Bible teacher Beth Moore, splitting with Lifeway, says, ‘I am no longer a Southern Baptist’      1

I Found God, Became A Pastor And Then Lost My Faith. Here's What I Believe In Now.            9

She wanted to give deported parents a choice. Then California’s Christian right attacked      13

James Dobson Was My Horror, and Yours                                                                                     19

Opinion: Why are so many Christians so cruel?                                                                            26

1

Bible teacher Beth Moore, splitting with Lifeway, says, ‘I am no longer a Southern Baptist’

The famed Bible study teacher said she no longer feels at home in the denomination that once saved her life.

By Bob Smietana 

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (RNS) — For nearly three decades, Beth Moore has been the very model of a modern Southern Baptist.

She loves Jesus and the Bible and has dedicated her life to teaching others why they need both of them in their lives. Millions of evangelical Christian women have read her Bible studies and flocked to hear her speak at stadium-style events where Moore delves deeply into biblical passages.

Moore’s outsize influence and role in teaching the Bible have always made some evangelical power brokers uneasy, because of their belief only men should be allowed to preach.

But Moore was above reproach, supporting Southern Baptist teaching that limits the office of pastor to men alone and cheerleading for the missions and evangelistic work that the denomination holds dear.

“She has been a stalwart for the Word of God, never compromising,” former Lifeway Christian Resources President Thom Rainer said in 2015, during a celebration at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center in Nashville that honored 20 years of partnership between the Southern Baptist publishing house and Moore. “And when all is said and done, the impact of Beth Moore can only be measured in eternity’s grasp.”

Then along came Donald Trump.

Moore’s criticism of the 45th president’s abusive behavior toward women and her advocacy for sexual abuse victims turned her from a beloved icon to a pariah in the denomination she loved all her life.

2

“Wake up, Sleepers, to what women have dealt with all along in environments of gross entitlement & power,” Moore once wrote about Trump, riffing on a passage from the New Testament Book of Ephesians. 

Because of her opposition to Trump and her outspokenness in confronting sexism and nationalism in the evangelical world, Moore has been labeled as “liberal” and “woke” and even as being a heretic for daring to give a message during a Sunday morning church service.

Finally, Moore had had enough. She told Religion News Service in an interview Friday (March 5) that she is “no longer a Southern Baptist.”

“I am still a Baptist, but I can no longer identify with Southern Baptists,” Moore said in the phone interview. “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 haven’t remained in the past.”

Moore told RNS that she recently ended her longtime publishing partnership with Nashville-based LifeWay Christian. While Lifeway will still distribute her books, it will no longer publish them or administer her live events.  (Full disclosure: The author of this article is a former Lifeway employee.)

Beth Moore addresses attendees at the summit on sexual abuse and misconduct at Wheaton College on Dec. 13, 2018. RNS photo by Emily McFarlan Miller

Kate Bowler, a historian at Duke Divinity School who has studied evangelical women celebrities, said Moore’s departure is a significant loss for the Southern Baptist Convention.

Moore, she said, is one of the denomination’s few stand-alone women leaders, whose platform was based on her own “charisma, leadership and incredible work ethic” and not her marriage to a famed pastor. (Moore’s husband is a plumber by trade.) She also appealed to a wide audience outside her denomination.

3

“Ms. Moore is a deeply trusted voice across the liberal-conservative divide, and has always been able to communicate a deep faithfulness to her tradition without having to follow the Southern Baptist’s scramble to make Trump spiritually respectable,” Bowler said. “The Southern Baptists have lost a powerful champion in a time in which their public witness has already been significantly weakened.”

 Moore may be one of the most unlikely celebrity Bible teachers in recent memory. In the 1980s, she began sharing devotionals during the aerobics classes she taught at First Baptist Church in Houston. She then began teaching a popular women’s Bible study at the church, which eventually attracted thousands each week.

In the early 1990s, she wrote a Bible study manuscript and sent it to Lifeway, then known as the Baptist Sunday School Board, where it was rejected. However, after a Lifeway staffer saw Moore teach a class in person, the publisher changed its mind.

Moore’s first study, “A Woman’s Heart: God’s Dwelling Place,” was published in 1995 and was a hit, leading to dozens of additional studies, all backed up by hundreds of hours of research and reflecting Moore’s relentless desire to know more about the Bible.  From 2001 to 2016, Moore’s Living Proof Ministries ran six-figure surpluses, building its assets from about a million dollars in 2001 to just under $15 million by April 2016, according to reports filed with the Internal Revenue Service. Her work as a Bible teacher has permeated down to small church Bible study groups and sold-out stadiums with her Living Proof Live events. 

For Moore, the Southern Baptist Convention was her family, her tribe, her heritage. Her Baptist church where she grew up in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, was a refuge from a troubled home where she experienced sexual abuse.

“My local church, growing up, saved my life,” she told RNS. “So many times, my home was my unsafe place. My church was my safe place.”

As an adult, she taught Sunday school and Bible study and then, with her Lifeway partnership, her life became deeply intertwined with the denomination. She believed in Jesus. And she also believed in the SBC.

4

Beth Moore speaks at Transformation Church, a nondenominational multiethnic evangelical megachurch near Charlotte, North Carolina, on June 2, 2019. Photo courtesy of Transformation Church

In October 2016, Moore had what she called “the shock of my life,” when reading the transcripts of the “Access Hollywood” tapes, where Trump boasted of his sexual exploits with women.

“This wasn’t just immorality,” she said. “This smacked of sexual assault.”

She expected her fellow evangelicals, especially Southern Baptist leaders she trusted, to be outraged, especially given how they had reacted to Bill Clinton’s conduct in the 1990s. Instead, she said, they rallied around Trump.

