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Growing up, Rachel Held Evans was a fiercely enthusiastic evangelizer for her religion, the type of child who relished the possibility to sit down subsequent to an atheist. But, when she skilled doubt, that sense of certainty started 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 advised Eliza Griswold. “That’s why it was particularly unsettling to have questions, because we were taught to have answers.” Held Evans started to weblog and then wrote a string of best-sellers about her religion, starting with “Evolving in Monkey Town,” wherein she separated the Jesus she believed in from the conservative doctrine she was raised with. Her work spoke to the hundreds of thousands of Christians who’ve left evangelical church buildings since 2006. “There’s this common misperception that either you are a conservative evangelical Christian or . . . you become agnostic or atheist,” Griswold explains, however many Christians had been turning away from politics and nonetheless sustaining their religion. She calls Held Evans “the patron saint of this emerging movement.” After Held Evans died, at thirty-seven, following a sudden sickness, her closing, incomplete manuscript was completed by a pal, Jeff Chu. Griswold travelled to Held Evans’s house city of Dayton, Tennessee, to satisfy together with her widower, Dan Evans, in addition to 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.”
