By Colby Malsbury

Who is Rachel Held Evans?

Woke ‘Christian’ females of a strongly antinomian bent: please don’t jump down my throat at the question. I wasn’t being facetious. I honestly had never heard of her before reading the news of her death, aged 37, this week. It might shock some of you fair maidens to know that I can’t name a single song from Ariana Grande, either. Some of us don’t live our lives saturated in the modern.

Well, whoever she was, I can’t say the tribute thread set up in her honor on Facebook appears too promising. All kinds of female emotional vomit about how profound and meaningful HER words were, how courageous SHE was, how SHE brought so much meaning into THEIR lives and how SHE made THEM better people, blah blah blah. If God is mentioned at all, it’s with the veiled threat that He had better receive her joyously, fantastic person that she was. I dunno – remind me again why women ought not to preach?

Guess I’m going to have to finally break down and find out who this harridan actually was, won’t I? Sigh.

Well, according to the good folks over at Slate, Mrs. Evans was quite a work of art. She was a member in good standing of that most odious breed: the professional hard-left ‘Christian’ feminist and self-help guru to zillions of lesbians who incongruously found themselves married to men. She was amply rewarded for such witchcraft by having numerous books on the New York Times bestsellers list. (Just like Tim Keller!) Slate makes it clear that there was scarcely a hot-button issue that she didn’t deliver a heavy-handed feely polemic towards, like a kid playing Whack-a-Mole at the Chuck E Cheese:

Evans was a forceful and winsome public voice for progressive evangelicalism, first as a blogger and later as an author and sought-after speaker. She started her eponymous site more than a decade ago, and in her years of writing she confronted every controversial issue in American evangelical culture. She wrote about biblical literalism, racism, abortion, evolution, theology, marriage, patriarchy, women in leadership, and evangelical support for Donald Trump. She advocated for the full inclusion of LGBTQ people in the church and analyzed her own complicity in racial bias after the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The Washington Post once called her “the most polarizing woman in evangelicalism.”

And of course, when your marriage is getting on some mighty shaky footing, men, you definitely want your wife laying in bed all day devouring the pop psychology masquerading as theology from ‘the most polarizing woman in evangelicalism’, amirite? One thing you can’t accuse Riotous Rach of is not practicing what she preached, though. Her own husband Dan Evans is an outstanding example of that all too common specimen Cuckus churchianus, a self-described ‘Jesus feminist’ all too happy to administer his wife’s blog traffic (while wearing a frilly apron, no doubt) while she brought home the lion’s share of the bacon. I guess Rachel held Evans in a rather sensitive area. On a related note, her ungainly triple-name moniker is an obvious attempt to have it both ways – with her maiden name catering to her feminist base and her married name catering to her traditionalist base (of which she had a larger one than you might think). She must have learned from Doug Wilson how to stick to your core convictions no matter what transpires.

Her father’s an interesting case study as well. Most feminists, of course, have daddy issues large enough to create their own gravitational fields, but not our Little Miss. No, Peter Held could do no wrong in her eyes! And given the description of both her parents she provided in a blogpost of hers, it’s little wonder:

…my parents have been wonderful.

We don’t always agree on theology or politics, (the 2016 election promises to raise the pitch of our dinner conversations a few decibels), but my parents have always prioritized maintaining our relationship over maintaining ideological uniformity.

They never expected their kids to turn out just like them. They never expected my sister and me to parrot their opinions. Rather, they raised us to think for ourselves, to disagree gracefully, and to tell them the truth without fear of judgment. Even when the local gossip flared up around my supposed apostasy, my parents weren’t ashamed. On the contrary, they bragged. They hung articles about me on the refrigerator and shared pictures on Facebook of me preaching from a pulpit (an act forbidden in the church in which I grew up). They were, and are, proud of me. They are glad that I am following Jesus— even if it’s in my own way, even if it’s with The Book of Common Prayer tucked under my arm.

It has taken me a long time to appreciate the gravity of that, the gift of it.

What a great dad. No wonder Rachel never had to worry about the ‘fear of judgment’ when telling her parents the truth – she was raised in such a relativistic household that whatever she perceived to be true (a la whatever floated her personal boat) was truth. ‘Fathers’ like this, when their daughters turn out to be ‘not only idle, but tattlers also and busybodies, speaking things which they ought not’ (1 Tim. 5:13), can only shrug their shoulders and grin like dolts when their little girls dive into full-fledged heathendom (sorry- I mean Episcopalianism. Tomato, towmahtoe), later cheering on their increasingly embarrassing declension into the full mystery of their self-chosen priestesshood. The authority to raise up a Proverbs 31 wife was given to him, but he opted to mold her into a Gloria Steinem instead. But then, Jesus never promised that the weak – as opposed to the meek – would inherit the earth. Peter Held is an instructor at a Christian college in Tennessee, and holds a degree from Dallas Theological Seminary. This student evaluation of him tells us all we need to know about his insipid and beta character:

You probably would have been a blast to groove in the mud with at Woodstock, Doc, but your skills at necessary patriarchy are criminally lacking. Can you lip-sync? I hear Hillsong might have an opening for a vocalist available.