“The disorientation of this was staggering,” she said. “Just staggering.”

Moore, who described herself as “pro-life from conception to grave,” said she had no illusions about why evangelicals supported Trump, who promised to deliver anti-abortion judges up and down the judicial system.

Still, she could not comprehend how he became a champion of the faith. “He became the banner, the poster child for the great white hope of evangelicalism, the salvation of the church in America,” she said. “Nothing could have prepared me for that.”

When Moore spoke out about Trump, the pushback was fierce. Book sales plummeted as did ticket sales to her events. Her criticism of Trump was seen as an act of betrayal. From fiscal 2017 to fiscal 2019, Living Proof lost more than $1.8 million.

After allegations of abuse and misconduct began to surface among Southern Baptists in 2016, Moore also became increasingly concerned about her denomination’s tolerance for leaders who treated women with disrespect.

5

In 2018, she wrote a “letter to my brothers” on her blog, outlining her concerns about the deference she was expected to show male leaders, going as far as wearing flats instead of heels when she was serving alongside a man who was shorter than she was.

She also began to speak out about her own experience of abuse, especially after a February 2019 report from the Houston Chronicle, her hometown newspaper, detailed more than 700 cases of sexual abuse among Southern Baptists over a 20-year period.

Her social media feeds, especially Twitter, where she has nearly a million followers, became filled with righteous anger and dismay over what she saw as a toxic mix of misogyny, nationalism and partisan politics taking over the evangelical world she loved — along with good-natured banter with friends and supporters to encourage them.

“I can get myself in so much trouble on Twitter because it’s kind of my jam,” she said. “My thing is to mess around with words and ideas.”

Then, in May 2019, Moore said, she did something she now describes as “really dumb.” A friend and fellow writer named Vicki Courtney mentioned on Twitter that she would be preaching in church on Mother’s Day.

“I’m doing Mother’s Day too! Vicki, let’s please don’t tell anyone this,” Moore replied.

The tweet immediately sparked a national debate among Southern Baptists and other evangelical leaders over whether women should be allowed to preach in church.

“Tere’s just something about the order of creation that means that God intends for the preaching voice to be a male voice,” Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said on his podcast.

Georgia Baptist pastor Josh Buice urged the SBC and Lifeway to cancel Moore, labeling her as a liberal threat to the denomination.

6

Controversial California megachurch pastor John MacArthur summed up his thoughts in two words, telling Moore, “Go home.”

Moore, who said she would not become pastor of a Southern Baptist church “to save my life,” watched in amazement as her tweet began to dominate the conversation in the denomination, drowning out the concerns about abuse.

“We were in the middle of the biggest sexual abuse scandal that has ever hit our denomination,” she said. “And suddenly, the most important thing to talk about was whether or not a woman could stand at the pulpit and give a message.”

When Moore attended the SBC’s annual meeting in June 2019 and spoke on a panel about abuse, she felt she was no longer welcome.

A panel on sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention takes place at the Birmingham-Jefferson Convention Complex in Birmingham, Alabama, on June 10, 2019. The panel was moderated by the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission Executive Vice President Philip Betancourt, from left, and included Rachael Denhollander, SBC President J.D. Greear, author and Bible teacher Beth Moore, abuse survivor and Birmingham native Susan Codone and ERLC President Russell Moore. RNS photo by Adelle M. Banks

Things have only gotten worse since then, said Moore. The SBC has been roiled by debates over critical race theory, causing a number of high-profile Black pastors to leave the denomination. Politics and Christian nationalism have crowded out the gospel, she said.

7

While all this was going on, Moore was working on a new Bible study with her daughter Melissa on the New Testament’s letter to Galatians. As she studied that book, Moore was struck by a passage where the Apostle Paul, the letter’s author, describes a confrontation with Peter, another apostle and early church leader, saying Peter’s conduct was “not in step with the gospel.”

That phrase, she said, resonated with her. It described what she and other concerned Southern Baptists were seeing as being wrong in their denomination.

“It was not in step with the gospel,” she said. “It felt like we had landed on Mars.”

Beth Allison Barr, a history professor and dean at Baylor University, said Moore’s departure will be a shock for Southern Baptist women.

Barr, the author of “The Making of Biblical Womanhood,” a forthcoming book on gender roles among evangelicals, grew up a Southern Baptist. Her mother was a huge fan of Moore, as were many women in her church.

“If she walks away, she’s going to carry a lot of these women with her,” said Barr. 

Anthea Butler, associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of a forthcoming book on evangelicals and racism, said Moore could become a more conservative version of the late Rachel Held Evans, who rallied progressive Christians tired of evangelicalism but not of Christianity.

Critics of Moore will find it easier to dismiss her as “woke” or “liberal” than to deal with the substance of her critique, said Butler. But Moore’s concerns and the ongoing conflicts in the SBC about racism and sexism aren’t going away, Butler said.

The religion professor believes Moore will be better off leaving the SBC, despite the pain of breaking away.

“I applaud this move and support her because I know how soul-crushing the SBC is for women,” Butler said. “She will be far better off without them, doing the ministry God calls her to do.”  

8

Unwinding her life from the Southern Baptist Convention and from Lifeway was difficult. Moore and her husband have begun visiting a new church, one not tied as closely to the SBC but still “gospel-driven.” She looked at joining another denomination, perhaps becoming a Lutheran or a Presbyterian, but in her heart, she remains Baptist.

She still loves the things Southern Baptists believe, she said, and is determined to stay connected with a local church. Moore hopes at some point, the public witness of Southern Baptists will return to those core values and away from the nationalism, sexism and racial divides that seem to define its public witness.

So far that has not happened.

