II. The Scandal

Mark Noll famously began his 1994 book, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”Footnote ⁵ Noll argues that “modern American evangelicals have failed notably in sustaining serious intellectual life.”Footnote ⁶ Noll points to the creation of separate evangelical and fundamentalist institutions – colleges and seminaries – as one of the limiting factors on the evangelical mind.Footnote ⁷ Evangelical scholars – at least, after their graduate training – are not typically exposed to colleagues with a diversity of experiences and intellectual conclusions, and are also not exposed to the latest thinking in theology or other disciplines outside the bounds of evangelicalism. This intentional division prevents cross-pollination that would lead to innovation, deepening, and expansion of thought. Moreover, the systematic exclusion of other points of view – either from other evangelicals or from non-evangelical Christians or non-Christians – at evangelical institutions means that evangelical scholars are ill-equipped to navigate differing theological viewpoints, which is integral to living in a religiously plural democracy.

Noll was not the only historian to identify the failures of evangelical intellectualism. Richard Hofstadter, in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, likewise diagnosed “the evangelical spirit” as one of the main sources of anti-intellectualism in America.Footnote ⁸ Historian George Marsden located the anti-intellectualism present in fundamentalism, neo-evangelicalism’s early twentieth-century predecessor.Footnote ⁹ Fundamentalism, according to Marsden, could be defined as “militant antimodernism.”Footnote ¹⁰ Rather than containing an intellectual core of its own, early twentieth-century fundamentalism was reactionary in nature, fearing for the fate of Christianity in the face of new intellectual currents coming out of Europe, including historical-critical biblical interpretations and evolutionary theory. According to Marsden, midcentury neo-evangelicalism, though still fundamentalist, tempered its stridency for the purpose of evangelism. However, Marsden argues that toward the end of the 1970s, “fundamentalistic evangelicalism” re-emerged from neo-evangelicalism to animate the Religious Right.Footnote ¹¹ According to Marsden, this fundamentalistic evangelicalism remained dominant through the early twenty-first century, when he was writing. British historian W.R. Ward suggests an essential change within British evangelicalism in the nineteenth century, in which biblical inerrancy, premillennial dispensationalism, and propositional systems led to the denigration of a vibrant early evangelical intellectual culture.Footnote ¹² I would argue that these intellectual trends also took hold in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century and were solidified in new ways toward the end of the century.

In her nuanced history, Molly Worthen argues that, rather than evincing a simple tendency toward anti-intellectualism, evangelicalism is shaped by a “crisis of authority,” or evangelicals’ inability to discern what is intellectual truth when confronted with various theological authorities.Footnote ¹³ When one figure’s theological ideas inevitably clashed with another’s, there was no single authority to reconcile these differences. This crisis is the result of the lack of denominational unity and hierarchy of authority in the evangelical tradition, since all people, including laypersons, are free to interpret the scriptures as they wish and argue about their interpretation with the popular voices of their day.

At times, the lack of authority structure in the evangelical tradition has given it the institutional flexibility to allow the inclusion of a wider diversity of leadership. Nathan Hatch notes in The Democratization of American Christianity that evangelicals’ suspicion of intellectual elites allowed evangelicals to accept those without formal education as leaders and preachers in the early nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁴ Eschewing the credentialing of higher education ushered in an extensive tradition of lay ministry in evangelicalism, including the lay ministry of those, including women and people of color, who historically had limited access to higher education. Indeed, early evangelical women like Jarena Lee and Sarah Osborn took direction directly from the Holy Spirit to preach and teach before their congregations recognized their authority.Footnote ¹⁵ In the late eighteenth century, Sarah Osborn gathered up to 500 believers, men and women, enslaved and free, into her home for Bible studies, despite the frequent criticism of her minister.Footnote ¹⁶ In the nineteenth century, Jarena Lee’s calling from God, experienced as a “fire shut up in my bones,” outweighed the reticence of her pastor Richard Allen, who later confirmed her calling after a public display of her gifts.Footnote ¹⁷ On the other hand, evangelicals’ emphasis on flexible leadership could tend toward platforming those already in power – in the American context, this meant white men. Democratization sometimes slipped into populism, and demagogues rose to quelch marginal voices. Those figures with the most charisma, which was culturally determined and often privileged those who fit racial and gendered ideals, rose to the top.Footnote ¹⁸ In some cases, the platforming of those already at the top of gendered, racial, and class hierarchies was intentional. Historian Christine Heyrman argues that evangelical missionaries in the antebellum South abandoned evangelicalism’s emphasis on radical spiritual equality and accommodated racialized slavery to gain adherents.Footnote ¹⁹

To handle the crisis of authority, evangelical leaders throughout its history have appointed themselves the arbiters of evangelical doctrine and the king-makers of the movement. As scholar Isaac Sharp argues in The Other Evangelicals, evangelical leaders in the twentieth century strategically curated a narrow definition of an evangelical Christian that added “accoutrements” to the central theological tenets of historic evangelicalism. These leaders curated the boundaries of evangelicalism to define an evangelical as one who “believed like an antimodernist antiliberal inerrantist, thought like an anti-feminist antigay complementarian, and voted like a white Republican.”Footnote ²⁰ Evangelicalism’s self-appointed authority figures actively sidelined and maligned those who did not believe or act in this way, including theological liberals, political progressives, feminists, gay Christians, and Black evangelicals. Marginalized within evangelical institutions, they were compelled either to assert their right to identify as evangelical despite ostracism or to opt out of this self-definition and leave their religious communities. One prominent twenty-first-century evangelical figure forced to make this painful choice was the late author Rachel Held Evans.

