The Afterlife of Rachel Held Evans

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.”

Held Evans offered Chu the same support. He had been a successful journalist, but “nobody in the Christian world knew who I was,” he told me. He had begun the process of coming out as gay in 2004, after which he’d lost both religious mentors and friends. In 2013, Held Evans contacted Chu’s publisher in advance of the publication of his first book, “Does Jesus Really Love Me?,” and asked how she could help. In the course of their friendship, Chu came to understand Held Evans’s holistic sense of inclusion. “It makes me a little nervous when she’s held up as an example for white women, and people don’t see the intersectionality,” Chu told me. “Rachel had a broader agenda.” Her radical vision involved pushing for a fundamental shift in church hierarchy. “Rachel advocated for a faith that was allowed to ask questions,” Chu told me. “Her legacy is that she helped people hold on to their faith.”

In April, 2019, Held Evans was with Chu at a conference, when she began to feel ill. On their last evening there, the two went to a friend’s home for dinner, but Held Evans lay on the couch, too sick to eat pasta. Returning home to Dayton, she tested positive for the flu. She wore a mask while breast-feeding Harper, who was almost eleven months old, afraid that she would get her baby sick. Within a few days at home, though, Held Evans worsened. Dan rushed her to the emergency room, where tests indicated that she had a serious infection; she was then transferred to the I.C.U. When her brain couldn’t stop seizing, the doctors induced a coma. She was eventually airlifted by helicopter to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, in Nashville. Chu, Bessey, and another close friend and well-known progressive Christian author, Nadia Bolz-Weber, flew in to be by Held Evans’s bedside. She died on May 4, 2019.

The public outpouring of grief startled some of her friends and family. On Twitter, Hillary Clinton wrote, “My prayers go out to everyone grieving the tragic loss of @RachelHeldEvans. She lived a life of generosity, justice-seeking, and inclusive faith. So many people were touched by her voice and her example. What a life and what a legacy.” Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of “Hamilton,” later tweeted that he was reading her book “Inspired.” Held Evans had left scattered writings for her latest project. To help Chu parse them, Dan uploaded some of the contents of his wife’s Kindle, where she took notes as she was reading Ann Patchett’s novel “Commonwealth” and Christian Wiman’s “My Bright Abyss.” He also sent almost everything on Held Evans’s laptop, including bits of old Christmas lists—“Dad Held: gargoyle. Amanda: Necklace and CD”—along with lectures, talks, and drafts of unfinished blog posts. For the past two years, Chu has interviewed Held Evans’s family members. He has sifted through the remnants of her remarkable mind, listening to her on podcasts and puzzling through half-written stories and material that she had cut from other pieces. “I’ve been following breadcrumbs,” he said.

The result is a touching and strangely disembodied series of essays in which Held Evans, with Chu’s invisible pen, explores how one might find a path forward in Christianity beyond conservative evangelicalism. Held Evans chose the title “Wholehearted Faith” in response to the work of Brené Brown, a self-help writer who uses the term “wholehearted living” to encourage people to be their full selves in all aspects of their lives. “I have kept Brown’s books on my nightstand,” she writes. “Her work has been an invaluable force in helping me reintegrate my heart, soul, mind, and body after years of torn-to-pieces-hood.” (Brown told me that she admired Held Evans as well, saying, “Rachel was someone who was firmly planted in faith, and moved in it like love moves between people—you couldn’t see or touch it, but you could feel it. And when she died, the absence of that love brought on a collective heartbreak.”) For Held Evans, wholehearted faith involved dropping the armor of intellectual certitude: “Much as I prefer the self-protection offered by cynicism, caution and carbohydrates, finding my way back to my own belovedness has required receiving a new spirit, one of tenderness and one of vulnerability.” Held Evans often drew on the ideas of Paul Tillich, a Protestant theologian who argued that doubt “is a necessary element” of faith.

The arrogance of intellectual superiority, Held Evans writes, isn’t a solely conservative folly. Regardless of ideology, holding oneself above others based on certitude is dangerous. She worries that she is often guilty of this habit: “At times it is as if I didn’t dismantle that fortress at all. I just took one flag down and raised a different one in its place.” She often circles back to the notion of “belovedness,” a watchword of Henri Nouwen, a Dutch Catholic priest, who argued that God’s love is at the core of Christian teaching. This idea, which Held Evans embraced, has become popular among those moving out of conservative evangelicalism. In the end, Held Evans’s final book offers few firm conclusions; it seems to simply stop, mid-exploration. The challenge and poignancy of the collection is that its essays mark both the evolution of a consciousness and its abrupt end. “Everyone’s theology is a work in progress that keeps changing until they die,” Chu told me. “Rachel hadn’t finished asking all her questions, and she never thought she had all the answers.”

