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

by Rachel Held Evans

The problem with fundamentalism is that it can’t adapt to change. When you count each one of your beliefs as absolutely essential, change is never an option. When change is never an option, you have to hope that the world stays exactly as it is so as not to mess with your view of it.

Spiritual evolution explains why Christianity has thrived while other ancient religions have perished. It explains why our brothers and sisters in rural Zimbabwe and those in the Greek Orthodox Church can worship the same God but in much different ways. Christianity never could have survived the ebb and flow of time, much less its own worldwide expansion, had God not created it with the innate ability to adapt to changing environments. The same versatility that allowed Paul to become all things to all people applies to the church collectively. The ability of the body of Christ to change — to grow fins when it needs to swim and wings when it needs to fly — has preserved it for over two thousand years, despite countless predictions of its imminent demise. That’s why I’m an evolutionist. I’m an evolutionist because I believe that the best way to reclaim the gospel in times of change is not to cling more tightly to our convictions but to hold them with an open hand. I’m an evolutionist because I believe that sometimes God uses changes

No longer satisfied with easy answers, I started asking harder questions. I questioned what I thought were fundamentals — the eternal damnation of all non-Christians, the scientific and historical accuracy of the Bible, the ability to know absolute truth, and the politicization of evangelicalism. I questioned God: his fairness, regarding salvation; his goodness, for allowing poverty and injustice in the world; and his intelligence, for entrusting Christians to fix things. I wrestled with passages of Scripture that seemed to condone genocide and the oppression of women and struggled to make sense of the pride and hypocrisy within the church. I wondered if the God of my childhood was really the kind of God I wanted to worship, and at times I wondered if he even exists at all. But rather than killing off my faith, these doubts led to a surprising rebirth. To survive in a new, volatile environment, I had to shed old convictions and grow new ones in their place. I had to take a closer look at what I believed and figure out what was truly essential. I went from the security of crawling around on all fours in

“If evangelical Christians are the only ones going to heaven, then that leaves a whole lot of people in hell. It leaves most people in hell, actually. I’m not sure I can believe that’s true.”

“It’s not like I haven’t grappled with my own mortality. I’m a realist. It’s just that people keep saying things like ‘This is not your home’ and ‘We were made for heaven.’ I know they’re just trying to make me feel better about how messed up things are, but it makes me want to say, ‘Well, then why don’t I just go blow my brains out and get it over with?’ I don’t really mean it, of course. It’s just that people talk as if nothing we do this side of eternity matters. It’s all pointless. We’re just waiting to die. And I wonder, then why don’t we just get it over with?” “Maybe salvation isn’t just about eternity,” I said. “Maybe God wants to save us from something in the present, something in the here and now.” “Like what?” “Like — I don’t know — maybe our sins, maybe our circumstances, maybe even our religion.”

* If there is an age of accountability, then why didn’t God let me die when I had open heart surgery so that I could go to heaven? * Why didn’t God let me pass away when I was certain about my faith so that I would be more certain I’d be saved.

I later learned that her name was Zarmina. She was a thirty-five-year-old mother of five whose husband had a reputation for abuse. She had married him when she was just sixteen. The Taliban never found a murder weapon, but locals report that they got a confession after beating Zarmina for two days with steel cables. Convicted in a secret trial, Zarmina spent three years in an Afghan prison, while her oldest daughters were sold into sex slavery by relatives. Friends say she came to the soccer stadium expecting a series of lashes, not death. CNN repeatedly aired the tape, perhaps to make us feel better about going to war against the Taliban. But it wasn’t the Taliban I was angry with. Each time I watched Zarmina’s execution, I got angrier and angrier with God. God was the one who claimed to have formed Zarmina in her mother’s womb. It was God who ordained that she be born in a third-world country under an oppressive regime. God had all the power and resources at his disposal to stop this from happening, and yet he

did nothing. Worst of all, twenty years of Christian education assured me that because Zarmina was a Muslim, she would suffer unending torment in hell for the rest of eternity. How the Taliban punished Zarmina in this life was nothing compared with how God would punish her in the next.

* I can’t believe anymore that God tortures people, especially for an eternity.

Suddenly abstract concepts about heaven and hell, election and free will, religious pluralism and exclusivism had a name: Zarmina. I felt like I could come to terms with Zarmina’s suffering if it were restricted to this lifetime, if I knew that God would grant her some sort of justice after death. But the idea that this woman passed from agony to agony, from torture to torture, from a lifetime of pain and sadness to an eternity of pain and sadness, all because she had less information about the gospel than I did, seemed cruel, even sadistic. God knew long before Zarmina was born — before her first giggle, before her first steps, before her first words — that this was her fate. He knew it from the beginning and yet created her anyway. I wondered how many millions of people like Zarmina died every day in similar circumstances. I thought about the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the gassing of Iraqi Kurds, and those terrible, haunting images of warehouses full of eyeglasses and shoes and prayer shawls left behind by victims of the Holocaust. Was I supposed to believe that all of these people went to hell because they weren’t Christians?