III. An Evangelical Mind

Rachel Held Evans (1981–2019) was born into a conservative evangelical family in Birmingham, Alabama. When she was 13, the Helds moved to Dayton, Tennessee, where she lived for the rest of her life. The daughter of two educators, she took to reading early and developed a love of words – the sacred words of the Christian scriptures, the narrative words of fictional books, words plucked from their context and listed in her thesaurus. Her mother, Robin, was a fourth-grade teacher who had graduated summa cum laude from her alma mater, and her father, Peter, was a college professor and administrator who held three graduate degrees, including a Master of Divinity from Dallas Theological Seminary and a doctorate in education from a research university. Both her parents believed in the integrity of the academic disciplines – in science, in psychology, in history, and in literature, which became her concentration in college. Evans specified in her writing that while her parents were conservative theologically and politically, they were not fundamentalist.Footnote ²¹ Her mother, Robin, had grown up in a fundamentalist home and was wary of what she called “legalism.”Footnote ²² Peter and Robin Held encouraged wide reading as well as honest discussion and disagreement within the household, even disagreement on theology.

During college and afterward, Evans encountered the boundaries of the evangelical mind when she began to question fundamentalist doctrines, including a six-day creation, the unsuitability of women for ministry, and the inherent sinfulness of LGBTQ people. Using her tools of reason, scriptural analysis, and observation of the world, she questioned the veracity of what she considered to be “disputable matters” of the Christian faith and faced intense backlash from conservative evangelicals for doing so.

Over the course of her adult life, Evans sustained what Noll called an “evangelical life of the mind.”Footnote ²³ Most of what she wrote on her blog, in print books, and on social media dealt with her Christian beliefs and ethics. Evans did her thinking and writing from a core belief in a loving God, demonstrated most fully in the life of Jesus, who, through the Holy Spirit, guided her and all of humanity, which God had created in God’s image.

With her bachelor’s degree in literature and her training in journalism, Evans read, researched, and conducted fieldwork for her books, successfully gaining a wide audience who appreciated her clear, informed, and at times humorous writing style. Evans’s respect for academics and the work they produced was evident in her writing, which was filled with scholarly sources on scripture, theology, and politics. When Jeff Chu finished Evans’s incomplete manuscript, Wholehearted Faith, after her death, he joked that while he was the seminary graduate, all the references to theological sources came from Evans.Footnote ²⁴ Evans’s interest in theological questions began in her childhood.

Evans had a base of biblical knowledge from her evangelical upbringing and her courses at her Christian college. She also had a Southern feminine charm that was part of the charisma that attracted her followers to her. But her intellect was the spark that led to her ostracization from the evangelical movement. Evans had the kind of curiosity that defines the intellectual vitality so valued at institutions of higher learning. Never satisfied with pat answers or contradictory statements, she sought intellectually satisfying, coherent ideas. When that inquiry led her outside the bounds of dominant conservative evangelical viewpoints, she found herself outside evangelicalism entirely.

IV. Hell and Suffering

The September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the United States occurred halfway through Evans’s college years at Bryan College. Walking past fellow students who were watching the documentary Beneath the Veil, aired on CNN, she stopped to watch footage of the execution of a Muslim woman whom she later learned was named Zarmina.Footnote ²⁵ As she learned more about women who suffered violence under Taliban rule, Evans worried about their eternal salvation. She had been taught in her “Christian worldview” class that anyone, even other theists, who did not share a “Christian worldview,” meaning a Christian faith recognizable to mainstream American evangelicalism, would go to hell.Footnote ²⁶ She began to ask friends and family what they thought happened to Muslim women who were executed by the Taliban. She doubted that God would punish women born into other religions after death, especially women who had already suffered so much in life. She stayed up late into the night thinking about Zarmina and other women under the Taliban who unjustly suffered in their lives on earth before proceeding to eternal damnation. It was not the first time she had doubted the theology of salvation she was taught within conservative evangelical churches and schools. In middle school, when she read The Diary of Anne Frank, she asked her teacher what happened to the Jewish girl after death, and was dissatisfied when her teacher evaded her question.Footnote ²⁷ Evans later noted that “The doubts I wrestled with most profoundly as a young adult were doubts related to salvation and religious pluralism. Those doubts often took the form of a single question in my mind: ‘Did Anne Frank go to hell?’”Footnote ²⁸ For Evans, these intellectual questions were also questions of conscience.Footnote ²⁹

The September 11 attacks renewed her questions about the eternal salvation of adherents of other religions and became the first crack in the system of the conservative evangelical “worldview” that she was taught at Bryan College, Summit Ministries, and other evangelical institutions. These questions blossomed into other doubts about the six-day creation, the submission of women in the church and home, and the inerrancy of scripture.

V. The Concept of a Biblical Worldview

In her early twenties, Evans began doubting the cohesion of the conservative evangelical package that had been presented to her as the “biblical worldview.” She volunteered as a youth counselor at an apologetics conference led by Summit Ministries. Summit Ministries, founded in 1962, offers “training in apologetics, worldview analysis, and social engagement” through camp-style conferences for high school students on college campuses.Footnote ³⁰ Founded as the Christian Anti-Communism Summer College, the ministry’s purpose from its inception was political indoctrination.Footnote ³¹ It aimed to counteract the “Marxism” taught at public high schools. The ministry expanded in 1989 after Focus on the Family leader James Dobson began promoting it on his radio program. In the 2000s, Summit Ministries ran a summer institute at Bryan College. When she attended the institute as a volunteer counselor, Evans was confused and disturbed by the narrow viewpoints taught by the leaders. Speakers presented beliefs that even her parents, conservative evangelicals, did not hold as gospel truth, and in several cases, speakers directly contradicted what her parents and church had taught her. One speaker condemned Christian students attending public schools, which Evans had done. Another condemned the idea of global warming as a left-wing conspiracy; another spoke of the dangers of feminism.Footnote ³² She felt that speakers lifted isolated passages from the Bible to support each plank in the Republican party platform. Though she voted Republican at the time, as did her family, she felt that the conservative apologists promoted primarily oppositional politics rather than Christianity.

Evans began to doubt the assemblage of theological and intellectual issues that constituted a “biblical worldview” as presented to her by Bryan college and the evangelical culture of her childhood.

