In Defense of Elisabeth Elliot: Why Truth Matters
Updated: Oct 27
Christianity Today has published a libelous article claiming Elisabeth Elliot was bisexual. Elisabeth Elliot (1926-2015) has been known for three generations as the bastion of biblical sexuality and Christ-centered living. Christianity Today’s (CT) new editor, Erik Petrik, has chosen a new path for CT. CT was once the journal of evangelical conviction founded by Billy Graham and Carl Henry 70 years ago. Now, under Petrik’s leadership, CT is remaking itself into a TikTok/social media click-baiting tabloid. To launch their new approach to reporting, Petrik started his first day in office by publishing an article, without any supporting evidence, that contends Elisabeth Elliot was in a lesbian relationship with the late feminist and queer theology pioneer Virginia Mollenkott (1932-2020). Mollenkott coined the phrase “Born-again Queer” back in the early 1970s. She also was the first to call God omnigender—a phrase which has become popular again among same-sex attracted individuals who believe they can be both gay and Christian. The trans community also hails this phrase and Texas Democrat candidate, James Talarico, quotes Mollenkott to support his belief that God is non-binary. To say CT’s article is seriously flawed isn’t sufficient. The article is scandalous. As a devoted reader of Elliot, it makes my blood boil.
Elliot biographer, Lucy S.R. Austen, wrote the fallacious CT article. In it, she cites an essay published last July in ARC Magazine by self-proclaimed historian William Stell. Stell, a gay pastor of a Presbyterian church in New Jersey, presents a 2020 interview with Mollenkott as his evidence that Elliot engaged in a lesbian relationship with the gay activist. Mollenkott was 88 years old at the time of the interview and was giving an oral account of her conversation with Elliot. The report Mollenkott gave was not based on notes, letters, journals, or recordings. In other words, there was no hard evidence. Austen, an Elliot biographer, processes Stell’s essay and finds it weak, unsubstantiated, and yet Austen makes no attempt to defend Elliot’s good name or even create an argument against Stell’s claims. She lets the allegation stand.
Not surprisingly, her 2023 biography of Elliot hasn’t done well in book sales, so perhaps she thought a little controversy might boost it. I will say, in my text conversations with Lucy Austen, I find her inarticulate, insincere, and quite milquetoast. When I challenged Austen that her article was libelous, she wrote back, “No. I said that the evidence, the record, shows inconclusiveness.” I explained to her that inconclusiveness by its very definition means there is no evidence; no proof. In her CT article, she insinuates that Elliot was bisexual. Implies that Elliot had a sexual relationship with not only Mollenkott, but also long-time companion and fellow missionary Eleanor Vandevort. Austen is not innocent in any of this; she is one of the main players and I had to ask myself, why? Why are Austen, Stell, and CT doing this to one of the greatest Christian heroes of all time?
Well, you see, there’s a purpose in all of this. Austen, along with CT’s editor Petrik, has an agenda and it’s not a good one. In fact, it’s evil.
In Austen’s CT article, she deliberately plants doubt about Elliot’s sexuality by reporting Elliot’s visits to Mollenkott in New York City during the 1960s, leaving us with the impression that this is where a lesbian affair occurred. Then Lucy Austen adds her own speculation that Elisabeth Elliot may have had “romantic love” for her longtime friend and housemate Eleanor Vandevort (1925-2015). Vandevort was in her own right a missionary hero—a missionary linguist who served 13 years in desperate conditions in the Sudan to translate the Bible into minority languages. Vandevort lived with Elliot and her daughter Valerie when they moved back to the US. Vandevort helped care for both the home and the child, freeing Elliot up for public ministry and writing.
Austen’s false accusations of this friendship made me realize something much more sinister was happening here. Austen wanted the article to be salacious. Austen wanted a scandal and Stell’s earlier allegations of Elliot were just the springboard Austen needed to catapult her name into the social media arena. Who cares if Elliot’s and Vandevort’s good names are dragged through the mud? As long as Austen and CT get the internet traffic and clicks they so desperately crave. Austen willingly became a social media call girl. Poor Lucy S.R. Austen sold her soul for media attention, but also for something far more sinister.
Austen writes in the CT article, “William Stell … brings to light new primary source material which, in context, strongly suggests that Elliot was what we would now call bisexual.” She adds, “There should be nothing shocking or scandalous about the mere discovery that Elliot was attracted to women as well as men.” She goes on, “The source material Stell has brought to light, though, should inform the church’s treatment of Christians who experience same-sex attraction, as Elliot seems likely to have experienced.”
AND BOOM! There’s the agenda. There’s the reason. THIS is what the article is all about—for both Austen, who longs to be a media darling, and for CT’s Petrik who longs to be a supporter of woke Christianity. Gays must be accepted and homosexuality is normal Christian behavior. That was their real purpose.
Austen, and Petrik, and Stell—none of them care about truth or whether or not Elliot was sexually perverted. None of that matters. They just needed a means and unfortunately for Elliot, her name was linked to Mollenkott’s. This was just the thing they needed to launch their diatribe promoting Side B, Born-Again Gay, Queer, Trans-God Christianity. That’s it. That is what it was all about all along and let Elisabeth Elliot’s pristine reputation be damned. And who better than Elisabeth Elliot? The woman who influenced generations to embrace biblical sexuality, to stand against homosexuality, and to walk with Christ in purity of thought and deed. Gay Christianity has hated Elliot for as long as I can remember and despised her truth-telling and clear Christ-centered voice. Who better to bring down? And then Austen and the gay community can pretend to be compassionate toward Elliot’s supposed same-sex attraction. As Austen said, “…there should be nothing shocking or scandalous…that Elliot was attracted to women…”
Austen is a sellout.
Glenn Stanton posted on The Federalist, “Of course, all this implicates Austen’s scholarship. Either she is now so impressed with and working solely off Stell’s unsubstantiated story, or she harbored these now-admitted concerns about Elliot while researching and writing her A Life, but didn’t bring them up, knowing Crossway would have certainly killed her book project. Either conclusion does not bode well for her journalistic integrity.”
Integrity? There’s no integrity here. There’s just an agenda.
As Denny Burk writes in his defense of Elliot, “The scandal here is not Elliot. The scandal is that Austen’s article provides exactly zero evidence to support the claim that Elliot was a bisexual. Zero. None. Nada.”
Burk goes on, “Rather, the entire case rests on a single interview with the late Mollenkott who recounted a story not of a lesbian affair with Elliot but of Mollenkott threatening to smear Elliot as a lesbian if Elliot outed Mollenkott. As even Austen admits, we don’t even know if Mollenkott’s account is true. The event she recounts happened 50 years before the interview, has not been corroborated by anyone, and both of the principals are dead (Elliot and Mollenkott). But even if it were true, there is no admission of bisexuality on Elliot’s part” (see Burk’s article here: https://wng.org/opinions/when-journalism-crosses-a-moral-line-1792406727). Burk ends his op-ed piece with, “None of it adds up.”
Oh, Denny Burk, but it does. They needed a figurehead on the bow of the gay/lesbian ship and a disfigured Elliot was ideal.
You see, it’s the perfect lie. In all of modern Christianity, no woman has had a greater influence on biblical womanhood and Christ-centered feminism than Elisabeth Elliot. She is hated by the LGBTQ community, by the trans community, and by militant feminists around the world. Why? Because she made a case for sexual purity, against homosexuality, for wifely submission, and for sacrificial Christian living. What makes Austen’s accusations even worse is that Elliot actually lived out what she taught. This is a woman who waited five years to marry the love of her life, her knight in shining armor. She and Jim Elliot waited so that God could prepare them for the mission field. They married and went to the deepest, darkest jungle on earth to reach the unreached, to reach the lost, and to bear witness to Christ. They gave of their love, their talent, and even their families, to serve God. It literally cost Jim Elliot his life, along with four of his close companions and colleagues—killed by the Auca Indians in 1956 deep in the jungles of Ecuador. The Five Martyrs were known worldwide for their faith and their brutal deaths. That’s a difficult enough story: a young mother and wife loses husband on foreign mission field. That would try anyone’s faith. But Elisabeth Elliot stood strong.
Then, she did the unthinkable. She went back into the belly of the beast. She packed up her two-year-old daughter and marched into the very jungle to the tribe that killed her husband. She embraced them. She lived among them, raised her daughter among them, translated the Scriptures into their language. She loved them and served them. And the result? Her enemies came to Christ. Today, the Auca tribe is a Christian tribe who now sends their own missionaries throughout Ecuador. Is there anything more Christ-like than that? It was a love only God could give her. It was a love she embraced. Elliot witnessed to the world what God could do through one woman who was willing to say yes to the hardest calling imaginable.
It is that woman whom Austen, Petrik, and Stell cannot understand. And it was that kind of love and friendship Elliot demonstrated to a broken and scarred Virginia Mollenkott. Elliot tried to rescue Mollenkott, not conform to her.
Mollenkott was a pathetic figure. She was raised in a strict fundamentalist home and at one time she had a very clear profession of faith. She was educated at conservative Bob Jones University in South Carolina. Mollenkott married, had a child, and she and her husband were called into full-time ministry. Mollenkott even taught at Nyack College in upstate New York.
Sadly, which happens too often in the Christian world, memories of childhood molestation began to haunt Mollenkott. As she confronted her molesters, she decided to rewrite Christian doctrine and she walked away from traditional Christianity. She declared herself free from biblical bounds. Virginia Mollenkott became a voice for vigilante style, defiant versions of the faith.
Only an impure and secular mind, like Austen and the others, could fail to grasp the compassionate love of God working through someone like Elisabeth Elliot to reach out and try to persuade Mollenkott back to real faith in Christ and back to orthodox Christianity. It is exactly the same kind of love that Elliot demonstrated walking into the jungles of Ecuador. Elliot was brave, courageous and very committed to her message: Jesus is the only way.
Mollenkott was broken and it was Elliot who tried to save her.
How perverted this all is. The darkness that springs from Austen and all Side B Christianity oozes a poison that tries to destroy the good, the pure, and the beautiful. Elliot would have forgiven Austen, I’m not so sure I can.
Austen, via direct messaging, has made it very clear to me that she is more interested in social media than in accuracy. There was one agenda here and that was to launch a Side B Christianity apologetic using the good name of Elliot to do so. She was killing two birds with one stone. Since Elliot influenced an entire generation to view sexuality from a biblical standpoint, she could take down Elliot’s reputation as well as launch an empathetic voice for gay Christianity. Elliot was a lighthouse to many during chaotic times. Austen could put out that light and launch a completely different view.
Perhaps Austen was a pawn here, but a willing pawn nonetheless. And the timing? Right when CT brings on a TikTok/social media junkie like Erik Petrik. After all, Austen's book came out three years ago—not exactly current. Add to that, Austen was looking for anything to help her book sales.
It was the perfect storm. And it launched Mollenkott back into the limelight. Hostile gay rights activists want to bring her back into the center of the discussion for supporting queer Christianity and wow! Did they ever find their hook for the story. Elliot, the bastion of biblical sexuality, who knew and befriended Mollenkott and presto, Elliot became a closet lesbian. What did it matter if it was true or not? It was their springboard.
The entire scandal has garnered them clicks, and views, and chatter—they've become the Kim Kardashian of the Christian world proving once again that negative attention is better than no attention at all. Again, I have discussed this matter with Austen and my opinion of her has only become more certain that she is indeed corrupt.
There is a nefarious agenda at play here, not just with Elisabeth Elliot, but globally with great thinkers and cultural icons. The LGBTQ influencers are aggressively working to deconstruct history to provide a platform declaring the whole world is gay. Even a recent Shakespeare film portrays William as a homosexual. They accuse men like the great Reformer Theodore Beza, Abraham Lincoln, and J. Gresham Machen of being homosexual. They have even marked Teresa of Avila and John Henry Newman as gay Christians. It’s an attempt to normalize and mainstream what God has called sin. I want to fight for Elisabeth Elliot. I want to do battle to protect her reputation and to defend her honor, but more importantly I want to stand for truth because truth matters and truth is our only way home.
Under communism, we used to say that not only is the future uncertain, but the past is as well. I can't help but think that Marxist/Socialist ideology has crept into mainstream Christianity via Side B and woke culture allowing an upcoming generation to literally re-write history. Elisabeth Elliot deserves defending. Lucy S.R. Austen can't rewrite Elliot's life. We know who Elisabeth Elliot really was, and best of all, God knows. Peace.
— Teri
Dear Clarke: Thank you for reading the Elliot post and thanks for responding to it. Does my response seem way over the top? I certainly hope so. You see, truth matters and the facts and hard evidence are not on the side of Austen, nor Stell. Petrek simply doesn’t care and just wants clicks. If there was any evidence that Elisabeth Elliot had same-sex attraction, I’d leave the whole CT piece alone. But there isn’t. Not a shred. And the fact that both Austen and Stell want to link Elliot sexually to Mollenkott is very telling. Elliot wanted to save Mollenkott, not to have sex with her. Both Austen and Stell found accounts in the women’s journals telling Elliot’s exact…
Teri: You have made some pretty bold claims here. If your contention is that the Lucy Austen article was meant to expose some type of illicit sexual relationship EE might have had with Mollenkott, then you might indeed have a case. I would agree that some could run with the CT article drape EE with a rainbow flag. But if the article was merely suggesting that EE, at least one time in her life, wrestled with same-sex attraction, then your reaction to the CT article seems way over the top. Using language like "Austen wanted the article to be salacious" and "Austen is a sellout" and "Austen, along with CT’s editor Petrik, has an agenda and it’s not a good one. I…
I sincerely hope her family re-opens Elizabeth's Estate and sues the daylights out of CT.
They should publish your article since you even knew her personally.
Teri, thank you! You uncovered the real intention. Has CT received your article? It needs large publication.