She posted a list from years ago. Before it was revealed that he's a pervert and child molester. Some of the pastors are rightfully upset. That is, the ones that exist.
Roy Moore and the Invisible Religious Right
The letter was a sham. The names of the pastors had evidently been copied and pasted from an earlier list of religious figures who had supported Moore. One of the signatories, Thad Endicott, the pastor of a Baptist church in Opelika, told local reporters that his name had been included “without asking if I still endorsed Moore.” He asked for his name to be removed, as did two Montgomery pastors, Fred and Tijuanna Adetunji. George Grant, whom the letter identified as the pastor of Parish Presbyterian Church, said that he had not spoken with Roy Moore in a decade, had no contact with the campaign, and, anyway, wasn’t an Alabama pastor any longer, having moved in the interim to Tennessee. It seemed to me, when I encountered this news recently, that Grant raised a different kind of problem for the Moore campaign, because his inclusion on Kayla Moore’s letter suggested that the campaign had been overstating its support from the religious right even before the scandals broke. Moore has been a signal figure for the religious right for two decades, ever since his days as a circuit-court judge in Alabama, when evangelical conservatives joined his fight to keep a plaque displaying the Ten Commandments in his courtroom. And yet, even before the latest allegations, his campaign had needed to artificially inflate his support among Christian conservatives by including pastors who had decamped for Tennessee.
A few days ago, I started calling around Alabama, trying to track down the rest of the pastors who had been listed on Kayla Moore’s letter. Some of them were easy to find, but others were elusive. I tried William Green, at the Fresh Anointing House of Worship, in Montgomery. A receptionist told me that she had never heard of Green. I tried Steve Sanders, at the Victory Baptist Church, in Millbrook. The current pastor told me that Sanders retired two years ago. I did not reach Earl Wise, also of Millbrook, but the Boston Globe did, and, though he still emphatically supported Moore, he had also left the pastoral life and was working as a real-estate agent.
Once you got beyond the ghosts and the real-estate agents, what was most notable about the pastors on Moore’s list was their obscurity. I found a list of the pastors of the thirty-six largest churches in Alabama, assembled this summer by the Web site of the Birmingham News; no pastor on that list appeared on Moore’s. I called leaders within the deeply conservative Southern Baptist Church—the largest denomination in Alabama and, for decades, the core of the religious right—and was told that not a single affiliated Southern Baptist pastor in the state was openly allied with Moore. The churches that appeared on Moore’s list tended to be tiny and situated in small towns, and some of the pastors on it held subsidiary roles within their churches. (A youth minister, for instance.) Of the several dozen pastors on the original list, four were affiliated with a small Methodist church called Young’s Chapel, in Piedmont. Five of the pastors were from Moore’s home town, Gadsden, but when I called a pastor of a major conservative church in that city, and read him the list, he recognized only a few names out of fifty.
So Kayla Moore is a goddamned liar, too.
Roy Moore and the Invisible Religious Right
The letter was a sham. The names of the pastors had evidently been copied and pasted from an earlier list of religious figures who had supported Moore. One of the signatories, Thad Endicott, the pastor of a Baptist church in Opelika, told local reporters that his name had been included “without asking if I still endorsed Moore.” He asked for his name to be removed, as did two Montgomery pastors, Fred and Tijuanna Adetunji. George Grant, whom the letter identified as the pastor of Parish Presbyterian Church, said that he had not spoken with Roy Moore in a decade, had no contact with the campaign, and, anyway, wasn’t an Alabama pastor any longer, having moved in the interim to Tennessee. It seemed to me, when I encountered this news recently, that Grant raised a different kind of problem for the Moore campaign, because his inclusion on Kayla Moore’s letter suggested that the campaign had been overstating its support from the religious right even before the scandals broke. Moore has been a signal figure for the religious right for two decades, ever since his days as a circuit-court judge in Alabama, when evangelical conservatives joined his fight to keep a plaque displaying the Ten Commandments in his courtroom. And yet, even before the latest allegations, his campaign had needed to artificially inflate his support among Christian conservatives by including pastors who had decamped for Tennessee.
A few days ago, I started calling around Alabama, trying to track down the rest of the pastors who had been listed on Kayla Moore’s letter. Some of them were easy to find, but others were elusive. I tried William Green, at the Fresh Anointing House of Worship, in Montgomery. A receptionist told me that she had never heard of Green. I tried Steve Sanders, at the Victory Baptist Church, in Millbrook. The current pastor told me that Sanders retired two years ago. I did not reach Earl Wise, also of Millbrook, but the Boston Globe did, and, though he still emphatically supported Moore, he had also left the pastoral life and was working as a real-estate agent.
Once you got beyond the ghosts and the real-estate agents, what was most notable about the pastors on Moore’s list was their obscurity. I found a list of the pastors of the thirty-six largest churches in Alabama, assembled this summer by the Web site of the Birmingham News; no pastor on that list appeared on Moore’s. I called leaders within the deeply conservative Southern Baptist Church—the largest denomination in Alabama and, for decades, the core of the religious right—and was told that not a single affiliated Southern Baptist pastor in the state was openly allied with Moore. The churches that appeared on Moore’s list tended to be tiny and situated in small towns, and some of the pastors on it held subsidiary roles within their churches. (A youth minister, for instance.) Of the several dozen pastors on the original list, four were affiliated with a small Methodist church called Young’s Chapel, in Piedmont. Five of the pastors were from Moore’s home town, Gadsden, but when I called a pastor of a major conservative church in that city, and read him the list, he recognized only a few names out of fifty.
So Kayla Moore is a goddamned liar, too.
