Ask & You Shall Evolve

Rachel Held Evans: Millennial Matron of a Leftist Faith

Background: Born and raised in the Bible Belt, Rachel Held Evans grew up deep in an Evangelical sub-culture. A self-described "fundamentalist" until about age 20, her formative years revolved around church activities, youth group, and high-school football. She majored in English literature at Bryan College, where her father taught biblical studies, and she has since established herself as a millennial blogger, columnist, and author. A skilled writer and popular speaker, Rachel seamlessly blends Christian lingo with a humorist's wit. Her first book, Evolving in Monkeytown: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask Questions, published in 2010 and republished in 2014 as Faith Unraveled, chronicles the evolution of her faith from unquestioned certainty to uncertain questioning. Her second book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband "Master" (2012), ostensibly addresses the question, "What does God truly expect of women?" as an exploration of "biblical womanhood." It has moments of warmth and genuine humor, but overall, it reads like a yearlong passive-aggressive mockery of the faith she professes to hold. Her third book, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church (2015), seems, thankfully, to reflect a more earnest search for a satisfying church experience. Reason for Surveillance: Rachel hasn't renounced faith per se. Rather, her faith has "evolved" (her word). "To survive in a new, volatile environment," she wrote, "I had to shed old convictions and grow new ones in their place." She's the stereotypical postmodern, having rejected notions of objectivity for "the truth of my own spiritual experience," only she holds on to her Christian identity, too. But shedding convictions at the whim of personal experience is exactly what Christians are admonished in the New Testament not to do. Certainly, it's good to ask questions, but Rachel has ceased asking good questions, having adopted pop culture's shallow answers. And so, not surprisingly, the problems she sees in the world are virtually indistinguishable from the fashionable outrages du jour. They stem, not from sin in the human heart, as has been the traditional biblical understanding for millennia, but from the catalogue of politically left grievance points, such as opposition to gay marriage, white male power structures, gender inequalities, racism, and xenophobia. And if you don't see the world that way, too—if your faith isn't "evolving" alongside hers—well, prepare yourself to fall in line or become the object of a hellfire-and-brimstone "Come to Jesus" talk. Most Troubling Theme: This religious imperialism showed itself most glaringly in a blistering blog post published in the wake of the 2015 Supreme Court gay marriage decision. In "For the sake of the gospel, drop the persecution complex," she took conservative Christians to task, blaming them for a veritable kitchen-sink-full of sins and societal maladies: caricaturing and vilifying atheists; privilege- and entitlement-based attitudes; culture war posturing; self-absorbed blindness; demonization of and hostility toward LGBT people; LGBT homelessness, bullying, and suicides in the U.S. and executions overseas; animus; discrimination; hate speech; deception, and more. The chewing-out went on for nearly 3,400 words. If you don't change, she warned conservative Christians, you "will lose the Christian identity." It was an ironic censure, coming from a postmodernist. Darwinian evolution, we are told, progresses when the strong overpower the competition. But faith "evolution"—if it's going to happen at all—should never follow the Darwinian model. Rachel Evans would do well to go back to asking questions.