Rachel Held Evans, the progressive gadfly that was on the wrong side of every controversial issue and point of doctrine plaguing the western church today and who passed away in 2019, is set to have her final book be released next week, giving her one more chance to spread false doctrine from beyond the grave.
The book, titled Wholehearted Faith, is the last adult book to be published by Evans, who made her name by publicly chronicling her departure from anything that could be considered the historical Christian faith. She was openly pro-LGBTQ, pro-choice, and a functioning universalist. Evans completed around 12,000 pages of the manuscript, which serves as a memoir of sorts for those wrestling with doubts and questions but don’t wish to leave the faith altogether.
Fittingly, her husband, who is an agnostic, brought in Jeff Chu, an openly gay family friend to finish the document. Chu cobbled together her notes, blog articles, speeches, tweets, and the rest of her body of work to form a cohesive document comprised of a series of essays explaining how one can trudge a path toward progressive Christianity and all the doubt that will entail, without the constraints of conservative evangelicals to cloud the way.
As such, the book brings us such gems as:
I am not afraid to say that many in the church have been agents of death for many women, for queer and trans people, for people of color, for immigrants and refugees, for disabled people, for all manner of minority. Many in the church have not proclaimed good news. They have not declared hope and possibility, justice and welcome.
and:
I affirm LGBTQ people because they are human beings, created in the image of God. I affirm their sexual orientations and gender identities because they reflect the diversity of God’s good creation.
The book will likely be lauded by the evangelical intelligentsia as eye-opening, powerful, and magnetic, but for faithful believers, it will serve as a somber reminder that absent a deathbed confession and conversion, one we hope and pray the Lord gave her, it stands as a testament to how far she had fallen and how lost she had become.