“At the end of the day, there comes a time when you have to say, this is not who I am,” she said.

Moore had formed long-term friendships with her editing and marketing team at Lifeway and saying goodbye was painful, though amicable. She’d hoped to spend 2020 on a kind of farewell tour but most of her events last year were canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.  (Lifeway does have a cruise featuring Moore still on its schedule.)

“These are people that I love so dearly and they are beloved forever,” she said. “I just have not been able to regard many things in my adult ministry life as more of a manifestation of grace than that gift of partnership with Lifeway.”

Becky Loyd, director of Lifeway Women, spoke fondly about Moore.

“Our relationship with Beth is not over, we will continue to love, pray and support Beth for years to come,” she told RNS in an email. “Lifeway is so thankful to the Lord for allowing us to be a small part of how God has used Beth over many years to help women engage Scripture in deep and meaningful ways and help them grow in their relationship with Jesus Christ.”

Lifeway will still carry Moore’s books and promote some of her events.

Those events will likely be smaller, attracting a few hundred people rather than thousands, said Moore, at least in the beginning. And she is looking forward to beginning anew.

“I am going to serve whoever God puts in front of me,” she said.

9

I Found God, Became A Pastor And Then Lost My Faith. Here's What I Believe In Now.

Rebecca Gummere   HuffPost Guest Writer

Posted on November 9, 2024, at 5:16 a.m. ET

The day I was ordained as a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), I knelt on the hard brick steps of the seminary chapel and made promises to proclaim and live out the faith that I had first come to late in my 20s.

“I will, and I ask God to help me,” I vowed.

As the bishop prayed, three pastors came up behind me. Their hands alit like birds on my shoulders and I felt the weight.

I did not grow up in a family that regularly attended church. We were what some refer to as “C&E” — Christmas and Easter — people. Still, even from a young age I was drawn to big questions ― about meaning and purpose, about death and dying, about whether or not there is a God.

When one of my older sisters was diagnosed with breast cancer and died two years later at age 35, the tap-dancing I’d done around the edges of faith landed me at a crossroad — there was either Something/Someone or there was nothing.

I joined a church a friend had invited me to. Since I’d never read the Bible, I enrolled in a two-year study that began with Genesis and ended with the Revelation. A year into the course, my second child, a boy, was born with a heart defect and had surgery when he was four days old. Six weeks later, he died suddenly in my arms.

In the dark time after his death, church friends brought food, showed up to take my two-and-a-half-year-old son to the park, sat next to me on the sofa and handed me tissues as I wept, or 

10

imply held silent space for me. It felt like God was there, and in each loving act, I found reason to hope for healing from grief and the strength to go on. Four years later, I entered seminary. 

In my time as a pastor, I preached the love of God and the grace of Jesus. I baptized babies and children and adults. I officiated at weddings and sat with the dying, praying with them and speaking of the ever-present Lord of Life. I stood at gravesides and proclaimed the hope of resurrection

Increasingly, though, I struggled with doubt — about God’s presence, about God’s trustworthiness, about the meaning of the Church in the world and the truth of its foundational tenets.

The shame I felt about my wavering faith kept me from being honest then. I believed I wasn’t supposed to succumb to serious doubts, that if I did I was failing my parishioners, that I was failing as a Christian. Still, the questions pestered me and began to interfere with my ability to continue living out those promises I’d made. 

Fourteen years after I was ordained, I left ministry and went to work for our county’s domestic violence and rape crisis center. The thin framework of what remained of my faith collapsed as again and again survivors shared their experiences of abuse and assault, stories of unspeakable horrors and the heartbreak of shattered lives. I could not understand why the God who supposedly had numbered the hairs on our heads would not show up for these women.

I was devastated, too, to hear how little support survivors often found in their faith communities. I railed at the thought that any of our suffering is redemptive ― that it serves some secret purpose of God’s. If that was how God operated, I wanted no more of it. For a time, overwhelmed by my fury at an absent deity and unable to connect with any sense of the Divine, I denounced my faith and told God in the most brutal of terms to get lost, and for a while that’s where I stayed.

11

But my heart was still filled with longing for what I’d come to think of as “the Big Dream,” the Biblical vision that had first drawn me into faith. In that dream, the hungry are fed and the homeless find shelter. Justice and restoration come to those who need it. Love binds us together. Sickness and suffering are no more. We are not abandoned. Death does not have the last word. 

I had to admit I was grieving — for the lost dream and for the loss of community, and for the loss of the God I thought I’d known. I gave myself a challenge: to be as

But what now? After I’d deconstructed my whole belief system — the creeds and the Bible stories and the church teachings and traditions — after I’d shown God the door, what was left?

And like an echo from a far-off hillside, the word came. 

“Love.”

It was true. And if love remained, wasn’t that enough to begin again?

Now I answered a new call, one to pilgrimage, and bought a small used RV, gave away most of my belongings, and rented out my house. I took off on a cross-country journey in search of a God I wasn’t even sure existed, shedding beliefs and habits that no longer served, releasing regrets that had kept me stuck in place. Nine months later I returned home, freed of old constraints, and began rebuilding ― but not the old faith with a God in a box we want to control. Not a faith in which the wild, free spirit of love is codified and commodified. Not a faith that spends one single moment arguing over who is out and who is in.

I lost my faith and I don’t want it back. 

I do want it forward, though. 

12

Forward to a faith that acknowledges the holiness and divinity in everyone without qualification. One with open doors and permeable walls. A faith that admits God is beyond knowing and naming and has many faces. One that lives out the creed that there is no law higher than love. 

Doubt doesn’t have to be failure. I now believe faith ― if it is a living thing ― will grow and change with us out of necessity. This living faith will accept our questions as the exercising of a necessary muscle, one that will strengthen us for the journeys of our lives and all that may come our way.

