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

Rachel Held Evans (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 15, 2010

Eighty years after the Scopes Monkey Trial made a spectacle of Christian fundamentalism and brought national attention to her hometown, Rachel Held Evans faced a trial of her own when she began to have doubts about her faith. Growing up in a culture obsessed with apologetics, Evans asks questions she never thought she would ask. She learns that in order for her faith to survive in a postmodern context, it must adapt to change and evolve. Using as an illustration her own spiritual journey from certainty, through doubt, to faith, Evans adds a unique perspective to the ongoing dialogue about postmodernism and the church that has so captivated the Christian community in recent years. In a changing cultural environment where new ideas threaten the safety and security of the faith, Evolving in Monkey Town is a fearlessly honest story of survival.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'With Evolving in Monkey Town, Rachel Held Evans steps onto the stage as a gifted writer, an honest storyteller, and a compelling voice in the Christian community. She represents what is most hopeful and promising in a new generation of articulate, intelligent, and faithful young leaders.' -- Brian McLaren, author/speaker, www.brianmclaren.net

From the Publisher

"With Evolving in Monkey Town, Rachel Held Evans steps onto the stage as a gifted writer, an honest storyteller, and a compelling voice in the Christian community. She represents what is most hopeful and promising in a new generation of articulate, intelligent, and faithful young leaders.

"These days the stories I love to read are the ones that ask questions, that live in the tension, that allow me to bring my doubt and uncertainty and join the conversation. Rachel Held Evans' Evolving in Monkey Town is one of those stories." -- Shauna Niequist, author of Cold Tangerines and Bittersweet

"This book is an argument--Rachel argues with herself, God, the Bible, and Southern fundamentalism. Somehow, though, we are the winners in this argument because we learn and watch as a young woman emerges into a maturing faith that lets the kingdom vision of Jesus reshape her life. I found myself cheering her on." -- Scot McKnight, Karl A. Olsson Professor in Religious Studies, North Park University

"Rachel Held Evans is brilliant, gutsy, real, and hilarious, and Evolving in Monkey Town impacted my spiritual journey in ways I never imagined. I can't remember a book that I enjoyed reading more, partly because Rachel is a great writer, and partly because she so fearlessly examines the conflict between her inherited beliefs about God and the truth of her own spiritual experience. There's a certain weight to Evolving in Monkey Town that distinguishes it from the other spiritual memoir books out there." -- Jim Palmer, author of Divine Nobodies and Wide Open Spaces

"Can I tell you how much I admire Rachel Held Evans? She is smart, compassionate, funny, and relentlessly inquisitive. It is the questions she asks, not the answers she uncovers, that make Evolving in Monkey Town such a compelling read. There are many good books worth reading, but a truly remarkable book will leave you pondering matters long after the cover is closed. I loved this book. That Evans wrote a remarkable debut at such a young age makes me want to slap her, bless her heart." -- Karen Spears Zacharias, author of Will Jesus Buy Me a Double-Wide?: ('Cause I Need More Room for My Plasma TV)

"It's not every day that a book with the word `monkey' in the title challenges and encourages me like Rachel Held Evans' debut. She adds a fresh, courageous voice to the faith-and-doubt discussion, and it's a voice all of us need to hear." -- Jason Boyett, Author, of O Me of Little Faith: True Confessions of a Spiritual Weakling

"Evolving in Monkey Town is the kind of book I'll pass along. Rachel Held Evans so accurately highlights her struggles to have a genuine, life-changing, world-beautifying faith. I love her heart, her journey, her questions, and her tentative understanding of Jesus. I'll be thinking about this book and its message for months and years to come. An important read." -- Mary DeMuth, author of Thin Places: A Memoir

"When we find ourselves asking tough questions, sometimes we want answers, but many times we just want a friend who is asking the same questions we are. Written with refreshing honesty, Rachel Held Evans' new book Evolving in Monkey Town is going to be that friend for many people." -- Chad Gibbs, Author, of God and Football: Faith and Fanaticism in the SEC

"Rachel's humorous yet humble memoir of growing up in the evangelical world serves as an encouraging guide for anyone looking to navigate through that particular subculture. The story told here is both faith and doubt affirming, a beautiful reflection of a heart earnestly seeking to follow God fully." -- Julie Clawson, author of Everyday Justice: The Global Impact of Our Daily Choices

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Zondervan (June 15, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0310293995
• ISBN-13: 978-0310293996
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (66 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #16,803 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Rachel Held Evans is an award-winning writer from Dayton, Tennessee, home of the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925. Her articles have appeared locally in the Herald News and the Chattanooga Times Free Press, nationally in Grit, On Mission, Journey, and the Lookout, and online at BurnsideWritersCollective.com and TheOOZE.com. Connect with Rachel at http://RachelHeldEvans.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

57 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you have all the Answers, you aren't asking the right Questions, July 1, 2010

By 

Chad Estes (Boise, Idaho, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions (Paperback)

I recently sat through a sermon where the preacher warned the audience about the things that could get them off course. There were the usual suspects - alcohol, rebellious friends, floozy girls and hormone-charged boys, but there was also a new suspect added to this evil gang--postmodern thinking. He didn't really quantify or qualify his statement. He just demonized the buzzword to his audience, and it got the bobbing head approval from many in the audience that he was looking for.

