Tag: Rachel Held Evans

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Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

In this 2015 memoir, the late Rachel Held Evans shared her journey with church – how she got to the point of leaving the church she had loved and how she struggled with where she belonged after that.  The book is structured around the seven sacraments of the Catholic church: Baptism, Confession, Holy Orders, Communion, Confirmation, Anointing of the Sick, and Marriage. Each section has several chapters where her personal story is woven in with a discussion of the theme.

I really appreciated how Evans shared both the positive and the negative of her experience with church.  She did not paint the conservative church she grew up in as all bad by any means, but she also didn’t shy away from the problems she came to have with some of the beliefs and behaviors she encountered.

After spending some time away from church entirely, she found herself longing for community and began searching for a church where she could experience that alongside people who were also willing to question and examine what they believed.  This quote seems to sum up what she was looking for:

Imagine if every church became a place where everyone is safe, but no one is comfortable.  Imagine if every church became a place where we told one another the truth.  We might just create sanctuary.

I can relate to her struggle with finding yourself in a place that does not align with your beliefs, but then feeling a sense of loneliness and disconnection when no longer inhabiting that space.  I am thankful that I have been able to find a community of faith that allows me to be myself while also challenging me to grow even more.

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Faith Unraveled

Faith Unraveled: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask Questions

In this 2010 book by the late Rachel Held Evans, we are taken on a journey of faith.  Evans describes her upbringing in a conservative Christian environment and how she learned to defend the faith she had been taught.  I resonated with a lot of her experiences, including going to a conservative, evangelical church and then college.

Along the way, she began to question some of the things she had been taught and some of the things she read in the Bible.  Her questions were not well received by those around her, but she continued pursuing answers.  Eventually she determines that she does not need to leave her faith in God to find answers but just the limited beliefs about what it means to be a Christian and follow God that she had been taught.

This was such a good book. It really affirmed what I have been experiencing in my faith journey the last few years. Evans compares the process of questioning your beliefs to evolution, as the town she lived in was the location for the Snopes trial in the early 1900s, which was about teaching evolution in schools.  My favorite line in the book is, “Faith must adapt in order to survive.”

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My Deconstruction Journey Through Books

My Deconstruction Journey

I have come a long way in the last few years with regard to my faith and my understanding of God and the church. Many beliefs that I never felt comfortable with have been discarded, and other ideas that I had accepted as gospel have been dispelled as man-made and untrue. I have listened to a lot of podcasts and learned a lot from various forms of social media, but I have also read several books that have been very helpful. I still have a long way to go and a lot to learn, but I wanted to share the books I have learned from so far here.

An Early Foray into Deconstruction

The first book I can recall reading in the deconstruction area was in July 2020, and the book was Fierce, Free and Full of Fire: The Guide to Being Glorious You by Jen Hatmaker.  At the time it made me nervous to even be reading the book because some of her views did not align with the doctrine I had been taught all my life growing up in a pentecostal church and then moving into a charismatic church later on.  I ended up skimming the book and not really looking for anything else like it.

A Year of Biblical Womanhood

Fast forward to November of 2023 and I had moved to an inclusive, justice-oriented church and was starting to embrace some new ideas and let go of some old ones.  I then read A Year of Biblical Womanhood by Rachel Held Evans, which was a very readable book detailing how she spent a year trying to live out characteristics and actions commonly thought to make a biblical woman.  She spent one month focusing on each of twelve different areas.  It was fascinating and I felt my spirit opening up to more possibilities of what it could mean to be a Christian.

Fierce, Free and Full of Fire: The Guide to Being Glorious You

After that, in December 2023, I decided to reread Fierce, Free and Full of Fire: The Guide to Being Glorious You by Jen Hatmaker.  I appreciated it a lot more the second time around.  It is a self-reflective book and very encouraging.

Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again

In January 2024, I read another Rachel Held Evans book called Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again.  This book focused on exploring the Bible in a variety of ways using different types of literary expression.  Interestingly enough, one of my Bible professors in college talked a lot about the Bible as literature.  He was considered borderline heretical by some of the students, but he was still pretty conservative in what he shared with us compared to some of what I have read and heard over the last few years.

