A review by ginkgotree
Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church by Rachel Held Evans

Rachel Held Evans died recently, tragically young, and that was what put her on my radar. She meant a lot to people, particularly Christians, and including Christians I respect. Having read this, I can see why. I found this book a little hard to take, honestly. Held Evans' love of Christ and compassion for others are very clear, and there were times when I found myself tearing up a little. But her prose can be a little corny, because it's almost impossible to write about Christianity without getting a little corny. There's nothing cool about Jesus, and that's okay.

More than that, I guess I wanted her to be angrier, and that wasn't really Rachel Held Evans' deal. She looks at the Evangelical church, and Christian practice in general, and she saw that there was hypocrisy and corruption and gatekeeping, and she hated those things, but she didn't hate the people who created them or the churches that were characterized by them. Hating and anger weren't really her thing, at least as far as this book shows. Her long dark night of the soul wasn't really very long or dark. And I'm glad for her, but I wanted more.

I got the sense that ultimately, Rachel Held Evans thought that the good of Christianity outweighs the bad, and I'm not convinced that it does. Maybe if she'd had more skin in the game - to her, for example, LGBTQ people were her beloved siblings who should be included wholeheartedly in Christian communities. But she wasn't one of them. She wasn't shunned or abused. She didn't condemn anyone, which is appropriate because she wasn't God, but it still left me feeling that when she weighed the good of the church against the bad, her math didn't quite work out.