I’m still in touch with a number of parishioners and pastoral colleagues as well. I will forever be grateful for how our paths and our stories have intertwined. A good friend, a pastor I’d served with, heard of my struggles and met me for lunch, asking straightaway, “How is your spiritual life?” As we clinked mugs and sipped our beers, I told him, and, bless him forever, he listened. 

From time to time, I’ve received emails from strangers who came across one of my blog posts. They suggest Bible verses I could read to restore my belief. And sometimes I do open the heavy book, turn the wispy pages, pore over the words. It doesn’t really help, but the spirit of kindness behind the message does and it creates for us a meeting place that I have come to deeply value. 

I still pray. I believe I’m joining my heart with others to plead for healing, to ask for mercy, to add my voice of hope for peace for those who grieve. Some days I imagine I’m talking to God. Some days I think Jesus is listening. Most days I’m simply gathering up love from others and passing it along, envisioning it as the energy that flows through all of life. 

I remain uncertain about many things and I’m okay with that. Uncertainty feels like truth these days. I also remain open to the mystery of grace falling unannounced. What I do know is this: Love is alive and well and flourishing in the world, no matter what name we give it. For me, right now, that is a firm enough place to stand.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost in May 2021.

13

San Francisco Chronicle

She wanted to give deported parents a choice. Then California’s Christian right attacked

A parents rights bill geared toward immigrant families has been overtaken by a megachurch pastor’s exaggerated stranger-danger narrative

Raheem Hosseini, Staff Writer  Updated: Aug. 24, 2025

As far back as she can recall, Celeste Rodriguez has been aware of her father’s childhood trauma.

Some 70 years ago in Pacoima, a Los Angeles neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, Rodriguez’s dad watched men he did not know put his grandmother into the back of a van. It turned out they were federal immigration authorities, intent on sending her back to Jalisco, Mexico, from where the two had immigrated ahead of the rest of the family.

The 5-year-old boy watched from his neighbor’s porch as the van with his abuela receded. Then he fell to pieces.

“As he tells the story, he wakes up on the porch, and realizes now as an adult that he cried himself to sleep,” Rodriguez said. “You can only imagine how traumatic that is.”

Today, Rodriguez is the mother to a 5-year-old herself and a freshman member of the state Assembly, representing the eastern San Fernando Valley. And a bill she introduced — to give parents taken by the Trump administration some say over what happens to their children — has drawn the ire of an influential megachurch pastor and his large, devoted following.

Early this month, the Rev. Jack Hibbs, founder and star pastor of Calvary Chapel Chino Hills in San Bernardino County, supercharged a Christian-right panic around Rodriguez’s Assembly Bill 495, the Family Preparedness Plan Act of 2025.

Repeating criticisms by the Chino Hills group Real Impact, which seeks to merge biblical values with public policy, Hibbs falsely accused Gov. Gavin Newsom “and his buddies” of crafting AB495 to strip parents of their rights and let strangers take their children with a simple form. Newsom did not initiate AB495 and does not typically comment on legislation until it reaches his desk.

Without suggesting a motive or mentioning the legislation’s immigration focus, Hibbs urged his followers to mobilize against AB495 and flee the state if it passes.

“It’s a meat-market bill. It’s a trafficking bill. It’s unbelievable,” Hibbs said during the Aug. 3 service. “If you have kids in the state of California, if this passes, you gotta go.”

14

Child welfare attorneys say Hibb’s claims show a complete misunderstanding of something called a caregiver’s authorization affidavit, how it has worked for 30 years and how AB495 would change it. Nonetheless, the provocative remarks bolted around social media and got the pastor, whose tax-exempt empire spans a television network, podcast, radio show, books, DVDs, CDs and more, onto Newsmax and Fox News to make similar claims.

At his urging, several hundred people descended on the state Capitol on Tuesday to hear Hibbs and other speakers assail AB495 as a singular threat to an eclectic array of conservative Christian family values in California and beyond.

“If Gavin Newsom passes this, then it’s going to be coming (to) your state in short order,” Hibbs told rallygoers. “You don’t want that.”

The feverish backlash, sparked months after AB495’s introduction, has threatened to derail priority immigration legislation for the Legislature’s women’s and progressive caucuses while showcasing Hibbs’ expanding crossover influence.

For Rodriguez, San Fernando’s former mayor, it’s a crash course in reactionary politics, and what makes for a more compelling narrative — protecting immigrant families from a hostile president or Christian families from a Democratic governor.

Overlooked history

Rodriguez said her goal with AB495 is to make it easier for immigrant parents to decide who looks after their children in the unthinkable event that they’ve been detained or deported by federal immigration authorities, or what she described as “the current Trump administration efforts to rip families apart.”

“That’s exactly what this bill is for,” she said.

To accomplish this, the legislation focuses on the caregiver’s authorization affidavit, a

document that lowers barriers to schooling and medical care for children living in informal custody settings with relatives, friends’ parents or even immigration sponsors. According to the National Center for Youth Law and child welfare attorneys, California created the affidavit in 1994 after noting a surge in kids living in nontraditional households, driven by the AIDS epidemic, crack-cocaine health crisis and an era of racially disparate tough-on-crime sentencing.

15

“ The whole point was that if a kid is living with grandma and has to go to the doctor, the kid can go to the doctor,” said Sharon Balmer Cartagena, directing attorney of the Child Youth & Family Advocacy Project at the pro-bono Los Angeles firm Public Counsel, an AB495 sponsor. “The child shouldn’t have to wait for that.”

