The New Yorker Radio Hour - Rachel Held Evans and Her Legacy

Episode Date: November 9, 2021

Growing up, Rachel Held Evans was a fiercely enthusiastic evangelizer for her faith, the kind of kid who relished the chance to sit next to an atheist. But when she experienced doubt, that sense of certainty began to crumble. “We went to all these conferences about how to defend your faith, how to have an answer for what you believe,” her sister Amanda Held told Eliza Griswold. “That’s why it was particularly unsettling to have questions, because we were taught to have answers.” Held Evans began to blog and then wrote a string of best-sellers about her faith, beginning with “Evolving in Monkey Town,” in which she separated the Jesus she believed in from the conservative doctrine she was raised with. Her work spoke to the millions of Christians who have left evangelical churches since 2006. “There’s this common misperception that either you are a conservative evangelical Christian or . . . you become agnostic or atheist,” Griswold explains, but many Christians were turning away from politics and still retaining their faith. She calls Held Evans “the patron saint of this emerging movement.” After Held Evans died, at thirty-seven, after a sudden illness, her final, incomplete manuscript was finished by a friend, Jeff Chu. Griswold travelled to Held Evans’s home town of Dayton, Tennessee, to meet with her widower, Dan Evans, as well as Chu and others. “I think people resonate so much with her work [because] she was giving words that people couldn’t say themselves,” Evans says. “It’s not going to stop for them just because Rachel died. There’s going to be one less traveller. One less person to translate for them. But there’s more people born every day.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Rachel Held Evans grew up in the 1980s in an evangelical family, in a town and a community that was also solidly evangelical. But then she came to challenge many things about the worldview that she had inherited, orthodoxies about the role of women, homosexuality, race, and much more. Held Evans went on to become an influential writer with a string of best-selling books that dealt with questions of faith. She was a linchpin in a movement among younger evangelicals away from conservative dogma.

Here's Evans speaking on the podcast called Nomad in 2015. I kept feeling like I wasn't allowed to ask these questions, and yet those were the questions I was asking, and those were the questions that a lot of my readers were asking. So it seemed worth addressing in books and on blogs, but it kind of got me in a little bit of hot water with the evangelical establishment here in the U.S. Progressive Christian author Rachel Held Evans died this morning at the age of 37. She was known for her best-selling books and her progressive activism in the evangelical church. Evans died young after a sudden illness in 2019, and she left behind an unfinished manuscript.

That book has now just come out. Its title is Wholehearted Faith, and it was completed by a co-author Jeff Chu. Eliza Griswold writes for us about religion and other subjects, and she's been reporting for us on Rachel Held Evans and her legacy. Eliza, you traveled recently to Dayton, Tennessee. What were you doing there? So I went to visit the family of Rachel Held Evans

and to get to know the people who were closest to her. And there was a dinner in her honor at the home of her husband, Dan, and he invited about 20 friends, including Rachel's parents and her sister Amanda. And that day they had driven me around downtown Dayton. This is where Rachel and Amanda went to school. This is Dayton City School. Dayton is a pretty sleepy place. It's brick storefronts, most of them seeming pretty empty. Kudzu kind of overgrowing.

the edges of streets. Oh, yeah. Right up here, we'll show you the courthouse. And in that tour, they really wanted to show me the courthouse, which plays a central role in Dayton's history. This is the courthouse right here on your left. We'll get out here and you can see the two, if you want to, there's the two statues here. You can't miss this.

Destination for anyone interested in the history of evangelicalism in America. You don't want to miss this. The courthouse is not just a Dayton landmark. It's also really important in Rachel Held Evans' story. It's the site of the Scopes trial, which was often called the Monkey Trial as well, and really was a turning point in modern biblical fundamentalism. The famous monkey trial that was almost 100 years ago.

Yeah. So Dayton played a big role in Rachel Held Evans' upbringing. It was really the backdrop for how she grew up thinking about the need to defend evangelicalism. And that involved a lot of absolute thinking that she came over time to reconsider. And that was really a huge evolution for her and for many evangelicals. And she writes about it in this book, which she very funnily calls evolving in Monkey Town. And here's that argument at work.

If we can adjust to Galileo's universe, she writes, we can adjust to Darwin's biote, even the part about the monkeys. If there's one thing I know for sure, it's that faith can survive just about anything so long as it's able to evolve. This was not old history to her. This was really a battle over what means to follow Jesus today.

These statues are fairly recent. The Darrow one came much later than the Brian statue. And then it was several years later that, and I don't know who commissioned to the other statue, said, well, if you're going to have a Brian statue, you've got to have a Clarence Darrow statue. There was a little resistance to that, but not much.

