Event: Elisabeth Elliot

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…