“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 have not remained in the past.”
Moore
retweeted a Religion News Service post on the article and a spokesman for Moore told CNN that her comments in that interview were all she had to say on the subject.
LifeWay Christian Resources, the publishing division 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 United States.
Moore is the founder of Living Proof Ministries, a Bible study for women organization based in Houston, Texas. For decades, she has been teaching people to love Jesus and model their lives on the word of the Bible. Millions of evangelical Christian women bought her books and gathered to hear her speak in front of stadium-sized crowds across the country.
In recent years, however, she has been an open advocate for sexual abuse victims and a criticism of President Donald Trump – positions that have caused a split between her and other Southern Baptist leaders, who are among Trump’s most fervent supporters.
Days after the news about the now infamous “Access Hollywood” tape burst in 2016, which captured Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women,
Moore revealed that she too had been abused and sexually harassed.
“Wake up, sleepers, what women have been dealing with all the time in environments of gross rights and power”,
she tweeted at the time. “Are we disgusted? Yes. Surprised? NO”
She told the Religion News Service that she was shocked at the time when other evangelicals gathered around Trump. As she watched her rise, she said in the interview that she could not understand how Trump became “the banner, the poster boy for the great white hope of evangelicalism, the salvation of the church in America”.
“I am 63 and a half years old and I have never seen anything in this United States of America that I found more surprisingly seductive and dangerous to the saints of God than Trumpism”,
Moore tweeted in December last year. “This Christian nationalism is not of God. Stay away from him.”
Moore’s departure comes as the Southern Baptist Convention faces its own problems with allegations of sexual abuse and misconduct.
A series of scandals involving Southern Baptist leaders surfaced in 2018. And in 2019, the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News published a comprehensive investigation that found that about 380 Southern Baptist leaders and volunteers faced allegations of misconduct. sexual abuse and more than 700 victims have been abused for 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 cases of misogyny that she personally experienced.
CNN’s Gregory Lemos contributed to this report.
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