Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions

by Rachel Held Evans

If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that faith can survive just about anything, so long as it’s able to evolve.

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. I think this explains why some of the preachers on TV look so frantic and angry. For fundamentalists, Christianity sits perpetually on the precipice of doom, one scientific discovery or cultural shift or difficult theological question away from extinction. So fearful of losing their grip on faith, they squeeze the life out of it.

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 in the environment to pry idols from our grip and teach us something new. But most of all, I’m an evolutionist because my own story is one of unlikely survival. If it hadn’t been for evolution, I might have lost my faith.

Strange now is the fact that before I lost my first tooth or learned to ride a bike or graduated from kindergarten, I committed my life to a man who asked his followers to love their enemies, to give without expecting anything in return, and to face public execution if necessary.

The first thing I noticed while reading through Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John was that Christians who claim to take the Bible literally or who say they obey all of his teachings without “picking and choosing” are either liars or homeless.

Some Christians are more offended by the idea of everyone going to heaven than by the idea of everyone going to hell. I learned this the hard way, as reports about my faith crisis spread around town and rumors that I’d become a universalist found their way back to me in a wave of concerned emails and phone calls. Once news of your backsliding makes it to the prayer chain, it’s best just to resign yourself to your fate.

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.

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.

REVELATION 7:9–10, 15–17

I don’t know anyone, believer or skeptic, who doesn’t long for a day when God wipes every tear from every eye, when “there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain” (Rev. 21:4 NASB). Even the faintest inkling that this might be true can keep you going for one more day.

Recently, a lot of good Christian people have tried to convince me that the compassion I inherited from my mother is a sort of spiritual liability, that when it comes to the eternal destiny of my fellow human beings, it’s best just to accept without reservation the notion that most will be damned. “God’s ways are higher than our ways,” they say with a shrug.

“We do know that no person can be saved except through Christ,” he wrote in Mere Christianity. “We do not know that only those who know Him can be saved by Him.”

We are saved by restored relationship with God, which might look a little different from person to person, culture to culture, time to time.

When we require that all people must say the same words or subscribe to the same creeds in order to experience God, we underestimate the scope and power of God’s activity in the world.

I cried tears of joy when I came across the apostle Peter’s emotional response to the faith of a Gentile named Cornelius. Peter exclaimed, “I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts men from every nation who fear him and do what is right” (Acts 10:34 – 35).

God’s ways are higher than our ways because his capacity to love is infinitely greater than our own. Despite all that we do to alienate ourselves from God, all that we do to insult and disobey, God abundantly pardons again and again.

It seems the kingdom of God is made up of “the least of these.” To be present among them is to encounter what the Celtic saints called “thin spaces,” places or moments in time in which the veil separating heaven and earth, the spiritual and the material, becomes almost transparent.

“Folks, the apostle Paul said, ‘To live is Christ and to die is gain.’ I’ve got news for you: death beats life. If your dream is to be with Jesus, then death beats life. The problem is, you’re too distracted by the stupid, pointless things of life to care about eternity. You’re too distracted by homework and ball games and parties to make sure you’re witnessing for Christ.”

According to Wright, participants in the early church understood that the ultimate goal wasn’t to die, leave their bodies behind, and float around like ghosts in heaven forever but rather to embody, anticipate, and work toward a new kingdom. What happened to a person in between death and resurrection remained a bit of a mystery, although the apostle Paul assured his fellow Christians that “to be absent from the body” is “to be present with the Lord.”

I think this is why people always ask me, “If non-Christians can receive salvation, then what is the point of Jesus? Why did he die on the cross, and why should we bother to share the gospel?” They assume that the gospel is important only when it saves people from hell. They assume that Jesus’ purpose was simply to alter the afterlife.

Following Jesus would mean liberation from my bitterness, my worry, my self-righteousness, my prejudices, my selfishness, my materialism, and my misplaced loyalties. Following Jesus would mean salvation from my sin.

I never know what to say when a street preacher in the parking lot of Shop Rite asks me if I’m saved. “Saved from what?” I usually ask. “Saved from your sins,” he will say. “Well, I guess I’d have to say that Jesus and I are working on that.” I always leave with extra tracts stuffed in my purse.

Sometimes when I want to put myself in Adele’s shoes, I imagine an alternate universe in which Christians have chosen a different biblical condemnation upon which to fixate, such as women uncovering their heads or people getting tattoos.

I would tell them that womanhood, like the Bible, is far too lovely and mysterious and transcendent to systematize or explain.

I should have been ready with an answer, but I wasn’t. The truth was, I thought Sam was right. Somewhere along the way, the gospel had gotten buried under a massive pile of extras: political positions, lifestyle requirements, and unspoken rules that for whatever reason came with the Christian territory. Sometimes Jesus himself seemed buried beneath the rubble.

As far as I’m concerned, the teachings of Jesus are far too radical to be embodied in a political platform or represented by a single candidate. It’s not up to some politician to represent my Christian values to the world; it’s up to me. That’s why I’m always a little perplexed when someone finds out that I’m not a Republican and asks, “How can you call yourself a Christian?”

In a way, we’re all fundamentalists. We all have pet theological systems, political positions, and standards of morality that are not essential to the gospel but that we cling to so tightly that we leave fingernail marks on the palms of our hands.

I would argue that healthy doubt (questioning one’s beliefs) is perhaps the best defense against unhealthy doubt (questioning God). When we know how to make a distinction between our ideas about God and God himself, our faith remains safe when one of those ideas is seriously challenged. When we recognize that our theology is not the moon but rather a finger pointing at the moon, we enjoy the freedom of questioning it from time to time.

I don’t know which Bible stories ought to be treated as historically accurate, scientifically provable accounts of facts and which stories are meant to be metaphorical. I don’t know if it really matters so long as those stories transform my life.