Bestselling author Rachel Held Evans once drew a global following through her Tennessee-based blog and books, where she wrestled openly with traditional evangelicalism and gave language to people who were questioning their own faith. Then an infection led to her sudden death at the age of 37 in 2019, ending what was expected to be a prolific writing career.

Since her death, a generation of writers owe a clear debt to the path she carved, many of whom are still trying to keep Evans’s writing alive in a new book called Braving the Truth: Essential Essays for Reckoning with and Reimagining Faith (HarperOne, Feb.). The book is edited by Sarah Bessey, a bestselling author and cofounder with Evans of the progressive Evolving Faith conference and podcast in 2018.

“Rachel created a pathway of truth-telling and prophetic speaking where you still get to love the church and nobody gets to tell you that you don’t belong here,” Bessey tells PW.

A self-described “Bible nerd” raised in the heart of the Bible Belt, Evans came of age within conservative evangelicalism. But when the doctrine she had inherited began to unravel for her, questions about science, gender, and the Bible itself became front and center. Braving the Truth is a collection representing a time capsule of some of the debates that were unfolding in American Christianity while Evans was blogging between 2007 and 2019.

“Rachel always had her finger on the pulse of the church and what was influencing it,” Bessey says. “I can’t think of another time in the history of the church when anyone would’ve cared what some southern lady from east Tennessee had to say about gender roles and reading the Bible or evangelicalism and the shift toward Donald Trump.”

Evans would encourage women, who are often not allowed to preach in evangelical churches, to speak up anyway. “To those who will not accept us as preachers, we will have to become prophets,” Evans wrote in 2011. An early critic of President Trump, Evans would talk about the “unholy American trinity of patriarchy, white supremacy, and religious nationalism.” In a January 28 blog post included in Braving the Truth, Evans wrote about Trump and opined, "When power is the end game, faithfulness bows to political expediency."

Keeping faith while questioning doctrine

Evans, who eventually left evangelicalism to embrace the mainline Protestant tradition by becoming an Episcopalian, explored topics ranging from doubt, scripture, politics, gender, and sexuality. Bessey says she still hears from parents who talk about Evan's 2013 blog post titled “If my son or daughter were gay” because it gave them language for how to think and talk to their kids. In the post, which is included in the book, Evans wrote that if her daughter were gay, “I would want her to know nothing could separate her from the love of God in Christ. I would want her to know that she isn’t broken, she isn’t an embarrassment, she isn’t a disappointment.”

Evans often served as a north star for many Christians going through deconstruction—picking apart their inherited faith. “People since her death would say, ‘I felt like I knew her. I felt like she was my pastor,’ or ‘She was alongside me,’” Bessey says. “She would know how I was feeling or thinking before I did.”

For many, Evans provided the courage to reexamine doctrine, what they previously thought was gospel truth.

Author Jen Hatmaker wrote an essay for Braving the Truth on how Evans helped her come to an inclusive position on people who are LGBTQ. “For every person who has responded to my leadership in their life toward spiritual evolution, know there was a Rachel in mine first,” Hatmaker wrote.

Another of the book's contributors, Shauna Niequist, wrote about how she would borrow bravery from Evans. “Rachel graciously allowed me—and so, so many others—to draft off her bravery, to be a little more courageous in the reflection of her courage,” Niequist wrote. “She gave me a living, breathing vision of something I wanted to be, something to aspire to.”

That idea of “borrowing bravery” came up for Bessey as she edited the book. “You borrow bravery from Rachel because she gave you language or said out loud something you felt but didn’t know how to articulate, and you were able to lean into truth,” Bessey says. “It takes a lot of bravery to be a person right now, and it starts with being able to say what’s true.”