Rachel Held Evans
1,354 words
Popular Christian writer Rachel Held Evans died last weekend at the young age of 37.
Held Evans’ death caused much sorrow among mainstream media outlets. Even Hillary Clinton mourned her death.
The reasons are obvious: Held Evans was a former evangelical who pushed progressive Christianity. The New Yorker celebrated her for promoting a “radically inclusive Christianity.” The Atlantic called her a “hero to Christian misfits.” The New York Times said she was the “voice of the wandering Christian.”
Held Evans wrote a few bestsellers, including A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband Master. The book retold her year-long experiment living the way a woman is supposed to live, according to her interpretation of the Bible. It, not surprisingly, argued against biblical literalism.
Held Evans’ progressive Christianity advocated for every Left-wing cause with a Biblical gloss. “I think the problem is white evangelicals don’t see Jesus in immigrants, refugees, people of color, and demeaned women,” she once tweeted. She claimed the downtrodden of today would one day lead Christianity: “The folks you’re shutting out of the church today will be leading it tomorrow. That’s the way the Spirit works. The future’s in the margins.”
She said the Bible made her a feminist. “I am an accidental feminist, for my liberation did not come from Simone de Beauvoir or Betty Friedan, but from Mary and Martha, Junia and Priscilla, Phoebe and Tabitha,” she stated in 2012. “It came from the marvelous and radical recognition that if the gospel is good news for them, then maybe it is good news for me too . . . and that maybe that boy in my youth group was wrong.”
The writer went so far as to say Jesus may have been racist: “It’s fear of Jesus’ humanity, I think, that keeps us from interpreting the story of the Syrophoenician/Canaanite woman as a story about a man changing his mind about his racial bias when confronted with the humanity (and chutzpah!) of another person. But that’s a tricky one . . .”
This is the kind of Christianity that earns elite adoration. Progressive Christianity already dominates several mainline Protestant denominations and is taking root in evangelicalism. Most young evangelicals are more like Held Evans than Jerry Falwell. Time magazine reported in 2015 that “a growing minority of millennial evangelicals” are “are non-white and much more likely to support progressive issues including social justice, equal rights, marriage equality and combatting climate change.”
Late last year, The New Yorker reported on this same phenomenon. “[M]any young evangelicals are more diverse, less nationalistic, and more heterodox in their views than older generations. Believing that being a Christian involves recognizing the sanctity of all human beings, they support Black Lives Matter and immigration reform, universal health care and reducing the number of abortions, rather than overturning Roe v. Wade,” New Yorker writer Eliza Griswold, who also penned Held Evans’ obituary, observed.
National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference President Samuel Rodriguez says there is a clear divide between older evangelicals and younger ones, groups he respectively dubs the “Billy Graham Generation” and the “Martin Luther King Jr. Generation.” The older generation cares more about “religious liberty, and life and Biblical inerrancy” while the young focus on “social justice, police shootings, and mass incarceration,” according to Rodriguez.
Polls show that young white evangelicals are far more likely to support gay marriage and mass immigration. White evangelicals as a whole are mostly opposed to LGBT causes and America’s demographic transformation. However, white evangelicals between the ages of 18 and 29 say they are more inclined to vote for candidates who advocate for LGBT causes, more immigration, and the abolishment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The New Yorker report also said that young evangelicals are skeptical of the nation and view nationalism as un-Christian.
The one thing young evangelicals share with older evangelicals is their opposition to abortion. Held Evans also stated she was pro-life, even as she supported every other Left-wing stance. Yet, her stance coincided with the larger social justice agenda of progressive Christianity.
Progressive Christians imagine the faith, and Jesus Christ, as embodiments of modern social justice. “This dude was breaking down gender roles and taking on racial issues that made people around him hate him,” one Hispanic evangelical told Griswold about Jesus. This twisted image of Jesus as the ur-social justice warrior regularly shapes mainstream discourse. Mass immigration proponents regularly dust off their Bibles to browbeat white Christians into welcoming millions of strangers into their country. They also say Jesus was a refugee and black in order to support arguments in favor of America’s demographic transformation.
