Did you know evangelical stateswoman Elisabeth Elliot was a closeted bisexual? That’s precisely what the once-great and editorially troubled Christianity Today (CT) wants you to believe, even as they offer no real evidence for their claim in their tabloid-adjacent piece published last Friday.
In fact, the historic evangelical publication, founded by evangelist Billy Graham in 1956, shamelessly insinuates the deceased woman’s bisexuality on nothing more than the word of a young gay activist currently promoting his new book, Born Again Queer: A History of Evangelical Gay Activism and the Making of Antigay Christianity. This author, William Stell, shares a wholly uncorroborated claim from Virginia Mollenkott, a lesbian-identified and self-confessed “bigender” feminist author, that she and Elliot shared a sexual relationship 50 years ago. Stell does not substantiate the claim by any other party. Nor does CT, as Mollenkott passed in 2020.
This is what gay advocacy does. It falsely signs up good people for its cause, like they have shamelessly done with Abraham Lincoln, the great evangelical theologian J. Gresham Machen, and more recently Senior White House adviser Stephen Miller. Yet, CT thought this gossip was enough evidence to run the story, lecturing us toward same-sex sexual sympathy, “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.”
For those outside the evangelical loop, Elliot was a trusted and brilliant stateswoman, author, radio show host, speaker, and Ecuadorian missionary for the Christian faith who died in 2015. She came to fame when her young husband Jim Elliot, along with four other fellow missionaries, was speared to death on a remote South American riverside in 1956 by the very Auca Indians they were seeking to share Christ with. Life magazine covered their martyrdom at the time. Elliot was a remarkable woman of stellar reputation by every measure.
Elliot was an extremely faithful teacher and defender of a biblical anthropology of human sexuality and what it means to be a woman and man. Living a life of sexual and bodily integrity was integral to her life’s work. She was also a dogged bulwark against the aggressive intrusion of liberalized feminism into the ranks of Christianity. Everyone who knows anything about her work knows how brilliant and consistently strong she was on these topics.
This article was written by award-winning author Lucy S.R. Austen, who researched and penned the 2023 biography, Elisabeth Elliot: A Life. It was published by Crossway, a scripturally faithful and exacting evangelical publisher. After writing such a beautiful biography of Elliot, Austen does nearly nothing to defend Elliot’s reputation in her CT piece, even as she admits Mollenkott’s “is a poignant and a puzzling story, one published long after either Elliot or Mollenkott was available for further comment.”
Is this Austen throwing doubt a measly bone, given what she clearly knows of Elliot’s character and conviction?
Yet, her article is titled “What We Know — and Cannot Know — About Elisabeth Elliot’s Sexuality” and even more pointedly subtitled, “Historian William Stell has published an interview suggesting Elliot was bisexual. Her private papers make it plausible too.”
There is no plausible reference in Elliot’s private papers.
Austen offers a March 1964 letter Elliot wrote to her mother about someone close to them who experienced same-sex attraction, but material quoted from the letter makes nothing plausible. Austen side-by-sides this letter to the year Elliot first met Mollenkott, when she showed interest in Elliot’s in-progress novel.
Austen adds references to places in Elliot’s letters where she and Mollenkott spent time together, including instances where they slept in the same home. Yet, these simply took place when Mollenkott, an English professor, helped Elliot with constructive critiques of her novel as Mollenkott lived in New Jersey and Elliot lived in New Hampshire. Austen offers no evidence anything romantic or sexual took place during any of these visits. She just lets the innuendo sit.
The fact is, none of this jibes with Elliot’s character. She was characteristically ever-stalwart in her commitment to biblical standards of sexuality. In a 1994 public Q&A event, she was asked if the Bible is equivocal on homosexuality. She didn’t hesitate, “Scripture is crystal clear, absolutely crystal clear; homosexuality is classified along with murder, and adultery and everything else, it’s in that list of sins.” She then asks, “What gives the homosexual the right to think he has a special dispensation to sleep with members of the same sex?” adding, “God deplores it, He hates it.” (Found here, @ 27:48)
It is a truly horrible thing for Christianity Today, which has gone through six editors-in-chief in less than seven years, to slime a woman like Elisabeth Elliot in such a salacious way with no actual evidence. CT’s editor-in-chief, Marvin Olasky, who resigned his role with the magazine on the day this article appeared in response to increased editorial staff cuts, wrote in an editorial “declaration of principles” earlier this year, “To be blunt, CT is not theologically affirming on LGBTQ issues and does not publish affirming perspectives.” Yet, they published a major accusation piece about a stellar woman based solely on the uncorroborated word of a queer activist author.
An editor’s note from the newest editor in chief, Erik Petrik, posted nearly a week later, claims that the CT article “responded to an article from another magazine that made questionable claims.” Yet, Austen’s article does not say Stell and Mollenkott’s story is “questionable” at all.
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.
In violation of Olasky’s editorial principles, Austen’s article ends with three full paragraphs of soft gay apologetics, “There should be nothing shocking or scandalous about the mere discovery that Elliot was attracted to women as well as men.” Austen’s concluding line moralizes that, “To welcome honesty about that experience is not to approve of sin, and we can work toward a world where people aren’t forced to choose between staying in the closet and leaving the evangelical church.”
Christianity Today and Lucy Austen have done a grave disservice to the strong reputation of the peerless Elisabeth Elliot and her family. They have also cheapened Christian journalism, much like they did last year when they questioned if Jesus was really crucified with nails. The apostle Thomas affirmed this in John 20:25 and they rightfully published a mea culpa on that one. They must do the same regarding Mrs. Elliot.
Glenn T. Stanton is the director of family formation studies at Focus on the Family and the author of "The Myth of the Dying Church."