There is something that Christian leaders need to understand. In the same way that the Church in the past needed to shift from "all mysticism, all the time" to some rational-based thinking (the shift from medieval to modernism) the Church now needs to shift from "all intellectual, all the time" model that hasn't worked for a while, and certainly isn't with the younger generations.

Take for example Rachel Held Evans--this is an under 30 aged woman who grew up with all the modern conveniences of Christianity - Christian home, private schooling, a dad who was a theologian, and won the `Best Christian Attitude Award' in her school four consecutive years.

* This is a girl who wrote out the plan of salvation on construction paper, folded it into a airplane and sailed it into her Mormon neighbor's back yard.
* Rachel learned that abortion was wrong before she learned where babies came from.
* She cried when she learned that her grandfather voted for Bill Clinton, thinking he would now be sent to hell when he died.
* She would move the wisemen away from the holiday manger scenes since the Magi didn't really arrive till Jesus was a toddler in order for the scene to be more biblically accurate.

But as certain as Rachel was in her belief system as she grew up it simply didn't answer the questions she faced in life. Just as her hometown of Dayton, Tennessee is famous for the Scopes Monkey Trial (1925 against a teacher who taught evolution in his classroom) Rachel found her own faith on trial. It didn't survive, at least not in the form it started in. It would be safe to say it evolved.

Here are her words, "I encountered a different Jesus, a Jesus who requires more from me than intellectual assent and emotional allegiance; a Jesus who associated with sinners and infuriated the religious; a Jesus who broke the rules and refused to cast the first stone; a Jesus who gravitated toward sick people and crazy people, homeless people and hopeless people; a Jesus who preferred story to exposition and metaphor to syllogism; a Jesus who answered questions with more questions, and demands for proof with demands for faith; a Jesus who taught his followers to give without expecting anything in return, to love their enemies to the point of death, to live simply and without a lot of stuff, and to say what they mean and mean what they say; a Jesus who healed each person differently and saved each person differently; a Jesus who had no list of beliefs to check off, no doctrinal statement to sign, no surefire way to tell who was `in' and who as `out'; a Jesus who loved after being betrayed, healed after being hurt, and forgave while being nailed to a tree; a Jesus who asked his disciples to do the same thing."

It is not hype when I say that Rachel's book, Evolving in Monkey Town, detailing her spiritual journey from certainty, through doubt, and to faith is the best book I have read this year. This memoir will replace many volumes of theology books on her dad's shelves and for a good reason.

If there is ANY hint of negative reaction in you when you hear the word `Postmodern' you really ought to read this book. To truly grasp the postmodern generation you have to do more than tackle their ideology with reason, you have to live out their stories with them. Rachel has invited you into hers; you'd be a monkey not to join her.

20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Spiritual Coming of Age, June 16, 2010

By 

R. Hollenbach (Campbellsville, KY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions (Paperback)

It's a sure sign of God's grace that he would put a journalist with the heart of a poet in a town like Dayton, Tennessee. Rachel Held Evan's Evolving in Monkey Town is a piece of narrative theology, a spiritual coming of age memoir of how a young woman schooled in a bastion of Christian conservatism found her way to freedom of thought and conscience in Jesus Christ.

Dayton took the nickname Monkey Town after hosting the "trial of the century" in 1925 when a high school science teacher named John Scopes was charged with the crime of teaching the theory of evolution. Clarence Darrow, William Jennings Bryan, and a horde of onlookers descended upon the town during that hot summer to debate the big question of the day--a literal view of Biblical creation or the theory of evolution? When the smoke had cleared, Scopes was convicted and fined $100, but Darrow captured the nation's attention, news coverage, and fundamentalism began its long slide into caricature in the national consciousness.

Rachel Evans missed the trial, arriving in Dayton some seventy years later in the late 90's when her father, a Dallas Theological Seminary product, moved the family to Dayton in order to teach at Bryan College (established in William Jennings Bryan's name just after the trial). Evans spent her teenage and college years growing up in Monkey Town, a precocious and insightful girl from a loving household, determined become the best Christian she could in the world she knew. She found herself the commencement speaker at Bryan college, hailed as the girl with all the answers, delivering an orthodox Christian conservative speech while secretly beginning to question her foundations.

The book is divided into three sections, Habitat, Challenge, and Change, the names of these sections echoing the central metaphor of the book: namely, her faith required adaptation, change--in short, her faith needed to evolve in order to survive. Evans drives home the irony that her faith had to go through the process of evolution, the very process considered anathema within her Christian circle. Woven into these three narrative sections are refreshing vignettes of the people from Dayton, Tennessee, and elsewhere. We are introduced to "June the Ten Commandments Lady," "Laxmi the Widow," "Adele the Oxymoron," and "Dan the Fixer" among others. Each person influenced her faith (for good or for ill) in profound ways. Evans' skill as a journalist shows through in these vivid pictures of the people in her life. Each portrait crackles with descriptive power.

