Setting: The 1925 Scopes Trial in East Tennessee
Ninety-nine years ago in 1925, the famous Scopes trial occurred in Dayton, Tennessee, in the state’s eastern part, halfway between Chattanooga and Knoxville. The state legislature had recently made it illegal to teach human evolution in public schools. The rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s genetic mechanism for evolution had brought these concepts to the front of the American mind. At the ACLU’s encouragement, one teacher John Scopes deliberately disobeyed the act, and charges were soon pressed. The national news media descended on this small Appalachian town.
This trial represented the height of the so-called Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy. The fundamentalists contended that Scripture was to be taken literally. They were named such because of their firm belief in five “fundamentals” of Christian faith: The literal inerrancy of Scripture, the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, the atonement of Jesus’ death for sin, the bodily resurrection of Christ, and the historical reality of Christ’s miracles. In Scopes’ case, they argued that the universe was created in a literal six days and that this perspective should be taught authoritatively in the public-school classroom.
Countering, the modernists posited that modern scientific knowledge was not to be eschewed. Medical research, vaccines, and a changing world needed to be embraced as progress’ way forward. Newer ideas of human evolution was not something to be rejected in fear. It’s ok to question whether the Bible was literally true in every jot and tittle. Public schools should teach science primarily, not religion.
Former multiple-time presidential candidate and lifelong Presbyterian William Jennings Bryant argued the prosecution’s case while Clarence Darrow provided the defense. The famous journalist HL Mencken brought out the absurdity of the proceedings in the nation’s newspapers. They were nationally televised via a new technology called radio.
In dialogue still repeated annually on college campuses, these lawyers debated about the oddities of both origin stories. Does it make sense that human came from monkeys? Was Eve actually made from Adam’s rib, and if so, what did that look like? What about other religions’ creation stories? Should public schools be a place of religious instruction? It was a “trial of the century” put on for show decades before the OJ Simpson case.
Under a strict reading of the law, a jury found the teacher Scopes guilty and forced him to pay a $100 fine. The case was appealed to the State Supreme Court, but they found the statue constitutional. Decades later, in 1968, the US Supreme Court ruled that bans like this ran afoul of the Constitution’s Establishment clause.
The fundamentalists may have won this case’s battle by bringing out much rhetoric to argue for their cause, but they lost the war because they were soon ostracized nationally as ignorant, regressive fools. In particular, Mencken’s reporting for The Baltimore Sun portrayed the fundamentalists as running counter to national trends for modern science’s advance. Attendance at fundamentalist churches continued to decline for decades. Only the neo-evangelical movement under Billy Graham in the 1950s and 1960s would rekindle fundamentalist fervor and revitalize interest in this church branch.
The Shortened Life of Rachel Held Evans
Fast-forward decades in the same town as the Scopes Trial. In 1981, Rachel Held Evans was born in Dayton, Tennessee, to a Protestant pastor’s family. She was taught to love Scripture in her home and loved trying to understand its meaning as a child. Like most children, she had many questions about life and God and sought to resolve them. She couldn’t always find answers but did find an abiding sense that God loved her.
As she grew into a teenager and young adult, she became aware of a pervasive sense of insecurity among the religious establishment around her. They all seemed haunted by the fear, What if we’re wrong? They were consistently defensive and entrenched in fixed ideas. The mere act of questioning seemed contrary to their personal ethic. They enjoyed modern medicine’s benefits, but did not dive deeply into her intellectual font.
This impression only deepened as she attended the local fundamentalist school Bryan College to study English. At the end of writing assignments, she had to conduct theological analyses of each book she read. She learned to apply ancient Scripture to the modern world, but she increasingly found herself spiritually out of step with the authority structures around her.
After college in 2004, she became a journalist at the local paper in Dayton. She married but soon stopped attending church. A lover of literature, she continued to read, learn, and question. Eventually, she found her way back to Christianity in the local Episcopal church, a tradition at odds with her fundamentalist/evangelical roots.
In 2008, she wrote a book Evolving in Monkey Town about how she deconstructed and reconstructed her personal faith. She proceeded to write a second book that became a best-selling hit: A Year of Biblical Womanhood. In it, she chronicled a resolve to take the Bible’s admonitions about women literally for 12 months. Whenever she had her period, she would camp out in her yard in a tent. She would call her husband “master.” She would cover her head in church. This book brought her much fame, including interviews on national news media like the Today show.
She used her platform to support a more progressive strand of Christianity. She argued that to keep millennials engaged, the church shouldn’t try to be “cool” but should instead try to be more meaningful. Politically, she remained pro-life but supported Hillary Clinton for president in 2016. In the early days of the Tennessee legislature’s shunning of the LGBTQ community, she spoke out for the full inclusion, even in church leadership roles, of the LGBTQ community in common life. She helped to start national conferences for Christians who found themselves out of step with the evangelical masses. In the blog fad of the early 2000s, her blogging reached a younger generation who were establishing their careers and their identities in a world increasingly out of step with American fundamentalism and evangelicalism.
