The Scandal of Rachel Held Evans’s Evangelical Mind

Abstract Mark Noll famously began his 1994 book, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” Through the narrative of author Rachel Held Evans’s life, this article explores the intellectual state of the evangelical tradition during her lifetime, 1981–2019. Evans, a prolific author, blogger, and social media voice, was raised in conservative evangelicalism in Birmingham, Alabama, and Dayton, Tennessee. Her intellectual journey and abundant reading led her to challenge conservative evangelical views of gender and sexuality, creation, and hell, while holding to historic Christian beliefs. After experiencing rejection in-person and online from conservatives, especially Reformed Protestants associated with New Calvinism, she eventually renounced her beloved faith tradition of origin, evangelicalism. I argue that Evans’s faith trajectory illuminates the intellectual weaknesses of evangelicalism that Noll identified in 1994 and suggests that these weaknesses did not ameliorate in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The intellectual state of evangelicalism, and its attendant political dimensions, was a key factor in Evans’s reluctant separation from evangelicalism, as it was for many of her contemporaries.