The belief in a “Christian worldview,” which was disseminated widely by youth ministries and Christian colleges, was central to the apologetics movement of the 1990s and early 2000s. Responding to the perceived spread of what conservative evangelicals labeled “secular humanism,” which they considered a competing belief system, the apologetics movement sought to disseminate an equally cohesive worldview that would inoculate evangelical Christians against it. During this time, the evangelical subculture was awash in products arguing for the intellectual viability and superiority of Christianity. Evans had been formed by listening to audio tapes by apologist Ravi Zacharias in her mother’s car and reading popular books like Lee Strobel’s Case for Christ. The apologetics movement provided tight intellectual arguments for the existence of God and the truth of Christianity. Young people like Evans were instructed to argue their peers – and themselves – into Christian belief.

The concept of the “biblical worldview” was a fundamental piece of the curriculum at Bryan College, the conservative Christian college where Evans attended and her father worked in Dayton. Every student at Bryan College, including Evans, was required to take “The Worldview Course.” Bill Brown, the president of Bryan College during Evans’s tenure, and professor Gary Phillips created the course, and several professors taught the course, including Evans’s father, Peter Held, who at one time held the title “Senior Fellow for Christian Worldview.” In the course, professors presented a survey of what they considered the three worldviews that encompassed all major religions and philosophies: theism, naturalism, and transcendentalism. The course categorized monotheistic religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, under theism. Atheism and agnosticism were considered naturalism. “Transcendentalism,” a term borrowed from the nineteenth-century philosophical and literary movement in New England, was used to describe varying spiritual beliefs, including pantheism, mysticism, and New Age spiritualities. The course systematically evaluated each worldview other than theism and ruled them out as appropriate explanations of reality. Finally, even other religions within “theism” were deemed insufficient, leaving the “biblical worldview,” which was equated with evangelical Christianity. Students were taught to defend the “biblical worldview” by asking non-evangelicals skeptical questions that should inevitably lead them to the truth.

In addition to The Worldview Course, Bryan College also had a “Worldview Team” that toured the South performing skits and talks for high school and college students.Footnote ³⁴ It performed locally, including at Bryan College chapel services, and traveled during school breaks to spread its message to other parts of the region. Bryan president Bill Brown founded and led the Worldview Team from 1995 to 1999, when it was taken over by John Stonestreet, an assistant professor of Bible.Footnote ³⁵ Evans’s best friend from high school and her boyfriend, Dan Evans, were members of The Worldview Team. A student team member named Michael Carter wrote in the 2001 yearbook The Commoner, “We asked them to open their minds and approach media – television, movies, and music – from a biblical worldview.”Footnote ³⁶ The team primarily aimed to encourage Christian high schoolers to view things “biblically,” rather than to evangelize non-Christian students. They believed that someone could identify as a Christian but still not hold a “biblical worldview.” Another student, Jen Vanden Heuval, was quoted in the 2002 Commoner saying, “The concept of Worldview is so interwoven with the subject matter of classes at Bryan that I sometimes forget that the idea is actually revolutionary.”Footnote ³⁷ This comment indicates the particular salience the concept of a “worldview” held at Bryan in the early 2000s when Evans attended.

The idea of a worldview (weltanschauung) originated with German philosopher Immanuel Kant and was first applied to Christianity by James Orr in 1890. According to theologian Michelle Sanchez, the articulation of a Christian worldview served to claim “epistemic certainty, conceptual stability, and rational integrity.”Footnote ³⁸ It made contemporary evangelical theological interpretations of the Christian faith seem traditional and historical rather than contextual and contested. It extracted a concept that was rooted in Kant’s historical and cultural context without attention to these specificities. This usage ignored the variety of Christian thought across time and space, defining Christianity as a unified belief system. Historian Molly Worthen calls worldview a “powerful rhetorical strategy” used to distinguish between sacred and secular intellectual frameworks.Footnote ³⁹ It was, therefore, a tool conservative Christians used to define themselves against both a secularizing world and against theologically and politically liberal incarnations of the Christian faith.

In the late twentieth century, the concept of a Christian worldview was popularized as part of the apologetics movement and in parallel to the rise of the Religious Right. Historian Simon P. Kennedy calls the idea of a Christian Worldview a “combat concept,” a weapon for cultural and political battle.Footnote ⁴⁰ In the 1970s, it was reincarnated by Dutch Reformed thinker Cornelius Van Til and popularized by figures including Francis Schaeffer, Chuck Colson, and Nancy Pearcy. According to Van Til’s worldview epistemology, all knowledge is either based on Christian presuppositions or non-Christian presuppositions, and the latter will inevitably lead to falsehoods that contradict Christianity.Footnote ⁴¹ By this logic, only those who accept the authority of Christ can produce true knowledge.

In each of these historical manifestations, the use of the idea of the Christian worldview was a defensive and reactionary tactic. It sought to provide Christians with certainty in an environment of increasing religious and intellectual diversity. The concept of a Christian worldview became especially popular in the first two decades of the twenty-first century among conservative evangelicals. The Family Research Council, a conservative think-tank, has a Center for Biblical Worldview, and the Colson Center had a Center for Christian Worldview, where both Bill Brown and John Stonestreet worked after leaving Bryan College.Footnote ⁴² For students and professors at Bryan College at the turn of the twenty-first century, one of the components of a biblical worldview was the belief in a literal six-day creation and a young earth.