Her personal life continued to become established. She had two children, the first while writing our book, and was involved in Christian community at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland, Tennessee. Though not seminary-educated and not ordained, she would travel to speak about her journey in church pulpits. Sadly, in 2019, she had a urinary tract infection and took antibiotics to treat her illness. She had a bad reaction to the drugs and was hospitalized. After doctors placed her in a medically induced coma, she suddenly died two days later from swelling of her brain. Her young children had not yet reached kindergarten. She was only 37 years old.
The wider world paid tribute to her sad passing. Writers eulogized her in elite literary venues like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic. Her final book was edited and published posthumously. Despite leaving behind a corpus of only four-to-five books, she contributed an outsized impact on Christians who longed for deeper theological and spiritual reflection than the popular evangelical movement had to offer.
My Personal Enmeshment with Rachel Held Evans
I was born one year before Rachel and had my own youthful struggles with American evangelical religion. Unlike Rachel, my struggles happened not in the backwoods of Tennessee, but after years of cultural tussle in the church, culminated while reading in graduate education at elite seminaries. My mind had left evangelical society long before Rachel came to prominence. In fact, I had found another profession by the time her books reached the mass market.
Thus, I never became a fan of Rachel’s during her life. I knew of her, but I never followed her writing. I did not have time, frankly, because of work and family. In 2019, I heard of her sudden death from a pastor at this church. The tragedy of an influential author leaving behind two young children and a husband shocked this pastor, a longtime fan of hers.
Eventually, four years later in the fall of 2023, I decided to pick up an audiobook of her last book published during her life – Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again. I find listening to audiobooks a good use of my time driving to-and-fro in a car. I heard her own voice reading her own words while I drove to a medical research conference in Atlanta, Georgia. And guess what? I quickly fell in love with her engaging personality and her profound perspective.
Evangelical theologians don’t like her approach to writing. She’s too conversational and down-to-earth for them. She’s too much of a humanist; that is, she’s too human in how she wrestles with God and doesn’t approach the Bible “objectively” enough. But that’s what I treasure about her. She sought to know God’s depthless heart beneath the humdrum of the Bible… and of life.
Recall that Rachel loved digging through the Bible as a child. She loved the Bible’s evocative plot then like many of us do as children, and this book chronicles how she came to love it again as an adult apart from the eccentricities of religious instruction. In the book we’ll read, she retells the big picture of the Biblical story and how she learned to wrestle with it as an Episcopalian, much as Jacob wrestled with God in Genesis. She even retells a few specific stories that represent vignettes in this larger narrative.
On the ride home from Atlanta, I decided that I wanted to share this book with our class the next summer, so here we are. I usually let the class choose its book from a list, but this year, I’m going to insist on my preferred choice. This book’s style differs compared to the last two summers’ books. It (thankfully) will not describe detailed arguments about science, nor will it contain academic research about the Bible’s context from the classical and post-classical world. Rather it conveys a very human struggle with who God is and a deep dive into humanity’s spiritual search for life’s meaning. It raises more difficult questions than firm answers, but I expect Rachel’s writing to engage your soul with the divine. Her words have certainly touched mine.
As we live in the Bible Belt, our summer series will resemble more of a traditional Bible study. In this class, we’re used to discussing theological ideas and religious history. Studying this book will help us wrestle more with those ideas’ root and source, the body of Scriptural writings. Since Scripture serves as a foundational text for church and American life, it’s easy for the words, heard over and over, to become stale. Preaching is an attempt to make the words be heard afresh and anew. I hope Rachel’s expressive, lively writing will do the same. As she educates about ancient texts in modern verbiage, I want our spiritual imaginations to be simultaneously reignited and revitalized.
Above all, I want us to do justice to Rachel’s far-too-short life. She wrestled with God in a way that benefited many, and as we wrestle with her thoughts, I hope we wrestle with God, too. She lived in the same Tennessee we live in, where many people find meaning in the Bible but not as much in wider American culture, where scientific knowledge is doubted even when it offers lifesaving treatment, where God’s name is taken in vain as it is confused with taking the Bible’s every word literally.
This summer will elucidate our personal wrestling with Rachel’s unique voice. The email shares a link to purchase the book, which is available in print, electronically, and in audiobook. Except for the week of July 4, we’ll cover one chapter per week and conclude with a class retreat in Monteagle the weekend before Labor Day. I’ll choose passages for us to discuss together and share those texts via slides in case someone doesn’t have time to read along. As always, the fruit will come out as we ponder about Rachel and God together. I invite you to join us.
Prepared for the June Ramsey Sunday School Class at First Presbyterian Church of Nashville in June 2024.