The Lies of Elisabeth Elliot
An Evangelical teacher kept secrets
She was a profound paradox—the religious teacher on sex for a religion that didn’t talk about sex, and that didn’t allow female teachers.
She talked about sex, but could one imagine her doing it? She was brusque, buttoned up, the image of Evangelical Christian repression as she laid down the rules, and punishments.
I’m thinking about Elisabeth Elliot.
She had no formal theological education.
Her qualification to pass on divine truth was her brief marriage in the mid-1950s to Jim Elliot, who’d been canonized as a ‘martyr’.
She told his story in book after book. Nobody seems to have noticed the details shifting around between them. In Through Gates of Splendor, her 1957 book about Jim’s death in a massacre in Ecuador, she recalls:
“I had not met Jim until Christmas, 1947, when Dave brought him home with us for the holidays.”
In Passion and Purity, in 1984, she thinks back to “that day in March of my junior year when I had met and talked with him.”
In Shadow of the Almighty, her 1958 biography of Jim, she mentions that first Christmas they spent together: “I don’t recall his doing very much for me except keeping me awake talking…”
The same scene in Passion and Purity reads a bit different.
“The more Jim talked, the more I saw that he fitted the picture of what I hoped for in a husband.”
Her first books don’t play up a courtship narrative.
Was it one? Jim, certainly, doesn’t seem attracted to her physically. In Through Gates of Splendor, he writes to his parents about “a tall, lean girl, far from beautiful, but with a queer personality-drive that interests me.”
She appeared to have no interest in him. Nearing her college graduation she had no marriage prospects, and so was on a perilous boundary.
She recalls the time in a 1993 speech:
“I was a senior in college. I was moving into what we called ‘senior panic’. Because, on a Christian college campus, the girls all felt, if you don’t find a Christian husband in a place like this, where you ever gonna find one? Obviously, I was not anything but a wallflower. My phone hardly ever rang. I never got invited out on dates. I was not popular in the usual sense, and I just suddenly realized my future is probably that of an old maid missionary.”
If she graduated and shipped out overseas to work as a missionary, she’d be classified as an ‘old maid’, a tabooed figure. But then, days before she’s to leave, Jim declares his love.
I’m examining that scene. May 1948. A social event with friends, Jim comes up to her.
“‘Walk you home?’
‘Okay. Bill and Van coming?’
‘They’re deep into something. Let’s leave ’em alone.’”
Getting her alone, he declares his love. Betty was shocked! Jim Elliot was interested in her? As she narrates in a 1983 speech:
“As far as we women could see, he was unattainable: handsome, popular, champion wrestler, president of the Foreign Missions Fellowship, honors student, campus clown, but alas, a woman-hater. That’s what we thought.”
‘Bill’ was Bill Cathers, a Wheaton student referenced throughout Jim’s journals. as I described in my initial Elliot post, “The ‘Purity’ Hoax.”
‘Van’ was a male name, but used by Eleanor Vandevort, a mannish-looking female student who was Betty’s longtime friend.
To visualize Jim and Betty walking away, I’d imagine Van watching them—in distress? She was deeply in love with Betty.
With Jim’s interest, she won’t be an ‘old maid’ after all?
That’s the plot twist in her young life. Except, then, Jim says he can’t get married. He’s marked as a special divine servant.
Betty left Wheaton for a summer school in Oklahoma. This is noted in Passion and Purity, whose narration evokes her tricky situation: “a woman trying to steer a straight course for the mission field, which, I thought, was supposed to be Africa or the South Seas.”
Some primary sources appeared in 2019. The one Elliot child, Valerie Elliot Shepard, rounded up excerpts of her parents’ letters and her mother’s unpublished diary, edited and published them as a book, Devotedly: The Personal Letters and Love Story of Jim and Elisabeth Elliot.
The portrait of Betty that emerges here is of a young woman who was not eager to marry, as Passion and Purity had claimed. And there was some kind of inner struggle.
“I cannot write it even here,” Betty writes in her diary. “O God, purge me, take away all desire!”
Betty was thinking of going, not to ‘Africa’ exactly, but specifically to the Sudan—where Van was also headed.
But Betty’s plans shifted.
This part is omitted from Passion and Purity. All she writes there is:
“Things had happened in the previous six months that pointed me away from Africa and the South Seas toward Ecuador.”
Among the things that “happened” was Jim’s declaration of love. Then Betty pivoted to spending a year in missionary training at a school in Alberta, Canada called Prairie Bible Institute.
The motive, as Valerie notes, seems obvious. To go to Alberta was to be near Wheaton, where Jim would be during his senior year. Betty’s diary entry on the point is quoted. She writes on September 19, 1948:
“Should I stop in Wheaton on my way to P.B.I.? I would love to — in fact, today my need seemed more acute than ever. O, what it would mean! But is it God’s way? Could things be the same? Should they be?”
