“Do I want a church that fits me, or a me that fits the church?”
—Rachel Held Evans, “Braving the Truth”
I initially made a little checkmark annotation next to this line (my shorthand for “good point!”) and kept reading, but then I paused — literally put the book down — and asked myself the question out loud. What do I really want from my church? Do I want it to change, or do I want to change myself? It is easy (and probably accurate) to simply say “both” and keep moving, but particularly in this season of Lent I found it worthwhile to let the question simmer for a while. Could I honestly say I was willing to change, to conform, in any meaningful way? Or am I really just waiting for the church to finally come around to my (obviously correct!) view? I’m not entirely sure.
This question, like so many that Rachel Held Evans posed in her writing, stayed with me, and has had me reflecting on my own relationship to my faith and what I desire from it. Evans, who was raised Evangelical but eventually became Episcopalian, was not writing about the Catholic Church,[1] but the ways in which she resisted any too-readily-supplied answers serves as a model for all of us to not rest too comfortably in our received faith traditions.
Evans’s faith journey was not the same as my own, but I found — find — real comfort and solace in following her path away from a vision of Christianity grounded in control and prohibitions and toward one oriented around compassion, justice and inclusion. Evans chronicled her struggles with Evangelical Christianity in her books, like “Faith Unraveled: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask Questions”(first published as “Evolving in Monkey Town,” a reference to Evans’s hometown of Dayton, Tennessee, site of the famous Scopes Monkey Trial) and “Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church,” but many of her readers knew her best from her popular blog, where she posted regularly from 2007 until her death from a sudden illness in 2019 at age 37. Last week a sort of “best of” collection of selections from these blog posts, titled “Braving the Truth: Essential Essays for Reckoning with and Reimagining Faith,” edited by her friend Sarah Bessey, was released, and it is a beautiful tribute to Evans’s originality, humor and faithfulness.
Anyone who has struggled with aspects of their faith (which, I imagine, is all of us), but desires to remain faithful, will find comfort and challenge in these pages. As she notes in one post, “Very little of my faith has involved leaving and arriving. The vast majority of it has involved wrestling, meandering, stretching, struggling.” In these essays, we witness her going through all of these processes, and we are invited to journey alongside her.
Anyone who has struggled with aspects of their faith (which, I imagine, is all of us), but desires to remain faithful, will find comfort and challenge in these pages.
One of the most moving aspects of the book is found in the numerous testimonials and reactions sprinkled throughout the text; Bessey has included more than 30 short reflections from people who knew Evans and/or were influenced by her writing. One consistent theme in these pieces is Evans’s willingness to platform and center other voices; she consistently wanted to make sure that her readers were also hearing perspectives that had been traditionally marginalized within Christian spaces, like members of the LGBTQ+ community and non-white women. These reflections are a testament to her influence and the community that she helped to foster.
I was particularly struck by the way she built and fostered this community of faith, primarily but not exclusively, online. In her essay “15 Reasons I Returned to the Church,” she writes: “#8. Sucking up my pride and embracing the fact that, like it or not, I need community … and real community isn’t about surrounding myself with people just like me.” Even as she came to reject the largely patriarchal and conservative forms of Christianity, she knew that she did need a diverse community of believers to support and challenge her to grow in her faith.
Her far-too-early death was a shock and a loss for all of American Christianity. But her words do remain, as does the community she created and nurtured.
As I was reading her posts about the kind of community she was searching for, and hoping to create, I found myself deeply grateful for what we have going here at the Jesuit Media Lab. In a post from April of 2014, Evans wrote: “I want this little online community to be … a place where we can tell our stories, confess our sins, discuss Scripture, ask questions, disagree with grace, grieve, heal, create, follow Jesus, and rally together to do justice and love mercy — not just with our words, but with our actions. I want it to be a community that partners with people and organizations serving those on the margins. … I want it to feature and celebrate the voices of those speaking prophetically from the margins. I want us to continue to advocate for ‘the least of these.’”
The Catholic Church, and the Jesuits specifically, have many opportunities for putting our faith into practice, but one reason I have come to treasure the Jesuit Media Lab, and the annual Creators Summit along with it, is that it is a true community — a (mostly) virtual but still real space where participants can gather and share their stories, learn from each other, and support and challenge each other to grow in faith, hope and love. Like with any community, there is always room to improve: We can do more to feature prophetic voices from the margins; we can find new ways to invite people into the community; and we can work harder to translate the community from the virtual space to embodied experiences. (And personally I’d really love a comment section on posts so we can engage in real dialogue in response to the most thought-provoking posts.) But I am also simply grateful for what we have here. Just as I am grateful for the gift of Rachel Held Evans’s life and work.
I was fortunate enough to meet her once; in the spring of 2014 she came to the university where I was teaching to give a lecture connected to her book “A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband Master.” At that point I was an occasional reader of her blog, but my wife was a superfan, and she was very excited to meet Evans; we had a lovely dinner with her before her talk, and it was an encounter both my wife and I treasured. In person she was incredibly kind and funny, and the lecture she delivered, about the extreme challenges that come from trying to live by biblical precepts, to a packed auditorium full of mostly Catholic, not terribly devout, students, was captivating.
The specific experiences she described were, for the most part, not anything these students (or professors) had done in real life, but we all still learned from (and laughed with) her examples. She taught us to think more critically about how we read and interpret the Bible, about the flaws in common understandings of gender identity, and about the always surprising movements of grace. The talk, like her books, like her blog posts, was both clarifying and prophetic.
Her far-too-early death was a shock and a loss for all of American Christianity. As the religious right increasingly aligns itself with authoritarian politics, her challenging witness feels ever more timely and necessary. But her words do remain, as does the community she created and nurtured. We can all learn from her example, and by “wrestling, meandering, stretching, struggling” alongside her, we will be engaged in the work we need to carry out in order to find, to build, the church that fits us — the community of faith where we all fulfill our roles in the body of Christ, carrying out the mission of loving, serving and protecting the poor and the vulnerable.
[1] Her experience of Christianity was very much shaped by Bible Belt fundamentalism, and she was up front about not entirely understanding Catholicism; in one blog post about visiting a Benedictine Monastery she wrote, “There’s a lot I love about the Catholic tradition — the connection to history, the liturgy and ritual, the time for contemplation, the sense that the “great cloud of witnesses” that surrounds us is very much alive and active and a part of our lives. But I’m not Catholic. I don’t quite fit.”