On a recent Saturday morning, Jeff Chu, a writer and ordinand in the Reformed Church in America—a small Protestant denomination—pushed a green grocery cart through a Whole Foods in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He was scouring the produce section for lemongrass and galangal. Chu, who is forty-four and slender, had learned to cook family-style Chinese meals from his mother and paternal grandmother. He had travelled to Chattanooga to prepare dinner that evening for twenty close friends and family members of Rachel Held Evans, an influential Christian thinker and writer, who died unexpectedly in 2019. He had brought a wheeled suitcase in which he had packed sauces wrapped in newspaper, and the Chinese greens and mushrooms that he feared would be nearly impossible to find in Chattanooga. For the rest, he’d have to improvise. “Sometimes you’ve got to make do with what you have,” he said.
Although she was only thirty-seven when she died, Held Evans had become a beloved figure in the landscape of American religion. The author of five popular books on Christianity, she employed self-deprecating wit and practical exegesis to critique the conservative evangelical subculture in which she was raised. Held Evans embodied a movement that emerged in the two-thousands among people who were becoming disillusioned with evangelicalism. Many were fleeing their churches—the portion of white evangelicals in the population dropped from twenty-three per cent to fourteen per cent between 2006 and 2020—and, to outsiders, their departure looked like the secularization of America. But the demographic was more varied than it seemed; many evangelicals were leaving megachurches with praise bands and coffee bars, but not abandoning a belief in Jesus.
To these earnest seekers, Held Evans became a patron saint. “Every generation needs dissenters, and Rachel was a sharp, faithful prophet in our midst,” Anthea Butler, the author of “White Evangelical Racism,” told me. With humility and openness, Held Evans helped reintroduce a mode of spiritual inquiry in America that was based in seeking mystery, not certainty. “She made Christianity seem like a decent place to be while you asked questions, rather than something you had to abandon to be free,” Kathryn Lofton, a professor of religious studies at Yale, said. Held Evans quickly became a major spiritual figure, appearing on television shows and serving as one of President Obama’s faith advisers. “I think Rachel would be the first person to scoff at any attempt to beatify her,” Sarah Bessey, her friend, told me. “She’s one of the few spiritual teachers I’ve known who had the humility to regularly ask herself, ‘What if I’m wrong?’ ”
On this visit, some of Held Evans’s friends and family had assembled to celebrate the publication of Held Evans’s sixth book, “Wholehearted Faith,” a posthumous memoir. When she died, Held Evans left behind 11,762 words of the unfinished manuscript, and her husband, Dan, asked Chu if he would finish the project. “Jeff is the kind of friend who shows up,” Dan told me. “He came to visit when Rachel was pregnant with Henry. He was riding right next to me when I was driving back from the hospital the night when Rachel was going to die.” Chu had reluctantly agreed, but he worried that he wouldn’t be able to capture her gifts of immediacy and authenticity. “She was so witty, both on the page and off, and she was brave,” Chu told me. Moreover, taking on the task was an admission that his friend would never be able to complete the book herself. The book, which comes out next month, is a collection of essays that continue Held Evans’s exploration of divine love and doubt.
The dinner took place at Dan’s home, a few miles outside of Dayton, Tennessee. Henry and Harper, Dan and Held Evans’s children, who are now five and three, tromped in wearing rubber boots and holding the hands of Dan’s new fiancée, Jessie. Chu gave them a hug. Since Held Evans died, Chu has visited several times to cook and freeze lasagnas and chicken pot pies for Dan, who, he said, had been living primarily on Soylent. The group gathered around the table, along with Held Evans’s parents, Robin and Peter Held, and her sister, Amanda Held Opelt. The family remains within the evangelical world: Peter teaches at Bryan College, a conservative Christian institution nearby, and, until recently, Amanda worked full time at Samaritan’s Purse, an aid organization run by the religious leader Franklin Graham. Several of Held Evans’s friends joined, including her college roommate, Kathleen Gleason, one of the people to whom the book is dedicated.“This book was not meant to be a progressive Christian manifesto,” Chu said. “It’s a pastoral letter to someone Rachel loved. It says you’re not alone because you’re questioning.”
The group laughed while sharing stories of Held Evans’s devout childhood. She often told the tale of how she had schemed to win her grade school’s “Best Christian Attitude” award four years in row. “The irony of this wasn’t lost to us at the time,” Peter said. They recalled how, as a senior, she was chagrined to be riding the bus to school, which was seen as supremely uncool. She came to believe that God had placed her there to save the souls of two atheist classmates, and began trying to bring them to Jesus. “She saw any converts she won on the bus as redemption from the humiliation,” Amanda said. Her mother added, “We should’ve bought her a car.”