The strength of the book is her choice of personal narrative. Since Evans herself was trained in the high art of apologetic combat it would have been easy for her to deconstruct the tenets of her upbringing and conservative Christian education. "I'd gotten so good at critiquing all the fallacies of opposing world views," she writes, "that it was only a matter of time before I turned the same skeptical eye upon my own faith." Instead her story unfolds from childhood through adolescence, adolescence through college, and into her new-found conclusions as an adult. Her personal story is compelling and resistant to argument precisely because it is her story.

The poet's heart meets the apologist's training early in her life. Evans tells her story with transparency and honesty. Even when the reader may disagree with her conclusions, her intentions are laid bare as someone with a strong sense of justice and a compassionate heart. Her journey begins with the conviction, "Salvation wasn't just about being a Christian: it was about being the right kind of Christian, the kind who did things by the book." By the time she evolves into a woman in her own right she posits, "Perhaps being a Christian isn't about experiencing the kingdom of heaven someday but about experiencing the kingdom of heaven every day."

It's a pleasure to read well-crafted sentences that sum up her experiences. A few examples:
* "Doubt is a difficult animal to master because it requires that we learn the difference between doubting God and doubting what we believe about God."
* "When the gospel gets all entangled with extras, dangerous ultimatums threaten to take it down with them. The yoke gets too heavy and we stumble beneath it."
* (And my personal favorite) "The longer our lists of rules and regulations, the more likely it is that God himself will break one."

There are few quibbles along the way: her conversations with friends seem a bit contrived--the voices of her friends all begin to sound the same. She does not explain how the very fellowship and educational institution she criticizes could produce such a free thinker as herself. And she leaves this reader wondering about the current dynamic of her family relationships--although this might be the curiosity of a nosy reviewer! But these are minor flaws--this is a good book. It will speak to anyone who has ever felt the stifling heat of orthodoxy, to those who want to be free to worship God without a spiritual Big Brother looking over their shoulders.

I recommend this book to anyone who is considering whether there is room in the church to ask troubling questions without being ostracized. I may even assign the book to the college freshman I teach this fall, if the campus bookstore will allow me to switch at such a late date!

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Fantastic Read! Honesty regarding finding life in The Questions., June 16, 2010

By 

Allen Paige (Georgetown, TX USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions (Paperback)

I just finished reading my advance copy of Evolving in Monkey Town by Rachel Held Evans. I devoured this thing in all of the spare moments I've had over the past two days, setting aside all my other reading to do so. My initial reaction: I'm jealous.

I met Rachel on Twitter and we've had some limited engagement there. I've enjoyed her tweets and her blog and jumped at the opportunity to read and review her book. What I didn't expect was how timely the read would be and how close to home her words would strike.

Evolving in Monkey Town is a wonderful narrative of Rachel's spiritual journey from conservative evangelicalism to a more progressive Christian experience. She doesn't pretend to have all the answer and she's brutally honest about her struggles along the way. Rachel deals with doubt and lands in the same place I have - Doubt is essential to faith. In the last chapter, Rachel writes:


"If there's one thing I know for sure, it's that serious doubt - the kind that leads to despair - begins not when we start asking God questions but when, out of fear, we stop."

It is exactly this realization that has transformed my life in recent months and a notion I found so moving in her book.

Rachel shows mettle in her ongoing grappling with issues like religious pluralism, sexual preference, political diversity, inclusiveness, social justice and other topics for which conservative apologetics training had already provided canned answers.


Each chapter feels like it's dealing with a topic or influence somewhat in isolation but the overall story emerges beautifully. Rachel is a gifted writer which makes reading her work so enjoyable. Topics are meaty and substantial, but form matters and it's a beautifully written book; a much easier read than so many of the heavy theology books I've read lately. It's her story.

Back to the jealousy part. I'm jealous of Rachel because she's still in her 20's while on this incredible journey. I've spent many more years than her parked in "spiritual neutral", clinging to the same old dogma I'd been raised with, perhaps afraid of bringing the tough questions that were burning deep within me into the light to be dealt with. Rachel gives voice to many of those questions.

I'm jealous of her style and ease with word. Although I don't envy the depth to which she had been plunged into evangelicalism, so young and so often, I am envious of her depth of Biblical knowledge and the amount of insight she shows, again, so early in life.

I'm jealous because Rachel had the guts to write her story and become a published author. She's a wonderful author at that with a fantastic career ahead of her and I'm already looking forward to her next offering.

I'm not going to reveal any more about her book because I want everyone I know to buy it, read it, and consider it. My copy is going onto my wife's nightstand as soon as I'm done with this blog entry. My bride tends not to read much of the heavy stuff I've read lately (Marcus Borg, Dominic Crossan, William Lane Craig, etc.), but I know she'll love this book, Rachel's style, and her story. I'm convinced Evolving in Monkey Town will give Michelle deeper insight into my own journey and perhaps shape her own as well.

Although I'm envious of Rachel for these reasons, I'm mainly blessed to have a connection with her, to get the opportunity to read her work, and to join her on this shared journey to find Truth, Peace, and Grace. Life really is found in the questions more so than the answers.


"We thought that we had the answers.
It was the questions we had wrong." - U2

Blessings my friends.