So much for the backstory. Suffice it to say RHE fancied herself pretty special. So special that, on the 11^th of April, doubtless after a glass or ten of dark chocolate-flavored wine, she got it into her empty head to engage in a bit of frivolous Twitter blasphemy. Judging from the obscene number of likes and retweets generated, she must have figured she had her ear perfectly attuned to the vox populi. It would not surprise me to learn that such a rush of popular acclaim was the high point of her life:

The obnoxious hysterically-laughing emoji that concludes this theosophic musing really and truly says it all about the life of RHE. God apparently thought so, as well. Not two weeks after her magnum opus, she was stricken with a series of brain seizures after receiving treatment for an infection. Placed in a medically induced coma, she languished on until she died on May 4^th. I report this with no joy. Rather, the suddenness of her passing – all the more timely for its seeming untimeliness – ought to serve as a harrowing reminder to all orthodox Christians that vengeance truly is God’s, and He knows how to wield it when He so chooses. Equally harrowing is the thought that her life’s apostate work – and especially her ‘ha, ha! In Your face!!!!’ tweet, timestamped as a witness against her and one of the last she ever composed – will be readily accessible to all who would ponder as long as there exists an Internet. The witness that the Christian bears on this medium is not to be taken at all lightly.

Try telling the last point to the mainstream ‘Christian’ community as a whole, though. Scarcely had she breathed her last before the body began hurling out their encomiums towards her en masse. This, when they would have been far better off rebuking her as an usurper of God’s ordained order. For as the aforementioned Slate article also noted:

Evans often used her platform to challenge male pastors and leaders. Over the years, she sparred about theology, culture, and politics with prominent Christian men including Russell Moore, John Piper, Rod Dreher, and Mark Driscoll. (Many of them have expressed their prayers for her in recent weeks, after Evans shared the news of her illness.)

A bunch of milquetoast pastor-wannabes saw fit to humor a foolish and contentious woman who loathed the very fact that they existed, just like Dear Old Dad did. Should we be surprised? Are they not the species of that type of ‘man’ whom John Knox warned ‘does not only to his own shame stoop under the obedience of women, but also, in despite of God and of his appointed order, rejoices and maintains that monstrous authority as a thing lawful and just’? For make no mistake: in her ignoble death, RHE has very rapidly been enshrined as a similitude of Mary, Queen of Scots for modern-day misfits by the men of the church, bowing and scraping shamelessly before the image that they themselves insisted on making. The Reformed community has done everything possible to take the lead in loud lamentation. As I do not want to clog up this article with an inordinate amount of screenshots, please take my word that the likes of Keller, McDurmon, Reasnor, and ‘hate Whitey’ guru Anthony Bradley have all offered fulsome praise for the dearly departed Jezebel. Praise God, though, that some women who could see what a shrew RHE truly was have seen fit to take this emasculated white-knight lot of ministers to task. Doubtless these ladies would have been every bit as disgusted as I was with the fact that the GoFundMe memorial page set up in RHE’s honor has raised over three times as much money as the original $70,000 goal as of May 9^th. So much for not wishing the reprobate so much as Godspeed, lest you become a partaker of his (or her) evil deeds. (2 John 9-11)

I’m sure this piece will go down like a lead pizza with the mealworms passing as men of the church in general, what with its speaking so ‘disrespectfully’ of the deceased and all. (And never mind that this, too, is a topic that I have covered before.) I have to ask: do they find the great intricacies of God’s unfathomable providence disrespectful, as well?

For awesome as His just wrath was in smiting this mocker in her complacency, that is not the end of His intercession in this matter.

As was reported here recently, in the wake of the synagogue shooting in Poway, CA perpetrated by a professing Calvinist of a racial realist persuasion, our opportunistic enemies in the alienist camp were salivating at the jowls at this chance to nail kinists’ hides to the wall for one and all times, and were starting a vociferous campaign against us towards the Reformed community as a whole. And while none of us will ever back down from a scrap and will always welcome a debate with them that we might pulverize them, in their malice and spite there was (and is) a strong possibility that they could start naming names, and jeopardize those among us with families to support. To God be all glory, though, the seemingly unconnected incident of RHE was latched onto with ferocity by this motley crew – thus demonstrating their innate apostasy to all those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. Will this stop their frothing slanders against us? No. But it will show a handful of those uncommitted to one camp or another the vituperative nature of rabid Christian egalitarianism. And kinists are nothing if not adept at appealing to the curious standing on the sidelines, to show them that though the intimidation against them might be great, they too have a Christian community to come home to if they so desire.

The typical unsubtle means by which the alienist crew castigates those who insist on adhering to patriarchal orthodoxy in this matter – Taylor Swift would call them ‘Mean‘, and so do the alienists – has led to that tried-and-true guarantee of Presbyterian irrelevance: calls for yet another denominational split! The tiny remnant of PCA congregants left that doesn’t equate ‘conservatism’ with a circa 1985 Hegelian societal synthesis has been making noises about migrating over to the Evangel Presbytery, a small sub-denomination established earlier this year. Doubtless the internecine warfare between them and the PCA will take on the character of a battle royale between the Pharisees and Sadducees, and God will be able to deliver kinists from their sight as He did with Paul to continue on His work.

To that end, praise be unto Him forever and ever, and may He provide solace and comfort to the children of RHE, and deliver them from the tentacles of modernism that enveloped both of their parents long ago.