The majority of white evangelicals are repulsed by these messages. Most white evangelicals oppose mass immigration and support nationalism. But those views only remain the norm among the older and whiter cohort. Several other popular Christian writers, even some conservative ones, wish to reeducate their prejudiced flocks.
Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber, the cleric who gave Held Evans last rites, is one of these figures. The heavily tattooed pastor’s rhetoric is suffused with profanity and sexual references. She primarily promotes sexual revolution values to Christians, urging them to have as much free love and self-fulfillment as possible. She fights against the “purity culture” of mainstream evangelicalism and offers sexual liberation in its place. Like Held Evans, her books are bestsellers and she receives mainstream media praise.
The Christian Left may have found its perfect representative in Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg. Buttigieg is a married gay man who emphasizes his Episcopalian faith. He shares no positions with the Religious Right. He’s pro-abortion and believes religious groups must kowtow to progressive demands. He summarized his Christianity in this statement: “When I think about where most of Scripture points me, it is toward defending the poor, and the immigrant, and the stranger, and the prisoner, and the outcast, and those who are left behind by the way society works.”
His Christianity is not one that defends healthy values, the national community, or even the traditional family. It is opposed to all those things. The Other is the great purpose of Buttigieg’s Christianity, and it conforms to the technocratic neo-liberalism for which he advocates. It responds to Nietzsche’s critical image of Christianity with the proud boast, “Yes, this is what we are!”
Fellow Democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker also articulates this same vision of Christianity. Religion News described Senator Booker’s Christian approach as “multifaith, LGBTQ-inclusive, liberation theology-influenced and social-justice focused.”
Maybe the European New Right had a point when it argued that liberalism is just a secularized form of Christianity.
Woke Christianity could become a major theme of the 2020 Democratic primary. It’ll certainly come out when candidates need to virtue-signal about the utter immorality of nationalism.
Progressives are learning that it is better to exploit Christianity than it is to attack it. They know they can rely on the media to ignore pastors and bishops on abortion and sexuality, yet give them air time when immigration is front-page news. The globalist elite wants people to think the Bible only tells people to welcome immigrants and other outsiders. It’s just about love and kindness; forget everything those bigoted pastors told you.
The Religious Right isn’t going to disappear anytime soon, and will continue to dwarf the Christian Left. Yet, it is important that many popular Christian writers and young evangelicals feel their faith is best expressed in progressive politics. The effects are already being seen. Pastors lead protests against immigration enforcement. News anchors grill conservatives on how they reject the faith by opposing mass immigration. Several churches fly the rainbow flag outside their door.
Conservative evangelicals may remain the majority in their community, but they still show the woke influence. The conservative Southern Baptist Convention did issue an embarrassing condemnation of the Alt Right in 2017. Apparently, nationalists are a bigger threat than secular progressives.
The globalists need every institution to support their agenda. Woke Christianity helps advance that goal by subverting the churches that lag behind “progress.” Contrary to its marketing, woke Christianity does not challenge power — it reaffirms the prevailing order.
It only challenges white America.
38 Comments
Did Jezebel, Bathsheba and Sapphira inspire her to the same degree
“Held Evans’ progressive Christianity advocated for every Left-wing cause with a Biblical gloss. ..The globalists need every institution to support their agenda”
That’s exactly what Pope Francis does with Catholicism in Europe. Immigrants, global warming, gay and modern marriage acceptance, etc. The “who am I to judge”- Pope Francis checks all the liberal boxes.
We are subjected to a huge propaganda campaign coming from the elites. One which throws at us all the arguments imaginable, and their logical opposites as well when it fits.
The globalist dream of the elites (and their global finance&corporations infrastructure) is at stake now. They have bet everything on it decades ago and they can’t go back now without triggering an avalanche. If need be, if propaganda alone does not do it, the present ‘soft-dictatorship’ style of governance will be replaced all over the West by a good-old hard dictatorship, with the leftist-views as the state-ideology.
