michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

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michael barbaro

Today, in a brief but prolific career, a young writer asked whether evangelical Christianity could change. In doing so, she changed it. My colleague, Natalie Kitroeff, speaks to religion reporter Elizabeth Dias about the legacy of Rachel Held Evans. It’s Monday, June 3.

elizabeth dias

It’s always interesting to me, as the religion reporter for The New York Times, which spiritual figures break out into the mainstream. And I think the last time I wrote an obituary was for Billy Graham.

archived recording (billy graham) And the word redemption means to buy back. Why do you need to be bought back? Because the Bible says you’re the slave of sin.

elizabeth dias

He was this giant of evangelical culture. He died at 99, and defined generations of evangelical culture.

archived recording (billy graham) You must make a choice tonight. Are you going to continue down the broad road that leads to destruction or will you change and go the narrow road that leads to eternal life? This is the choice that only you can make.

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archived recording (rachel held evans) Asking one question about your faith will undoubtedly lead to another.

elizabeth dias

Rachel Held Evans was a 37-year-old writer.

archived recording (rachel held evans) Changing your mind about one idea means you will likely scrutinize others.

elizabeth dias

Who didn’t always even seem totally sure that she was a Christian.

archived recording (rachel held evans) And allowing yourself to have doubts about Christianity or about your present version of Christianity puts your sense of safety, security, certainty at risk.

elizabeth dias

And yet.

archived recording (rachel held evans) It is absolutely 100 percent worth it.

elizabeth dias

She almost single-handedly brought together an entirely new kind of community that is defining Christianity for the next generation.

archived recording (rachel held evans) Because living in faith — tried, tested, hard-won faith — is so much better than living in fear. rozella haydee white So my name is Rozella Haydee White. william stell My name is William Stell. julie rogers I am Julie Rogers. I live in Washington, D.C., with my wife and our two cats. rozella haydee white When I first encountered Rachel and her work, I had just gone through a divorce. julie rogers I was still in conversion therapy trying to become straight. william stell She gave me permission to trust that the spirit inside of me that was leading me to come out as gay was the same spirit inside of me that was trying to follow God as I understood God at that point. Rachel’s become meaningful, I think, to so many because, at some point, she began to realize, wait, what I’ve been told, what I’ve been told to believe, what I’ve been told to think isn’t all there is. And in fact, sometimes what we’ve been told to think, told to believe has been hurting people.

natalie kitroeff

So how did we get here? When does the world meet Rachel Held Evans?

archived recording (rachel held evans) I started having questions about my faith when I was in college. I was going to a Christian college. During that time, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, we got involved in Iraq, and I sort of became more aware of world events and how the circumstances of one’s birth affect their entire life. And so I started having questions about what that meant when so many people in the world either never had any exposure to Christianity or that exposure has been limited.

elizabeth dias

I think the book that really started to put her on the map was “A Year of Biblical Womanhood.” She committed to spend one whole year living exactly as if she followed all of the rules for women in the Bible.

natalie kitroeff

Wow.

elizabeth dias

Right. There’s a famous passage in the Bible, Proverbs 31. And it’s this long description of all of these things that make a wonderful woman. One of those verses is, you know, her husband is respected at the city gate. So she made this sign — Dan is her husband — and so she made this sign that said, “Dan is awesome,” and held it up just inside of the town’s entrance.

natalie kitroeff

Amazing.

archived recording (rachel held evans) I certainly don’t recommend that any other woman try this. You know, part of the point of doing this was to show that none of us are actually practicing biblical womanhood, and that we need to be more careful with how we treat the word biblical. You know, we kind of throw that around and stick it in front of other loaded words to try and bolster our position on something. And that’s not only disrespectful to women, it’s also disrespectful to the Bible. I don’t think it’s meant to be read that way and reduced to this adjective.

elizabeth dias

This idea of challenging reading the Bible as this literal document, I mean, it’s really provocative because the whole evangelical system for so long had been about biblical literalism, when you had to understand the Bible exactly for the words that it said literally. I think what often makes someone so powerful is when they start to actually name something that a lot of people feel.

natalie kitroeff

Yeah.

elizabeth dias

And she was writing at the same time that social media was really taking off.

archived recording (rachel held evans) I think a lot of women were asking these questions and struggling with these issues. And what I love about the internet, what I love about blogging is it gives a platform to people who wouldn’t otherwise have them, particularly in Christian culture. But the church I was raised in, I couldn’t even pass the offering plate, much less teach a Sunday school class or speak in front of the congregation. And so blogging gave me a voice in evangelicalism that I would never have had because I’m a woman.

