In Memoriam: Rachel Held Evans

Rachel Held Evans passed away yesterday, as a result of a cascading series of complications stemming from the flu.  She was 37 years old, and leaves behind a husband and two very small children.

Social media was awash in tributes to Evans yesterday, and she had an obituary in the New York Times and other general-interest fora.  Many of the personal tributes were from folks with a similar background as Evans--raised evangelical (perhaps fundamentalist) Christian, once committed to this model but in time came to have grave doubts, struggling to rebuild some notion of the faith.  The tributes were particularly poignant from women, for whom she provided a voice in a place that does not often take women's voices seriously, and/or LGBT folks, for whom she was one of the earliest and most uncompromising advocates for their full inclusion in the evangelical space.  I was also struck by the praises from writers and theologians of color regarding Evans's commitment to building inclusive spaces.

I fit none of the above categories, and yet Evans was an enormous inspiration for me.  I can't recall now how or in what circumstances I first encountered her blog, but it was well before the modern incarnation of this blog in July 2013.  When I first encountered her, I was very much in a bubble from a religious perspective.  The only religious tradition that I gave any thought to was Roman Catholicism, and maybe the spare thought to Eastern Orthodoxy via my friend Fr. Justin.  It's easy to forget in this era of Francis, but in the days of Pope Benedict the Catholic conservatives came very close to completing the Jedi Mind Trick that Vatican II really didn't mean much of anything, or at least meant whatever they told you it meant.  The Jedi Mind Trick is less about advancing a set of specific positions as it is closing off conceptual possibilities, shutting down the idea that things could be different.  And it worked on me--I thought that they way things were now was the way they were always going to be.

Meanwhile, my experience growing up in Florida taught me that there was nothing of value from a  religious perspective outside of the world of Roman Catholicism and maybe Orthodoxy.  And evangelicals, in particular, were to be completely ignored, consisting of an undifferentiated mass of anti-intellectual, retrograde fanatics.  No, the horizon of religion was the space I currently inhabited, and nothing was going to change in that space, so we might as well make the best of what we have.

That wholly parochial world view was shattered by contact with Evans and her writing.  It certainly didn't happen overnight--it was more like the slow drip of water wearing away the rock.  But she opened the door for me into a world of people who, while coming from a different place, were struggling with fundamentally the same questions, same concerns, same doubts.  And because she was so meticulous at using her platform to boost others, she revealed that there were a lot of these people out there.  Realizing that I had more in common with these "progressive evangelicals" than I did with the EWTN crowd in Catholicism was a major paradigm shift, one that encouraged me to start looking for possibilities outside of the confines of the Catholic Church.

I think there is no way I would be an Episcopalian now if it weren't for Evans, because I don't think I would have seriously considered that I might find a home in a *gasp* Protestant church.  But knowing there were these fellow travelers out there "in the wild" was the inspiration I needed to start looking.  She opened up space for that possibility for me, as the leader and face of others like me in those seemingly foreign places.

The second thing I took from Evans was her steadfast belief that Christianity was worth fighting for, worth fighting to get right.  As I mentioned above, I found myself in a kind of passive, resigned state with regard to Catholicism by the beginning of this decade.  In such a state, people generally don't leave for other faith traditions, but often just give up on the whole thing.  Eventually you get tired of pushing against this giant immovable rock, so you just stop pushing.  I could feel that fatigue begin to set in with me, and while it is an unknowable counter-factual, I think there is a real chance that I would have just faded away, like so many others have.

While she would express openly and publicly her times of despair and exhaustion with the Christian establishment, at the end of the day she never wavered from her conviction that it was worth it in the end to stick with Christianity, to find a way to make it work for you in a manner that makes sense and nourishes your soul.  And she did so with a full, sober awareness of all of the horrors and bullshit present in establishment Christianity.  She never blew sunshine up our collective asses, nor tried to sell us on easy solutions.  Instead, there was a quiet but dogged determination to see the thing through, that there was something wonderful possible for those who went through that.  She, more than any other writer of "public Christian" figure, strengthened and empowered me to keep looking, to keep searching, to keep going.  This, too, is a way in which I would probably never have become an Episcopalian without Evans--I think I probably would have just given up rather than taken the scary step of setting out for a new home.

Finally, I think it is highly unlikely this blog would not have existed without her as a model.  When I first started writing here, I did so with the notion that I was doing it for me, and that no one was going to read it.  But I wanted a place where I could write honestly, where I could say what I thought and felt without having to self-censor.  All of that came from her example, from her writing.  She showed what can be possible with this format, and while I have not had the reach she had (thank God, because she took enormous abuse as a result of that reach), I have seen some of the same effects, both on me and on people who read what I write.  To the extent I have had any modest positive impact on folks here, it is only because she pointed the way.

So, all I can say to her is thank you, and I will miss her writing and her presence.  I think I'll end with this collect from the funeral liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer, one of the most beautiful I have seen:

O God of grace and glory, we remember before you this day our sister Rachel. We thank you for giving her to us, her family and friends, to know and to love as a companion on our earthly pilgrimage. In your boundless compassion, console us who mourn. Give us faith to see in death the gate of eternal life, so that in quiet confidence we may continue our course on earth, until, by your call, we are reunited with those who have gone before; through Jesus Christ our Lord. 

Amen.