Well Bred, Well Fed .  .  .

Honor Moore’s memoir is about her complex father and her complex history with him, her mother, stepmother, the Episcopal Church, and her own complicated emotional and sexual life which, like the bishop’s, has been bisexual. After this book was excerpted in the New Yorker, three of Honor Moore’s eight siblings publicly denounced her exposure of Bishop Moore’s sexual secrets. But she insists her other siblings support her, and prominent reviewers have acclaimed her narrative.

Ascribing to her priestly, charismatic father almost “supernatural” powers, Moore was initially disgusted by her father’s promiscuity and betrayals of her mother, whose depression had eventually confined her to an asylum. But her disappointment was mingled with continued enchantment, and she employs her father’s larger-than-life story to explain her own journey before and after his death.

The enchantment was understandable. Bishop Moore, filling pulpits with his flowing robes and booming voice, speaking the cadence of King James English amid the organ blasts, was a powerful presence to anyone, especially an admiring daughter: “In the sacristy, my father left being a father and a husband to become someone more like God, God who had a son but no daughters, God who had had a son without touching a woman,” she recalls.

It’s tempting to dismiss The Bishop’s Daughter as one more Episcopal psychosexual melodrama. But Honor Moore’s descriptive prose is tightly poetic and tells a story that opens a sad window into what was once the Protestant elite. “My father always wanted me to write about him,” she wrote just two weeks after his death.

Paul Moore was converted to High Church Anglicanism while an adolescent at St. Paul’s School. While studying at Yale he joined the Marine Corps and fought heroically at Guadalcanal, swimming a river to rescue two fellow Marines while under Japanese machine-gun fire. Later, he led bayonet charges and was wounded by a Japanese hand grenade. Even when injured he urged his unit on until he fell unconscious. A Japanese bullet pierced his torso, leaving chest and back scars that his little daughter would later stare at during summers on the lake.

Back from the war he penned an eloquent recollection of his time in combat. He also married a young woman who was, herself, of distinguished New England heritage, and who converted from nonbelief to Episcopalianism at his urging. Studying partly at Union Theological Seminary in New York, Moore encountered Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. The Niebuhrs attended the Moores’ wedding, Mrs. Moore having taken classes from Ursula Niebuhr. She suggested that her new Republican husband would not be harmed by exposure to the “liberal slant” at Union, but Paul Moore was skeptical about postwar plans for peace:

“There is no permanent value in building more and more economic, diplomatic, social, and political cages for the lion or human beast,” he wrote. “Rather, he’s got to be trained from the inside out, then the cages are immaterial. So–let the diplomats and hot-shots decide their treaties.”

He preferred another solution: “Our job, as Christians, is to think and pray like hell so that God can someday enter the lion’s heart.”

While at seminary, Paul Moore had his first full-fledged affair with another man, who also was married. Paul and his wife begin to see psychiatrists. But they were both committed to the church: His first parish was in a rough neighborhood of Jersey City where On the Waterfront would later be filmed. The Moores immersed themselves in helping the poor and befriended Dorothy Day of The Catholic Worker. Their dinner table was regularly filled with clergy, intellectuals, and activists of different races discussing the great issues of the postwar world.

Later the Moores served at a mission church in New York before Paul was appointed cathedral dean in Indianapolis, where he attempted to integrate the congregation amid much resistance from the vestry–except for the pharmaceutical mogul Eli Lilly, who was fully supportive. Moore belonged to the NAACP and Planned Parenthood and was by now an enthusiastic social liberal.

“I saw Jesus Christ in the faces of the poor,” he explained. His friends now included Catholics and Jews who voted Democratic and subscribed to the New York Times as a corrective to the conservative Indianapolis press. The Moores, who had withdrawn from the New York Social Register, shunned a country club that excluded Jews and an amusement park that forbade blacks.

