All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir

All My Knotted-Up Life is a 2023 memoir by author and speaker Beth Moore, the founder of the Christian women’s organization Living Proof Ministries. The book weaves together intimate details of Moore’s personal and spiritual journey, such as her break from the Southern Baptist Church and the foundational moments of her ministry. It has won several awards, including 2024 Christian Book of the Year and Barnes & Noble’s Best Christian Books of 2023. All My Knotted-Up Life is a candid look into Moore’s life’s challenges and her steadfast faith throughout.

This study guide uses the Kindle edition of the Tyndale book.

Content Warning: The book contains references to child sex abuse and psychiatric disability.

Summary

Moore starts her memoir by describing her family’s camping road trip from their home in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, to visit cousins in Florida. Her father, Major Albert Green (called Dad) rented a Volkswagen bus and took the family on the trip. Dad and his wife, Aletha (called Mom) had five children: 18-year-old Sandra, 14-year-old Wayne, nine-year-old Gay, six-year-old Beth, and four-year-old Tony. Moore’s maternal grandmother, Minnie Rountree (called Nanny), went with them.

After struggling to set up the tent, the family fled it in a lightning storm and spent the night at a diner. The visit to the cousins was a success.

When Moore was almost eight, the family moved to a large new house. Now retired from the Army, Dad managed the local theater, which the children regularly attended. The theater was segregated, with a separate door and seating for Black patrons. As the children aged, they worked at the concession stand.

The family attended the First Baptist Church of Arkadelphia three times a week. Moore was baptized there at age nine and felt she spent the best days of her childhood in the theater and the church.

When Moore was 11, her father sexually molested her in the car on the way back from an orthodontist appointment. Her mother subsequently fell into a deep depression as a result of her husband’s infidelity with another woman. Moore compares the havoc created in her life through her parents’ abandonment to a tornado.

The family maintained an outer show of normalcy. Even when Mom disappeared one night, they didn’t call the police for fear of hurting their image. Moore, however, began having boyfriends and running around with Gay. She calls herself a “good girl doing bad things” (68).

When Moore was 15, Dad was promoted to a position overseeing all the AMC multiscreen theaters in Houston, Texas. Her parents’ marriage improved after Gay found a letter from Dad’s mistress and confronted both the woman and Dad. Mom stayed with Dad but “punished” him with long periods of silence.

Moore made a new start in Houston and began attending the church of family friends, though her parents did not join a new Baptist church. Nanny died during the family’s Houston years, and the family buried her in Arkansas.

Moore went to Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State), where she joined the drill team and majored in political science. A journal she kept from that time portrayed a “bleached” version of her family life as she tried to shut out her past trauma. While chaperoning a sixth-grade church camping trip, she had an experience in which she sensed God’s presence. The camp director and her home pastor interpreted this as a call to vocational Christian service.

When Moore was a junior, she met her future husband, Keith Moore. They were opposites but shared histories of past trauma. Keith survived a household fire as a child that killed his older brother. They fought often but married anyway. Keith was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Two months after the wedding, Moore discovered she was pregnant. She delivered her first child, Amanda, and had a second daughter, Melissa, three years later. Moore began teaching an aerobics class at her church and later transferred it to Houston’s famous First Baptist Church. When Moore and Keith were asked to also transfer their membership to that church, they complied.

The pastor, John Bisagno, invited Moore to speak about “Making Fitness Count for Christ” at a women’s retreat. The keynote speaker was a woman, Marge Caldwell, which was unusual at the time. Afterward, she told Moore she was “called” to speak. Moore did not find any opportunities to speak, however, and so continued teaching aerobics. At age 27, Marge asked her to teach a Sunday School class for married women. After taking a class on Bible doctrine from a man named Buddy Walters, Moore gained enormous confidence, and her love of Scripture and teaching Scripture was ignited.

Moore began traveling to speak two Friday nights each month while Keith watched the children. Her special call was to women, as her mentor Marge’s was. She named her ministry Living Proof. She took on a Bible study group for women and began writing curriculum for her students, a breakthrough experience. However, after being asked to counsel a woman who was struggling with past abuse, Moore’s childhood trauma was triggered. She faced her demons while parenting and teaching, and the opportunity to publish her women’s Bible study writing helped to restore her peace of mind.

When Moore was 41, her mother died and her father remarried. She was subsequently invited by her publisher, Lifeway Christian Resources, to partner with them on a dozen speaking engagements a year. Moore accepted, calling the events Living Proof Live. Her successful video-driven Bible study series Breaking Free helped attract women to her live events. By her mid-forties, Moore was speaking to sold-out arenas. She tried to ignore theologians who criticized her lack of formal theological education.

As the Southern Baptist Church grew more conservative, partly through the influence of Jerry Falwell, Moore’s critics grew more vocal. Some openly ignored or ridiculed her at conferences. During this traumatic time in 2016, Keith nearly died due to a bacterial infection and its treatment. Concurrently, Moore read about sexist comments by then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Having spoken to numerous survivors of sexual abuse, and being a survivor herself, Moore was incensed by the evangelical leaders whose response was essentially “Boys will be boys” (240). She posted a series of tweets on Twitter speaking out against the leaders who tried to sweep sexual abuse under the rug. 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.

In 2019, a series of newspaper stories broke the scandal of rampant sexual abuse within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Moore was sickened, although she told her father she forgave him when he died. Finally, in 2021, she left the SBC. Keith had returned to full health and supported her. They eventually joined an Anglican church in Houston where both felt welcomed. Moore reflects that “Jesus had held” (278) throughout the turmoil of her life.

An epilogue describes how Keith custom-built a new house for them, and she later discovered he modeled it on the church he attended with his grandparents as a child. Moore closes by reflecting that the knot she perceived as her life was really a tie that binds her to Jesus.