elizabeth dias

She broke down the access barrier of who could be asking questions about what it meant to be a Christian and who got to talk about what those answers might be.

natalie kitroeff

And how was she received by the larger evangelical Christian world?

elizabeth dias

Well, I think at first she was a bit of a curiosity.

archived recording 1 You’ve told me you have doubts. archived recording (rachel held evans) Yes. archived recording 2 What do you doubt? I mean, what’s the hard part for you? archived recording (rachel held evans) Oh, my goodness, where to start. I mean, a lot of this is really hard to believe, and oftentimes I think all this resurrection stuff, we made it up because we’re afraid of death and this solves that problem. And I doubt when I see people who claim to be Christians not behaving like Christ. I doubt the more I learn about science and our place in the universe. I wonder, where does God fit into all of this? So my doubts are a pretty consistent part of my faith.

elizabeth dias

She’d speak at churches. And most of the time, she was being interviewed by men.

archived recording (rachel held evans) I was often told you’re losing faith, just pray more, just read your Bible more, that’ll fix it.

elizabeth dias

But at the same time, other people were really flocking to her.

speaker There’s so many of us that have been disconnected from the church because the church has been so black or white. Christians who thought, you know, I’ve been told my entire life that women can’t lead, I wonder if Christianity has something else to say.

elizabeth dias

And I think a lot of these people, you know, their struggles were the same, right? It’s the same kinds of doubts and questions. In her, they found this safe place to actually think through some of those.

archived recording (rachel held evans) I still doubt. I still wake up some mornings unconvinced that the God I worshipped in church on Sunday even exists. And I don’t want to glorify that experience because, sometimes, it sucks. Sometimes, it’s really lonely and really hard and really scary. But I know for a fact it’s better than the alternative.

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archived recording (barack obama) I have to tell you, as I said, I’ve been going through an evolution on this issue. I’ve always been adamant that gay and lesbian Americans should be treated fairly and equally.

elizabeth dias

It’s funny to think about now, but even President Obama then was just kind of getting to the point where he was openly supporting gay marriage.

archived recording (barack obama) I had hesitated on gay marriage, in part because I thought civil unions would be sufficient.

elizabeth dias

In the evangelical world, the division was there, but it was much more under the surface, because evangelical teaching has long been that homosexuality is a sin. And that comes from long-standing interpretation of biblical passages.

archived recording (matthew vines) I’d just like to start by saying thank you to everybody for coming tonight. I really appreciate it.

elizabeth dias

In the midst of all of this, Rachel decides to question some of what she’d been taught to believe about it.

archived recording (matthew vines) The Bible is not opposed to the acceptance of gay Christians.

elizabeth dias

In 2012, there was this guy named Matthew Vines.

archived recording (matthew vines) Being different is no crime.

elizabeth dias

And he put a video up on YouTube.

archived recording (matthew vines) Being gay is not a sin.

elizabeth dias

You see him in front of a church, and he is speaking and he’s giving this argument that was pretty revolutionary at the time.

archived recording (matthew vines) And for a gay person to desire and pursue love and marriage and family is no more selfish or sinful than when a straight person desires and pursues the very same things.

elizabeth dias

You can be gay and be a Christian. And Rachel wasn’t immediately on board, but she listened.

matthew vines In September 2013, she did a blog post about that talk that I had given, and was using it as a good way to open up the conversation among the readers on her blog about the Bible and same-sex relationships, and really to try to start presenting an affirming case for understanding same-sex relationships from a biblical standpoint. And the way that she was approaching it was not, again, by saying this is what I think, but rather these arguments are worth considering, let’s talk through them. Let’s think through them.

elizabeth dias

He wasn’t, like, an academic or biblical scholar or someone famous, but she was just interested in what he had to say. She puts this idea out there like, well, you know, evangelicals, maybe we’re wrong about homosexuality. And so she and this online community that she is building are working through these questions together.

natalie kitroeff

And this conversation does not seem like it’s necessarily going to be the easiest one for the evangelical establishment to stomach.

elizabeth dias

Yeah, that kind of change was such a threat.

archived recording (matthew vines) One month after that, she was on the receiving end of a lot of mocking, abusive commentary.

elizabeth dias

The idea for her of changing her mind about homosexuality not being a sin, that’s enough to cause people to say she’s a heretic. And yet, in the midst of all of that —

speaker You know, it’s so scary to leave behind a really conservative faith community, even if it’s a sort of toxic community, if you don’t have somewhere else to go.

elizabeth dias

Her online platform and community, I mean, that’s just growing through all of this. And it’s getting stronger.

speaker And I feel like Rachel builds up other places, and even created a movement that we could be a part of and belong to that sort of made it much easier to fully come out of the closet. If I had not come across those people, I think I likely would have stayed in conservative evangelical communities a lot longer, maybe even tried to marry a man and just see if I could make it work, or that might have become so desperate and unbearable that I would have just left the church all together.

