How Rachel Held-Evans Lit the Way

a Yes, And… Theology reflection

Rachel Held-Evans and her public faith lit a way for me during a difficult season in my life. Her book Searching For Sunday helped bring me back to the roots of my faith. After walking away from the path of ministry because I could not reconcile the God presented by Evangelical Christianity with my identity as a queer, trans woman, I swore off religion.

I had an agnostic faith in God and no faith in Christianity. The hypocrisy of a church that would deny a seeking queer or trans person admittance to the building much less the eucharist, yet helped cover up cases of abuse (physical, sexual, emotional, & spiritual) showed me the Christian religion could not be trusted. I felt believing in it meant both excision of a core part of my God-created self and blinding my eyes to injustices commited by Christians.

Passing through the teacher’s lounge in September of 2015, I heard colleagues talking about Rachel. It was, unsurprisingly, in a negative light. I expected she was the wife of a pastor caught in a delicate position, distraught over her husband’s actions but ready to forgive and standby him. I was wrong. She wasn’t running a scam or preaching the Evangelical half-truth "hate the sin but love the sinner.” Instead, they were deriding Rachel because she was “undermining God’s creation”…