VI. Creationism

As a child in a conservative evangelical household and church in the 1980s and 1990s, Evans absorbed the idea of six-day, young-earth creationism, which excluded biological evolutionary theories early. Her rejection of the illustrated science in the children’s book Tell Me Why demonstrated her belief that, as a Christian, she was bound to reject commonly accepted science that pointed to an old earth. It was not a coincidence that once she began doubting the coherence of the evangelical “worldview,” anti-evolutionism was one of the first issues that drew her attention. Indeed, anti-evolution thinking was central to the conservative evangelicalism in which she had been raised, as well as to the Christian culture of Dayton. The Scopes Trial of 1925 still loomed over Dayton, embodied in the preserved Rhea County Courthouse, which hosted a yearly reenactment of the trial.Footnote ⁴³

The doctrine of six-day creation and a young earth was not a widespread or traditionally held Christian belief before the mid-twentieth century. Church theologians throughout history, including Augustine of Hippo, had largely interpreted the text figuratively, believing that the “days” in the Genesis 1 account represented eras of time rather than twenty-four-hour periods. In fact, Augustine warned other Christians against speaking “nonsense” that contradicted the science of the day, lest people lose faith in the reliability of the biblical text all together.Footnote ⁴⁴

Protestant belief in a literal, six-day creation began with Seventh Day Adventism’s founder, Ellen White’s nineteenth-century visions. White accused “infidel geologists” of contradicting the biblical record by dating the earth as more than 6,000 years old.Footnote ⁴⁵ She strongly opposed Darwinism and Christian efforts to accommodate Darwin’s theory. Through the early twentieth century, a plurality of Christian views co-existed, with some allowing for evolution. The authors of The Fundamentals, after which the fundamentalist movement was named, held varying beliefs, with some accommodating evolution into a theory of old-earth creationism that maintained God used evolution as the method of creation.

In the 1920s, some prominent Protestants, including Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson and politician William Jennings Bryan, railed against the dangers of evolutionary theory. Some U.S. states, including Tennessee, moved to ban the teaching of evolution in public schools. The American Civil Liberties Union wished to challenge Tennessee’s Butler Act of 1925, and businesspeople in the town of Dayton, Tennessee, convinced teacher John T. Scopes to be the test case. Scopes, who opposed the Butler Act on principle, agreed to be prosecuted under the Butler Act, defended by the ACLU. The prosecution hired Bryan, a three-time Democratic presidential candidate. Nicknamed “The Commoner,” Bryan prided himself on protecting the interests of the common people, including the right of parents to not have their children taught scientific theories that contradicted their Christian faith. In the trial, the court upheld the Butler Act and convicted and fined John Scopes. The ACLU paid the $100 fine. Northern public opinion, shaped by negative portrayals in the news media, especially by journalist H.L. Mencken, was critical of the fundamentalist religion embodied by the small Southern town. This episode was one of several that historian Angie Maxwell argued triggered “an expression of defiant pride manifested by a regional inferiority complex” that existed among white Southerners.Footnote ⁴⁶

The mid-twentieth century led to new battles over the compatibility between evolutionary theory and scriptural truth. Baptist theologian and philosopher Bernard Ramm published The Christian View of Science and Scripture in 1954.Footnote ⁴⁷ Just as Augustine had, Ramm argued for the necessity of harmony between modern science and the Christian faith. Ramm developed what he called Progressive Creationism, which simultaneously advocated for God as creator and for an old earth as supported by geologists. Like many Christian theologians before him, Ramm interpreted the days in Genesis as long periods of time, in his case, millions of years. Many prominent evangelicals, including Billy Graham, welcomed the book.Footnote ⁴⁸ In response, John C. Whitcomb and Henry Morris published The Genesis Flood, a version of Whitcomb’s dissertation, in 1961.Footnote ⁴⁹ Their book argued for young-earth creationism and a worldwide flood in the time of Noah. Rather than providing scientific evidence for a worldwide flood, the book relied wholly on claims made from biblical texts, and it became a catalyst for the “creation science” industry within U.S. evangelicalism.

In 1972, Henry Morris founded the Institute for Creation Research, which is still active today. The institute and similar organizations attempted to construct what they called “scientific creation” or “creation science” as a legitimate alternative to evolutionary science. Though creation science never gained acceptance in the scientific community, its advocates pried their way into educational institutions. While a 1968 Supreme Court decision had overruled state laws such as Tennessee’s Butler Act banning the teaching of evolution, creation scientists fought for equal classroom time given to creation science as to evolution in public schools, and in some states were successful.

As a resident of Dayton, Tennessee, Evans was steeped in creationism. She attended Rhea County High School, where John Scopes taught before his conviction. Though teaching evolution was no longer illegal in Tennessee, many Dayton parents were relieved that some science teachers routinely skipped portions of the textbooks that covered evolution.Footnote ⁵⁰

When she attended Bryan College as an undergraduate student, named for William Jennings Bryan, the Scopes Trial prosecutor, Evans took a course with professor and creation scientist Kurt Wise. A paleontologist who had studied at Harvard with leading evolutionary biologist Stephen Gould, the charismatic Wise sought to reconcile scientific evidence with his biblical interpretation, which required a literal six-day creation. “Only a Biblical worldview gives us good reason to believe the presuppositions of science,” he wrote in Bryan Life, Bryan’s alumni magazine, in 2003.Footnote ⁵¹ His courses sought to convince students of the scientific viability of a literal interpretation of the scriptural account of creation and history, including an earth less than 6,000 years old. As he did with many Bryan students, Wise persuaded Evans – at first.

In her 20s, Evans abandoned the belief in young-earth creationism that she had been taught at Bryan and in her churches. After reading Christian geneticist Francis Collins’s The Language of God, Old Testament scholar John Walton’s The Lost World of Genesis One, physicist Karl Giberson’s Saving Darwin, and biologist Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is True, she was convinced that belief in evolution could coexist with Christian belief.Footnote ⁵² She also read historical theology relating to creation, including Augustine. She attended a conference at Gordon College with the Biologos Forum, an organization for conversation about faith and science founded by Collins.Footnote ⁵³ “I did my due diligence to love God with my mind, even when it required a dramatic shift in my perspective,” she wrote.Footnote ⁵⁴ These efforts demonstrate the lengths Evans went to in her pursuit of intellectual truth.

After leaving behind young-earth creationism, Evans believed that conservative evangelicals’ promotion of creation science over accepted evolutionary science erected an obstacle to Christian belief for other young people like herself. Her first book, published in 2010 when she was 29, was originally titled Evolving in Monkey Town. In it, she reflected on her changing faith in Dayton, the town that symbolized the rejection of evolutionary theory. In a blog the same year, she wrote,

Though she did not leave her Christian faith behind when she came to a belief in evolution, Evans’s pursuit of intellectual integrity took her beyond the bounds of conservative evangelicalism.