She Deserves Better: Raising Girls to Resist Toxic Teachings on Sex, Self, and Speaking Up

The next book I read in March 2024 was She Deserves Better: Raising Girls to Resist Toxic Teachings on Sex, Self, and Speaking Up by Sheila Wray Gregoire, Rebecca Gregoire Lindenbach, and Joanna Sawatsky.  This is a book aimed primarily at women who have daughters and want to give them better messages about their bodies and themselves than they would get from purity culture. I really enjoyed this book; even though I don’t have a daughter, it helped me with some of the internalized messages I still had from growing up in a conservative church environment.  This book is based on strong research the authors have conducted and contains a lot of charts and graphs highlighting various results they found.

Where We Meet: A Lenten Study of Systems, Stories, and Hope

During the Lent season of 2024, I attended a virtual Bible study hosted by my pastor, and we read and discussed the book Where We Meet: A Lenten Study of Systems, Stories, and Hope by Rachel Gilmore, Candace Lewis, et al.  The book contained daily reflections with a different topic for each week: Beginning the Journey, Diversity, Postcolonial, Equity, Contextual, and Innovation.  I was introduced to a lot of new concepts that I hope to spend more time studying at some point.

The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

In May 2024, I read Beth Allison Barr’s book The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth.  In this book, Barr traces the history of the belief that God designed women to be submissive wives, virtuous mothers, and joyful homemakers. This was a well-written, easy-to-follow account of the historical events that have shaped this teaching into what it is today in American conservative circles.  It really helped solidify my thoughts on this topic.

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez is another book tracing the history of the conservative American church.  I read this in August 2024 and found it thoroughly fascinating and readable.  Du Mez takes us through the last 75 years of white evangelicalism in America, showing us how rugged masculinity and Christian Nationalism have taken over and also how these developments have led to the championing of Donald Trump by the religious right.

The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church

In September 2024, I picked up a recently released book called The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church by Sarah McCammon.  This was a very well-written book that is part memoir and part informational discourse on the issues that arise for people who don’t fit or who start to question the church.  I could relate to a lot of this book and found it very encouraging to the journey I have been on myself.

DNF (Did Not Finish)

I was recently reading Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hope, Hell, and the New Jerusalem by Bradley Jersak.  This was my second time attempting this book.  The writing is more dry and complicated, and I just had too hard a time getting through it.  I have always had a lot of fear of hell (and the rapture!), and what I got from what I did read is that there is really no way to know definitively what is going to happen as the Bible can be used to support several different views of the afterlife.  A related book I also DNF’d was Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple by Scot McKnight with Cody Matchett.  That book was too esoteric for me.

Moving Forward

I have noticed that all but one of the books I have read have been written by women.  I think that is interesting.  I have listened to a number of male podcasters, so I’m not anti-men by any means, but it seems like I gravitate towards books that are written from a woman’s perspective.

I have a large list of books related to deconstruction on my TBR.  Here is what I have at this point:

  • Faith Unraveled: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask Questions by Rachel Held Evans
  • Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church by Rachel Held Evans
  • A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today by Bonnie Kristian
  • The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis by Karen Swallow Prior
  • How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy by Terran Williams
  • Marriage in the Bible: What Do the Texts Say? By Jennifer Grace Bird
  • The Liturgy of Politics: Spiritual Formation for the Sake of Our Neighbor by Kaitlyn Schiess
  • The Ballot and the Bible: How Scripture Has Been Used and Abused in American Politics and Where We Go from Here by Kaitlyn Schiess
  • Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope by Esau McCaulley
  • The Color of Compromise: The Truth About the American Church’s Complicity in Racism by Jemar Tisby
  • How to Fight Racism: Courageous Christianity and the Journey Toward Racial Justice by Jemar Tisby
  • Beyond Fragility: A Skills-Based Guide to Effective Anti-Racist Allyship by Yara Mekawi, Natalie Watson-Singleton, and Danyelle Dawson (I think this is a secular book, but it seems to fit in this list.)
  • The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You’ve Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended by Sheila Wray Gregoire, Rebecca Gregoire Lindenbach, and Joanna Sawatsky
  • Baby Dinosaurs on the Ark: The Bible and Modern Science and the Trouble of Making It All Fit by Janet Kellogg Ray
  • God and the Gay Christian: The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships by Matthew Vines
  • UnClobber by Colby Martin
  • Star-Spangled Jesus: Leaving Christian Nationalism and Finding a True Faith by April Ajoy

I am open to suggestions of other books you have found helpful in deconstructing harmful doctrines that are taught in the American church and in finding your way to a more honest and loving faith.