We have long passed the point of a ‘soft dictatorship’. Private companies dominate the American landscape to such a degree that the first amendment has become irrelevant, except for providing boomers with plausible deniability that they are in fact living in a nightmare Orwellian state. We all know the power that social media has to un-person dissidents, and now more recently Mastercard has come under pressure to block service to “hate groups”.
>https://www.paymentssource.com/news/mastercard-faces-pressure-to-monitor-hate-group-payments-at-board-level
The narrative they have created assures us that we are free, democratic, have rule of the people, etc. The moment the government begins illegally punishing people for political views is the moment they destroy their own narrative, which is why that will never happen.
Their winning strategy is to continue to exploit the libertarian attitudes of Americans and use private companies to do their bidding. In a way this is more convenient because the division of labour is already there – Faceberg cancels you online, Amazion decides what you are allowed to read, and Mastercard and PayPal prevent you from creating an organization to resist.
Well said. The United Kingdom is no longer free: say the wrong thing in the wrong place and you will at the very least have your collar felt by the police: what was once a joke at the expense of the soviet bloc is now our quotidian domestic reality.
As the rulers of Singapore, colonial or Chinese, knew and know, a multiethnic society must above all eschew intercommunal strife to survive. Therefore while a certain level of resentment-based criminality can be accepted as the price of cohabitation, no existential attacks, be they merely couched in scholarship, journalism or art media, can be permitted.
We are now quite close to a system of mandatory censorship: the state broadcaster cannot and will not report facts that go against the grain and our internet access is also soon to be locked down in the name of thrwarting pornographers and terrorists.
Perhaps one day the traditional British, still a majority, will ask themselves: what we have gained in exchange for our hard won liberty?
“As the rulers of Singapore, colonial or Chinese, knew and know, a multiethnic society must above all eschew intercommunal strife to survive. Therefore while a certain level of resentment-based criminality can be accepted as the price of cohabitation, no existential attacks, be they merely couched in scholarship, journalism or art media, can be permitted.”
Exactly. This sums it up…..The state policies become subordinate to this all important goal of avoiding intercommunal strife and freedom of speech and expression is curtailed to avoid igniting such strife.
I was making this exact argument against open borders libertarian loonies back in the 80s. The more divers a society, the less social trust, and thus the more The State becomes the only “social glue” keeping basic public order and national cohesion. NOT good for liberty!
Most libertarians are utter fools. That was my experience (though I still strongly support basic capitalism).
If I may disagree with one thing–the net isn’t being censored because of porn (would it be so) or terrorism (ditto), but because PC. Those Big Tech guys want the global technocracy so bad they can taste it, and yeah, they’ll censor us all if we say anything like “a man is not a woman.”
Good stuff on here. First time–came here from a link. Glad to see our movement is on the net in increasing numbers.
I was raised a Catholic though it never took with me. I would gladly “fake it” if a revived Christianity meant a revived future for whites. But it seems just the opposite. Religion is not much different from the media, Hollywood, business, academia, schools, the arts, music, military and all other institutions in its anti-whiteness. So why waste your Sunday listening to a boring sermon and injunctions about how wicked you are (if you are white)?
I’ve heard that a certain political leader once said he wished Europe had been conquered by Islam rather than Christianity. He may have had a point.
It was Hitler! I read the same thing, but it’s been so long I don’t remember where.
Hitler : “The Mohammedan religion would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?”
Also : “Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies the heroism of . . . the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world.”
Aleister Crowley made a similar point : “Islam . . . is a virile religion. It looks facts in the face, and admits their horror; but it proposes to overcome them by sheer dint of manhood.”
Islam retarded scientific progress even more severely than did Christianity. It is just as universal as Christianity, and it has no more room for racialism in it than Christianity does. Contrary to Crowley’s statement, Islam is not known by anybody as a religion that puts facts first. Deploring Christianity’s corrosive effects on white racial interests does not require us to sing the praises of a religion as culturally, morally and aesthetically rebarbative as Islam.