Brian has a light that shines on him all night long, but Darrow doesn't get a light. A night. They didn't put a light up for Darrow. It's so great. So not a whole lot's changed in 100 years.

Amanda, what did you, what was the idea growing up of the scopes trial? that like William Jennings, Brian was the hero. Yep. And defending against like the carpet bagging, liberal northerner. Yeah, yeah, who didn't believe in God and didn't respect the Bible. I don't even know that that was explicitly taught. It was just kind of the tone, you know what I mean?

It was just kind of the general understanding. And no one really knew that the town folk had been the butt of the joke, you know, in terms of the media coverage and things like that. And we didn't really talk about that. That's something I learned later. Eliza, I think we can hear from even that, the beginning of the culture war somehow. So for evangelical Christians, this idea of defending the faith comes very much out of the scopes trial. And not just defending the faith against like the liberal, secular, north, but also defending the faith among fellow evangelicals who would choose to recede from society.

So this group is very much about engagement. And Peter, Rachel Held Evans' father, who we heard in the car, is a professor of Bible studies at Bryan College, which is named for William Jennings, Brian. And he actually teaches a class on angelology, which is the study of angels and demons and spiritual warfare. And so they moved here so he could be a professor at Brian when Rachel was in eighth grade. And she was not just like an enthusiastic young evangelical. She was a fiercely competitive evangelizer, and she cornered kids on the school bus and tried to convince them at 6.45 in the morning to give their lives to Jesus. And then along comes a turn in her life, a real turn. And when you're raised and your father is a professor of angelology and you've inhaled this powerful belief system, what made her leap out of it? What happened for her, you know, she was in college when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan.

And she was watching on a kind of replay loop, a Taliban execution of a woman who was accused of committing adultery. And it was with watching that that she had this spiritual crisis because she was like, how could that woman be going to hell? By nature of geography, that where she lives, she hasn't heard of Jesus. And that for her was the beginning of a larger unraveling of these. received ideas about absolute faith, about who's saved and damned. Yeah, and I remember that very clearly. The coverage of that was live on television and showing her being executed. And that just started questions about, wait, what happened to her?

Does that mean she'll spend an eternity and held? And starting questioning, is that fair? Questions about the justice of God and judgment and, and how can we believe what we believe? And I could see she was worked up over it. You know, I was thinking, Dad, as you were talking, that I think part of it for Rachel, too, was that we kind of grew up in this,

it was kind of the height of the evangelical apologetics movement, where we kind of went to all these conferences and about how to defend your faith, how to have an answer for what you believe. And so just kind of the subculture and church and Brian. And so I think that's why it was particularly unsettling to have questions because we were taught to have answers. We were taught to be confident to have a reason, to have an answer,

to give an apologetic for why we believe what we did. And so that's why I think Rachel didn't quite know what to do with her questions. because even though our home was a safe place for that, the subculture at large wasn't. What did Rachel do with that? Where did she take those questions? So after she graduated, she married her college sweetheart Dan Evans, and she went to work at local newspapers, writing style features,

like one about hermit crabs, but she was really still struggling with aspects of her faith. And her husband, Dan, encouraged her to start a blog. blogs weren't new at that point. This was 2007, but still a fairly new idea. And she wrote super friendly, soft posts like raising kids in faith. And she wrote pretty hard-edged controversial ones too. Like a takedown of Mark Driscoll, who was the pastor of the hugely popular Marshill Church.

And he and his church have now both totally collapsed due to allegations of abuse. But really the blog allowed her a whole new audience. and a whole new reach. I just remember we first started the blog, we broke double digits. We got up to like 10 people who had subscribed. And then when it got a little higher than that, closer to 20, we started thinking, you know,

counting up on our fingers like, okay, there's gotta be people reading that we don't actually know. That was a fun experience. I remember watching it grow. Yeah, we was like, oh man, can we break 100? And through that blog, other like-minded people who were afraid to ask the same questions, found her and began to read her work. Long story short, her blog grew and she attracted this massive

community of readers and started publishing books. Her first evolving in Monkey Town, her second, a year of biblical womanhood, which was a pretty hilarious send up of what biblical literalism looked like. Like if you actually lived according to being a good wife, as this culture had called for like she she slept in a tent outside she she stood on a roof to do these biblical injunctions and by doing so relief pointed out the absurdity of them here's dan in the car showing me where some of those stunts took place in proverbs there's a passage that talks about a woman praising her husband at the city gates and so rachel held out a sign that said dan is awesome and stood right there in front of the entrance to Dayton because it's also good to have some strong marketing.

