Rachel Held Evans

In Which I Use a Dead Person For Self Reflection

There was a writer by the name of Rachel Held Evans. She’s dead now. I didn’t like her.

Rachel was, like myself, apart of the Millennial Religious Homebrew Movement (MRHM). [Remember this acronym, I will use it a few more times.] I say “movement” like it was somehow or other organized, when in reality MRHM is just a term I made up, just now, as I’m sitting here. But what the term is referring to really happened. What I call the MRHM was a tendency of young Christians in the late 00s to early 10s to try and “rediscover” their religion on their own terms, largely through the mediums of podcasting and the blogosphere. It was, in hindsight, a reaction to the New Atheist Movement, which was an actual movement, with like, leaders and funding and stuff. By comparison the best we had was a podcast, which, let me check… might be still operational…AH! it is, here’s a link, and a few authors who achieved some measure of popular or commercial success, Rachel being one of them.

To be clear, Rachel wasn’t a bad person, I don’t think. I mean, I didn’t know the woman, she might’ve been but I have no reason to suspect so. I just didn’t like her. I think I didn’t like her because she, like Tripp and Bo of the afore-linked Homebrewed Christianity Podcast, tried to resolve the conflicts between their faith and their culture by further demystifying their faith. In other words, if something in the Bible, or in their religion, seemed old, out of touch, weird, or impossible from a scientific perspective, Rachel et al tended to abandon it. Well… that’s not really true. They didn’t abandon it so much as reinterpret it or shove it violently into the “metaphor” category. I didn’t like Rachel because she was so good at that. At making everything seem like a metaphor, or a myth. That’s always felt wrong to me. As I wrote here, doing so buys you a temporary peace with the culture but at the cost of sacrificing the internal logic of your own religion. I have no reason to believe Rachel wasn’t good hearted, and caring, and so on, but I saw her as tremendously damaging. She would’ve probably said the same of me though, if she’d ever heard of me, which she hadn’t, which was probably for the best.

I’ve been struggling to come to terms with that portion of my life for a while now, mostly wondering why I didn’t take the same path. Rachel was, like myself, a Southerner. We grew up quite near each other, so much so that I consider it almost a certainty that we passed each other on the interstate from the back seats of our parents’ cars from time to time. I understood all the struggles she wrote about in her books and on her blog. Coming of age within evangelical Christianity. Going out into the world as a young adult and finding that your religion, and especially your particular brand of it, was sort of despised by the world at large. Grappling with the apparent contradictions between faith and science. Having, or not having, the courage to stand by your convictions in the face of almost overwhelming peer pressure not to. I got where she was coming from.

So, if I understood her so well and had so much in common, why did I take such a different route? Genetics maybe? A biological predisposition towards being disagreeable? Where as the rest of the people in the MRHM zigged, I zagged. Why?

On paper it would’ve been easy for me to do what they did. Morph, over time, into a sort of vague liberal progressive Christian that has no particular convictions except that we ought to “welcome the neighbor” and “kiss the feet of the outcast”, or what have you. I certainly had that sort of heart. I was, and still am, somewhat of a softy. All of the appeals to emotion and pulling on heart strings that are the bread and butter of progressivism were very effective on me. I was, as they were, smart enough to rationalize any position, and good enough with words to make anything seem to square with scripture. They were my friends (not Rachel or Tripp specifically, just the sort of people who read and listened to them). And yet, somehow I departed. I moved away from them and, as has been a recurring theme of my life, I burned every bridge I had on the way out for fear that I might be tempted to walk back. Nobody from that time of my life speaks to me anymore. A decade or so of friendships, gone. I don’t blame them. I was kind of a jerk towards the end honestly. But why did I leave? Like the Robert Frost poem, what has made all the difference?