I’ve yet to find any proper sources on the Hitler quotes on Islam that aren’t populists trying to cast Islam in a negative light.
Islam is pure evil, from both Christian and White perspectives. It is totally alien to the White mind, and it has historically been the chiefest enemy of Whites and the West. I would hate living in an Islamic society (and if that ever came about in a Western land, as it well might, it would likely coincide with dirty Arab ethnic domination – to hell with that!).
Keep the West purely White!
Hitler: “We had hardly succeeded in sharing this great uniting idea of how to combat the problem with the German people when the Jew struck with a counter attack. He used his old methods. With remarkable speed, he hurled the burning torch of dispute into the popular movement and sowed the seeds of disagreement there. In raising the Ultramontane Problem and through the arguments it caused between Catholicism and Protestantism, the public’s attention was diverted in order to prevent any organized attack upon Jewry. […] I can, without hesitation, declare that these men who draw the race-centered movements into the crisis of religious controversy are worse enemies of my people than anyinternational Communist.”
“Maybe the European New Right had a point when it argued that liberalism is just a secularized form of Christianity.”
J. Gresham Machen made this point at the beginning of the last century. “Liberalism” is a not a variation on Christianity, it is a distinct religion of its own. People like RHE simply co-opt Christian language to dress up their religion and make it palatable to culturally Christian Westerners.
Menciois Moldbug also makes this point
Actually Nietzsche had them all beat.
EXACTLY! Thank you. I’m not a fundamentalist and never will be, but the notion that the Jesus of the KJV Bible was some kind of Social Justice Weirdo is ludicrous. SJWism is itself a kind of ersatz religion based on the totally unChristian idea that bearing false witness against one’s own people, and placing the illegitimate/unearned “needs” (trans: “wants”) of alien Others, are expressions of moral virtue. They are not. Lying about one’s own tribe’s faults so as to ingratiate oneself with, as well as excuse the genuine faults of, members of alien tribes – something ONLY Whites ever do (and which is the ultimate source of our racial decline) – is an act of devilry (if the Devil exists; if not, we may say that it is either sinful, or evolutionarily maladaptive).
But the proper response of pro-Whites should not be to assume that this SJW garbage is somehow the REAL Christianity, but rather to invade the churches and aggressively promote real Christianity, which allows for the existence and maintenance of nations and ethnocultures, which in turn require borders and apartheid territories. Let’s be clear: the, eg, Southern segregationists and Boer architects of apartheid were generally far more pious Christians than these trendy utopian sentimentalists like this pathetic woman whom I’d never hard of until after she’d died.
It would be a huge mistake for White patriots to allow SJWs to take over institutionalized Christianity as they have almost all other formerly Western institutions. Of course, one alternative would be to start forming conservative churches – “conservative” not simply theologically but politically (and yes racially).
The Eastern Orthodox Holy Fathers have a special name for this –Prelest. It is a spiritual delusion or deception, a false spiritual state ususally caused by demonic suggestion that somehow you have more personal scanctity than anyone else and must spread the word. Typically called nowadays purity spiraling except that it is not pure at all. All is vanity.
Ah, the age-old delusion of the conservative: if only we could get the right religion set up, ethics and politics would take care of themselves. This is true only as a tautology: “right” religion is defined as “religion that promotes my politics.”
And the reason it never works, like Acme rocket skates or Lucy’s football, is that the causality is backwards: religion provides sanctions to promote whatever ethical system is already in place. Ethics/politics trumps religion every time.
Ever hear of the Treaty of Westphalia?
It trumps religion so much so that religion drops out as irrelevant: atheistic China, Japan and Czech Republic (the LEAST religious country on Earth) have no problem refusing immigration, practicing eugenics, etc. ; the most religious, the USA, not so much.