The laughter quieted as the conversation turned to Held Evans’s questions about her faith. Gleason said that, in their college dorm, the two would lie awake at night while Held Evans criticized evangelical notions of Biblical womanhood. Gleason had grown up in a conservative church in Pennsylvania, and, by the time she got to college, she was certain that her duty as a Christian woman was to keep her mouth shut and stay away from boys. “I was reading this book called ‘Lady in Waiting’ that said treat Jesus as your boyfriend,” Gleason said. Held Evans helped her roommate push back. “Rachel told me I could love boys and Jesus,” Gleason said. She remained within a fundamentalist church until several years ago, when her pastor sided with President Trump’s decision to separate migrant children from their families at the border. Appalled, Gleason decided to leave the church, and went to Held Evans’s house. Held Evans sat Gleason’s toddler in front of a “Paw Patrol” cartoon with a bowl of Goldfish crackers, and held Gleason, who had started to cry. “Am I going to Hell?” Gleason asked. Held Evans replied, “Of course not.” At the dinner, Gleason turned to her friend’s parents. “If it weren’t for Rachel, I’d have lost my faith,” she told them.
One afternoon, Held Evans’s family took me on a tour of Dayton, in their S.U.V. “This is kind of a big destination for anyone interested in evangelicalism in America,” Amanda said. The town had been the site of the Scopes trial, which took place in 1925; the case centered on a science teacher—John Thomas Scopes—who had been prosecuted for teaching evolution. William Jennings Bryan, the former Secretary of State and an ardent fundamentalist, had served as the prosecutor; Clarence Darrow, a leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union(https://www.newyorker.com/tag/american-civil-liberties-union-aclu), defended Scopes. (Scopes was convicted, but later acquitted on a technicality.) On the courthouse lawn stood a statue of Bryan, cast in bronze. “Bryan was the hero defending the Bible against the liberals who didn’t believe in God and didn’t respect the Bible,” Amanda said, repeating, with skepticism, what she and her sister had absorbed as children. Darrow stood across the grassy square, looking haggard and paunchy. “There was a small resistance to that statue,” Peter said, quietly. Amanda pointed out a light fixture that illuminates Bryan’s statue. A mischievous smile flickered across her mouth. “Darrow doesn’t get a light,” she said.
Although Held Evans was raised in a conservative community, her parents encouraged her intellectual curiosity at home. Her father, a professor of theology and Christian thought, teaches a class about angelology—the study of angels, Satan, and demons, and the ongoing battle between them. As a teen-ager, Held Evans fastened a piece of duct tape that read “God is Awesome!” to her JanSport backpack, and served as the president of the Bible club. She attended Bryan College, which is named after William Jennings Bryan. Held Evans was a counsellor at a popular Christian summer camp held on Bryan’s campus. There, she was influenced by the apologetics movement, which employs intellectual arguments and critical thinking to defend faith. In a psychology class, she met Dan, and, with her signature moxie, ginned up a stargazing event and invited him to join; the two started dating soon after. Her spiritual crisis began in 2001, just after the United States invaded Afghanistan. Held Evans watched footage on CNN of the Taliban executing a woman for adultery, and confronted a question that her tidy apologetics couldn’t answer to her satisfaction: How could it be that this woman was going to Hell? She headed across campus to her father’s office, where, in pained terms, she laid out the injustice of a world in which salvation was a matter of geography. Soon, for Held Evans, other cultural and theological absolutes began to unravel.
After she graduated, she had a brief stint as a local news reporter, writing about hermit crabs and the comeback of eighties fashion trends. In 2007, Dan suggested that she start a blog about her thoughts on faith. The two formed a team: she wrote and he managed her Web site and helped her think strategically about marketing. In 2010, she published her first memoir, “Evolving in Monkey Town” (later called “Faith Unravelled”), which, at first, gained little attention outside of Dayton. In 2012, she published her second book, “A Year of Biblical Womanhood”—a tongue-in-cheek how-to for the ideal evangelical woman, who cares for her family and serves her husband like a traditional housewife. For a year, Held Evans took all of the Bible’s instructions for women literally. As we drove along the highway, Dan pointed out where his wife stood in front of the “Welcome to Dayton” sign, holding a sign of her own—a poster board that read “Dan Is Awesome!” It was a stunt she’d done for the book—a way to enact Proverbs 31:23, which says that a virtuous woman’s husband “is known at the city gates.” She also used the word “vagina” in “A Year of Biblical Womanhood,” despite being warned that, as she put it, the word would anger “the Christian bookstore gatekeepers and could prevent them from stocking it.” But the book was an enormous success; it landed Held Evans on television talk shows like “The View” and the “Today” show, cementing her role as a leader of an emerging movement. “Sure, she was on the cusp of things, or maybe she was on the front wave,” Dan said. “But she never saw herself in isolation, showing people the way.”
Held Evans was committed to seeking out those at the margins of evangelical thinking, and often encouraged little-known writers and thinkers to guest-write on her blog and share the stage at numerous conferences which she started or attended. She supported Kaitlin Curtice, an Indigenous essayist and poet, by promoting her writings on the complex inheritance of Christianity among Indigenous people. “Every new book that I’ve written, I’ve wished Rachel could read it,” Curtice told me. Held Evans’s theological commitments extended to fighting racism, sexism, and homophobia, which she saw as aspects of conservative culture, not of Christianity. The Reverend Wil Gafney, a Black professor of the Hebrew Bible at Brite Divinity School, told me that Held Evans modelled, for many, “how to be a deeply faithful Christian without literalism or other fundamentalisms.”
