On the Days When I Believe

Meet the millennial woman who changed American Christianity.

Rachel Held Evans was one of the most influential Christians of her generation. Raised in the heart of the Bible Belt, Evans absorbed the certainties of conservative evangelicalism at a young age. But as she grew older, she began to question some of those beliefs. A gifted writer and communicator, she voiced her questions publicly. What she found on the other side of doubt changed not only her life, but the lives of hundreds of thousands of readers around the world.

Through her groundbreaking blog, bestselling books, and intuitive use of social media, Evans explored and articulated post-evangelical theology. In so doing, she created a new kind of religious community: a gathering place for women, people of color, queer Christians, and others who felt pushed to the margins of American faith. She called it making “tables in the wilderness.” When she died unexpectedly in 2019 at the age of thirty-seven, the outpouring of grief was immense. 

On the Days When I Believe is the first biography of Rachel Held Evans. Carefully researched and sensitively written by religion scholar Kelsey Hanson Woodruff, the book traces Evans’s journey from an intellectually ambitious evangelical teenager to a post-evangelical icon. In telling Evans’s life story, the book also illuminates the forces that drove so many Americans away from organized religion in the early twenty-first century, and the radical hospitality that kept others holding on.

This landmark biography is essential for readers of Rachel Held Evans, those interested in women’s influence on contemporary Christianity, and anyone navigating a faith journey of their own.