Tennessee-based author Rachel Held Evans has stirred up a controversy among evangelical Christians with her latest book A Year of Biblical Womanhood.

The book is her sometimes comic, sometimes ridiculous attempt to follow the tenets for female behaviour set out in the Bible, from covering her hair to making her own clothing to spending three days in a tent in her backyard when she was menstruating.

“Growing up in the Bible belt, Biblical womanhood was always presented up to me as an ideal that I should strive towards as a Christian woman,” Evans said in an interview with CBC’s Q cultural affairs show.

“No one could really explain what it was, but most of the time people described it as a return to Western gender roles – the June Cleaver lifestyle.”

Evans, who describes herself as a liberated woman as well as a committed Christian, says she wanted to challenge that perception playfully – and create a discussion of Christian living that is not about cherry-picking parts of the Bible that seem to fit the views of people who would rather women not have leadership positions in the church or the community.

“We have to understand that it was a more patriarchal culture in those days,” she said, adding “I’m encouraged that Jesus was so good to women and affirming to women. At a time when women were forbidden from studying under a rabbi, he taught women.”

But her critics have accused her of questioning God’s word and one Christian retailer has refused to carry her book.

“If I’m poking fun at anything, it’s not the Bible — it's our interpretations and applications of it which can be very arbitrary and up for discussion and I think are open to laughter,” said Evans, who is also a popular blogger.

Evans talked to Q about why she still believes the Bible is relevant today and why her strange journey into Biblical womanhood deepened her faith.