When Paul was elected suffragan bishop in Washington, the Moores excitedly moved to the nation’s capital, where they already had many friends, including John F. Kennedy and his national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, Cord Meyer of the CIA, and Benjamin Bradlee of the Washington Post. The Reverend Moore was consecrated as Bishop Moore amid much fanfare at the National Cathedral, and crowds afterwards surrounded him, one man kissing his ring.

Honor, by now in college, noticed a new solemnity as people addressed her as a bishop’s daughter. The Moores lived in a big Cleveland Park house, even while ministering to the poor, but were almost relieved to learn that they ranked on a “very low rung” of the Washington social ladder, on a par with the “low judiciary.”

Bishop Moore was invited to co-chair a clerical organization called the Coalition of Conscience to push for social justice in Washington, D.C. Moore traveled to Mississippi to register black voters and addressed 15,000 civil rights demonstrators across the street from the White House. Moore threw away his prepared text: “The bodies of white men may be at liberty, but to the extent of their prejudice, their souls are in chains,” he exclaimed. “The bodies of Negro Americans are in chains, but those who are in the movement are the freest men in the world, for their souls are free.” According to Newsweek the suffragan bishop of Washington was “a leader of the new breed” of clergy.

Meanwhile, Honor Moore went to Radcliffe, where she lost her virginity to a Harvard undergraduate she thought would marry her. The bishop told her that premarital sex is unwise, but he did not call it sinful, which left her with “freedom and confusion.” A counselor at Radcliffe advised that promiscuity means 10 or more sexual partners, and Honor vowed to reach the ceiling, bedding a series of aspiring artists and philosophers, and undergoing an abortion. She raised funds for the Black Panthers and joined a women’s consciousness-raising group. Her mother wrote a memoir of their life in Jersey City, appeared on the Today show, posed for Life, campaigned for her friend Eugene McCarthy, and was gassed at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

In 1969 Moore became bishop of New York, where he was welcomed by a dinner party hosted by his fellow Episcopalian, Mayor John Lindsay, and took up residence next door to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. He and his wife agreed to an open marriage, but Mrs. Moore soon died of colon cancer. Honor Moore later learned that her mother had discerned her husband’s bisexuality very gradually, over the years, but had never confronted him. Paul Moore was soon re-married to a Virginia widow.

In the mid-1970s Honor embarked on a series of lesbian romances, the first with an ex-nun. At about the same time (1977) her father ordained the Episcopal Church’s first openly lesbian priest. His fellow bishops declined to censure him. His retirement as bishop was prompted by his second wife’s discovery of his secret bisexual life, forcing him to confess (partially) to his children. Honor told him that she felt betrayed by his deception, and he angrily accused her of hypocrisy because of her own status as a lesbian. Later, after a priest alleged sexual harassment, Moore was quietly inhibited from ecclesial duties.

The second Mrs. Moore drank herself to death, but the ex-bishop led an active retirement, speaking and traveling. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, he returned to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and thundered from the pulpit: “What kind of Christian is a man who prays alone in the White House before proceeding with a war that millions across the earth of all faiths have protested?”

When confronted by his imminent death from cancer, Honor Moore asked her father about an afterlife. “I don’t know,” he responded. “I think I’ll just go to sleep.” And then added: “No one has really come back from the afterlife.”

“No one except Jesus,” she said, to which the bishop replied: “And he was a little, maybe a little, nuts.”

After his funeral Honor Moore visited her father’s female lovers, and at least one male lover. She herself has reverted to heterosexuality, but professes to honor her father’s legacy, linking it to the 2003 consecration of Gene Robinson, the Episcopal Church’s first openly homosexual bishop.

Apparently neither Honor nor any of her eight siblings have themselves joined any church, and her father’s decades of duplicity–which seem to have sent one wife to an asylum and another to death from alcoholism–combined with a sanctimonious political “activism,” do not paint a pretty picture. But Honor Moore claims that the writing of The Bishop’s Daughter was therapeutic, after decades of psychiatric care, and the reader can only hope that it was helpful. It certainly is painfully honest.

Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, is the author of Taking Back the United Methodist Church.