Letha Dawson Scanzoni on Rachel Held Evans at EEWC.com

Rachel Held Evans  (1981-2019)

If, like me, you didn't pay much attention to Rachel Held Evans until she died, you will want to read "Rachel Held Evans--Reaching Across Generations" by Letha Dawson Scanzoni.

https://eewc.com/rachel-held-evans/

Writing for the Christian Feminism Today website, Letha reviews RHE's online impact and how her influence spread beneath the radar of the white male evangelical leaders.

As a millennial, RHE was quick to pick up the tools of the internet, blogging and tweeting as well as writing four books.  

She bypassed the male hierarchy and built an online community very different from the power-oriented hierarchy of the evangelical world.  

In her community, LGBTQ folk were welcome.  Women preachers and leaders were cool.  She attracted baby boomers and Gen Xers as well as fellow millennials.  

Female terms for God were legitimate to RHE though infrequent.

"It's not about being politically correct; it's about confronting the ways in which we have made God in our image," RHE blogged in April 2008.  When we insist on God as a "he," we are making an idol.  

Letha points out that RHE "usually avoided gendered pronouns to avoid controversy but was intentional in those times that she did speak of God in feminine terms."

I confess that I didn't take much interest in RHE because she wasn't radical enough for me.  I have a low tolerance for male language in reference to God.

  
The idea of taking a whole year to live out "biblical womanhood" sounded to me like such a waste of time--though Letha assures me that RHE's intention was satirical.  She meant to show that complementarians pick and choose when they talk about "biblical womanhood," that really observing all the levitical rules is ridiculous for Christians today. 

I didn't need that proved.  I'm not her audience, though I do identify as an evangelical.  I claim the word evangel on the basis of its actual meaning (good news), not on my church membership or whom I hang out with.    

Thank you, Letha, for your many hours of reading RHE's books and blogs and viewing her speeches to present us with this distilled drop of who she really was. 



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