosure, wasn’t getting enough attention. 

Or the idea that Beth was using this as an opportunity to sell stuff and get her name out there. This is particularly hilarious in its iteration from John MacArthur, a man who, as near as I can tell, needs to be physically restrained from putting his name on things and then selling them. But at any rate – Beth was already famous in 2016, and the attention she got for criticizing Trump was hardly just positive.

Or the idea that Beth, by calling out the gendered violence and sexism of Trump and his Christian followers, was “betraying Israel” or “betraying the unborn” or whatever the hell else the issue of the day was. Why should Beth have been more worried about Benjamin Netanyahu than the entire half of the population that includes herself? Why the hell is Netanyahu Beth’s problem?

Or of course, the idea that Beth was somehow failing as a woman by devoting her time to her own gifts and talents instead of being at home with her husband Keith. If Beth is teaching the Bible, then who is home caring for and admiring Keith? Who is making sure Keith doesn’t walk into traffic? The suspicion of being a bad wife or mother, simply because one has been spotted in the wild doing something that isn’t fixated on one man, pervades Christian spaces around well-known women.

At its most extreme you see variations of “well, she SHOULD feel bad. She SHOULD feel disrespected. She ought to be ashamed of herself!”

Because why, exactly? For not carrying enough water for the extravagantly wealthy and powerful president of the United States? Who doesn’t have enough stuff? For possibly promoting herself at a fraction of the rate in which John MacArthur has promoted himself for years? For threatening the survival a nuclear power by not excusing the occasional Christian rape? What kinds of arguments are these?

Well, they make sense if we think of all this as a reaction to all of Beth’s care and attention and interest failing to flow outward. It’s not about who has enough. It’s about who owes who. If the standard for women is that everything they have and everything they do flows outwards, towards men, and what men are doing — or at least a very particular kind of man, who is also appropriately worried about a particular kind of man’s interests — then this is a standard we can always hate women for not meeting. But women will never meet it. And yet we are so incandescently angry when they don’t. 

I honestly think Beth’s fate was sealed from the moment that she disclosed she was a survivor of sexual abuse, and that women had been telling her their own stories of survivorship for decades – often for the first time. Beth did not say this to highlight the dangers of secularism, or to encourage women to stay home, or to advance any cause that patriarchy might have accepted. She said to advocate for women. To say that more care needs to be diverted towards women, that women are beings with needs and rights and things they deserve, was always an offense that Beth was going to pay for. She made women the center of a story. She denied that their needs come last and ought to be directed outward, towards causes bigger and greater than oneself that never look that great when one looks at them too long.

This is just not how you get through a forty-year career writing for evangelical women. When I look at women who did get by for decades without significant pushback, or the women who often write alongside their husbands now, I see this constant refrain that women don’t need anything from men that men don’t like doing. Women are constantly framed as not needing therapy, or encouragement, or help with their work, or protection from guys you actually like. All that’s treated as stuff they can either get by without or get from God. Instead women just need men to be happy, and in charge, and impressive, and whatever else men would like to be themselves. 

It’s because this is the exchange we’ve agreed on. Women give. Women support. Women owe. Women know what happens if they don’t.

Part 4: The Ugly Truth 

So what do we say about this?

I really struggle to find from an evangelical perspective what exactly Beth did wrong. None of this looks to me like it’s being driven by theology, or a sincere commitment to the authority of the Bible, or the lordship of Jesus Christ. There was no moment where Beth Moore made some decisive break with evangelicalism as we generally agree it exists. If Bebbington’s definition of evangelicalism holds water, or ever has, Beth is an evangelical. She has always been an evangelical. She still is.

It seems like that the explanation for why so many turned on Beth, and why she eventually left the SBC, has a baser explanation. Among evangelicals, being an evangelical is no longer enough. Holding to the standard beliefs of evangelicalism is no longer enough. Being an evangelical – at least in the SBC and in spaces that are deeply influenced by it – now requires a commitment to, if not to advance patriarchy, then at least to not stand in its way. 