VII. A Christian Journalist

Part of Evans’s intellectual development occurred through her training as a journalist. From a young age, she aimed to be a writer. When she entered Bryan College, she immediately enrolled in the “Introduction to Reporting” course with journalism professor John Carpenter. From her freshman to her junior year, she took all six courses in journalism offered at Bryan. As part of the courses, she wrote for the college newspaper, The Triangle. According to Carpenter, Evans was eminently motivated and teachable, taking seriously her work and the lessons he imparted from his experience as a journalist for the local Dayton paper, the Herald-News. Footnote ⁵⁶ During her college career, she was promoted from reporter to associate editor to editor of The Triangle, a role she held as a junior. Before she graduated, she applied and was accepted to attend the World Journalism Institute, which trained Christian journalists.

At the World Journalism Institute in the summer of 2003, Evans clashed with the leadership over Christian belief and the purpose of journalism. World Journalism Institute was associated with God’s World Publications, which published WORLD Magazine, an evangelical periodical. The Institute was founded by Bob Case, who was a board member of God’s World Publication. He had also worked for Campus Crusade for Christ, served as the director of the pro-life organization Christian Action Council, worked as a pastor in the Presbyterian Church in America, and was a member of the National Council on Vocational Education under President Ronald Reagan.Footnote ⁵⁷ Case ran the 2003 summer institute that Evans attended. The way Case understood the Christian faith clashed with Evans’s beliefs. Case, a Presbyterian, was Reformed, while Rachel had been raised in non-denominational Bible churches that balanced Calvinist and Arminian theology. Though Evans had interacted with Reformed Christians before, including her journalism professor John Carpenter, Case expressed his beliefs in a particularly antagonistic manner. At the Institute, Case ridiculed Christians like Evans who were not Reformed.Footnote ⁵⁸ Just as the particular view of Christianity presented by Summit Ministries had caused her to doubt the packaged beliefs of the “biblical worldview,” Case’s presentation of Reformed theology as the only viable soteriology aggravated Evans. She was bothered by the evangelical tendency toward certainty to the exclusion of other Christian perspectives.

After the World Journalism Institute, Evans moved with her new husband, Dan, to Chattanooga, Tennessee, to pursue an internship with the Chattanooga Times Free Press. Unlike many of her World Journalism Institute peers, the Institute placed Evans at a secular rather than a Christian newspaper. There, she developed her writing under the mentorship of experienced journalists, interacting for the first time with non-evangelical journalists. After her internship year, she and Dan returned to Dayton, where she took a position as a community news reporter at The Herald-News, her hometown newspaper, alongside her former professor and mentor, John Carpenter. At The Herald-News, she wrote a variety of articles and won prizes from the Tennessee Press Association for two separate genres – a feature story and a humor column.Footnote ⁵⁹

VIII. Doubts and Digital Media

Though Evans was trained to be and worked as a professional journalist, her ultimate goal was to become a book author. While she worked on her first book, Evans’s husband, Dan, who was gifted with technology, suggested she start a blog. Blogs, originally termed “weblogs” in the late 1990s, had evolved from two types of websites: meta-commentaries linking to other websites and online diaries.Footnote ⁶⁰ While she was initially skeptical about the medium, Evans began to write an eponymous blog, Rachel Held Evans, in 2007. She wanted to distinguish her blog from the informality of many blogs at the time and developed one that was akin to her topic-driven journalism.Footnote ⁶¹ On her blog, she wrote about her doubts about dominant conservative evangelicalism, including topics like creation, scriptural inerrancy, and gender roles. Even as she explored her theological disagreements with conservative evangelicalism, her blog posts and books reflected common evangelical emphases: the importance of scripture and the necessity of activism, including the commission to spread the good news of Jesus.Footnote ⁶² Writing on her blog was a form of evangelism. When she derived what she considered to be more accurate interpretations of scripture passages than the ones she had learned in conservative churches, she set out to spread the word. Through the internet, her words traveled across state and national borders, gathering a digital community of like-minded feminists, many of whom shared her conservative evangelical background.

The popularization of the internet in the first two decades of the twenty-first century coincided with Evans’s young adulthood, bringing her new opportunities for broad exposure to diverse people and viewpoints. When she started her blog in 2007, her readers interacted with her in comments on the blog and through email. Her relationship to her readers, especially in the beginning when she was not well-known, was more than parasocial. For example, an interaction with one of her early blog readers affected the way she thought about LGBTQ inclusion and the sacrament of baptism. After corresponding with him through her blog, Evans met 19-year-old Andrew in person at a conference, where he then invited Evans to his baptism in Missouri. Andrew was a pastor’s son who had been rejected by his family after coming out as gay.Footnote ⁶³ Though Evans was unable to attend, she watched the video of the baptism he sent her and was touched by his excitement at finally being included in Christian community by his affirming church. This interaction was one of many instances in which Evans’s interactions with her readers on the internet impacted her, even as she was impacting them. She did not have many gay friends in Dayton, but through her blog, she was introduced to diverse Christians from around the United States and throughout the English-speaking world.

Evans’s thinking – and her readers’ – was also influenced by her blog series, “Ask A…” In the first post of the series, she introduced her readers to a featured guest who had a particular perspective different from her own and invited readers to ask that person questions. In a second post, she included a selection of these questions and the answers the guest provided. The series included “Ask a racial reconciler” with Austin Channing Brown, “Ask a transgender Christian” with Lisa Salazar, “Ask Brian McLaren” with the Emerging Church leader, “Ask a Universalist” with Robin Parry, “Ask a Calvinist” with Justin Taylor, and “Ask a Muslim” with Khurram Dara.Footnote ⁶⁴ These topics and guests indicate the breadth of Evans’s intellectual interests and influences. She did not share theological views with all of her guests, but she invited her readers to consider their experiences and their viewpoints.

