Rachel Held Evans and Her Legacy

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 9 November 2021

⏱️ 33 minutes

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Summary

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.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:13.4	Rachel Held Evans grew up in the 1980s in an evangelical family, in a town and a community
0:19.6	that was also solidly evangelical. But then she came to
0:23.8	challenge many things about the worldview that she had inherited, orthodoxies about the role of
0:29.0	women, homosexuality, race, and much more. Held Evans went on to become an influential writer with a
0:36.5	string of best-selling books that
0:37.8	dealt with questions of faith. She was a linchpin in a movement among younger evangelicals
0:43.3	away from conservative dogma. Here's Evans speaking on the podcast called Nomad in 2015.
0:50.9	I kept feeling like I wasn't allowed to ask these questions, and yet those were the questions
0:56.2	I was asking, and those were the questions that a lot of my readers were asking.
1:00.7	So it seemed worth addressing in books and on blogs, but it kind of got me in a little bit of hot
1:06.5	water with the evangelical establishment here in the U.S.
1:13.3	Progressive Christian author Rachel held Evans died this morning at the age of 37.
1:18.4	She was known for her best-selling books and her progressive activism in the evangelical church.
1:23.6	Evans died young after a sudden illness in 2019, and she left behind an unfinished manuscript.
1:29.2	That book has now just come out.
1:31.7	Its title is Wholehearted Faith, and it was completed by a co-author Jeff Chu.
1:40.5	Eliza Griswold writes for us about religion and other subjects, and she's been reporting for us on Rachel Held Evans and her legacy.
1:48.0	Eliza, you traveled recently to Dayton, Tennessee. What were you doing there?
1:52.0	So I went to visit the family of Rachel Held Evans and to get to know the people who were closest to her.
1:59.0	And there was a dinner in her honor at the home of her husband, Dan,
	...

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