What was the reception of her work in the greater evangelical world? Were people reading her? People were pretty hostile about her work while she was alive within conservative circles. And her dad really bore the brunt of that because he's still very much at Brian within that world. But the reception to her work outside of it or within those who are questioning it, I mean, we're talking millions of people who followed her and revered her as really the patron saint of this emerging movement. She was making things better for a lot of people. And the complaints against her didn't have anything to do with her ruining people's lives. The complaints against her were always too inclusive or not using the right terminology or not calling God the he all the time or accepting people.

people were just gay. Things like that, the people who had the complaint didn't really have a ground to say, like, you're hurting me. And the people that she was helping had the ground to say, you're helping me.

Like, I didn't kill myself because of your work. So, yeah, I was definitely invested in that. I think Rachel really founded a movement, right? I think that she did. And I think that partly, because as I watch the fissures of evangelicalism, right, I meet so many people who are like,

oh, I had the courage to do this because I watched her blog, right? She gave them permission to speak out what they really, because they saw there was an audience, you know? My ego wants to agree wholeheartedly. David, it's important to understand about Rachel Held Evans that she was a pretty rigorous, self-taught scholar. And one of the things that she did was reground the Bible in the Hebrew tradition in which it actually belongs. And by doing so, reclaim the authority and reclaim the

roominess and reclaim the sort of intellectual underpinnings of a faith that allowed people to find space for themselves in it again. Dan showed me this important text on the wall of their house where she wrote books. This is like a picture of a crown in Hebrew? So this is a scroll. Okay. And this was done by a rabbi in Israel because this is Eshthahel. Proverbs 31, woman of valor.

So you have Proverbs 31 in the shape of a crown. And Proverbs 31 was at one point a sticking point for Rachel because it's about valorous woman. and in evangelicalism, it was always held as an ideal that you're supposed to ascend to. But in Jewish culture, it was a song of appreciation for the things that you have already accomplished as a woman. I see. And it's a completely different perspective. And Eshit Heil, Rachel's bringing of that understanding to evangelical women had such an impact. People got tattoos of it on their arms.

It was one of the things that your biblical womanhood brought to evangelicalism at Rachel facilitated. It's like a freedom from some of that misogyny and heron and complementarian ideas. You don't have to ignore the Bible. You can use the Bible and say, look, recent Christianity is not the only way this has ever been interpreted. In fact, there's entire generations of people that precede us that have a better understanding of their own scriptures that, we can listen to. And guess what? It doesn't throw women under the bus. In fact, it elevates them, and that was the entire point. That's Dan Evans, who was married to the late writer Rachel Held Evans. Our story about Evans' life and work continues in a moment. We'll continue now with our story.

Rachel Held Evans'n's new book, which comes out two years after her death, is called Wholehearted Faith, and it was co-authored by Jeff Choo. Could I get a pound of pork fillies? Let's do both pieces. Yeah. I want to make sure they have enough food. I went to Tennessee with Jeff Chu, and Jeff was a dear friend of Rachel Held Evans, and he also finished her book for her after she died.

And in addition to being a writer, he's also quite an accomplished Chinese cook. Okay, could I do two pounds of cod, please? And so for this night, he had offered to cook dinner for Rachel's family and friends in order to celebrate the book. He hadn't accounted for the fact that Dan Evans might invite 20 people. So it was a little bit of a Hail Mary going to this Whole Foods to get everything that he thought he needed. Love it is going on today.

We're going to make a big dinner. It'll be good. What are you making? Chinese food. Right on. It was really Dan Evans who chose Jeff Chu to finish Rachel. book. And Jeff, quite honestly, was pretty reluctant about doing it. I wanted to say no for multiple reasons. But probably the biggest one was that saying yes would

mean I would have to admit that she's not here anymore. And I was just afraid that I wouldn't live up to her standards of writing, which I knew were extraordinarily high. But Jeff did finish the book over, you know, really a painful period of pandemic, sifting through not only the chapter she'd left behind, because she left behind 11,762 words, but also talk she'd given, blog posts she'd never posted, family stories, anything, you know, old Christmas lists, anything that was on her computer, he used a source material as a journalist to try to piece together not only a life, but the evolving theology of his dear, dear friend. And in a way, there was a parallel, as he made, between trying to,

just work with what you've got. And then making this huge gift of a Chinese feast for her family and friends with basically whatever he could figure out on the spur of the moment. So I'll steer it off and then put it in the stew. Jeff spent all day cooking. You know, the kitchen grew warm and redolent with garlic and scallions. And people began to arrive. First of all, her family.