After we finished the last pages of The Diary of Anne Frank in middle school, Mrs. Kelly informed the class that Anne and her sister died of typhus in a prison camp, thanks to Adolf Hitler. I was horrified, not just because of the prison camp but because everything I’d been taught as a girl told me that because Anne was Jewish, because she had not accepted Jesus Christ as her Savior, she and the rest of her family were burning in hell. I remember staring at the black-and-white picture of Anne on the cover of my paperback, privately begging God to let her out of the lake of fire. For weeks, I prayed diligently for her departed soul, even though I’d heard that only Catholics and Mormons ever did such a thing. I was a pretty intense kid, actually.

If only born-again Christians go to heaven, then the piles of suitcases and bags of human hair displayed at the Holocaust Museum represent thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children suffering eternal agony at the hands of an angry God. If salvation is available only to Christians, then

the gospel isn’t good news at all. For most of the human race, it is terrible news.

“Do you think that there is rape in hell?” I asked Sarah. “What?” She looked understandably startled. “Rape. Do you think there is rape in hell?” “I don’t know, Rachel. I don’t think the Bible says anything about that. What on earth makes you ask?” “People say that hell is a place of eternal torture, right? Well, the most horrible thing I can imagine happening to anybody is getting raped over and over again for eternity, so I suppose it’s fathomable that people get raped in hell, right?”

I was terrified into salvation at six years old, because when a Sunday school teacher talked about eternal punishment I pictured my father whacking my bare bottom with his belt or wooden paddle, and the pain and anxiety never ending.

We sang a song in which the lyrics said of God, “You’re altogether lovely, altogether worthy, altogether wonderful to me.” As my friends and classmates sang together, some with raised hands and closed eyes, all I could think about was Zarmina’s tennis shoes peeking out from under her burqa. I didn’t see anything lovely or wonderful about that. My throat tightened, and I stopped singing. A thick and intense sadness rushed over my body, and I didn’t want to worship anymore. All my life, I had imagined God as a warm, faceless light, a sort of benevolent and eternal sunshine. That morning in chapel, a shadow passed over him like an eclipse, and for the next few years, all I could see was a faint glow around its edges.

The second theme that emerged while reading the Gospels is that, if Jesus is God, then God has not forgotten the downtrodden and oppressed of this world. In fact, Jesus had a special relationship with the most forgotten of first-century society: women, tax collectors, sick people, minorities, Samaritans, and sinners. Jesus welcomed children into his arms and washed his disciples’ dirty feet. He took those suffering from leprosy by the hand and surrounded himself with the poor and uneducated. Jesus began his first sermon by explaining not that the poor are unlucky victims of the cosmic lottery but that theirs is the kingdom of heaven (Luke 6:20). Even when the crowds got so big that people were stepping all over each other, even when the beggars became loud and obnoxious, even when all the neediness and desperation embarrassed the disciples, time and time again Matthew describes Jesus as being “moved with compassion” (Matt. 9:36; 14:14; 15:32; 20:34 NKJV). Cautiously, I began to wonder if the reason I was so desperate to believe that God loved Zarmina was because he does.

I’d heard this response many times before and had affectionately dubbed it “pond-scum theology.” At the heart of pond-scum theology is the premise that human beings have no intrinsic value or claim to salvation because their sin nature makes them so thoroughly disgusting and offensive to God that he is under no obligation to pay them any mind. It’s the view that inspired Jonathan Edwards’ famed “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermon, in which Edwards told his trembling congregation, “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.”9 It’s a view recently resurrected by outspoken Reformed pastors who have argued that God can’t even look at us because he is so disgusted by our sin nature, one even suggesting that God sent the tsunami to wash some of this pond scum from his sight. Pond-scum theology effectively shifts the question from How could a loving God send anyone to hell? to How could an angry God allow anyone into heaven? While pond-scum theology provides an intellectually satisfying response to the problem of the unevangelized, it looks a lot better on paper than it does in real life,

with real people who have real lives and real names. Pond-scum theology made sense in my head, but it never made sense in my heart. I knew that I was broken, that I was capable of great evil and tragically prone to sin, but deep down, at the very center of my being, I felt as though I still mattered to God. And I needed to know that Zarmina and Anne Frank mattered to him too. I needed to know that every person behind every pair of shoes recovered from every concentration camp mattered, that God had not forgotten them, that he loved them, and that he knew each of their names. I needed to know that God does not make disposable people. Pond-scum theology makes even less sense in the context of the Gospels. To believe that people are inherently worthless to God strips the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of all their meaning and power. It makes Jesus look like a fool for dying for us, and it leaves his followers with little incentive to seek out and celebrate the good in one another. When it came down to it, to believe that the reprobate are created for hell without any hope of salvation required that I ignore my most instinctive and visceral conceptions of right and wrong, good and evil, justice and love. I just couldn’t stomach the idea that some people are beyond hope, that God has no intention of ever loving them, and that my compassion for them represented a weakness of faith. What Andy considered mere sentimentality and emotion, I considered the very essence of...