Currently, the affidavit authorizes qualified caregivers to enroll children in school and only blood-related caregivers to consent to medical care outside of required school immunizations. It does not confer custody or alter a parent or legal guardian’s custodial rights. Parents can cancel the arrangements at any time.

AB495 changes none of this.

It would extend the power to make medical decisions to unrelated caregivers like godparents, great-aunts and teachers under the rationale that immigrant children may have limited access to blood relatives and close ties to honorary ones.

“In communities of color, cousins of cousins are cousins. We would say, ‘That’s my auntie’ even for non-blood relations,” said Chantel Johnson, directing advocate at the San Francisco-based Youth Law Center and guardian to her half-brother’s daughter. “Placing children with people they know reduces their trauma rather than placing them … in foster care.”

AB495 actually strengthens parental rights in a couple ways, allowing separated parents to share joint guardianship with the caregivers — which current law does not permit — and making it easier for parents to terminate the arrangement once they’re back in the picture.

“This is all about family and parent empowerment,” Rodriguez said.

Evolving opposition

The first formal opponents to AB495 were Our Duty — USA and Women Are Real, groups critical of transgender rights and gender-affirming care.

16

Erin Friday, co-lead of Our Duty — USA, said in an email to the Chronicle that AB495 would allow any “random adult” to claim custody of a child using the affidavit, change their name, gender identity, school and funnel them into the sex trade.

Johnson and her colleague, Youth Law Center staff attorney Chris Middleton, whose organization is not involved in the AB495 push, say such claims indicate a gross  misunderstanding of the child welfare system, the affidavits and of AB495.

“That’s completely off base,” Middleton said.

Still, it wasn’t until Hibbs got involved and platformed broader stranger-danger fears around legalized kidnapping and child trafficking that the controversy actually started to affect the legislation’s chances.

Introduced on March 24, AB495 charted an unremarkable journey over its first four months. It cleared state Assembly committees on Human Services, Appropriations and Judiciary, was approved by the full Assembly on May 28, then moved on to the Senate, where the bill was passed by that body’s Judiciary and Human Services committees.

On Monday, two weeks after Hibbs began campaigning against the bill, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted 7-0 to place it on the suspense file. At the same hearing, Department of Finance legislative director Christian Beltran registered his agency’s opposition over AB495’s general fund price tag, estimated to be $5.4 million annually for additional Department of Social Service staff.

More than 30 child and immigrant advocacy organizations signaled support for AB495, including co-sponsor Alliance for Children’s Rights, the Children’s Law Center of California, California State PTA and First 5 California.

Sex trafficking is illegal, and AB495 would not legalize it. Child welfare advocates say the worst-case scenarios imagined by opponents would require a caregiver or stranger to commit numerous serious crimes without being reported or noticed, and could conceivably happen under the existing affidavit.

17

“It’s just a real misunderstanding of what the bill is,” Johnson said. “Is this a population that’s at risk and are we all trying to protect vulnerable children? Yes, but this does not open that door. … It’s the people that are not enrolling (children) in schools and not getting them health care that we worry about.”

It’s part of why Rodriguez and Cartagena say they’ve been mystified by parental rights attacks on the bill.

“I’m a parents’ rights attorney,” stressed Cartagena, who said she’s defended parents who were pressured to give up their rights after being evicted or ordered into drug rehabilitation programs, and who struggled to reclaim custody following deportations. With an exasperated laugh, she added, “I’m like, I’m on your side, people.”

Church and state

Outside of the state Capitol on Tuesday, rallygoers from across the state said they learned of AB495 from Hibbs. Some said they hadn’t read the bill themselves or heard of its immigration focus, but believed the pastor and were astounded that California would make it easier to sexually traffic children.

“I don’t know the details of the bill. I just know it’s against parental rights,” said Helen Burkert of Lake Tahoe, who said she doesn’t have children herself and watches Hibbs online. “And this is evil.”

The rhetoric reached near-hysterical levels with speakers from a network of conservative religious, legal and policy organizations making outlandish claims that AB495 would thrust kids into the clutches of kidnappers, pedophiles and sex traffickers.

“Never in my life have I witnessed such a great attack on parents and parental rights,” said Brad Dacus, founding president of the Christian legal nonprofit Pacific Justice Institute, who — along with Matt Sharp, senior counsel at the conservative Arizona legal nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom — suggested AB495 could result in forced gender transitions. “It is the nightmare of nightmares.”

Will Estrada, senior counsel at the Virginia-based Home School Legal Defense Association, said AB495 could be used to justify removing children from homeschool.

18

The affidavit only grants the power to enroll children in schools, not disenroll them, Cartagena said.

Republican Assembly Leader James Gallagher and Sens. Shannon Grove, R-Bakersfield, Tony Strickland, R-Huntington Beach, Roger Niello, R-Fair Oaks, and Marie Alvarado-Gil, R-Jackson, also spoke out against the bill.

Evoking the Jan. 6 insurrectionists as she encouraged rallygoers to lobby their lawmakers,

Heidi St. John, a Christian podcaster and influencer from Washington state, said, “We are going to storm the Capitol here in Sacramento!”

Cartagena said she doesn’t think it’s bad if lawmakers take a beat to evaluate AB495. But she said she’s troubled by the kinds of questions she’s gotten over the past two weeks. They parrot Hibbs’ claims, and are coming from Newsom’s office and moderate Democrats, she said, as well as people attending family preparedness clinics at Los Angeles-area schools and medical providers.

“It’s having a huge effect,” she said. “It would be very awful if a campaign that’s based on just wrong misinformation could stop a bill that could help a lot of folks.”

Rodriguez said her office has been inundated with phone calls from people convinced AB495 would force kids to switch genders.

