A piece on the website of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, the leading proponent of “complementarian”—anti-egalitarian—gender roles in the church, accused her of a “mocking” attitude. Others have tut-tutted over her interpretation method, and called the project dangerous.”

An evangelical blogger is spending 12 months following the Bible’s instructions for women—and she’s doing it for egalitarian reasons.

Rachel Held Evans is writing a book about the Bible’s rules for women Before Easter this year, Rachel Held Evans camped out for the weekend in a purple tent she had set up in her Tennessee yard. For nine days after this adventure, she abstained from sex and even from touching her husband. She stayed home from church, and toted around a stadium seat cushion to avoid sitting directly on chairs outside her home.

Evans’ goal was to obey the Bible’s commandments for menstruating women in Leviticus Chapters 15 to 18, a passage that takes a lot of shalls and shall nots to make a simple point: Women on their periods are untouchable.

Evans is not a Biblical literalist, and even fundamentalist Christians no longer hew to the Old Testament’s specific laws for daily life. (That’s kind of the point of the New Testament.) But she is an earnest evangelical, with a serious influence within the insular world of conservative Christianity. Her Easter weekend in the tent was part of a project called “A Year of Biblical Womanhood,” in which she is following all the Bible’s instructions for women as precisely as possible for 12 months.

The secular Jewish writer A.J. Jacobs attempted a similar feat with his 2007 best-seller The Year of Living Biblically, but Jacobs is a humorist and commentator, not a believer. (Slate’s own David Plotz, another secular Jewish writer, blogged the Bible and wrote a book about the experience.)

Conversely, Evans’ intended audience doesn’t think the Bible is a kooky ancient document—they believe it is the living, inerrant word of God and arrange their lives according to their interpretation of it. Evans gives her stunt focus by narrowing it to Biblical instructions for women.

Evans maintains an eponymous blog that draws thousands of highly engaged evangelical readers. She launched the site in 2008 to promote her first book, a sensitively written memoir that wrestled with faith and fundamentalism, and it now draws between 4,000 and 5,000 page views on a typical day, and significantly more when she pokes at a controversial topic.

Christian publisher Thomas Nelson has purchased her book about the womanhood project, which will likely be in stores late next year. She’s one of the rare prominent evangelical women who isn’t primarily interested in parenthood; her blog takes on thorny theological questions, gender issues, and the future of the church. Evans speaks at Christian universities and conferences all over the country, and her writing frequently draws (mostly) respectful responses from prominent figures including Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr., the powerful president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

The Bible includes hundreds of rules for women, both explicit and implied, Old Testament and New. Women should dress modestly (1 Peter), submit to their husbands (Ephesians), and remove themselves from their communities while menstruating (Leviticus). The project is often funny—growing her hair out all year, as suggested in 1 Corinthians, has clearly been driving Evans crazy—but it has a point: All Christians pick and choose the parts of the Bible that suit them.

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Ruth Graham is the founder and president of Ruth Graham and Friends. She travels widely as a conference speaker and has appeared on a variety of radio and television shows, including Good Morning America, The Hour of Power, Focus on the Family, and Moody Broadcasting. A cum laude graduate of Mary Baldwin College, Ruth worked in publishing for thirteen years. She lives in Virginia.

[Editor’s note: One or more original URLs (links) referenced in this article are no longer valid; those links have been removed.]