I like Beth Moore. I confess that I have not had much opportunity to hear her speak, and never in person. But I did pick up one of her books at a secondhand store some years ago and I found it quite helpful. Most of all, I appreciated her honesty about failures in her own life and her emphasis on Christianity’s central doctrine: grace. That takes some courage. Unlike two other Christian leaders making our list—Tim Keller and Russell Moore—she is not a scholar or theologian. Moore is best characterized as a kind of pastor-at-large with a focus on women’s issues. But one gets the impression that she is increasingly a victim of her own social media and stardom.
We have all experienced it. The intoxicating feeling that through our InstaTwitFace profiles we are shaping public opinion. My fans adore me! But most know that this is illusory. I can only imagine what it is like for someone like Moore who commands almost a million followers on Twitter alone and could probably tweet a picture of Eva Braun and get thousands of retweets. Like Keller, Moore has experienced success in one field and assumes her expertise and authority extend to fields where she has none. Were she to write a manual on Egyptian archaeology I have no doubt it would sell, but one should not assume she has the faintest idea what she is talking about.
Deeply influenced by Russell Moore and David French with whom she is chummy, she has leaned-in to the reigning “woke” orthodoxies on issues ranging from Trump and “Trumpism” to immigration and Critical Race Theory, Moore can’t seem to help herself when it comes to social media. And when it comes to Trump, she seems to have a Twitter version of Tourette syndrome, blurting out anti-Trump rhetoric uncontrollably. (Mrs. Moore announced in April that she was taking a “time out” from Twitter because she didn’t trust herself on the platform and she wanted to “punch somebody”—that break lasted less than a month.) Of her tweets on the subject of Donald Trump, this is the most baffling to me:
I do not believe these are days for mincing words. I’m 63 1/2 years old & I have never seen anything in these United States of America I found more astonishingly seductive & dangerous to the saints of God than Trumpism. This Christian nationalism is not of God. Move back from it.
— Beth Moore (@BethMooreLPM) December 13, 2020
As children are taught to deny the facts of their biology, people are dragged before tribunals and convicted in show trials that serve a political end rather than justice, and millions are thrown into poverty by local, state, and federal governments that take an adversarial view of the citizens they are elected to serve, Mrs. Moore is worried about MAGA hat-wearing people like my father-in-law.
Go figure.
The danger is particularly seductive for those of Mrs. Moore’s class. The Christian version of Chrissy Teigen, they are people who are wealthy enough to be insulated from the real world and for whom the savage, distorted world of Twitter is their reality. They don’t punch a clock and they don’t rub elbows with those who do. I mean, do you really think these people shop at Walmart or eat at Golden Corral? Moore and those who follow her have unwittingly locked arms with elitists who hate her God and whose central message to the salt of the earth people of this country is this: I am better than you.
My father-in-law isn’t hiding under your bed, Mrs. Moore, and Twitter isn’t the real world. Trumpism is what illusionists call misdirection and politicians call spin. Either way, it’s the shiny object, the scapegoat the would-be tyrants need to distract you from what is truly evil in our society.
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