Looking back, I think I was more afraid of death. Maybe Hell too. I think, honestly, that was the only difference. Ironic maybe since Rachel went ahead and died but, you know. I think that she believed that, if there was a Heaven, she would go there, and I think she probably did too. I don’t think she ever had much of a doubt of it, and good for her. Most of my life I have held, at least emotionally if not intellectually, that almost everybody is going to Heaven except me. I have always feared Hell. Probably too much. It was always easy for me to see how God could forgive others but not see how he could forgive me. This is a form of narcissism. I’ve since made strides to get over it. But more than the fear of Hell, the fear of Death itself, and that there might not be anything, drove me. If everything was just a metaphor, if everything was just a myth, if everything was just a clever social commentary on how we ought to treat others in our society… then all of it belongs in the trash. What was the line from St. Paul? If Christ be not raised our faith is in vain? Yes. If death is a chasm that can never be crossed and those who go into are lost forever then there is no point to anything. I felt that very keenly. Life, even should it go on a billion years, if it is not eternal it is worthless. For even a billion years is nothing against eternity. The difference between 1 and infinity and 1 billion and infinity is the same. Infinity. All our loves would fade to nothing and everyone we ever cared for would go away, forever, and eventually be forgotten.

Intolerable.

So intolerable it could not be true.

I at any rate couldn’t believe it. The miracles had to have happened. Christ had to have gotten up out of the grave. The stone had to have rolled away. If not, all was for nothing, and I couldn’t look at the smile on my grandfather’s face or feel the hug of a friend and imagine that was true. These people were beautiful, too beautiful to be lost forever. I had to go to bat for the miraculous, for the impossible, for the absolutely absurd. Men did walk on water. Chariots of fire were real. There were, once upon a time, giants, the offspring of angels and mortal women. That was the only rational choice because if the miraculous did not happen then everyone I ever loved would be lost and that seemed insane. It was the most absurd thing I had ever heard. And was the resurrection so outlandish, really? After all, have we all not already woken up out of nothingness into life? Once all was blackness, we were not, and then, poof! all of a sudden, through no doing of our own, we were born. Alive. Into a world of light and color and sound and smell. All the resurrection is saying is that such will happen again. That we will once more emerge out of the dark. That doesn’t seem crazy, to say that that which has already happened can happen again. If you like, it seems almost statistical.

And so I feared death. I feared losing everyone I ever loved and became for that reason an internet crazy person. Whereas they went on to become respectable, people that belonged in society ((You know, teachers at universities and authors of books (the kind on actual shelves, in actual stores!) and pastors of churches and youth ministers and missionaries).) I went on to develop intricate theories on how ghosts could be possible and what spirits are and the nature of creation, and to try and explain the fact that Jesus doesn’t seem to shy away from astrology. I became not a respectable person. I became a person on the fringe of the fringe, a guy who can wax prolific on how the orbit of the moon is impossible unless it is miraculous (true, btw). Because… because I guess I want to see my grandfather again. Because somewhere deep inside I know he isn’t really dead. He’s not gone. He’s asleep. Miracles do happen, and one day they will happen to me. It’s not all just a metaphor. It’s real.

So I turned a corner at some point and that’s okay. Everyone else went the other way, and that’s fine too. I wish we could still be friends but I get it, at this point being friends with me is sort of like inviting the unkempt homeless guy over for dinner, or worse, asking him to come speak at your Sunday School class. Ha! One time this actually happened! (It was never offered again). But it really is okay. I used to be bummed about it, to feel like I had been betrayed, like people had parted ways with me or something but really, of everybody in the broader MRHM, I walked away from them. It had to be that way. I wish them well. And, hey, if one day they ever do need some ammunition to shore up the supernatural parts of their faith, I’ve got them covered. Maybe that was my purpose. To prepare an intellectual stockpile for a future conflict. Who knows?

What I do know is that you should all check out Rachel’s books, particularly Evolving in Monkey Town and Searching for Sunday. I didn’t like Rachel, but she was a good writer and her thoughts encapsulated a particular moment in time for faith in America that we all felt. It’s a time I like to remember because it was simpler. Lines had not yet been drawn and it felt like, maybe, maybe we could find a way to hold onto the past and also walk into the future. Didn’t work out that way though. Culture wouldn’t allow it. You had to pick sides. And, as the saying goes, I may have been on the losing side, but I’m still not convinced it was the wrong one. To be fair, I don’t know where Rachel landed on all these things by the end of her life. I sort of stopped following her. Maybe she agreed with me more than I give her credit for. Maybe not. Maybe I’m projecting the whole of the zeitgeist of the MRHM onto her and that’s not fair. Don’t know. Whatever happened, Rachel dealt with the culture war her way, and I dealt with it mine. And it’s cool. I’ll take up my issues with her when we meet on the other side. I’m sure she’s there. I hope I get there too.

Until then…

Bless her heart.

As a fellow southerner, she’d know exactly what that means.