Rachel Held Evans is an author, blogger and columnist living in Dayton, Tenn. Her latest book is called "Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water and Loving the Bible Again," and she hopes it will help others "learn to love the Bible again." / Contributed photo by Maki Garcia Evans
The way biblical author and columnist Rachel Held Evans sees things, the Bible is not intended to be a place where a person goes to find an answer that supports a preconceived theory or question, especially, she says, if that theory argues in support of doing someone else harm.
Unfortunately, that is how it is too often used, she believes, and why many people, like her, grew up happily memorizing passages of the book without really understanding their meaning, only to turn away from it later in life. With her latest book, "Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water and Loving the Bible Again," she hopes to help people learn to love it again.
Rachel Held Evans is an author, blogger and columnist living in Dayton, Tenn. Her latest book is called "Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water and Loving the Bible Again," and she hopes it will help others "learn to love the Bible again." / Contributed photo by Maki Garcia Evans
"With this book, I wanted people to come back to the Bible because the Bible is one of those things that I think for a lot of us who grew up memorizing it and loving it and knowing all the stories, we get to a point where we started to question it because of things we've encountered: stories about genocide and stories about women as property and stories and verses that have been used against LGBTQ people.
"We see how it has been used to hurt people, and we turn away from that. It's like every time we open it, we seem to have a faith crisis. I wanted people to see it used in ways that are healing and helpful. I wanted to help people come back to the Bible and use it to help people. I wanted them to keep their brain engaged and their heart engaged and to bring their skepticism, and they can bring their doubts and really wrestle with it."
She says she was aided in that quest by approaching the book the way members of the Jewish faith do, where the myths, psalms, stories, letters, writings and parables are meant to be conversation starters, not conversation enders.
"The Jewish posture, I think, can be a lot healthier than the Christian attitude about the Bible can be," she says.
"Christians sometimes approach the Bible with this attitude where there is one meaning to this story, one meaning to this verse, and we have to find it and then we are going to fight like hell against each other based on what we think the meaning is."
Or, she says, Christians will search through the book until they find the meaning that supports their argument.
"It's funny how you can find the meaning that you thought going into it," she says with a laugh. "Which we all tend to do."
Evans, 36, spent much of her youth in Birmingham, Alabama, before moving at age 14 to Dayton, Tennessee, where she lives today with her husband Dan, and two kids, Henry, 2, and Harper, 2 months.
She grew up in a conservative religious environment, she says, and upon reaching adulthood, she started looking at many of the Bible stories she had memorized as a child through different eyes, and didn't much like what she saw.
She rightly figured she was not alone, as she is today a popular blogger, columnist (rachelheldevans.com) and New York Times best-selling author whose works include "Faith Unraveled," "A Year of Biblical Womanhood" and "Searching for Sunday." When not caring for her family, Evans says she loves nothing more than curling up with a voluminous scholarly study of the Bible.
"That's my beach read," she says.
She loves the research aspect of studying the Bible, looking for context such as when and where a passage was written and for whom.
She was an English literature major at Bryan College and with her latest book, she used several techniques and skills in her quiver to engage the reader. She retells some of the Bible stories as a poem, or a screenplay and even a you-pick-the-adventure type of story, for example.
"I wanted to do something different. I love to read these thick biblical commentaries for fun, but not everyone does I realize, so I wanted to find ways to make it interesting. I wanted it to be engaging, like when we were children."
She also used the different styles of writing to make a point about the Bible itself, a point that is too often overlooked, she says.
"There are all these genres within the Bible. There's myths, there's song, there's poetry, there's laws, there's proverbs, there's philosophy, there are lots of letters, Gospels, political commentary, satire. We make a mistake, I think, when we misidentify them. If you open psalms and read them as laws, you are making a mistake. If you read the epistles as wisdom literature, you are going to make a mistake."
She cites the Genesis story as an example, saying it was not meant as science but as a story designed to explain to people living a couple of thousand years ago "their place in the world."
"It was based on the cosmology of the day, not the cosmology of today," she says.
She says she was "horrified" when U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently quoted Romans 13 while defending the Trump Administration's policy of separating children from their parents trying to cross into America from Mexico.
"I was just enraged for a full 48 hours on that one because it was such a horrible misuse of the Bible to justify treating children with cruelty," she says. "You are not doing it right if you are using the Bible to justify the mistreatment of children."
She says that incident makes her even more passionate to want to show people how the Bible can be used for liberation and healing.
"Jeff Sessions can go to the Bible and pull out a verse to justify the oppression of immigrants, but we can look to the Bible and see a consistent teaching throughout, from Genesis to Revelation - about treating immigrants and refugees with respect and kindness."
Incidents like that further her drive to help people understand the Bible as an inspiration for doing good, she says.
"It makes me even more passionate to help people see that the Bible can also be used for liberation and healing.
"If you are going to the Bible to look for ways to hurt people, you will find that, but if you are going to find ways to heal and to help, you will find that also, so a lot of it is the posture you have going into it."
Contact Barry Courter at bcourter@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6354.