Prophetic Wisdom, Reborn
A Feature Review of
Braving the Truth: Essential Essays for Reckoning with and Reimagining Faith
Rachel Held Evans and Sarah Bessey
Hardcover: HarperOne, 2026
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Reviewed by Bethany Mannon
When Rachel Held Evans started her blog in 2007, she was twenty-six and writing a humor column for her local Dayton, Tennessee newspaper. She was drafting her first book, and she recognized that online writing could help build her audience. That strategy worked—through her regular posts at RachelHeldEvans.com, she became famous among American Christians. As Sarah Bessey writes in her introduction to the new collection Braving the Truth: Essential Essays for Reckoning with and Reimagining Faith, Evans became known as a “southern white woman who had the gumption not only to wrestle with doubt but to do it in public.”
Of course, these posts did much more than draw readers to Evans’s books. In her 1000th blog post, published on September 24, 2012, Evans lists ten ways her blog had made the world better. For example, her readers raised money for a nonprofit providing clean water in underresourced communities. A series of posts profiled “women of valor” and resisted white evangelical notions of biblical womanhood. The space hosted interviews that, Evans remarked, “represent some of the most productive and civil conversations on the blogosphere.” Over time, Evans cultivated a collaborative space that included the voices of readers, introduced other writers, and translated theology for a lay audience.
Writer Sarah Bessey compiled these blog posts into Braving the Truth at the request of Rachel’s widower, Dan Evans. For the collection, Bessey chose representative posts—some that were popular but also others that she knows her friend loved. She added notes to explain references and context and invited writers and scholars to reflect on the significance of the essays and the community that Evans built. The result is a valuable record not only of Rachel’s writing but of her relationships and her lasting influence on evangelical (and ex-evangelical) culture.
Reading Braving the Truth is a journey into not-too-distant white evangelical history. The collection reminds us what Christian media was like in the 2010s, when Bessey and Evans were finding their voices:
“At the time, Christian publishing was dominated by megachurch pastors or seminary-trained theologians and influential conservative voices steadily steering the church toward religious white nationalism. Suddenly, because of the internet, those of us who were largely silenced, ignored, isolated, or purposely marginalized found a way past the gatekeepers. And boy, did we have things to say” (xxii).
In 2011 Evans chided “super-hip” churches that “get so wrapped up in the ‘performance’ of church that they forget to actually be the church” (191). In a 2014 essay she declared “glorification of gender binaries has become a dangerous idol in the Christian community” (241). When Jerry Falwell Jr. endorsed Trump’s candidacy in 2016, Evans argued that Trump’s promise to give power to Christians was “the very thing Satan promised Jesus when he tempted him in the desert” (98). The topics that caught her attention remind us of the debates that absorbed and divided the evangelical movement during the first decades of the twenty-first century. Most of these issues still have not been resolved.
Bessey is being modest when she says Braving the Truth preserves Evans’s online writing. The collection asserts Evans’s ongoing importance to North American Christianity. Bessey organized these essays not chronologically but thematically. Some of the sections explore topics for which Evans was famous: doubt and questioning, the church, gender and sexuality, interpreting scripture. These highlight the kind of faith communities she was for, not the trends she was against.
Other sections highlight themes in Evans’s writing that have come into focus in the years after her death. Part Two, “That Unholy Trinity: Essays on Patriarchy, White Supremacy, and Religious Nationalism,” invites readers to encounter Evans’s prophetic essays about a persistent problem in the church. The essays in Part Six, “Telling the Truth: Essays on Life in the Midst of It All,” reflect on the courage and tenderness required to be a writer, a scholar, and a mother in a dark world. Future collections of Evans’s essays could address other themes, like church leadership, progressive Christianity, or how to engage diverse theological traditions.
This collection will be valuable to a wide range of audiences. It seems ideal for church small groups and book clubs to read together. The essays will invite readers to reflect on their own faith journeys and will prompt conversations about the personal and political challenges Christians encounter today. Scholars of theology, religion, and rhetoric will appreciate having Evans’s blog posts available in a durable volume. Bessey’s notes and the reflections from people like Jen Hatmaker, Scot McKnight, and Kathy Khang will offer material for research on 20th century evangelicalism. I plan to teach these essays in my classes on religious rhetoric; I could see them also enriching courses on writing and spirituality or gender and religion, as well as core curriculum at Christian universities.
In his foreword, Dan Evans writes “If you have been reading her work since the beginning, welcome back, old friend. If you have just found her now, welcome to the beginning” (xv). Braving the Truth will encourage readers who have missed reading Rachel Held Evans’s kindly wisdom on faith, the Bible, and politics. It will introduce a new generation of readers to the tremendous resources in Evans’s writing. At a time when “ex-evangelical” discourse has become its own market, Evans will offer mentorship and courage for the messy process of wrestling with the truth.
I hope to see another volume of these essays come out. Rachel Held Evans’s blog did indeed make the world better. Braving the Truth will continue that work.
Bethany Mannon
Bethany Mannon is an Associate Professor of English at Appalachian State University where she teaches writing and rhetoric. Bethany is the author of I Grew Up in the Church: How American Evangelical Women Tell Their Stories (Baylor UP, 2024) and she is currently writing a book about Rachel Held Evans.
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