One afternoon, Held Evans’s family took me to the rolling expanse of the graveyard where their daughter is buried. They drove to a plot slightly secluded from the main road. “We wanted a spot where we could just see mountains and greenery,” her mother said. A stranger had left pink plastic peonies in a vase that was soldered to the headstone, which read “Woman of Valor,” a term Held Evans had used to celebrate women’s strength. Amanda bent down to place orange daisies by her sister’s name. “A lot of people said, ‘Rachel gave me permission.’ She gave permission to doubt, permission to study as a woman,” she said. After Held Evans died, thousands of letters, cards, and social-media messages inundated her family. Some of the messages expressed remorse; the senders admitted their regret at not having listened to Held Evans’s critiques earlier. For example, Held Evans had often spoken out against Mark Driscoll, the pastor of the Seattle-based megachurch Mars Hill, who she believed was peddling a harmful brand of Biblical hypermasculinity. In her lifetime, this critique had earned her ire. In 2014, Driscoll fell from grace after accusations of bullying, and today he is the subject of a hugely popular podcast called “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill.” (Driscoll apologized for his behavior in an open letter to his congregation, writing, “In the last year or two, I have been deeply convicted by God that my angry-young-prophet days are over.”) “You know, people didn’t feel comfortable with what she was saying ten years ago,” Amanda went on. “Now they’re saying, ‘Man, I wished I’d listened to her. I wish we’d all paid a little closer attention.’ ”

A few years ago, Held Evans and her husband purchased a twenty-five-acre plot of farmland and planned their future house together. They pored over paint colors and open-plan kitchens. About a month before Held Evans died, they installed the concrete foundation. For the past two years, Dan has overseen the construction on his own. The gray clapboard house, with two airy porches, is perched on the steep slope of an open field surrounded by woods. Dan painted the front door red, as Held Evans had wanted, but he had to choose a different hue of gray for the exterior than the one she’d been leaning toward. “She’d picked a shade called ‘Repose,’ ” Dan said. “But it made me think of her lying in the casket, so I went with ‘Mindful.’ ” The house was full of touches from Held Evans’s life. As a teen-ager, she and her sister had toilet-papered the houses of some boys who were teasing them in band practice, and, a few nights later, the boys had retaliated by wrapping the girls in duct tape on their front lawn. One of the culprits became a calligrapher in adulthood, and carved one of Held Evans’s sentences into a piece of raw wood that now sits by the door: “Even here in the dark, God is busy making all things new.”

Today Held Evans’s roomy and inviting theology is cherished by pop-culture icons such as the writer Glennon Doyle, who told me, “Those looking in at Christianity don’t know what an act of heroism it is for a woman inside to live this way. It was dangerous, the way Rachel lived. It was Christlike.” For many, emerging from evangelicalism involves attempting to return to a truer sense of Jesus’ life and teachings. Held Evans once tried to help start a new church but failed; she eventually joined the Episcopal Church, which she valued for its rituals. “She often told me how much she loved these sacraments,” Peter, her father, said. “They tied her to the ancient tradition that she valued so deeply.” Michael Curry, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, told me, “Christianity is going through a reformation, and she might well have been our Martin Luther.” He added, “She helped mainline Christians stop being afraid of Jesus, and she helped evangelicals know the love of God.”

Before I left Dayton, Dan brought me to the old house that he and Held Evans had shared, a brick bungalow. The two had intended to sell it once their dream home was completed, but, after his wife’s death, Dan had found himself unable. The house now stands as a shrine to a writer and mother’s interrupted life. Their old Ford Explorer sat in the driveway, its trim marked by long-gone “Just Married” decorations; the front door was still decorated with a Christmas wreath, the Styrofoam cranberries of which had faded to blue. “It’s hard for me to accept the concept of, Well, it was just her time, because it wasn’t, actually—it wasn’t her time,” Dan said. “There’s still breast milk in the freezer.” Dan gave a tour. Here was the lime-green chair where Rachel breast-fed Henry and Harper. Here was the breakfast menu that she wrote out on the whiteboard before leaving for her last trip, to California, in 2019. Here was a framed coffee cup from the White House—Held Evans had been there twice—and an empty box of Presidential M&Ms, and a formal citation from President Obama.

We walked into her study. “I imagined that ‘until death do you part’ meant that, once one of you dies, you’re parted,” Dan said. “I now realize that for some things—some things last until you’re both dead.” Her books were scattered everywhere: “One Coin Found,” by Emmy Kegler; “Womanist Midrash,” by the Reverend Gafney; “Jesus Feminist,” by Bessey. Above the desk, on a corkboard, was a series of index cards on which she had left messages to herself, to read while writing: “Tell the truth” and “Sentence is NOT in the refrigerator.”

Dan brought me to the bungalow’s back deck, which had red wooden slats and a built-in bench. “This is where I had the most difficult conversation of my life,” he told me. “I sat my three-year-old down and had to explain to him that his mom died.” At the hospital, grief counsellors told Dan that the best way to talk to his son, Henry, about Held Evans’s death was in concrete, specific terms: her arms and legs didn’t work anymore, and her brain wasn’t thinking, but she wasn’t scared, and she wasn’t in pain. A month earlier, Henry had found a dead carpenter bee. “He got it,” Dan said. “He said, ‘Oh, like the bee.’ ” Dan had learned that, with children, death wasn’t a one-time conversation; Henry had to reëngage with loss at every stage of development. Abstractions like “passed away” weren’t helpful, nor was talk of Heaven. “As Henry grows and develops a sense of spirituality, I think he’s probably going to have his own examining to do,” Dan said. “Grownups don’t have it figured out.” Dan pulled the door shut and bent down to pick up three wet leaves that had blown in from the porch and come to rest on the kitchen floor; he stacked them carefully, so that everything would remain just so.