Jim learned she was to arrive.
His journal entry of September 20th finds him anticipating a visit from the girl to whom he’s declared his love.
“Cannot bring myself to study or to pray for any length of time. Oh, what a jumble of crosscurrented passions I am — a heart so deceitful it deceives itself.”
Panicked, he appeals to Jesus to be his only ‘lover’.
“How I hate myself for such weakness! Is not Christ enough, Jim?”
He writes on September 22: “Betty came yesterday on her way to P. B.I.” He adds: “Oh, that I could understand my heart toward her.”
As Elisabeth Elliot was so often saying that men should “lead” and women should follow, it’s remarkable to find her hunting Jim, the nervous suitor.
The visit went all right.
But in his September 28th entry, Jim writes of his disquiet before God:
“Because I cannot see, nor even assuredly feel, His satisfaction with me, I cannot doubt the leading simply because of the dark. The leading is nonetheless real; the pathway has simply been into a place I didn’t expect or ask for.”
He was trying to see it as God’s “leading,” but the reality was Betty making moves, and Jim reeling in response. They began to correspond. Jim’s first note, of October 2, 1948, is quoted in Passion and Purity, with the framing that he was a Christian man insisting on correct sexual morals.
That’s not really how the letter reads to me. He writes:
“I cannot for the life of me understand my heart. Somewhere down deep in the murky pools of consciousness, there is a great monster whom I will name ‘Want’ for just now. This is the only constant thing about me — Desire. Much to Freud’s consternation, I cannot name it ‘Sex Urge,’ for I have found that such will not glut the maw of the brute. He demands more of a varied diet, and one not so easily obtained as that either. ”
Now I’m sitting at Wheaton College, looking over the Elisabeth Elliot archive.
I’m going to clarify the narrative of Passion and Purity.
The diaries of Elisabeth Elliot are a key document of Evangelical history, and clarify the narratives that guided the lives of millions of people for decades. I wrote to Ellen Vaughn, the official biographer, whose Becoming Elisabeth Elliot came out last year.
This is her reply:
“Let’s see, I don’t know who cut what out of Jim’s journals, nor whether any excised pieces still exist. Regarding destruction of any of EE’s diaries, I don’t know about that either.”
Let’s be clear about what’s going on here.
The Elliot family held out Jim and Betty as the models of “purity” — with Jim presented as a divine servant whose special nature shone out through his sexual morality. Christians were prodded to follow his example.
The Elliot women oversaw this industry, while concealing and destroying primary documents of his life. This was fraud, and an open affront of New Testament teachings. So eager to cite “sex rules” against others, they overlooked Colossians 3:9:
“Do not lie to each other…”
I would mention, as well, Lucinda Secrest McDowell. As a young woman in 1977, she worked with Elisabeth Elliot to transcribe Jim’s journals. I emailed her through her website asking if she knew what had been censored. She didn’t reply.
Let’s walk through the story again?
It seems Betty met Jim in March of 1947. As Classical Greek majors, each training to be Bible translators, they had classes together.
It seems he asked her on a date in October 1947. She accepted, then cancelled. This is mentioned in Shadow of the Almighty, but omitted in Passion and Purity—where it would have upset the narrative of her fascination for him. She hadn’t explained why she cancelled, only to say that “friends” told her it’d been a rare opportunity:
“Didn’t I know that Jim Elliot was a woman-hater?”
A month later, in late November 1947, they attended a party together. As quoted in Devotedly, Betty afterward wrote in her diary:
“On the way home Jim Elliott told me some of the reasons why I have such a bad reputation among the fellows. I am terribly sarcastic, for one.”
To put together this story, we have Jim asking her on a date, to be turned down with some idea of him having a “bad” reputation. Not long after, he took the opportunity to tell her she had a bad reputation as well.
They’re well-matched? Both sexual rejects.
Jim appears then to have begun to focus on her—with an eye on improving her social skills. In Passion and Purity, she mentions they went on a date, or rather, Jim asked her to the student recreation center.
When she got there, he pulled out a Bible. It seems they were to do a Bible study. “It was about my reticence,” she writes. “Jim rebuked me as a ‘sister in Christ,’ urged me to be more open, more friendly. Christ could make me freer, if I’d let him.”
Betty seems mostly indifferent to Jim.
The archives have an exchange between them in early December, as was not mentioned in Passion and Purity. Jim wrote her a letter. It isn’t archived, so she didn’t keep it.
Her reply is included, so he’d kept it. She says she’s busy studying—so it seems he’d asked her for another date. She writes back, not in her typical cursive, but in block lettering. The tone is snide.