Beth didn’t just say no to patriarchy. Without any obvious intention to do so, she interrupted it. She’s not a feminist, at least not by any definition I can discern. She just stopped supporting it in the myriad devouring ways it insists upon. She said that she was not okay with accepting the place that patriarchy has for women’s safety – that is, at the bottom of the list, which is always getting longer, unless some more pressing need that patriarchal men have can be tied to it. She did not accept her role as a booster for the most powerful men in the world, even though they clearly got by without her. She was honest about how men had hurt her. She was honest about how men had hurt her students. She called for change, and asked men of goodwill to help her.

Some of the men she called on did. But a lot of them didn’t.

If these actions are not enough to avoid the hostility of misogyny, or to evade penalties for deciding not to stay in our lanes, then what hope is there for the rest of us? If Beth can’t escape misogyny, who can?

The list of things that women owe men will never stop growing. As long as it is the responsibility of women to sublimate herself and assume a duty of care and support for men – for a certain kind of man, who does not even generally represent men, who represents only a certain kind of man, even if he lacks nothing that any individual woman could give him – when will we be finished? When will there be time to speak for women? When will there be time to hold men to account who have done wrong? When will there be space for women to talk about their own needs, and each other’s needs? When will we get there?

I think it is hard to explain Beth Moore’s story apart from this problem. If women are born into a debt they can never pay back, if there is always more they can do for men, and if any diversion from the path of paying it is met with resistance and hostility, what is there left for us but tireless, bottomless service? What is there besides endless parroting of the words that some men have already agreed we should say? What is there for women to say to each other, or hear from their pastors, besides “wait, wait, wait.”

One day, you will have done all you need to do. 

One day, you will have caught up with the tasks on your list.

One day, you will have given away so much, and attended to every request, that there will not be anything left of you to give, or anyone else who needs it. 

And on that day, but not before, we will talk about the ones who hurt you, and stop them from hurting anyone else. 

If, of course, the other women have also completed their list.

But not before. 

This is certainly not compatible with the evangelical claim that in patriarchal churches, men protect women. There is always an exception clause. There is always something that must be done before a woman can ask for protection. How could anything else be the case when there is always some new responsibility out there that women must complete — cheerfully, and enthusiastically, without any resentment — before the protection is offered? 

That is why in patriarchal spaces we will never get there.

I have one other thing to say, and it is particularly grim. A voice I am very familiar with in these spaces is The Woman Who Thinks She’s Getting the Good End of Patriarchy. There are some secular iterations of this (Pick Me/Not Like Other Girls), but generally what I mean by this is the woman who loves doing Biblical Womanhood and thinks this is going very well for her. Usually she is a helpful voice against other women, when men would rather not do the policing themselves or know that a woman’s voice on the matter will sound more agreeable.

To these thoroughly orthodox women: I would encourage you to take Beth Moore’s story as a warning. 

Women, the powers you have allied yourselves with don’t hate you.

Or at least, they don’t hate you yet. 

Unless you are very lucky, a day will come when you will find it impossible or morally reprehensible to pay your dues. It might be because of a sin committed against you. It might be because of a sin committed against your child. I don’t know. You will be asked, as you have always been, to focus your care and attention on men with power, and forget this sin and allow it to go unaddressed – perhaps to even let it continue. When that day comes – and I hope it doesn’t, truly – you will have two options.

The first option is, as I have recently been reminded by the documentary, that you can be Michelle Duggar. You can keep paying. You can keep on collecting the applause and the pats and the smiles, and fawn and serve and smile yourself, and set aside whatever you’re asked to set aside. And in her case, in return her son became the adulterous, incestuous, child-sexual-assault-material-collecting monster we know today. Was it worth it? I don’t know. You’ll have to ask her, or more to the point, her daughters. 

Or you can be Beth Moore, and say when enough is enough. It will be hard, and you will have to be brave. 

But I think you can do it.