Beth Moore never planned on becoming a symbol of spiritual defiance. She just wanted to teach the Bible. But somewhere along the way — between sold-out arenas, public criticisms and a lifetime of private battles — Moore became living proof of what happens when a woman refuses to make herself small.
The Texas-born Bible teacher and author has spent decades in a church culture that often expects women to sit quietly on the sidelines. Instead, Moore chose to speak up, even when it cost her friendships, support and safety. Her story isn’t tidy, and it’s definitely not safe. But it’s exactly the kind of story that gives other women permission to stop shrinking too.
Moore didn’t set out to build a platform.
“I wasn’t looking for it,” she said. “I didn’t have any clue that I would go under some kind of scrutiny. But suddenly I’m going to speaking engagements which are getting bigger and bigger, the Bible studies are taking off, and I’m in rooms of thousands of people. I can’t even describe the anxiety of it.”
As her influence grew, so did the pushback. A woman teaching Scripture in front of thousands was more than enough to make some people uncomfortable. But Moore kept showing up anyway, driven by a deeper conviction that women needed to see it was possible to stand tall even when the world wanted them small.
“It has been very, very difficult,” she admitted. “But one of the things that has kept me out there through all the controversy, through all the criticism, through getting on social media, was all the young women out there.”
Moore feared becoming a cautionary tale — the woman who spoke out and got crushed. She didn’t want young women looking at her life and thinking, “I’ll never risk that.”
“I kept thinking to myself, ‘Oh my gosh, what I’d love to do is just go completely out of the public eye,’” she said. “But what became my concern is that the culture was going to use me as a cautionary tale and make women say, ‘Whoa, I don’t ever want that to happen to me.’”
Instead, she decided to stay visible, even when it felt like every bone in her body was breaking.
“If I’m being honest, I feel like most of my bones are broken from the top of my head to the bones in my feet,” Moore said. “I feel battered up. But the best part of lloking back at my story was seeing the times when Satan meant to absolutely destroy me, and there were times when it felt like he got away with it, and realizing that as I look back over my life, even with all these broken bones, I did land on my feet.”
Her story — chronicled in her memoir All My Knotted-Up Life — isn’t tidy. It’s filled with the abuse she endured as a child, her struggle with depression, her husband’s PTSD and her own crises of faith. But beneath all the pain is a throughline of resilience and a fierce belief that women should never have to make themselves smaller to survive.
Moore’s passion for pushing women forward has only grown stronger over time. She’s become a spiritual big sister to a generation of women who learned that “biblical womanhood” meant being quiet and compliant.
“I have always been a strong-willed woman,” she said. “There’s nothing more wonderful than a strong-willed woman — that is, a woman who is strong-willed about the will of God in her life. That kind of strong will is essential in this culture.”
That strong will has often come at a high price. Moore’s refusal to support certain political figures in 2016 brought even more criticism, with insults coming from every direction. But she stayed, knowing there were young women watching to see if she’d flinch.
Moore has learned that faithfulness doesn’t always look like success. It doesn’t always look like applause or packed auditoriums. Sometimes, it looks like saying the thing no one wants to hear.
“We have been trained to think numbers and success are signs that God is pleased,” she said. “We have lost touch with what Christ-likeness looks like in the Gospel.
“But you’ve got to be able to distinguish between those two things,” she continued. “And once you can get to where you can distinguish between what is Christ-like and what is just in our culture, then you’re going to find there are a whole lot of people pursuing Jesus.”
Moore’s vision for the church isn’t about building bigger stages. It’s about making space for people who have been silenced or pushed aside. It’s about women stepping into callings they might not even have language for yet.
“What God is calling some young women to might not even exist yet,” Moore said. “He’s getting us ready for things that we don’t even know how to prepare for. We just have to trust it.”
That’s the paradox Moore embodies: deeply battered but still standing, uncertain of the future but unwavering in her faith. Her life is living proof of what happens when a woman decides she’s done shrinking. She becomes someone who can’t be ignored. She becomes the kind of leader who changes the narrative for every woman who comes after her.
And maybe that’s the loudest sermon Moore has ever preached — not from a stage or a book, but from a life lived unshrinking.
