Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions

By Rachel Held Evans
Zondervan, copyright 2010, 232 pages
Examined, Analyzed and & Reviewed by Marion Aldridge,
Coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of South Carolina
Contact at marion@cbfofsc.org or 803-779-1888

When I was growing up in North Augusta, South Carolina in the 1950’s and 60’s, the people in our church knew we were Southern Baptists, not Independent Baptists or Fundamentalists. Bob Jones University was Fundamentalist, and they believed some things differently than we did. They were against the idea of evolution, for instance. In fact, as many things as God told us Southern Baptists not to do or believe, it seemed that their list was longer. These Fundamentalist folks had strong opinions about such things as millennialism and dispensations that I don’t remember being important at all in our Southern Baptist world. We were “pan-millennialists,’ figuring it would all pan out in the end.

Rachel Held Evans grew up in that world of Independent Bible churches and Fundamentalist Bible colleges. Before Southern Baptists took a hard right theologically in the 1970’s and 80’s, these independent congregations were as different from my kind of Baptists as were the Catholics. They were our neighbors and we liked them, but they were a bit weird. Eventually, because Southern Baptists moved in their direction theologically and politically, I learned more about the beliefs of these Independent/Bible people. No wonder the secular press has a hard time figuring Christians out. Nowadays, it is sometimes hard even for insiders to distinguish between Fundamentalists, Pentecostals, Evangelicals, Southern Baptists, Inerrantists and Conservatives.

Doctrinal purity was way more important to the Independent Bible Churches than to us denominational Baptists. Most of their churches, as a result, were small. Southern Baptists, on the other hand, were marketing geniuses. We majored on evangelism, revivals, altar calls, missions, starting new churches, witnessing and church growth. We knew all the 10 year olds joining our churches would not hang around into adulthood. That is why 1000 member SBC churches averaged 250 in attendance.

The word “apologetics” was apparently hugely important in Independent Bible churches because the Bible is chock-full of verses that need explanation. The idea is that there needs to be a defense, an apology, a clarification, a justification for difficult passages. Rachel Held’s world was full of these teachings. She mentions a volume that apparently was a standard part of her church life:

“Gleason Archer’s massive Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, a heavy volume that seeks to provide the reader with sound explanations for every conceivable puzzle found within the Bible—from whether God approved of Rahab’s lie, to where Cain got his wife. Note to well-meaning apologists: it’s not always the best idea to present a skeptic with a five-hundred-page book listing hundreds of apparent contradictions in Scripture when the skeptic didn’t even know that half of them existed when you recommended it.”

Rachel Held Evans and I did not grow up in the same world. Still, she seemed to tell my story. Less than half my age, Rachel Held Evans figured out some of the deeper questions of the Bible and faith before age thirty that I had only begun to wrestle with at age sixty.

The evolution issue that gives her book (and her blog) its title, Evolving in Monkey Town, turns out to be one of a dozen theological and ethical questions with which she wrestles. Just a few years ago, I read Darwin’s Origin of the Species for the first time ever. I thought that Darwin made his case for natural selection soundly and impressively. He did leave God out of the book, since his was a science treatise and, by then, he had become a man of little or no faith. I am sure I take medicine that was discovered or created by non-believers. What does that have to do with whether the medicine works? What does Darwin’s faith or lack of faith have to do with whether he told the truth about evolution? So, at my semi-advanced age, finally I have begun to read books about Darwin and the voyage of the HMS Beagle. Visiting the Galapagos Islands is now on my Bucket List. When I discovered Evolving in Monkey Town, I was drawn to it. Rachel Held Evans narrates a relatively brief summary of the Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, for those who don’t know that story.

Her title comes from the small town where Rachel Held grew up, home of the famous trial in 1925 in which evolution was hotly debated between Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan. I incorrectly made the assumption that the book was primarily about Evan’s pilgrimage with regard to the subject of evolution. Instead, the book is a memoir of her adolescence and young adult years as she wrestled not only with the matter of evolution, but also with traditional theological hot topics such as hell and hot button topics such as homosexuality, militarism, pluralism, feminism, and even politics.

Mature beyond her years, Rachel Held Evans wrote lots of lines I wish I had written.

• “The problem with fundamentalism is that it can’t adapt to change.”
• “The ability of the body of Christ to change—to grow fins when it needs to swim and wings when it needs to fly—has preserved it for over two thousand years.”
• “I think I must have gotten my bleeding heart from her [my mother], which, combined with my father’s cautious idealism, accidentally made me into a liberal.”
• “Salvation wasn’t just about being a Christian; it was about being the right kind of Christian.”
• “The evangelical community has a curious reputation for resisting cultural movements before suddenly deciding to embrace them.”
• “Stubborn isolationism and anti-intellectualism is an outdated and ineffective strategy for expanding the kingdom.”
• “We criticized relativists for picking and choosing truth, while our own biblical approach required some selectivity of its own.”
• “In Sunday school, they always made hell out to be a place for people like Hitler, not a place for his victims.”
• “The space between doubting God’s goodness and doubting his existence is not as wide as you might think.”
• “I think you officially grow up the moment you realize you are capable of causing your parents pain.”
• “Christians who claim to take the Bible literally or who say they obey all of his teachings without ‘picking and choosing’ are either liars or homeless.”
• “You’d have to be crazy not to have second thoughts about following Jesus.”
• “Some Christians are more offended by the idea of everyone going to heaven than by the idea of everyone going to hell.”
• “As soon as you think you’ve got God figured out, you can bet on the fact that you’re wrong.”
• “In the end, it was doubt that saved my faith.”
• “Apologists like to say that following Christ shouldn’t mean checking our brains at the door. Perhaps it shouldn’t mean checking our hearts either.”
• “We are not saved by information.”
• “Our way is to make someone pay with blood; his way is to bleed.”
• “Perhaps being a Christian isn’t about experiencing the kingdom of heaven someday but about experiencing the kingdom of heaven every day.”
• “The idea of a single comprehensive biblical worldview to which all Christians can agree is a myth.”
• “For as long as I can remember, the Bible has been compared to a weapon, and for as long as I can remember, it has been used as one.”
• “The Bible is by far the most fascinating, beautiful, challenging, and frustrating work of literature I’ve ever encountered.”
• “Our interpretations are colored by our culture, our community, our presuppositions, our experience, our language, our education, our emotions, our intellect, our desires, and our biases. My worldview affects how I read the Bible as much as the Bible affects my worldview.”
• “Maybe God wants us to have these discussions because faith isn’t just about being right; it’s about being a part of a community.”
• “Most weren’t looking for a faith that provided all the answers; they were looking for one in which they were free to ask questions.”
• “It’s not up to some politician to represent my Christian values to the world; it’s up to me.”
• “Our best answers in defense of Christianity have always been useless clanging symbols unless our lives have inspired the world to ask.”

I loved this book. I like this woman. She can think. She can write. I like the way she has evolved. May I evolve in my faith as well!

My goal is to engage, comment on, interact with, reflect on, provide quotations from, and helpful insight regarding books of relevance to contemporary Christians.  Disclaimer: As a service to pastors, Sunday school teachers and others within the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Marion Aldridge produces these book “reviews.” His attempt to pay attention to the culture in which we live does not mean that Aldridge or CBF endorses every sentence of every book or even every sentence quoted in the review. Quotations from the book are in italics.

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