Evolving in Monkey Town

This book is written by Rachel Held Evans, who some would consider a "darling" in the Emerging Church movement.

Evolving in Monkey Town tells her faith story. She grew up in a staunch evangelical home where her Father was a Bible Professor. In her Christian school she competed for and won the "Best Christian Attitude" award 4 years in a row. She was an outspoken evangelist as a child, and apologist as a young adult. She had all the answers and saw it as her solemn duty to give them to the rest of the world.

Then one day she saw a Muslim woman executed on TV and her house of faith started to crumble. This woman had lived a life of horrible abuse, and now that she was dead, would suffer unimaginable agony for eternity. Why? Because she had the misfortune to be born in a non-Christian nation. The notion of hell became horrifying to Rachel. It seemed like salvation was a "cosmic lottery" in which only a lucky few were winners. She could not reconcile her notion of what kind of God would devise this system.

So she went on a journey of questioning anything and everything about her faith, God, the Bible, and eventually made faltering steps back to Christianity by clinging to the depiction of Jesus as "the Great I AM with dirt between his toes," who taught and demonstrated that it was more important to love than to have all the right answers.

She isn't real in-your-face about it, but she strongly implies she's a universalist... no one will go to hell. Or at least people will be in heaven that had never heard of Jesus. The proof text wherewith she had her epiphany was the verse in Revelation where John said he saw people from "every tribe, nation, language" worshiping in heaven. She even imagined shouts of "Allah" ascending to the throne.

This book is an easy and enjoyable read. I identified much with the personal turmoil her doubt causer her, as I seem to have a faith crisis myself every decade. Her candor is refreshing.

One thing I don't understand, however. She talks a lot about the problems she has with lots of things in the Bible, such as the creation story, the role and treatment of women, the atrocities in the Old Testament, etc. She is very ambivalent about the Bible, loving and hating it at the same time. However, when it comes to the Bible's description of the person and work of Jesus, she seems to accept it at face value. She doesn't seem to question the story about him like she seems to question so much of the rest of the Bible. It's like, in spite of all the errors or "human fingerprints" throughout the Bible, somehow we have a reliable record of who Jesus was and what he did.

I suppose this book reflects much of what the Emerging Church movement is about. No doctrine. No creed. No absolutes. Nothing is very important except loving God and loving others (however that happens to be defined at the moment). The emerging church claims to not be simply a "Take II" of the liberal Christianity/social gospel of a century ago, but if it walks and quacks like a duck...

I'm going to finish by posting a bunch of quotes from the book. She's a good writer, and I trust this is not copyright infringement; but I'd like to give you a good enough taste that you will consider reading it. It will give you a  lot to think about. Definitely not for those who like their faith neatly tied up with a bow.

My friend Adele describes fundamentalism as holding so tightly to your beliefs that your fingernails leave imprints on the palm of your hand. p. 17


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. p. 22


There are a lot of things I don't know. I don't know where evil came from or why God allows so much suffering in the world. I don't know if there is such a thing as a "just war." I don't know how God will ultimately judge between good and evil. I don't know which church tradition best represents truth. I don't know the degree to which God is present in religious systems, or who goes to heaven and who goes to hell. I don't know if hell is an eternal state or a temporary one or what it will be like. I don't know why people are gay or if being gay is a sin. 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. I don't know how to reconcile God's sovereignty with man's free will. I don't know what to do with those Bible verses that seem to condone genocide and the oppression of women. I don't know why I have so many questions, while other Christians don't seem to have any. I don't know which of these questions I will find answers to and which I will not. --- And yet slowly I'm learning to love the questions... pp. 224, 225


An evangelical in the truest sense of the word, I once wrote the plan of salvation on a piece of construction paper, folded it into an airplane, and sent it soaring over the fence into the back yard of our Mormon neighbors. p. 31


My strategy for winning the Best Christian Attitude award each year included keeping extra pens and pencils in my desk to loan to needy students, graciously allowing my classmates to cut in front of me in line at the water fountain, trying not to tattle in an effort to secure the troublemaker vote, and writing sweet notes of encouragement to Isabella and Juanita, to procure the minority vote. p. 36


I may have been the only teenager on the planet who enjoyed guilt-based purity lessons more than the adults giving them, and yet I managed to attract a few boys who thought that an excessively friendly, large-breasted girl with a purity ring and a savior complex sounded intriguing, especially the year Cruel Intentions was released. The smartest ones feigned interest in talking about spirituality so that they could get my phone number. Few made it past the first two-hour diatribe about being equally yoked. pp. 42, 43


You might say that the apologetics movement had created a monster. I'd gotten so good at critiquing all the fallacies of opposing worldviews, at searching for truth through objective analysis, that it was only a matter of time before I turned the same skeptical eye upon my own faith. p. 79


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. p. 91


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. p. 92


The space between doubting God's goodness and doubting his existence is not as wide as you might think. I found myself crossing it often, as it didn't require much of a leap. p. 96


When I was a little girl, if someone asked me why I was a Christian, I said it was because Jesus lived in my heart. In high school, I said it was because I accepted the atonement of Jesus Christ on the cross for my sins. My sophomore year of college, during a short-lived Reformed phase, I said it was because of the irresistible grace of God. But after watching Zarmina's execution on television, I decided that the most truthful answer to that question was this: I was a Christian because I was born in the United States of America in the year 1981 to Peter and Robin Held. Arminians call it free will; Calvinists call it predestination. I call it "the cosmic lottery." pp. 97-98


Some Christians are more offended by the idea of everyone going to heaven than by the idea of everyone going to hell. I learned 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. p. 113


...Sammy was one of those kids who lived in constant terror of getting unsaved, so every year, he marched his way to the front of the rustic little chapel at Bible camp and rededicated himself to Jesus, while the rest of us pretended to keep our eyes closed. p. 170


I'd always wanted a gay friend. But, as embarrassing as this is to admit, I wanted the sort of gay friend who would give me fashion advice and add some diversity to my clique, the kind of gay friend who would make me look edgy and open-minded, not the knid who would actually challenge my thinking or stereotypes. p. 177


When I was a little girl, I knew I could be anything I wanted to be when I grew up, except a pastor. p. 181


Doubt is a difficult animal to master because it requires that we learn the difference between doubting God and doubting what we believe about God. The former has the potential to destroy faith; the latter has the power to enrich and refine it. The former is a vice; the latter a virtue. p. 219


 The Bible is by far the most fascinating, beautiful, challenging, and frustrating work of literature I've ever encountered. Whenever I struggle with questions about my faith, it serves as both a comfort and an agitator, both the anchor and the storm. One day it inspires confidence, the next day doubt. For every question it answers, a new one surfaces. For every solution I think I've found, a new problem will emerge. The Bible has been, and probably always will be, a relentless, magnetic force that both drives me away from my faith and continuously calls me home. Nothing makes me crazier or gives me more hope than the eclectic collection of sixty-six books that begins with Genesis and finishes with Revelation. It's difficult to read a word of it without being changed. pp. 188, 189

Well, there are many more nuggets. But I will leave it to you to get the book and discover them for yourself.

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