“The opposition phone calls we’ve received … have not been about immigrant children and the protection of families, but this idea that children will be taken to transition their — I don’t even know how to frame it,” Rodriguez said with an uneasy laugh. “It’s been shocking what it has been twisted into.”

As for Hibbs, who was followed wherever he went outside the capitol by his entourage, his fans and friendly media, he did correct one thing Tuesday.

“When I publicly announced this bill several weeks ago, I did not say that I was leaving California,” he said to cheers. “I’ve always said, ‘I’m not leaving California.’ And I’m not leaving California.”

19

New York

THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT

James Dobson Was My Horror, and Yours

By Sarah Jones

About ten years ago, I created a Google alert so I’d know the moment James Dobson died. Sometimes an obituary would pop up, but it was always for some other James or Dobson — a benign stranger. On Thursday morning, my inbox was empty, and then I saw the news on Slack. A few minutes after that, a friend texted: “JAMES DOBSON IS DEAD!!!!!” I looked at X and read the headline again. I started to believe it. My husband walked into the room, where I sat on our bed, and I told him. He said he’d bring me Champagne that night. I told my mother. My Google alert went off at last, and I started to write a eulogy that I’ve been planning since I was 10.

To almost everyone else, James Dobson was the founder of Focus on the Family, a co-founder of the Family Research Council and the shadowy Arlington Group, and a titan of the Christian right who labored long and hard to bring a bleak world into being.

To me, he was a personal enemy.

Before he died at the age of 89, Dobson wrote more than 70 books and built a radio empire that lasted for decades and reached millions upon millions of listeners around the world. Dobson was not a preacher like Jerry Falwell or a lobbyist like the lesser-known Gary Bauer, though he moved in the same circles and pursued similar aims. He was a child psychologist who exchanged academia for Christian ministry because he was horrified by the sexual revolution. The traditional American family was at risk, he thought; Christian parents should enforce their values through corporal punishment at home, and later, by voting according to Biblical principles. He endorsed Donald Trump in 2016 after it became clear that Ted Cruz did not have enough Evangelical support to win the Republican nomination.Trump was “a baby Christian,” Dobson said, and though he was no longer at Focus and had probably entered his final decline, his words still mattered. Dobson lived just long enough to see his work bear hideous fruit. He committed his life to violence and cruelty – toward women and queer people and children – and he discovered a brother in Trump.

20

I never met Dobson, but I hated him, and sometimes the hatred kept me up at night. I hated him the way you can hate only a man who destroyed you as a child. There are other culprits, certainly. Dobson did not hit me; my father did. But Dobson told him that he was right to hit me, that God gave him permission. That if he hit me, I would obey my parents and the Lord, and that everything would be all right because to strike a child is to love her. Or as Dobson once put it, “Corporal punishment, when used lovingly and properly, is beneficial to a child because it is in harmony with nature itself.” So I can remember the crack of a belt, and the shouting, and my own fear. One day, I decided my father did not love me, because how could he, and I cried until I felt nothing at all. Later, I pulled nails out of the walls so I could cut up my arms.

In my earliest memories, one of Dobson’s best-known books, The Strong-Willed Child, sits in our living room. It was there because the title described me, and my parents wanted to change who I was. Dobson offered solutions, within certain parameters. He often told his followers they had to break a child’s will, but not their spirit, as if such a distinction exists. To Dobson, the parent-child relationship was little more than a battle for power, which the child must lose in order to become the right kind of adult. Parents should not insult their children, or beat a toddler unnecessarily, but they must wield a firm hand – or a belt or a switch. In The Strong-Willed Child, he wrote of his dachshund, Siggie, whom he had named after Freud. Siggie would not obey, and Dobson would not be thwarted, so he attacked the dog. “I fought him up one wall and down the other, with both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt,” he wrote. Dobson believed he won because Siggie lay down to sleep “in perfect submission.”

When I rejected Christianity in my 20s, I thought Dobson’s power might be waning.  Obama was president, and although the Christian right remained a formidable enemy, I allowed myself to feel a little optimism. I got a job at Americans United for Separation of Church and State and moved to Washington, D.C., where I would eventually attend a right-wing press conference on Obergefell, the case that legalized same-sex marriage. The Supreme Court had not released its decision, but gender traditionalists were already frantic. At the press conference, they played a video message from Dobson, who warned of the Obama administration arresting pastors. I thought he sounded old.

21

The court issued its decision, but no one rounded up any pastors. For the rest of us, catastrophe arrived a year later, when Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton with Dobson’s endorsement, Dobson’s machine, and Dobson’s values. By Trump’s second victory, in 2024, Dobson’s individual support meant far less than it once had. Trump did not need Dobson the man because he already owned what Dobson had helped build.

Now that Dobson is dead, it is easier to see the scope of his legacy. A childhood like mine is a personal tragedy with political dimensions. Dobson served tyranny all his life, and over time, he sought to enshrine it in the highest seats of power. To him and his heirs, the American home is a laboratory; they inflict suffering in private to better reproduce it in public. “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” the Lord told Isaiah. Dobson is my horror, and yours.

During Trump’s first campaign, the conventional wisdom held that Trump’s three marriages and general impiety would alienate “values voters,” who would naturally prefer a candidate like Ted Cruz or Ben Carson. After Trump became the obvious front-runner with an assist from the godly, analysts scrambled for some explanation or easy conclusion. “RIP religious right,” a CNN story announced that March. But the religious right, or Christian right, had not gone anywhere; it was simply evolving into a fuller expression of itself. A few months after CNN ran that headline, Dobson hitched himself to Trump. In one sense, the elderly Dobson merely followed power where it led. In another, Trump fit into Dobson’s world more naturally than many understood at the time. The broadcaster had always believed in the divine merits of brute force. So does Trump, in his own way.