Protestantism is dead. While once can’t blame the Reformers for rejecting the corruption of Rome, this is more or less the inevitable consequence of discarding all Tradition other than Augustine, who would not be my go-to Church Father. In Protestantism, you have one one side the SJWs like Evans, who worship POCs, LGBTQ+ and so on; on the other side the Zionists like Hagee, who are just as heretical.
The Orthodox Church (particularly the Russians) is the only one that still holds to a defends the traditions and the teachings. I imagine there will be efforts to suppress it one day.
If you think Protestantism is one side Held Evans and the other side John Hagee, you know very little about Protestantism.
Sorry, brother. The Orthodox church always follows the whims of secular rulers and for the time being, the secular rulers are anti-white leftists. I’ve written an article to that effect right here on counter-currents:
https://counter-currents.com/2019/05/ordogs-like-me/
The jews already did this to Catholicism–it was only a matter of time. The Christian religion, regardless of how it is packaged has always been inimical to the white race.
The Lord has called another angel to his side.
Why do the good die so young?
I’d never heard of her until she died (I don’t tend to pay attention to the shenanigans of evangelical Protestants, whether of the Left or Right), but she seems to exemplify the kind of liberal Evangelical/Protestant who wants to turn Christianity into a mere adjunct of whatever the latest SJW social causes are. That way lies the death of genuine Christianity; devoid of any deep metaphysics or mysticism, it turns Christianity into a mere branch of social work. Nietzsche ate these kinds of progressive, liberal, bourgeois, milquetoast Christians for lunch.
And given that evangelical Protestants like Held Evans don’t accept the 7 sacraments (and Lutherans only 3, of which “Last Rites” is not one), what kind of “Last Rites” could she have received from Miss Bolz-Weber? Sounds like the setup for some absurdist comedy: Lutheran Priestess presides over “Last Rites” (which is not a sacrament in Lutheranism) of an ex-Evangelical SJW activist (who rejects all sacraments), while after her death hagiographers promote her as a “saint” (though they also reject the Communion of Saints, and lack any formal canonical process for such recognition anyway).
I don’t see that it does this. Why should a woke evangelical have to jettison Christian metaphysics or mysticism? The content of a woke evangelical’s “works” seems just as compatible with such metaphysics and mysticism as a Catholic’s.
They do so by the very fact that they are obsessed with materialistic, this-worldly goals as decided by contemporary socio-political fads and obsessions, turning Christianity into a sort of social welfare committee. What place then for the high mysticism of Meister Eckhart, Jacob Boehme, Dante, Hildegard of Bingen, Juliana of Norwich, or Dionysius the Areopagite, to mention just a few in the great Tradition?
In the Thelema / occult / “pagan” community, we have the same problem as Christians have with #WokeChristianity.
Just today, I had gotten this chick’s number from a local meetup group. The girl was into “pagan” ritualism, art, etc. Definitely not a looker or someone I’d consider sleeping with, but it seemed worth it, if for no other reason that one can not have too many IRL friends / contacts.
After getting her #, I had mentioned being a huge fan of Aleister Crowley & Julius Evola, and recommended a chapter of the UR Group’s “Introduction To Magic”, Volume I.
What followed with a gigantic diatribe about how Crowley was a “racist”, “sexist”, “anti-Semitic”, etc.
What is even more funny is that, when I had first gotten into Mr. Crowley, I had no idea he had any “racist” or “sexist” proclivities. I was purely in it for his rigorous metaphysical views of religion and spirituality.
Its really funny that interacting with leftists has caused for me to drift further to the “right” (see: normal views of reality) than the actual positions of the right as espoused by rightists themselves
We should remember that genuine conservative evangelicals who are considered nationalists in this article are total supporters of Israel. They believe that an expanding Israel will
fulfill “End Time” prophecy which is good for them because, when Jesus returns , evangelicals
will apparently rule for a thousand years . But , in order to achieve this very Jewish like metaphysical goal, they are willing to force us to use our tax money and military services to support the Zionist aggressor. Of course this is quite contrary to our national interest In my judgement this makes conservative evangelicals no bettor than the American Jews
who have used our country to support Israel.
