A new book is about to hit the shelves, and it’s getting a lot of buzz on the internet. Rachel Held Evans has written “Evolving in Monkey Town”, with the subtitle “How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions”.

Previews are lauding the book as “gutsy, brilliant, real and hilarious”. The author is being hailed as “smart, compassionate and relentlessly inquisitive”, someone who “represents what is most hopeful and promising in a new generation of faithful young leaders”.

One of the first things that attracted me to this book is the title. I love it! “Monkey Town” refers to the city of Dayton, Tennessee, where the Scopes Monkey trial was held 85 years ago. In 1925, high school teacher John Scopes was charged with violating a state law which banned the teaching of evolution. The trial drew intense national publicity. Big–name lawyers were brought in to represent each side. It was an early skirmish in the battle between Fundamentalists and Modernists. The trial was dramatized in a well–known play and movie called “Inherit the Wind”.

Ms Evans wrote the book because she began to ask questions about her faith. She tells us that she grew up in Dayton, the buckle of the Bible Belt, where no one questioned traditional Christian beliefs.

So what happens when a young woman begins to ask those kinds of questions? What happens when a person begins to doubt what everyone else accepts as gospel truth? “Dayton is a strange place to struggle with religious doubt,” she says in a video promoting the book, “but that’s exactly what happened to me in my early 20’s just after I graduated from a Christian college.”

This town has “a church on every street corner and a community gospel sing every Thursday night.” She began to “question everything she’d been taught about origins, the Bible, about religious pluralism, about faith, about politics, about heaven and hell, about what it means to be blessed by God.”

She decided to write her story in this book. In the process, she discovered that “faith is incredibly resilient. Like a living organism it has a remarkable ability to adapt to change, in order to survive. My faith survived. It adapted. It evolved.”

“I used to be a fundamentalist, the kind who thinks God is pretty much figured out already, that he’s done telling us anything new. What makes a person a fundamentalist is not so much the beliefs they hold, but how they hold them. And I was holding mine with a death grip, partly because I was convicted but mostly because I was afraid. I was afraid of being wrong, I was afraid of not having all the answers, I was desperately afraid of change.”

That’s an important and wonderful insight. We have a choice about how we hold our beliefs. We can choose to hold our beliefs in hands that are tightly clenched. When that happens, nothing will change our beliefs. We will allow no light into our clenched fist. It is a posture of fear. We close ourselves off to anything new.

We can also choose to hold our beliefs with open hands. When we do that, we assume a posture of openness, a posture of confidence. We are open to new things, to new ways of looking at life, to new ways of believing and hoping and living.

I have long thought that the best approach to faith is not one that thinks it has found the answer. Christian faith is about learning to ask the right questions. It is a journey of exploration, an adventure. “Evolving in Monkey Town” is the story of one woman’s faith journey. I suspect it will be instructive for all of us. I can’t wait to get my copy.