In addition to evolution, Evans made gender roles a prominent topic of the blog. While Evans had resisted conservative evangelical gender ideals since her college years, the research she did for her second book project strengthened her feminist position.Footnote ⁶⁵ Leading up to the publication of her second book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, Evans wrote a series of blog posts questioning the subordination of women in a series entitled “Week of Mutuality.” She used one post to reinterpret Proverbs 31, a passage central to the complementarian view of the Bible.Footnote ⁶⁶ She argued, informed by a Jewish friend and by biblical commentaries, that Proverbs 31 is not a list of activities and attributes for women to embody, but rather a model for men to praise the women in their lives for their daily triumphs by calling them a woman of valor, eschet chayil. In response to this post, many of Evans’s readers began calling their friends and families by this moniker. Some even tattooed it on themselves.Footnote ⁶⁷

In her writing on gender roles, Evans described herself as an “accidental feminist” because she claimed her views on the equality of women came from scripture.Footnote ⁶⁸ “I didn’t learn to be a feminist from Margaret Atwood or Simone de Beauvoir,” she wrote, revealing her familiarity with these authors, “I learned to be a feminist from Jesus.”Footnote ⁶⁹ She wrote that although conservative evangelicalism had taught her patriarchy, it had also taught her women’s equality. Listing evangelical Bible scholars whose work she had read, including Gordon Fee and Scot McKnight, she explained that their egalitarian interpretations of scripture convinced her of Jesus’ “good news for women.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Evans’s description of her development as a feminist as “accidental” belied her serious consideration of both evangelical and secular sources in her research on the subject.

IX. Intellectual Development

Despite living in a small, conservative town and attending a small Christian college founded as a bastion of conservative Protestantism, Evans found ways to broaden her intellectual horizons beyond the divisions imposed by evangelical culture. In The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Noll lamented that the divided structures of separatist evangelical colleges produced a “divided evangelical mentality,” meaning that evangelical scholars did not have regular interaction with the best scholarship from outside evangelicalism.Footnote ⁷¹ Evans, like other curious evangelicals before her, reestablished connections with non-evangelical thinkers through the relatively new medium of the internet and through her prolific reading.

Evans’s childhood love of reading continued into adulthood, and she continued to read widely. She racked up library fines at the Clyde W. Roddy Public Library in Dayton, where she had held her first book signing, sometimes carrying more than $100 of debt to the library in small fees for the dozens of books she would check out at a time. She read books on Christian theology from authors of various Christian traditions, including the reformer Martin Luther, American Presbyterian writer Frederick Buechner, and Orthodox priest and theologian Alexander Schmemann.Footnote ⁷² She also read books on topics that helped her apply and understand Christian ethics, such as politics, race, and gender. In a blog post examining her white racial identity and prejudice, she referenced books on race by researchers and theologians, including attorney and civil rights activist Michelle Alexander, liberation theologian James Cone, journalist Isabel Wilkerson, and womanist theologian Delores Williams.Footnote ⁷³ In research for her books, she spoke with people of various Christian and Jewish traditions. She enjoyed learning Christian history. Her refusal to limit herself to conservative evangelical books expanded her intellectual resources beyond her tradition of origin and introduced her to new ideas from Christian and secular sources.

Over the course of her adult life, Evans concluded, moreover, that the evangelical limitations on her compassion that had been required to hold dominant conservative evangelical positions were not God-ordained. In an interview about her fourth book Inspired, the last before her death, Evans asked, “What kind of God would ask us to check our brains at the door? Check our consciences at the door? Check our emotions, our compassion, our hearts for other people at the door?”Footnote ⁷⁴ In 2013, Evans wrote, in reference to Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, “the questions that have weighed most heavily on me these past ten years have been questions not of the mind but of the heart, questions of conscience and empathy. It was not the so-called ‘scandal of the evangelical mind’ that rocked my faith; it was the scandal of the evangelical heart.”Footnote ⁷⁵ It was Evans’s compassion that led her to question the eternal damnation of all non-Christians in the wake of September 11, 2001. It was also her compassion that led her to consider voting for the Democratic party. “If my father gave Christianity a head, my mother gave it a heart and hands,” wrote Evans.Footnote ⁷⁶ Though she would come to different theological and political conclusions than her parents, Evans felt she was following the values and central tenets they had taught her as she strayed from conservative evangelicalism.

Early in her writing career, Evans reflected on the intellectual journey she had embarked upon and whether it might lead her to opinions that contradicted conservative evangelicalism. In reflecting on her conversion to evolutionary thinking from young-earth creationism, Evans wrote in 2011,

This effort to face her theological questions led Evans progressively away from conservative evangelical views of salvation, creation, gender hierarchy, and finally, sexuality.

X. Beyond the Pale

A final evolution in Rachel Held Evans’s thinking was her affirmation of LGBTQ relationships. Evans had supported LGBTQ people’s political rights since the beginning of her public writing career. She had, for instance, opposed the ban on homosexuality that Rhea County commissioners passed in 2004, and seethed when her childhood church allowed partisan campaigning for a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.Footnote ⁷⁸ But she also hesitated to make a clear pronouncement of her own theological and ecclesiological views on sexuality. On her blog, Evans exposed her readers to her growing comfort with gay and transgender Christians, frequently interviewing them and recommending their books. By 2018, it was obvious to her readership that she was “affirming” – shorthand for believing in the ethical and ecclesiological viability of gay relationships within Christianity – though she provided no explicit theological defense of this position.