And her sister, Amanda, just went right to work, rolled up her sleeves. washed her hands and started rolling wantons and spring rolls at Jeff's very specific instructions. Can you fold a square piece of paper into a triangle? Sometimes, usually. I just, if the cooking doesn't involve, like, pork fat, then I don't know how to do it. Like, all I know is, like, Appalachian Southern cooking. That's all I know. Well, it sounds like you were having a good time, a real feast.

Who was at the table? It was like a Southern episode of Friends. It was her high school and college. college friends gathered around telling stories that many of them hadn't heard before. I mean, she died in 2019, but for many of them, this was the first time they had come together to really celebrate her and to do what she did the best, which was poke gentle fun at her, like her playing the piccolo and closing a flute in the door of her high school band bus. And she was this enthusiastic, like almost rabbit evangelist who would seek out anybody she could find to try to bring them to Jesus.

There weren't many atheists or even Presbyterians at the Dayton High School, but Rachel did her best to find the tiny handful that she could. I think one of them, I think one of them rode the bus with us. And she was like, this is amazing. Like, this is why God is allowing me to walk through this hardship of having to ride the bus. because mom and dad wouldn't buy her car. And so she had to ride the bus. But fortunately, she sat down next to an atheist.

Rachel's friend Kathleen was there too. And Kathleen was Rachel's freshman year roommate at Brian. I remember for me coming to Brian was freedom. and I grew up in legalism and abuse. And definitely thought that I was kind of bad because I was a woman. So I shouldn't trust my emotions or my feelings and even my mind. This is what I was taught. Kathleen grew up in a fundamentalist church in Pennsylvania.

And she and Rachel would lie in bed and they would talk about womanhood, basically, and what it meant to be a devout woman. woman. And in particular, they talk about Proverbs 31, which in white evangelical culture is one of the principle texts by which women are defined as like staying home and being good mothers and being good wives and submissive to their husbands. So the Proverbs 31 woman gets up early. Oh, man, I've been in trouble my whole life. I'm not, that's not me. Sometimes I tell my husband, I'm the I'm the bad proverbs lady. Like there's a, there's like the one that you're warned against.

I'm like, I think that's me. But anyways. So I think it was just perceived as like the formula for how you're supposed to be, which was translated into being a woman who your life is kids, keeping the home and getting up early and cooking and making things from scratch and just like a woman who can do it all, you know. So I remember with girls talking about that and wanting to be that and Rachel pushing back against that. Like I'm not sure that we're using this passage in the right way or as simple as I don't think we really have to do all that to be, you know, godly.

I loved that. I was like, oh, all right. So Kathleen told me that she had left her church when her pastor came out in support of Trump. Trump's policy of child separation at the border. And she was pretty appalled, and she was also scared. So she gave Rachel a call, and Rachel told her to come right over. I just couldn't be alone. Like, I was just so scared.

And I went to her house, and she gave my kid, Goldfish. Sat him on her couch with, like, Papa Troll. Gave me some of Dan's birthday cake. And then I remember asking her, am I going to hell? And I'm just, like, crying. And her response was just like so comforting. It was just like, of course not. And she just held me and I just sobbed.

Just shook and sobbed. And she let me talk with her the rest of the day. Kathleen, one question I asked these guys earlier is how Rachel's journey of faith affected your own? Hmm. I would say, you know, I still have faith because of Rachel. because I almost lost it. David, this is something we probably should emphasize

that there's this common misperception that either you are a conservative evangelical Christian or you leave that and you become agnostic or atheist. But the truth is that Rachel Held Evans is part of this turn within Christianity away from conservative Republican culture of a reclaiming of faith outside of politics. You mentioned that her father, Peter Held, bore a lot of criticism about Rachel while she was alive, especially in conservative evangelical circles.

What's been the response more recently? The response is overwhelmingly positive. And I know that among the conservatives I talk to pretty regularly, there's regret at not hearing her wisdom earlier. And hearing some of the misogyny and the racism that she was calling out has really now fallen from grace. but at the time she was alive, it was still pretty risky and pretty brave of her to name some of these things so publicly. Now, you're talking about people who are either former evangelicals or progressive evangelicals. What is the scale of that community? Give me a sense of it relative to the, I would assume, much larger community of traditionalists, conservative right-wing evangelicals. So the scale is pretty overwhelming. I mean, if you look at it numbers-wise, from 2006 to 206 to,

2020, you can see the number of white evangelicals in America dropping from 23% of the adult population, so nearly a quarter of Americans identified with this movement. Now that number has fallen to 14%. So very roughly, that's something like 15 million people. And I think where we get it wrong sometimes looking in from the outside is we see this as like growing secularization. But that's not necessarily what it's about. And Dan and I talked about this. And we were on its porch in, a torrential rainstorm. For a long time, people wanted to shift evangelicalism, but that's not really what's happening.

