What the World Needs Now Is Dear Evan Hansen
How a Musical About Lies Tells the Truth About Our Kids
There was a time when the inside of a church’s fellowship hall felt like the entire world.
Metal chairs scraped linoleum. A piano sat along one wall, always slightly out of tune. Someone would start rapping the first verse of Hamilton, and within seconds, a group of kids would be belting out Waving Through a Window.
You had to be ready to pivot from Pitch Perfect mashups to theological debates to impromptu group therapy, all before the pizza arrived.
That was my ministry for years. Unitarian Universalist youth, in all their beautiful, chaotic, deeply-feeling glory.
It was around 2017, near the end of my time in that role, when Dear Evan Hansen came out. I remember the kids bringing it to me. I remember listening to it for the first time with them. I remember how they lit up. How we all did.
Unless you’ve lived it, you might not know just how much life can unfold inside a church basement. Whole cultures form there. Movements rise and fall. Friendships that feel like lifelines. Angst runs deep and is very real.
Sacred moments—yes, I’ll use that word—carried out in socked feet, on secondhand couches, with glitter everywhere and someone crying in the corner while another plays chords on a ukulele.
There was always a ukulele.
Dear Evan Hansen arrived into that world. It met the moment perfectly. It spoke to the loneliness, the ache to be seen, the blurry line between performance and identity.
And it gave it music.
Ben Platt—what, 23?—sang it all with such trembling honesty you couldn’t help but feel your own voice inside his.
This was before the pandemic. Before the cultural landslide. Before gender ideology reshaped so much of how we talk about adolescence, pain, and the search for self.
And that’s why I’m writing this now.
From my own remembering.
Because I think Dear Evan Hansen still has something to say.
Maybe more than ever.
Dear Evan Hansen tells the story of a teenage boy who wants to belong.
That’s it.
That’s the whole arc, right there.
Evan is lonely. He struggles with anxiety. He’s in therapy. He lives with a single mom who loves him deeply but is stretched thin, working long hours, trying to keep them afloat. He doesn’t have many friends. He feels invisible. Then one day, a classmate named Connor Murphy dies by suicide.
And through a strange, heartbreaking twist, Evan becomes mistaken as Connor’s best friend.
Instead of correcting the misunderstanding, he lets the lie grow. And with that lie, he’s suddenly welcomed.
Seen.
Celebrated.
Evan gives a speech that goes viral. He gets the girl. He’s no longer the invisible kid. The lie makes him real. It gives him euphoria.
And then, of course, it falls apart.
What’s brilliant about Dear Evan Hansen is that it doesn’t let him off the hook. It doesn’t say the lie was noble or necessary.
It says it was human.
Evan did the best he could with what he had. And in the end, he has to face the truth of who he is without it.
That’s why the story still matters.
Dear Evan Hansen helps us understand what so many kids live through. It gives us a way to see adolescent identity, emotional isolation, and the deep ache to be seen through real human pain, real mistakes, real love, and the slow work of returning to yourself.
I believe it what’s happening with gender ideology, too. So many kids are just trying to survive. They’re reaching for something that helps them make sense of the pain. And like Evan, they grab onto anything that feels like relief.
The story also shows us that coming home is still possible. Even after the rupture.
And that unconditional love is what truly matters.
There’s a moment in Dear Evan Hansen that still wrecks me.
It’s in the song “Good for You.” Evan’s mother has just found out everything: the lie, the betrayal, the fact that her son has been living in someone else’s family while she was left out, uninformed and discarded.
She sings:
"So you got what you always wanted. So you got your dream come true. Good for you."
It’s her anger that grabs me. Her devastation. She’s not yelling because he lied.
She’s yelling because he left.
If you’re a mother who’s watched your child disappear into a new identity, especially one shaped by gender ideology, you might sense its grip, too.
That sense of betrayal is visceral.
A child rewrites their story, erases the life you shared, cuts off connection…and you’re left stunned.
You’re told to accept it. Affirm it. Celebrate it. But inside, there’s grief.
Raw, aching, and real.
Dear Evan Hansen names that rupture.
But it also shows a path back.
Because Evan comes back. His mother doesn’t rescue him. She doesn’t fix anything. But her love was steadfast. Even when she’s furious. Even when she’s heartbroken. She keeps holding the thread.
And eventually, Evan returns.
To the truth of who he is.
And this is what matters most at the end of the story: nothing actually changes.
Evan is still socially awkward. Still fatherless.
If anything, things are harder. He’s lost relationships. He’s burned trust.
But for the first time, he’s not pretending.
He’s telling the truth.
And somehow, in that truth, he begins to heal.
And that leads me to ask: what are our children, youth, and young adults asking of us?
Back in those UU youth spaces, it was always in the quiet hours when something deeper would surface. When the singing stopped and the glitter settled, the real stories would emerge.
That’s when I’d hear things like:
“I love my mom. I don’t know why I’m mean to her. I can’t help it. But I don’t want to be.”
Or a girl would describe standing in the high school bathroom, washing her hands, and glancing up. She caught her reflection and startled. She had felt so small, so young inside. Just a scared child. But the mirror showed an adolescent face she didn’t recognize. That disconnect terrified her. She didn’t know what to do with it.
These statements were always beyond ideology or the call to social justice.
They were raw, honest expressions of what it means to be becoming.
What’s going on in so many of our kids isn’t something new. It’s necessary adolescent development. It’s the deep discomfort of a body and mind trying to grow around something universal.
It’s that wrenching need to be seen, and the terror of what might happen if you are.
Of course they’re grasping for a story that makes sense of their pain.
Of course they’re trying to explain themselves, to belong, to be understood.
That’s what Evan Hansen was doing, too.
His actions, his lies, his desperation, his reaching were a cry. He needed someone to hold the story with him.
To say, “You’re not invisible. I hear you. I still see you.”
And maybe that’s what our kids are asking now.
Can you still love me if I’m difficult?
Can you still see me if I don’t even know who I am?
Can you stay close while I push you away?
Can you hear me if I fall?
Dear Evan Hansen shows us what it means to act out of pain, to lose yourself, and still find your way back.
And it reminds us: our children are speaking.
Even when it makes no sense.
We have to listen.
With a steadfast love.
I haven't seen the musical, but you present it in a way that is especially evocative in light of what we are experiencing culturally. It's the every kid story if there ever was one. I can't help thinking it would make for good youth group viewing even now (I assume it's available in video form?).
So grateful for this. It’s funny—I teach music, am a veteran of musical theater pit orchestras, have taught songs from that show to my students—but never made the connection to my own life and my own son until reading this. This is a really deep insight for me. I may or may not be able to handle watching the show through this lens, though…it might be too much.