Rachel Held Evans

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

Documented themes

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

Connections to Rachel Held Evans

• Council on Biblical Manhood & Womanhood opposed (2012) — Rachel Held Evans's writing was, from CBMW's perspective, precisely the kind of theological argument they had been organized to refute: a woman, working from Scripture, arguing that complementarian readings of the Bible were selective and self-serving. Her 2012 'A Year of Biblical Womanhood' satirized the proof-texting methodology that underpinned CBMW's entire doctrinal edifice. CBMW-affiliated writers responded with formal critiques arguing that Evans misunderstood hermeneutics, misrepresented complementarian theology, and failed to engage the best versions of the position she criticized.
• The Gospel Coalition (TGC) opposed (2012) — The Gospel Coalition became one of Evans's most persistent institutional critics, publishing multiple responses to her books and essays over the course of her career. TGC writers argued that Evans misread Scripture, misrepresented complementarianism, and was leading a generation of evangelicals toward theological liberalism. The volume and regularity of TGC's critical engagement was itself evidence of her reach: the organization devoted institutional resources to refuting a blogger-turned-author who had no formal theological credentials and operated outside their denominational structures. When Evans died in 2019, the restraint of TGC's public response — compared to the outpouring from progressive Christians — was widely noted.
• Mark Driscoll opposed (2012) — Mark Driscoll attacked Rachel Held Evans publicly and repeatedly, calling her a 'femi-nazi' and positioning her as a representative of the feminism he argued had emasculated American Christianity. The attacks were personal and specific — Driscoll's masculine-Christianity brand required visible enemies, and Evans, as a woman writing theology from inside evangelical culture, was a more threatening target than secular feminists. His attacks had the ironic effect of amplifying her reach: audiences who had never heard of her discovered her through Driscoll's denunciations.

Sources

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