22

There is arguably no path to Trump without Dobson, and it begins with the broadcaster’s commitment to violence and ideological rigidity. In 1970’s Dare to Discipline, Dobson’s first major book, he urged parents to keep a belt or switch on a child’s dresser as a visible and perpetual threat. When parents spanked their offspring, whether by hand or with an object, they should follow the pain “with a clear reaffirmation” of their “love for the child,” as Dan Gilgoff explained in The Jesus Machine: How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America Are Winning the Culture. Evangelical readers bought around 2 million copies, and Dobson was off. In 1975, he published another book, What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women, and two years after that he founded Focus on the Family, which distributed his message through radio programs, magazines, and endless books. In the mid-’80s, Dobson became an adviser to President Ronald Reagan and joined the administration’s Commission on Pornography. Gilgoff wrote that, by 1987, Focus had a yearly budget of $34 million, with most of its funds coming from individual donors. By 1988, the year I was born, Focus was receiving “150,000 pieces of mail a month, almost all addressed to Dobson and mostly from fretful mothers and wives,” and Dobson’s profile would only grow from that point on. In 1989, he interviewed Ted Bundy, who said that porn had turned him into a serial killer.

During the 1990s, Dobson was a fact of Evangelical life. Everyone in my small universe listened to him on the radio, or at least knew of him, even if they didn’t follow his advice to the letter. On car rides, we’d tune into Adventures in Odyssey, a Focus radio drama for children. One episode introduced me to Dungeons & Dragons, which it called Castles & Cauldrons and which could supposedly summon evil spirits. Though Dobson didn’t host every broadcast his ministry produced, he was enough of a presence that I can still hear his voice if I think about him now. He spoke the way he wrote, with an even tone that could lull you into quiet agreement. Then he’d slap you across the face with a sinister observation. Husbands ought to romance their wives, he wrote in What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women, but wives should also know their place. “How many wives have ‘let themselves go,’ waddling around on massive rhino haunches and looking like they had spent the night in a tornado?” he wrote.

23

According to Dobson, God made man a despot. A father’s children could not flee him, and neither could his wife. As a child, I knew I had no way out, and as long as I listened to Dobson, I could never find one. I figured that I’d die young, unless I got Raptured. Either I would kill myself or someone else would do it for me. A woman named Laura once wrote to Dobson because her husband had “loosened three of her teeth” and cut the inside of her lip. “I really thought he was going to kill me!” she recounted, but Dobson told her that because she was a Christian she could not get divorced. “Our purpose should be to change her husband’s behavior, not kill the marriage,” he wrote. Marriage was not a relationship but another battle of wills, and Dobson knew who should concede power to whom.

I don’t know what happened to Laura, and I doubt Dobson did, either. He didn’t care about her or about any of us. All that mattered was order, and if brutality got the job done then so be it. Later, I learned that he would routinely twist research or simply make things up to justify his convictions. Dobson told women that men needed to ejaculate every 72 hours because if they didn’t, semen would build up and men would become frustrated and stray. This is not true, of course; the point was to coerce women into having sex. There is no evidence that corporal punishment is beneficial to children, but there is evidence that it can inflict long-lasting psychological harm. Conversion therapy doesn’t make queer people straight, either, yet Dobson promoted it until the day he died.

As Dobson aged, his folksy act receded in favor of open sadism. He reserved a specific revulsion for LGBTQ+ people and devoted much of his life to attacking them. People became queer only because they had been sexually abused or had absent fathers, or because feminists had “feminized, emasculated, and ‘wimpified’” men, as he wrote in Bringing Up Boys. Dobson wanted to eradicate any trace of homosexuality from American society because it threatened the natural order of things, like the gender hierarchy that so preoccupied him. Christian parents needed to recognize signs of “pre-homosexual” behavior in boys and then root it out, he wrote. Dobson’s obsession with sexuality affected his parenting advice in nearly every respect; his vision of fatherhood turns innocent moments into something bizarre. In Bringing Up Boys, he urged fathers to shower with their sons so they could see

24

“that Dad has a penis” like theirs, “only bigger.” This would affirm a boy’s masculinity and prevent him from becoming gay. Elsewhere, he told fathers to organize “daddy-daughter dates,” and not because they enjoyed spending time with their girls. As the scholar Sara Moslener noted in Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence, the dates “encouraged  girls ages 6 or younger “to develop romanticized attachments to the opposite sex and learn how to nurture a heterosexual partnership.” After Adam Lanza murdered dozens of children in Sandy Hook, Dobson partly blamed the bloodshed on the “redefinition” of marriage.

When Focus first threw itself into electoral politics, it was on behalf of gender traditionalism. As Gilgoff reported, Dobson backed a 1992 effort to amend the Colorado constitution in order to ban future gay-rights laws, including anti-discrimination ordinances. The amendment passed, though the Supreme Court later struck it down. In 1998, the organization launched an “ex-gay” ministry called Love Won Out, which claimed it could “heal” a queer person by making them into someone else. Love Won Out no longer exists, but Dobson was relentless. After he left Focus in 2010, he dedicated his final years on earth to a war against “transgenderism.”

Dobson has many successors within the Christian right, the GOP, and the Trump White House. The Supreme Court felled Roe in Dobson’s dotage, and abortion bans were killing and maiming women long before he breathed his last. The parental-rights movement would make every home a fiefdom. Pronatalists may not adhere to all Dobson’s religious convictions, but they do share his birth-rate obsession and want American women to produce brood after brood. Now, they have the attention of the White House. Trump’s quest to erase LGBTQ+ people from public life would fulfill yet another Dobson goal.

