All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir

What Moore describes as “our nightmare” began in 2014. A wound Keith received while fishing developed a rare bacterial infection that required a drug treatment so strong that it caused his kidneys to fail. Eventually, the person she and her daughters knew disappeared from their lives emotionally. Moore took the hardship as a punishment both of herself and Keith—whom she thought God didn’t love. Still, she continued praying and believed that God endured her difficulties with her.

In 2016, Moore was on a flight returning to Houston from a Living Proof Life event in Arizona when she read about the 2005 Access Hollywood tape. In it, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump bragged to host Billy Bush about being such a star that he could do anything he wanted with women, including grabbing them by the genitals. She also read the response of various evangelical leaders who essentially said, “Boys will be boys” (239).

Having spoken to numerous survivors of sexual abuse, and being a survivor herself, Moore was incensed. She posted a series of tweets on Twitter speaking out against the leaders who tried to sweep sexual abuse under the rug. The punishment was “swift and severe” (241). She was accused of campaigning for the Democrats and being pro-abortion, and her coworkers at Living Proof were bombarded with angry calls. Moore’s Bible studies were pulled out of churches and burned.

Moore realized she had accepted rampant sexism among Christian evangelicals because they considered it to be Scripture-based. However, she felt the benign male response to the Access Hollywood tape was about male control rather than Scripture, and she continued speaking out against it.

In 2019, the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News broke the story of rampant sexual abuse of over 700 victims within the SBC. Later articles in the series showed the attempts of leaders to cover up the abuse and demonize the victims. Three months after the first story broke, rumors began in the SBC that women were trying to seize power as pastors in churches, with Moore as their ringleader. Sickened, she realized she had to leave the church, including her longtime association with her publisher.

Nine years after marrying a friend of his late wife, Moore’s father suffered a massive stroke. Moore knew her father never understood the longtime repercussions of his abuse on her ability to form healthy relationships. As he was dying, she told him she forgave him. He was too unresponsive to reply, and she would never know if he heard her.

She reflected that she never really knew her father and spoke to her uncle, Dad’s brother, who said he felt her father learned to dissociate to survive the trauma he experienced as a soldier. Keith insisted that Dad, who among other accomplishments in wartime had helped to liberate Dachau, receive a full military burial with a 21-gun salute. A year later, Moore had a vision of her parents together, young and healthy, which brought her comfort. She believed the gates of their pain had been “pushed open by the hand of God” (264).

In 2021, Moore publicly left the SBC. At this point, Keith had returned to almost complete health and supported her through the ordeal. As churches began opening their doors after the pandemic, they visited several denominations but felt they were too well-known to be fully accepted. One night, Keith suggested that Moore look up Anglican churches, as one of their daughters had recently had a positive experience attending Anglican services.

The rector greeted them and didn’t realize she was “the” Beth Moore. Keith, who found the liturgy similar to that of the Catholic church in which he grew up, knelt and uncharacteristically began to weep. Moore found the language of the service beautiful. As the service ended, a group of women gently touched her and welcomed her and Keith to the church. Moore, too, began to cry.

It took several weeks for Moore to begin to anticipate the liturgy. During one service, the offertory hymn was one that took her back to her childhood in the First Baptist Church. She reflects that “through a chain of endless storms, pocked by furious tornadoes […] Jesus had held” (277). When she later thanked the organist for playing a Baptist hymn, he replied that he chose a hymn from another denomination each week in case “a wanderer [was] in the house pining for home” (278).

Moore stumbled her way toward the car, realizing that all of her pain or her actions had led her to this point, with even the detours marked by God. Her heritage was intact, for “he who called me was holding on to me” (280).

Moore and her husband built and moved to a house in the woods, with another house nearby for Keith’s parents. Keith designed the house, modeled on a simple church. The girls and grandchildren were miles away, but Moore spoke to them daily.

One day, Keith drove Moore to the church his grandparents attended, which Keith went to when he visited them. Without realizing it, he had recreated the building in the home he designed. Moore thinks that God loved Keith all along and chose this way to show it.

Moore reflects in closing that she never got the black-and-white answers, or the division of people into good and bad, that she once sought. Instead, she got a “tangled-up knot” (287). However, she thinks a knot is like a tie that can’t be undone. She considers how, throughout her journey, her hand has been “knotted” with the hand of Jesus. He holds her fast and will continue to do so until he leads her home. She concludes by quoting an old hymn, “Blest be the tie that binds” (289).