“young evangelicals are skeptical of the nation and view nationalism as un-Christian”
That is one thing they at least got right.
I am leaning more and more to the conviction that it does not matter what interpretation of christianity you introduce into a society. Sooner or later it is going to rot that society to its roots due to its built in submissiveness.
Just a more comprehensive version of Einstein’s definition of stupidity by doing the same thing again and again and expect different results.
Just how “twisted” is that image though? To the chagrin of pro-white Christians, Jesus obviously has more in common with SJWs than he does with WNs.
Regarding woke evangelicalism, I suppose this faction will gain ground on rightwing evangelicals, but as far as I can see, rightwing evangelicals qua evangelicals are of little use to the pro-white cause anyway, so their conversion to “wokeness” would not be any great loss to us.
The rise of woke Christianity should be welcomed by pro-whites. SJWs reinterpreting Christianity so as to make it compatible with their values opens the door to pro-white Christians reinterpreting their faith so as to make it compatible with pro-white values. The more that white Christians see that “Christian morality” is simply what the living generation of Christians decides it is, the better for us.
How is creating a future where the entire planet is poor, brown and tyrannical consistent with the golden rule?
A couple of things I noticed:
One, the MSM’s pathetic substitution of “evangelical” for “any Christian who votes trad/cons/nationalist” is spreading, and it’s so dopey. “The religious right” was bad enough, but at least it didn’t substitute one branch of Christianity for every Christian who is not a leftist
Evangelical describes a specific type of Christian — my uncle was an evangelical minister, and his kids didn’t dance or play cards. That doesn’t describe who the press means when they use that word.
What they mean is, anyone who believes in the divinity of Jesus and votes nationalist rather than globalist, and that’s not what most of us are. We’re all spread around — I’m not a church-goer and not a literalists — I even mix in some Buddhist philosophy -but I’m in the heartland of the Bible belt and get along fine with all those who ARE church-goers, some of whom are in “evangelical” denominations, some who are not.
The Christian/political thing is really more rural vs urban than evangelical vs “mainstream,” which leaves a lot of us out when the MSM press paints us as all fundamentalists. All the people around me (maybe even me and my husband, who mixes Edgar Cayce with his Bible reading) are rural Christians and trad Americans, but the press would call us “evangelicals” ‘cos we’re anti-left/anti-PC/anti-globalist.
And point number 2 (thought I forgot, didn’t you?) — while I can’t speak for “evangelicals” — I can say that Time and the New Yorker are both BS when it comes to agendas, and that no, we’re not going wholesale lefty out here in the heartland, where DT won my state by 30-some% and will do the same in 2020.
Peace out (Can Christian Right people say that??)
Is your highest loyalty to a set of words (values, principals, propositions, scripture) or to your own kind? When white people replace racial loyalty with loyalty to words in a book as their HIGHEST loyalty, they brown out. It doesn’t matter which book it is.
Figures that an article about Christianity would get a lot of discussion. I’ll add to this point:
“The conservative Southern Baptist Convention did issue an embarrassing condemnation of the Alt Right in 2017. Apparently, nationalists are a bigger threat than secular progressives.”
I recently visited a Southern Baptist Church in this new city I have moved to, and noticed something I have been noticing at many evangelical churches: a church-affiliated “charter school.” One of my dad’s good friends, actually, is one of the people running one of these charter schools.
These schools are not your typical religious education centers, like ones attached to Catholic Churches. They are apparently secular. They are targeted at giving alternative schooling options to poor black children, and their student bodies are almost entirely black.
Yes, the most conservative churches of the religious right are pouring their charity into Social Justice. Vox Day continues to be proven right in his grand proclamation that any institution that is not explicitly (primarily?) anti-progressive will one day be “converged” to being an arm of progressivism.
“Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism.”
― Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision