The Trouble with Elliotgate

Few women loom as large as Elisabeth Elliot in the pantheon of American evangelical saints. The martyrdom of her missionary husband, Jim Elliot, and colleagues at the hands of the Ecuadorian Auca tribe, told in her bestselling book Through Gates of Splendor, is the stuff of legend. Equally legendary is her continuation of that dangerous work, as she risked her own life to evangelize her husband’s killers. Over the decades, she would become a public-speaking and writing powerhouse, with a long-running radio show and many books to her name. Her work was especially pivotal in shaping a contemporary conservative evangelical theology of sex and gender. She is regarded today as the godmother of so-called “purity culture.”

It is thus no surprise that Christianity Today created shockwaves last week when it chose to publish, then pull, then republish an article propagating the suggestion that Elliot may have been bisexual. The writer, award-winning Elliot biographer Lucy S. R. Austen, considers recently surfaced source material from gay historian William Stell’s new book, Born Again Queer. One of Stell’s interview subjects, progressive church activist Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, recalled a period of close friendship with Elliot in the ’60s, when Elliot was newly widowed and Mollenkott was married. The two women would later drift apart as their theological trajectories sharply diverged. 

By Mollenkott’s account, Elliot began publicly accusing her of lesbianism before she had come out. Mollenkott claims Elliot surprised her in a food line at the inaugural conference for the Evangelical Women’s Caucus in 1975, asking her to speak privately. In their subsequent tense hotel room confrontation, Mollenkott claims to have met Elliot’s accusations with a threat of her own: “If you keep it up, I’m gonna say to people, ‘Ask her how she knows.’” At this, Elliot allegedly fell on her knees, begging Mollenkott not to “destroy” her.

Was Mollenkott threatening to smear Elliot falsely, or was she privy to a true secret? The alleged dramatic exchange itself is ambiguous, but in the rest of Stell’s 2020 interview clip linked in Austen’s article, Mollenkott implies the latter. She goes on to describe Elliot as “very liberal” at the time of their friendship. Austen points to a 1964 letter from Elliot’s papers, in which the thirty-eight-year-old Elliot addresses same-sex attraction in tones decidedly different from her mature presentations. After some speculation on the nature of David and Jonathan’s “much deeper love than the usual man-to-man friendship,” Elliot concludes, “Perhaps the truth is that there are no such things as lines drawn, coincident with sex. Love is the great thing.” Meanwhile, Mollenkott alleges that the young Elliot would privately drop coarse gay jokes that even made Mollenkott blush at the time. She never outright claims they were sexually active together, coyly leaving audiences to speculate as to the extent of their “closeness,” while further hinting that Elliot had a similar “very close” dynamic with “another woman that I know of.”

Austen speculates that the “other woman” might have been Eleanor Vandevort, who lived with Elliot for seven years to care for Jim and Elisabeth’s daughter, Valerie. The only evidence she offers for this is a vague reference from Elliot’s papers to her second marriage as “salvation” for Vandevort as well as herself and her daughter. This, plus Mollenkott’s testimony and the documentary evidence that Elliot’s approach to same-sex attraction in the abstract was at one time less than sound, constitutes the entirety of the proposed evidence for Elliot’s bisexuality. On this less-than-perfectly-solid ground, Austen is bold to say the conclusion “seems likely,” then launches into a didactic disquisition on why there should be “nothing shocking or scandalous” in this “discovery.” 

For Christianity Today to publish such a speculative piece, boosting material that was initially made public with a clear political agenda, seems in tension with the magazine’s own editorial philosophy as of 1970 that it is wrong “to gossip about things of which we are not certain.” According to a new report from Ruth Graham at the New York Times, the erstwhile flagship journal of American evangelicalism has been declining in more ways than one. To its critics, “Elliotgate” is one more sign that the magazine has lost its way, against the chaotic backdrop of mass layoffs and a waning subscriber base. But former deputy editor Bonnie Kristian, who edited Austen’s piece, has defended it as important and conversation-driving. Whatever the article’s merits, the magazine handled the backlash unprofessionally, leaving Austen unaware of the temporary choice to pull it.

Some of that backlash has itself been less than helpful. In a column for WORLD, Denny Burk, president of the Council on Biblical Manhood & Womanhood, rightly noted how thin Austen’s evidence is. But he has treated her claim that same-sex attraction isn’t itself a sin as an endorsement of “Side B,” the view that gay Christians should embrace their orientation in various problematic ways while remaining celibate. The two ideas are not the same. One can grant that same-sex attraction is itself not a sin while holding that it is “objectively disordered”: something to be resisted, not adopted as a public “identity” in the manner of modern sexual politics. This conflation has been a persistent blind spot in the evangelical approach to the issue, missing areas of concern for evangelicals and Catholics alike.

Still, Burk’s instinct is not entirely misplaced. Austen says plainly that Elliot’s story “should inform the church’s treatment of Christians who experience same-sex attraction,” and Side B proponent Wesley Hill’s praise for the piece suggests how it is likely to be read. Austen’s remarks seem to gesture beyond simply separating temptation and sin, implying that double standards toward opposite-sex and same-sex attraction are automatically bigoted and normalizing a broader church culture of “coming out of the closet” beyond a close circle of friends and counselors. This is not an especially helpful word for evangelicals, who if anything could benefit from more discretion and less “tell-all” culture when it comes to sexual temptations of any variety. 

In a time of personal and cultural upheaval, when the young Elliot was kicking over the traces of fundamentalism, is it beyond the realm of possibility that she entertained bisexual temptation? No. But even if she did, the mature Elliot would have been mortified to see it publicly aired and “driving conversation,” with no discernible benefit for the Church she served so devotedly.