When the author and Bible teacher Beth Moore announced she was leaving the Southern Baptist Convention this week, she cited the “staggering” disorientation of seeing its leaders support Donald J. Trump, and the racism and sexism revealed in her community by his presidency.

Ms. Moore’s departure from the country’s largest Protestant denomination attracted widespread interest — condemnation from her conservative critics, regret from some denominational leaders, and cheers from some of her admirers. She is arguably the most prominent white evangelical woman in America. She speaks to arenas of fans; her many books have sold millions of copies.

Until now, however, she has remained relatively obscure outside of evangelical circles. That is in part because unlike many high-profile evangelical men, Ms. Moore, 63, did not build her career as a firebrand doing public battle in the culture wars. Rather, she has spent decades teaching on spiritual and psychological topics for an overwhelmingly female audience.

Here is a look at some highlights from that career:

Lessons With Panache

Ms. Moore is not the leader of a church, a role inaccessible to Southern Baptist women. But as an itinerant speaker, she attracts significantly larger — and more engaged — audiences than most church leaders.

She headlines weekend-long conferences across the country under the auspices of her own Living Proof Ministries. But she got started in Christian ministry through an unusual side door: She began sharing devotional lessons with an aerobics class she was teaching at First Baptist Church in Houston in the 1980s. Eventually she was asked to lead a Bible study at the church, which quickly attracted real crowds.

Ms. Moore has an electric stage presence. She is also an “exegetical powerhouse,” said Kate Bowler, a historian at Duke Divinity School who wrote about Ms. Moore in her 2019 book, “The Preacher’s Wife: The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities.” Rather than simply telling personal stories or offering generic inspiration, she goes deep on biblical texts that can look dry or complicated to the untrained eye.

In Ms. Moore’s telling, they are anything but.

At a 2016 event in Waco, Texas, for example, she opened by reading a dense passage from the New Testament book of Hebrews from a large well-worn Bible. She zeroed in on the phrase “a kingdom that cannot be shaken.” Within an hour, she had connected the passage to the Old Testament books of Psalms and Exodus, delivered a theological primer on the “Old Covenant” vs. “New Covenant,” and polled the audience on what issues in their lives were “shaking” them. She also brought the house down with an extended slapstick bit about a minor incident at drive-through carwash.

‘A Woman’s Heart’

Ms. Moore’s books are ubiquitous in evangelical Bible studies, which are often targeted to one gender; like secular book clubs, they tend to function as intimate social gatherings as well as sites of literary analysis.

Her best-selling first book, “A Woman’s Heart: God’s Dwelling Place,” first published in 1995, is presented as a 10-week study. The book is built around a topic that does not appear particularly relatable to 21st-century women: the making of the tabernacle in the book of Exodus.

In Ms. Moore’s hands, it becomes something much more than an account of an ancient construction project. One lesson is built completely on a passage of instructions for building a piece of furniture for the portable worship space: “You are to construct a table of acacia wood, 36 inches long, 18 inches wide …” With that raw material, Ms. Moore spins a lesson on community, forgiveness and God’s love.

The books are intended for devotional purposes, to deepen their readers’ faith. But in authoritatively analyzing the Bible and asking her readers to do the same, Ms. Moore invites evangelical women into deeper acts of textual scrutiny than many comparable Bible studies.

She is also a prolific author of books focusing on single books of the Bible, including “Esther: It’s Tough Being a Woman,” and on broader spiritual topics, like “Get Out of That Pit: Straight Talk About God’s Deliverance.”

If Ms. Moore’s books attract little notice outside of evangelicalism, they are reliable best-sellers within. The 2019-20 catalog of resources for women from the Southern Baptist publishing arm, Lifeway Christian Resources, opens with 11 solid pages of offerings from her. (Ms. Moore told Religion News Service this week that she had ended her longtime publishing relationship with Lifeway, though it will continue distributing her books.)

‘Stay in Your Bibles’

In recent years, Ms. Moore has achieved a new fame online that is distinct from her writing and speaking career. On Twitter in particular, where she has more than 950,000 followers, she found a new audience including men and non-Christians, and space to speak on topics beyond her usual portfolio of women’s issues and spirituality.

Her new outspokenness has turned her into a kind of avatar for evangelical women who may be theologically conservative but are increasingly uncomfortable with the cultural politics they have seen revealed in their churches since the 2016 election.

In August, Ms. Moore issued a thread that read like a fiery sermon, directly addressing the racism she saw in the white evangelical world.

“White supremacy has held tight in much of the church for so long because the racists outlasted the anti racists,” she began. “Outlast THEM.” She exhorted her readers to ignore name-calling and to take the long view.

And, as always, she directed them back to the text:

“Stay in your Bibles,” she wrote, advising her followers to read the Old Testament prophets, starting with Isaiah, for insight into “God’s displeasure over injustice.” Then read through the Gospels, she wrote, and the rest of the New Testament: “Read, read, READ.”

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