Rachel Held Evans

Rachel Held Evans (1981–2019) grew up in Dayton, Tennessee — the site of the Scopes Trial — in a conservative evangelical home. She attended Bryan College, a small evangelical institution. By her late twenties she was writing from inside evangelical culture about its contradictions, its cruelties, and its capacity for reform. She was not a liberal leaving the faith. She was a believer arguing with it from within. Her 2012 book 'A Year of Biblical Womanhood' spent a year attempting to follow every instruction given to women in the Bible — including calling her husband 'master' and sitting on the roof during her period. The book was a sustained satirical argument against proof-texting complementarian theology, written with enough humor and personal specificity to reach people who would never read academic theology. LifeWay Christian Resources — the SBC's publishing and retail arm — refused to carry it, citing the word 'vagina' in the text. The refusal made national news and was itself an inadvertent illustration of her thesis. Mark Driscoll was among her critics after she led a 2011 online protest of his remarks about 'effeminate' worship leaders. The Gospel Coalition published multiple critical responses to her writing. The pattern of response revealed what she had argued: the evangelical establishment's investment in controlling women's voices was not incidental to its theology. It was structural. Evans also became one of the most visible evangelical voices affirming LGBTQ people, and one of the earliest to frame the deconstruction movement — the mass departure of millennials from evangelical Christianity — as a rational response to what the church had actually done, rather than a failure of faith formation. She died on May 4, 2019, at 37, from complications following a severe allergic reaction to an antibiotic. She was pregnant with her second child. The outpouring of grief from across the Christian world contrasted with a more muted response from some of the institutions she had challenged.

Themes this entry appears in

• Opposition / Resistance
• Patriarchy
• Gender & Patriarchy
• Anti-LGBTQ

Connections to Rachel Held Evans

• The Gospel Coalition (TGC) opposed (2012) — The Gospel Coalition published critical responses to Evans's books and essays. TGC writers argued that Evans misread Scripture, misrepresented complementarianism, and was leading a generation of evangelicals toward theological liberalism.
• Mark Driscoll opposed (2012) — In 2011, after Driscoll asked on Facebook for stories about 'effeminate' worship leaders, Rachel Held Evans urged readers to ask Mars Hill's elders to stop what she called his bullying; Driscoll responded on his blog, and Evans reported that the elders had asked him to 'do better.' His attacks had the ironic effect of amplifying her reach: audiences who had never heard of her discovered her through Driscoll's denunciations.

Sources

• A Year of Biblical Womanhood — Rachel Held Evans (2012)
• Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church — Rachel Held Evans (2015)
• Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation — Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020), pp. 248–252