You Who?

You Who? Why You Matter and How to Deal With It by Rachel Jankovic

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I’ve made a habit of checking the New York Times best seller list regularly now for the last 3-4 months. One author has consistently had two titles in the top 10 the entire time: Rachel Hollis. “Girl, Wash Your Face!” “Girl, Stop Apologizing!” I admit I haven’t read Hollis. I trust the Gospel Coalition’s critical review of her, though, and it gave me pause.

Now, after reading You Who, by Rachel Jankovic, I connected the dots. Jankovic attacks head on the can-do, “you’re-good-enough” positivism Hollis doles out as a panacea for hurting women. The problem is Hollis cries “peace, peace” too soon, when there is really none to be had until you get to the denial and death of our petty and wicked self, and our recovery in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Jankovic is at her best when substantively refuting Hollis’ shallow, self-affirming message with the basic gospel of the Christian Scriptures. We need to apologize to God and others for sinning against them. We need to do more than wash our face; God needs to wash us clean. We generate gunk on our own and need an outside cleanser in Christ. It isn’t the other way around: that we generate glory inside ourselves and need to shed the gunk the world tries to load us down with. The chapter on looking to Christ was especially good.

I had one quibble with a chapter where Jankovic inadvertently implies that we should rely on our obedience for our standing before God. She is so reactionary against letting emotions define you (mostly a right reaction), that in this chapter she fell into the other ditch of letting your actions define your faith. But it’s important to recall, too, the Romans 7 reality, that we don’t always behave how we know as believers we should.

Jankovic also suffers from a marketing weakness. She seems unwilling to come right out and say to whom she is responding. She knows enough to go after this big beast, but seems to want to keep the reader in the dark that she is refuting a precious author who affirms them as they are. You Who? really needed a subtitle like, “A Response to Rachel Hollis.” Maybe it is intentional to not turn away readers who haven’t heard of Hollis, though.

A solid read overall to re-center women in the Gospel and not heed the siren song of Oprah with a Christian veneer.



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