An earlier generation of evangelicals had also wrestled with the issue of how Christians should treat their gay co-religionists and taken various positions, with some taking affirming positions. In 1978, feminist evangelicals Virginia Mollenkott and Letha Scanzoni published Is the Homosexual My Neighbor?, which referenced the Good Samaritan story in the Gospel of Luke and concluded that, yes, homosexuals were evangelicals’ neighbors and thus were due neighborly love and acceptance.Footnote ⁷⁹ The ministry of gay evangelicals like Troy Perry, founder of the Metropolitan Community Church, caused what historian William Stell terms a “panic of proximity” among conservative evangelicals, due to the fact that Perry and others simultaneously affirmed evangelical theology and homosexuality.Footnote ⁸⁰ Though rejection of homosexuality became dominant within evangelicalism, evangelicals’ views ebbed and flowed as accumulating scientific and psychological data showed that homosexuality was, at least partially, inborn. In the early twenty-first century, as the general American public increasingly accepted gay marriage, evangelical acceptance also rose, especially among millennials.Footnote ⁸¹ One of the founding organizations of the conversion therapy movement, Exodus International, shut itself down due to the lack of evidence that changing sexual orientation was possible and the mounting evidence that attempting to do so was harmful.Footnote ⁸²

By the mid-2010s, however, rejection of LGBTQ sexualities and gender identities was hardening again among institutional leaders and quickly becoming an evangelical litmus test for Christian orthodoxy. Churches and organizations added gender and sexuality statements to their statements of faith.Footnote ⁸³ Evangelical colleges added addendums to their “community covenants” requiring professors and students to hold anti-LGBTQ views and used them to fire faculty and expel students. Evangelical leaders who questioned dominant evangelical views on this issue were condemned, and consequences were swift. In 2016, writer Jen Hatmaker announced her affirmation of gay marriages, after which her national speaking tour was cancelled, evangelical publishing house Lifeway stopped selling her books, and Christian streaming service RightNow Media took down her video Bible studies.Footnote ⁸⁴ In 2017, well-known author and Presbyterian pastor Eugene Peterson told a journalist that he might perform a gay wedding and faced backlash so severe, including Lifeway threatening to stop selling his books, that he recanted his statement just one day later.Footnote ⁸⁵ He was 84 at the time, and after his death, an authorized biography confirmed his affirming stance.Footnote ⁸⁶

Though Evans had leaned toward affirmation for many years based on her embrace of compassion and ethic of inclusion, the nail in the coffin of her inherited anti-LGBTQ views was reading Mark Noll’s The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. Footnote ⁸⁷ The book explores the biblical arguments on both sides of the antebellum debate about slavery. Evans found the way that pro-slavery Christians navigated scripture to be “strikingly similar” to the way anti-LGBTQ Christians did.Footnote ⁸⁸ In an interview with podcaster Matthias Roberts in 2018 on Queerology, Evans identified as an LGBTQ “ally.” For several years prior to her death, she worked on a blog post detailing her intellectual trajectory toward LGBTQ-affirmation, a statement that expressed her unequivocal affirmation and apologized for her former views. “You are beloved children of God,” she writes to LGBTQ readers in the statement.Footnote ⁸⁹ “My heart grieves over the ways this truth has been obscured and denied by the Church, often in deadly and destructive ways, and I apologize for years of complicity in that.” She never finished the post or published it, and her husband, Dan, published the post on her blog posthumously.

XI. The Crisis of Authority in the Digital Age

The crisis of authority, which historian Molly Worthen identified, took on a particular intensity in the age of the internet when Evans was writing. In its early years, blogging had a democratizing effect, allowing laypersons to broadcast their messages to co-religionists without the intermediaries of Christian book publishing or Christian bookstores, producing a broader variety of viewpoints than gatekeepers of these industries accepted. In an article in Christianity Today in 2017, Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren called attention to this tension as it appeared in the era of the internet with her article, “Who’s in Charge of the Blogosphere?”Footnote ⁹⁰ The article accused non-ordained women bloggers of being a danger to the church as they racked up readers without being accountable to the denominational hierarchy. When Evans read the piece, she was so frustrated that she threw her phone across the room.Footnote ⁹¹ Though she was not named in Warren’s piece, her friend Jen Hatmaker was, and she was clearly part of the group of women bloggers Warren chastised. Evans had received no formal theological training and was not ordained. She, like Hatmaker, had been raised in a tradition in which women were prohibited from pastoral leadership.

Warren’s accusations about women bloggers obscured women bloggers’ knowledge and their embeddedness in networks of accountability. It was true that Evans did not have specialized biblical or theological training beyond her Christian college education. Though she had considered attending Duke Divinity School later in her adult life, she ultimately decided it was unnecessary for the kind of writing she did.Footnote ⁹² However, along with other prominent women leaders like Beth Moore, she was self-taught and had acquired for herself much of the theological and biblical knowledge she would have learned in a master’s program.Footnote ⁹³ Her theological knowledge was evident in the abundant references in her writing.

As someone who valued education, Evans was particularly distressed when her lack of official seminary training was called to attention. In a blog post, she described an incident at a dinner party in which a seminary-trained man, a “young Calvinist,” suggested that she “google” Alexander Schmemann if she was writing about the sacraments in her forthcoming book.Footnote ⁹⁴ She had already referenced Schmemann repeatedly in the manuscript, which became Searching for Sunday, and took offense to his “paternalistic familiarity.” She wrote, “I am intensely aware of my lack of theological qualifications, which is precisely why I read a lot, cite my sources, ask questions, listen, apologize when I get stuff wrong, and refuse to fake my way through Q&A sessions…”Footnote ⁹⁵ Strangers on the internet also frequently highlighted her lack of theological education in order to invalidate her arguments. In a workshop session for other writers, she described an online argument with a man who commented that she had no right to write about theological issues without a seminary education.Footnote ⁹⁶ Evans recounted that the comment hit “an insecure little nerve in my heart.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Yet, the cumulative research she did for her four books and 12 years of blogging, in addition to what she read to satisfy her internal thirst for knowledge, most likely surpassed the required reading for a two- or three-year seminary degree. Moreover, she read more broadly from mainline, Catholic, Orthodox, Jewish, feminist, and liberation sources than would have been assigned at an evangelical seminary. In addition to her extensive reading, Evans was, as were many women bloggers, contrary to Warren’s accusation, in a religious community that was part of an institutional hierarchy. She and her husband, Dan, attended St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland, Tennessee, where they learned from their rector, Father Joel Huffstetler.Footnote ⁹⁸

Warren’s Christianity Today piece represented conservative evangelical anxiety over not only who was doing theology in public – women – but what conclusions they came to in doing so. Hatmaker was singled out because of her position on gay marriage – a position Evans also held. Women writers were criticized not primarily for their lack of credentials – in fact, many evangelical leaders, including men, do not have seminary degrees – but for the positions they took on social and political issues, including gender, sexuality, race, and Donald Trump. Hatmaker’s much-maligned affirmation of gay marriage, for instance, was revealed in an article published just weeks before Trump’s 2016 election in which she stated her support for Black Lives Matter and her criticism of Trump, both of which were explosive issues within evangelicalism during this time.Footnote ⁹⁹ Evans’s views, like Hatmaker’s, placed her outside dominant conservative evangelical ideology and under attack by conservative evangelical figures.

