The Loss of Rachel Held Evans, Unifying Christian Voice

On May 4, 2019, Rachel Held Evans died unexpectedly in a Nashville, TN hospital.

She was a theologian an atheist could love. Like C.S. Lewis in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in Mere Christianity, and in his better-known Narnia books, Evans wrote with humor, commonsense, and openness about her own spiritual crises. Raised to believe that all non-Christians burned in hell forever, she learns as a middle-school student that Anne Frank and her sister died of typhus in a concentration camp. Staring at Anne’s photo on the cover of her paperback, Evans begs God to “let her out of the lake of fire” for being a Jew. She notices that her Sunday school teachers spoke of hell as a place for Hitler, not his victims, and she’s quick to observe inconsistencies: if her Sunday school teachers and college professors were right, she reflected, then hell would be populated not just by Hitler and Stalin, Hussen and Milosevic but by “the people that they persecuted.” As a college student, she watches the televised execution by the Taliban of a Muslim woman in a soccer stadium in Kabul and seriously interrogates her fundamentalist belief that only Christians enter heaven: “The idea that this woman passed from agony to agony, from torture to torture, from a lifetime of pain and sadness to an eternity of pain and sadness, all because she had less information about the gospel than I did, seemed cruel, even sadistic.” At that point she experienced the transformative spiritual crisis that is almost inevitable with the constitutionally honest. Against all odds, she rejected easy hatred for difficult love.   

She will be remembered for her bravery in rejecting dogma for questions, even or especially when these sent her into spiritual agony: “What makes a faith crisis so scary is that once you allow yourself to ask one or two questions, more inevitably follow.”  Doubters of all faiths and those of none admire her skill in setting down, in crystal clear prose how unsettling, even terrifying it is to ask questions that shatter one’s entire sense of identity.

In her online congregation, she brought together young and old who were looking for a God of love who didn’t automatically dump them in hell for being gay, questioning the patriarchy, or wondering, as she did, why tickets to heaven could only be offered to Christians. In the polarized world of Donald Trump, she brought together the disparate groups he keeps divided. Her voice will be greatly missed.