On the Days When I Believe:

The Life and Spiritual Legacy of Rachel Held Evans

Rachel Held Evans—in addition to being a blogger, speaker, author, mother, and wife—was a religious leader. Unlike many of her male counterparts, she was not to be found in the pulpit on a Sunday or on the clergy rolls of any denomination. Her congregation was gathered online through her digitally disseminated words, and her influence was geographically dispersed and massive. In a New Yorker article in 2021, Episcopal Bishop Michael Curry claimed that Rachel Held Evans may have been the “Martin Luther” of Christianity’s contemporary reformation. After her death at the age of 37 in 2019 after a short illness, Evans was eulogized in both mainstream media and Christian presses, on Twitter, in Instagram posts, and at that year’s gathering of the Christian conference she founded, Evolving Faith. This biography explores Evan’s experience as a millennial at the height of evangelical subculture at the end of the twentieth century and demonstrates her role in American Christianity during the proliferation of digital media in the early twenty-first century. The book will be published with Eerdmans Publishing in March 2027.