XII. The Reformed Resurgence, Evangelical Rejection, and Post-Evangelicalism

Conservative evangelicals labeled Evans a heretic for her feminist views, Democratic politics, and LGBTQ-affirmation. Figures within conservative evangelicalism’s “Reformed resurgence” especially chastised her. In the 2000s, when Evans first began writing, evangelical leaders popularized a form of “new Calvinism,” which rose to prominence within American evangelicalism.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Contrary to the Arminian theology that had characterized Baptist, Methodist, Holiness, and Pentecostal theology and was predominant in American evangelicalism in the twentieth century, new Calvinism emphasized the total depravity of humanity. This emphasis contradicted the theology that Evans had learned growing up in Bible churches, which had also emphasized individual agency in the decision to follow God. Nicknamed the “young, restless, and Reformed” movement, leaders in the “Reformed resurgence” foregrounded patriarchal views of gender as central to Christianity, and the movement was dominated by male voices.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Just as Evans and her network of post-evangelical feminist bloggers used the affordances of new media, the leaders of the Reformed resurgence used digital media to spread their version of evangelicalism.Footnote ¹⁰² Celebrity figures like Mark Driscoll, Timothy Keller, and John Piper used YouTube videos and blogs like The Gospel Coalition and Desiring God to spread their messages.

Leading figures of the Reformed resurgence were the primary targets of Evans’s criticism and became her most outspoken critics. In 2011, she called Mark Driscoll a “bully” in a blog post, arguing that his sexism, homophobia, and glorification of violence proved that he was not a “godly man,” an insult within evangelical circles.Footnote ¹⁰³ In 2013, Evans criticized Tim Keller for suggesting that intellectual doubts resulted from sexual sin rather than from honest intellectual inquiry.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ She wrote on her blog, “This was not true for me, and it is not true for many of the young adults who leave college with questions about science, philosophy, politics, and religious pluralism that challenge the fundamentalism with which they were raised.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Also that year, Evans criticized John Piper’s gender essentialism in a series of blog posts entitled “The absurd legality of gender roles,” which called attention to Piper’s hyper-specific gender ideals that sought, for instance, to exclude women from the military and from spiritual leadership, and boys from playing with dolls.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

In turn, new Calvinist leaders were Evans’s most vocal critics. Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Seminary and a key figure in the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention in the late twentieth century, accused Evans of a “glib and superficial endorsement of evolution and its reconciliation with Christianity” after she wrote an article in The Washington Post identifying herself as a Christian who believes in evolution.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Evans’s feminist interpretations of the Bible drew particular ire from new Calvinist figures. Blogger Denny Burk, who later became president of the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, repeatedly blogged about Evans’s theological “errors.” He accused her second book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, of mocking the Bible.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ He focused on her rejection of biblical inerrancy – a theology characteristic of the fundamentalist movement of the early twentieth century – and concluded that she could not be an evangelical if she did not affirm inerrancy.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Evans’s work was also poorly reviewed by writers Tricia Newbell and Kathy Keller on the Reformed websites Desiring God and The Gospel Coalition, founded by evangelical celebrities John Piper and Timothy Keller, respectively.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Evans also clashed with powerful evangelicals like Russell Moore, the head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), who later became president of Christianity Today. Evans sometimes praised Moore, as she did in response to the ERLC’s work on immigration, but more often criticized him, especially for his complementarian views.Footnote ¹¹¹ When Rachel was dying, Moore tweeted, “@rachelheldevans and I are, as you know, theological opposites…”Footnote ¹¹² It was a strange statement for one Protestant who held to traditional Christian beliefs to write about another. In the tweet, Moore suggested that a patriarchal Christian was the theological opposite of a feminist Christian. It was meant to signal to readers that Moore’s prayer for her recovery did not mean approval of Evans’s politics and theology. It revealed how central Moore’s conservative politics and ideological views on gender were to his Christian identity.

The criticism from conservative evangelicals confused Evans. She ascribed to Christian orthodoxy – she held to the historic creeds of the Church, including the Nicene Creed, and to the principal supernatural beliefs about God the Creator, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. For many years into her adulthood and writing career, she also identified as an evangelical. It upset her that conservative evangelicals spoke about her as if she were not a Christian. “But I’m still their sister in Christ,” she said to her friend Sarah Bessey in frustration.Footnote ¹¹³ Many key voices in evangelicalism did not recognize her as such.

In contrast to the feminist evangelicals of the 1970s, including Nancy Hardesty, Letha Scanzoni, and Virginia Mollenkott, who had clung to their self-identity as evangelicals, Evans eventually decided to stop identifying as an evangelical. She left the evangelical church she attended from her childhood into her early marriage, Grace Bible Church, and after attempting a church plant, began attending an Episcopal Church. In a post published a few days after Donald Trump was elected with 81 percent of the white evangelical vote, entitled “Life After Evangelicalism,” she wrote: “We don’t have to abandon Jesus to abandon the unholy marriage between Donald Trump and the white American Church.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Leaving evangelicalism in its institutional form and as an intellectual community grieved Evans. She told her father, in tears, “I didn’t leave evangelicalism, it left me.”Footnote ¹¹⁵