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elizabeth dias

The next really big issue for her was around race.

speaker She would talk about race or write about things around people on the margins, so whether it be racially or identity-wise, orientation —

elizabeth dias

Around this time, Trayvon Martin had been shot and killed and George Zimmerman, the man who had shot him, he was acquitted.

speaker Her piece on her blog about Trayvon Martin and the verdict around complicity and doubt and her role as a white woman really, really spoke to me.

elizabeth dias

And so you have this moment when the loudest voices in the more mainstream evangelical culture were white men speaking out.

archived recording 1 Quite frankly, I think it’s more of a sin problem than a skin problem. And when I hear people, you know, scream Black Lives Matter, I’m thinking, of course they do, but all lives matter.

elizabeth dias

But Rachel did the opposite here. Rachel starts to give up this platform that she had created.

speaker Using her platform for a black woman who speaks about racial justice, using her platform for a native woman, an indigenous woman who’s calling out rights for indigenous people, she did that all the time.

elizabeth dias

She starts promoting black writers and speakers.

speaker I don’t know that I had any, like, standard readers outside of my friends and family before Rachel Held Evans came along. Rachel introduced me to her literary agent. She introduced me to her speaking agent. She started a conference called “Why Christian,” and allowed me to be one of the first speakers of that conference. She not only used her social platform, she then created two whole events and then brought us to be speakers at these events. We were different races, we were different sexualities, we were just different. We were so different.

elizabeth dias

She had this rare sense for when she needed to be the one to take a step back and to listen instead of speaking first.

speaker So seeing her, hearing her fight with us and alongside us was just really powerful.

natalie kitroeff

So through all of this, all of this criticism, backlash, to a certain extent, does she ever get to a breaking point?

elizabeth dias

Well, I don’t know if I’d call it a breaking point, but she does join the Episcopal Church in about 2014, and is very public about why she’s formally leaving the evangelical church.

archived recording (rachel held evans) You know, for all of my differences with evangelicalism, I still love that community and still feel very much a part of that community.

elizabeth dias

And I didn’t get the sense it was this wholesale rejection. It was more of a recognition of the kinds of fights that she did and didn’t want to have anymore, and what kind of church she was able to call home.

speaker It’s her work to say, although there are rotten roots in our practices around Christianity, we may not have to throw the whole thing out.

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michael barbaro

We’ll be right back.

natalie kitroeff

Fast-forward two years. You have the 2016 election. I’m wondering what her take on the candidacy of Donald Trump is, especially given how many questions were being asked around whether evangelicals were going to endorse this person, this candidate.

elizabeth dias

Right. Well, 2016 was this pivotal crossroads for evangelicals in America with Donald Trump’s candidacy. Evangelicals have long voted for candidates who oppose abortion rights, and then candidate Donald Trump was promising to advance those causes in really significant ways. In the middle of this, Rachel comes forward and says, look, I am pro-life, but this is why I’m going to vote for Hillary Clinton. And she ended up writing this article about how she was going to support Hillary Clinton even though she was still holding onto her pro-life views. So in the article, she said, even though I think abortion is morally wrong in most cases and support more legal restrictions around it, I often vote for pro-choice candidates when I think their policies will do the most to address the health and economic concerns that drive women to get abortions in the first place. For me, it’s not just about being pro-birth, it’s about being “pro-life.”

natalie kitroeff

So when does Rachel get sick?

elizabeth dias

So on Palm Sunday in the middle of April, Rachel sends out a tweet. And she says, if you are the praying type, I’m in the hospital with a flu and U.T.I. combo, and I’m having a severe allergic reaction to the antibiotics. And you know, she jokes, I’m going to miss “Game of Thrones.” And things escalated from there. Her brain began having these seizures and they just didn’t stop. And so she’s in the I.C.U., and doctors put her in a medically induced coma. At some point, the news trickles out on social media, and everyone organizes a prayer campaign for her with this hashtag, you know, #prayforRHE. And you started to just see this flood of prayers from all sorts of people, many of whom had never, ever met each other in person, but were all part of Rachel’s church, you know, on her social media feed. And then, on May 4 came the news that, all of the sudden, she had experienced sudden and extreme changes to her vitals. And her brain was swelling. And doctors took emergency action to stabilize her, but the swelling just caused severe damage and ultimately was not survivable. So Rachel died early Saturday morning May 4, 2019.