I think what's happening is evangelicalism is shrinking as fewer and fewer people describe themselves as evangelical. So I think evangelicalism's issue with people being gay, for whatever reason, is probably still a part of that identity. I just think the shift is people moving out of evangelicalism.

What I will say is the people leaving that community are still looking for the spiritual community. There's a lot of social inertia to still be able to claim some part of Christianity and spirituality and not ostracize the group that raised you.

It's just such a real thing to not want to lose that group. And it is a search at some level for meaning. So Rachel and Dan actually left evangelicalism, and they went searching for a new church. They started their own, which didn't take very well, and so Rachel ended up going on to join an Episcopal church. Why the Episcopal church? What did it? Was it this particular church? Was it Episcopalianism in general? Was it its welcoming, affirming stance for gay people? That was certainly a part of it, a larger part.

was the liturgy, having all that history, that was meaningful to her. Words were always meaningful to her. And the fact that the climax of the service wasn't the pastor. The climax of the service was communion. And that shifts the perspective of what's most important in a church. Is it really a certain person in that building, or is it the community? Eliza, who's going to carry on her legacy? She was a major figure in this movement. In terms of the nuts and bolts of Rachel's legacy, Dan feels the responsibility at least for now,

but he's really careful about speaking for Rachel. He always refers to what she herself has written, and he's struggling to build his own life. He has two tiny kids to raise. He has a new fiancé, and he's really between two lives. It's important to him, As his kids come to him, though, and keep asking questions about her death, that he explains what that loss means in terms that are incredibly literal and don't branch into any kind of ideology or supposition or any talk about heaven.

Dan explained this to me when we were outside on his back deck in terms that were wrenching and stark and really honest. So this is our back deck. And that is where I had the hardest conversation of my life. And that was when I sat my three-year-old down and had to explain to him that his mom died. I said, Mommy died. And he said, why mommy died? Because he's not even sure what that means. Like, is the died a thing that she got?

And so I say, well, died is really? your body doesn't work anymore. And you can't leave your arms, you can't work your legs, and say there's no pain, mommy doesn't hurt. And she's not sad. Did people, does he ask about things about heaven? And does he ask where she went? And do you get into some of the,

people must talk to him about that stuff? So what I, yeah, because we've had multiple nannies and everybody had different belief systems. And what I have suggested, is we talk about the things that we all know to be true. And as he grows and develops a sense of spirituality, I think he's going to probably have his own examining to do. But for me, it's worked really well to frame it as,

guess what? Grownups don't know. Right. We don't know what consciousness even is. So best thing just to go ahead and let the kids know, you know, we don't have this figured out. Wholehearted faith, in part, is about embracing that doubt. Because for Rachel growing up, the idea of doubt was sinful.

Faith had to be absolute. But one of the tragedies on the page is that, you know, these questions she's asking of doubt, of the idea of worthiness, of being beloved by God are not finished questions. And that theological journey, which she talks about evolving, just stops. Yeah. Right? And I'm like... Forever, those will be the last 11,000 words that she ever wrote. Right. For the book like this.

Right. And because her evolution was such a beacon for other people, I'm like, how are they going to go on? Rachel did a really good job of ensuring that she was walking on the same path with people and she wasn't really leading them along. And this is why I think people resonate so much with her work is she was giving words that people, couldn't say themselves. It was because Rachel's unique way of putting those words together gave voice to the thing that already existed in all the people. And so

those people are going to still have those thoughts and there will be other people who are able to put into words some of their feelings. But it's not going to stop for them just because Rachel died. There's going to be one less traveler. It's one less person to translate for them. But there's more people born every day.

Eliza, this new book, is coming out without its main author alive to talk about it, and we both know how important book promotion can be. Do you think that will make any difference in the reception of the book? You know, she had a children's book come out that was also posthumous, and it was the number one New York Times children's bestseller. And I think that this book, because of the hunger for her message, I don't think it's going to matter whether she's there to speak it aloud or not. It's on the page. Eliza Griswold is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and her story, the afterlife of Rachel

held Evans, is at New Yorker.com. You can hear more from Eliza on the state of Christianity and more on the podcast of the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining us and see you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado.

This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon Corby, Calliola, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino. With additional help from Priscilla Alabi, and thanks this week to Kim Green for production on our story about Rachel Held Evans. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.