25

Focus on the Family still marshals voters. The Family Research Council still puts out shoddy white papers while its lobbying arm pummels Congress. At the state level, the Family Policy Councils he helped create still push the archaic policies he preferred. As one anonymous source put it to Gilgoff nearly 20 years ago, Dobson “told me that closing down the congressional switchboard was more interesting than talking about changing diapers and potty training.” Much later, the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute joined the coalition that advised Project 2025.

Dobson was not The Mule, Isaac Asimov’s famous mind-controlling mutant, and he could not force anyone to do anything they were not inclined to do. Even in my home, he was merely one influence among many, albeit an important one. I’ve heard him described as a moderating force in the Evangelical world because he called for only a little violence instead of a lot. Maybe that’s true. Maybe my father would have hit me regardless. But Dobson made it easier. Dobson promised families like mine that we’d be happy if we listened to him, so we did. He had a doctorate, and he followed God, and he was so damn pleasant on the radio.

The point of transforming the American home was to reshape American society. Should Dobson achieve posthumous victory, through Trump or whoever comes after, the public sphere will look a bit like my childhood home, only worse. Dobson wanted to grind us all down into particles so he could rebuild us into something unrecognizable. There would be suffering on a mass scale if he ever won, but he hasn’t yet, and he still might not. The future is not fixed. On Friday morning, I woke up and the sun had risen. I listened to my husband breathe. I watched our cat roll around in her sleep. I thought about Dobson, who has gone where Bundy went, which is oblivion. For a moment, I felt all right.

26

Salt Lake Tribune

Opinion: Why are so many Christians so cruel?

DAVID FRENCH | THE NEW YORK TIMES

DECEMBER 24 2024, 6:00AM

Here’s a question I hear everywhere I go, including from fellow Christians: Why are so many Christians so cruel?

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard someone say something like: I’ve experienced blowback in the secular world, but nothing prepared me for church hate. Christian believers can be especially angry and even sometimes vicious.

It’s a simple question with a complicated answer, but that answer often begins with a particularly seductive temptation, one common to people of all faiths: that the faithful, those who possess eternal truth, are entitled to rule. Under this construct, might makes right, and right deserves might.

Most of us have sound enough moral instincts to reject the notion that might makes right. Power alone is not a sufficient marker of righteousness. We may watch people bow to power out of fear or awe, but yielding to power isn’t the same thing as acknowledging that it is legitimate or that it is just.

The idea that right deserves might is different and may even be more destructive. It appeals to our ambition through our virtue, which is what makes it especially treacherous. It masks its darkness. It begins with the idea that if you believe your ideas are just and right, then it’s a problem for everyone if you’re not in charge.

In that context, your own will to power is sanctified. It’s evidence not so much of your own ambition, but of your love for the community. You want what’s best for your neighbors, and what’s best for your neighbors is, well, you.

The practical objections to this mindset are legion. How can we be so certain of our own righteousness? Even if we are right or have a superior vision of justice compared with our opponents, the quest for power can override the quest for justice.

The historical examples are too numerous to list. Give a man a sword and tell him he’s defending the cross, and there’s no end to the damage he can do.

27

There’s also a theological objection to the idea that right deserves might. In Christian theology, Jesus was both God and man, a person without sin. I’m fallen and flawed. He is not.

And how did this singular individual — this eternal being made flesh — approach power? He rejected it, by word and by deed. And it all began with Christmas.

If a person is going to look for a coming king, the last place you’re going to start is in a stable. But that humble birth presaged a humble life and the establishment of what my former pastor always called “the upside-down kingdom of God.”

Christ’s words were clear, and they cut against every human instinct of ambition and pride:

“The last will be first.”

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

“If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”

“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

Those were the words. The deeds were just as clear. He didn’t just experience a humble birth; Jesus was raised in a humble home, far from the corridors of power. As a child, he was a refugee.

And when he began his ministry, he constantly behaved in a way that confounded every modern understanding about how to build a movement, much less how to overthrow an empire.

He withdrew from crowds. When he performed miracles, he frequently told the people he healed not to tell anyone else. When he declared, near the end of his life, that we are to “render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” he not only rejected the idea that he was Caesar, he also rejected the idea that Caesar’s domain was limitless.

And then, faced with the ultimate test — an unjust execution — right yielded to might. The Son of God allowed mortal men to torture and kill him, even though he could have freed himself from Rome’s deadly grasp.

When Jesus did triumph, he didn’t triumph over Caesar. He triumphed over death itself. When he ascended into heaven after his resurrection, he left Earth with Caesar still on the throne.

28

My own attitude about Christmas has changed over the years. A day that was once purely celebratory is now also profoundly humbling. In many ways, the facts surrounding Christ’s birth are as important as the fact of Christ’s birth. How he arrived was a signal of why he arrived: to redeem hearts, not to rule nations.

It’s remarkable how often ambition becomes cruelty. In our self-delusion, we convince ourselves that we’re not just right but that we’re so clearly right that opposition has to be rooted in arrogance and evil. We lash out. We seek to silence and destroy our enemies.

But it is all for the public good. So we sleep well at night. We become one of the most dangerous kinds of people — a cruel person with a clean conscience.

The way of Christ, by contrast, forecloses cruelty. It requires compassion. It inverts our moral compass, or at least it should. We love rags-to-riches stories, for example, so if many of us were writing Christ’s story, we might begin with a manger, but we’d end with a throne.

But Christ’s life began in a manger, and it ended on a cross. He warned his followers that a cross could come for them as well. An upside-down kingdom began with an upside-down birth. When Jesus himself is humble, how do we justify our pride?

Return to Top of Page

Return to Home