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speaker For me personally, it feels like I’ve lost a champion. I felt less alone in the world because she was in it. I’m sorry, this is really hard.

elizabeth dias

Once she dies, it’s instantaneous, I mean the outpouring of grief across the world. It wasn’t just people who might have considered themselves Rachel fans, it was people that she had sparred with. You know, evangelical men who she’d taken to task were remembering how grateful they were to her for her authenticity.

speaker She required a response. Her work and her life demanded a response from people who didn’t agree.

elizabeth dias

It didn’t stop. That went on for days, people trying to make sense of how someone so loved and so young just died in the middle of this dynamic work that she was doing.

natalie kitroeff

So I have to ask, Rachel built this community, and now she’s gone. What happens?

elizabeth dias

Well, you might think that, when someone so central to a community dies, that the whole project might disintegrate. But —

speaker Rachel’s own evolution gave all of us the fearlessness to evolve, too. And because she had created such community, we knew that we didn’t have to evolve alone. She walked with us. If nobody else would, she would walk with us. She said the folks you’re shutting out of the church today will be leading it tomorrow. That’s how the spirit works. The future is in the margins. I hope that we will embody her legacy of freedom, because she set so many of us free. matthew vines I think the movement that she’s built will only grow, because she was here long enough and she was working long enough in order to make changes that I don’t think will be able to be undone. I really don’t.

elizabeth dias

The last thing that her readers heard from her was this blog post that she wrote for Lent. And I’ll read it. She said: “It strikes me today that the liturgy of Ash Wednesday teaches something that nearly everyone can agree on. Whether you are part of a church or not, whether you believe today or you doubt, whether you are a Christian or an atheist or an agnostic, you know this truth deep in your bones — remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return. Death is a part of life. My prayer for you this season is that you make time to celebrate that reality, and to grieve that reality, and that you will know you are not alone.”

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archived recording (rachel held evans) I keep thinking about the women who showed up at the tomb on Easter morning. On the days that I believe the story, I’m struck by the fact that they showed up with burial spices. They showed up ready to walk through the rituals of grief and say goodbye to their friend. That was women’s work in those days, tending to those vulnerable things. But it’s only attending to the vulnerable things that we can expect to witness a miracle. I can’t promise you resurrection, but I can promise you companionship. I can promise you friends for the journey. I can promise you fellow travelers to help you carry those burial spices. And as we tend to the vulnerable things together, may the God of every season, the God of survival — and if not survival, then death and resurrection — bless, preserve and keep you, now and forever. Amen.

michael barbaro

The funeral for Rachel Held Evans was held this past weekend in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The eulogy was delivered by her high school youth pastor, who said that being her pastor had not been easy because she was constantly asking questions and challenging him. She, he said, like Jesus, was a revolutionary. In the weeks since her death, Evans has reappeared on the New York Times bestseller list for the book she wrote about grappling with her faith, “Searching for Sunday.” Thanks to Willie Stell, Rozella Haydee White, Julie Rogers, Emmy Kegler, Austin Channing Brown and Matthew Vines for sharing their stories with us. We’ll be right back.

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michael barbaro

Here’s what else you need to know today.

archived recording Sixteen hours ago, the lives of 12 people were cut short by a senseless, incomprehensible act of violence.

michael barbaro

Police are still searching for a motive behind a mass shooting inside the city offices of Virginia Beach, which left 13 people dead, including the shooter. The gunman, a longtime city engineer, began shooting at co-workers inside the city’s municipal building on Friday afternoon, hours after submitting a letter of resignation.

archived recording This morning, I have the responsibility to inform friends, co-workers, and the public of those who lost their lives yesterday. All but one of the 12 victims were employees of the city of Virginia Beach. I have worked with most of them for many years.

michael barbaro

On Saturday, the city manager of Virginia Beach, Dave Hansen, paid tribute to each of the victims during a news conference.

archived recording We want you to know who they were so in the days and weeks to come, you will learn what they meant to all of us, to their families, to their friends, and to their co-workers. They leave a void that we will never be able to fill.

michael barbaro