“Wish I could see you once in a while! All the kids here think you draw and write very well for a 7-year old boy. I just love the picture you draw on the cover of the letter. I don’t see how you do it. Please write to me as often as you can — soon! And I’ll answer.”
The story is: Jim read her as “sarcastic,” brought it to her attention, and she became even more sarcastic.
He kept approaching her.
As noted in Passion and Purity they had a series of interactions over Christmas and then the coming months. He found her study spot in the library and regularly joined her. Betty must have known he was signaling interest in her.
Jim’s first overt mention of her in his journal is June 8th—the day after he’d declared his love for her. He seems oddly…unenraptured.
“Mind has been muddy about Betty H. lately and have had trouble in concentration.”
Jim frames the episode as a test done by God to see if he was sexless enough to be a ‘eunuch’ servant. As he writes:
“The Lord gave me this affair with B.H. to try me, to see if I were really in earnest about the life of loneliness He taught me of in Matthew 19. A eunuch for the Kingdom’s sake. I believe He has proved me, but I doubt if He was satisfied. I am willing to let her go but only with struggle.”
Jim feels he passed his test — but barely.
Betty graduated Wheaton, then went to Okahoma.
She finished up in mid-August 1948. As noted in Devotedly, Betty went from Oklahoma to Wexford, Pennsylvania, to spend several days with Van.
Van was also a Greek major, also headed to the Sudan, and friends with Jim. Van shows Betty the three letters Jim wrote her over the summer. An uncomfortable subtext. Jim hadn’t written Betty at all.
Betty notes in her diary that reading Jim’s letter’s to Van “gave me a strange feeling.” Was she jealous? Van was aware of Jim’s declaration of love. Betty writes: “She asked me a lot about J.”
Should Betty go to the mission field right away? She writes in her diary:
“It is the first time in my life when plans have not been laid out for me far in advance. I am cast only upon my Lord. Oh, that ‘Christ, the wisdom of God’ might have full charge. Never have I felt so completely helpless and ignorant of the way I should turn. I turn, O God, in faith and love, to Thee.”
The God-talk is masking the real choice. She wanted to go hunting Jim, and finally she does.
From Canada, she monitors his senior year.
She learned that Jim, while writing her odd, wandering letters, was misbehaving. He’d embarked on his ‘Renaissance’, an exuberant shedding of the rules on proper behavior. It’s not explicit who Betty’s spy had been. She writes in Passion and Purity:
“I heard of it secondhand and was offended. What had happened to him?”
Her unnamed correspondent was surely Van—who seems to have been keeping tabs on Jim. In the 1949 yearbook, they sit together for the group shot of the Foreign Mission Fellowship.
Later, Van recalled their senior year together.
In correspondence after Jim died, Van writes Betty:
“I think it is accurate to say that those days in our senior year I knew Jim in a way I would never have known him had it not been for his love for you. But he was determined not to allow anything to come in God’s way with him, and as we talked there together and he told me of his love for you nevertheless there was an admonition from him not to write to you about it or him lest the traitorous flesh would, in some way, cast its shadow over the perfect will of God. But how he did love you, Betty, and he just couldn’t contain himself he so longed to be one with you. The content of his heart overwhelmed him and he was helpless.”
Betty seems to have written asking for clarification on this moment in which Jim “just couldn’t contain himself,” and Van replies:
“You asked me what I meant when I said Jim was overwhelmed & helpless that day he was telling me of his love for you. What I meant was that the expression of his face, the attitude of his spirit, both revealed that which was in his heart which left him unable to express himself adequately. Thus his helplessness. Nor did he want me to tell you, then, of our time there together.”
However vague this may remain, we see Jim in some kind of emotionally overwhelmed state—and keeping secrets.
Van was clearly in love with Betty.
The archive has a file of Van’s letters to Betty, begun in 1950 when Van was in the Sudan. She’d said that Jim longed to be “one” with Betty, but we can see this was Van’s own longing.
The first letter, of March 6, 1950, finds Van gazing on a recent photo that Betty sent her. Van writes:
“Your picture thrills me every time I look at it and I just wish for one more time to see you and talk with you. What will it be to be together forever? I am coming to know what the opposite of it means and the greatness of it makes me wait eagerly for the fulfillment of the eternal state. From your picture I believe that the grace of the altogether Lovely One has flooded your soul. Certainly its fragrance reaches to my heart even from that piece of paper.”
The same tone continues, letter after letter.
Van goes on, and on.
“I love you, Bets, with all my heart and at times when I get to think of our fellowship together, miss you more than I could ever say. But always we are one for His love is one.”
Van thinks back to a meeting they’d had a year prior, so it seems they met up again in 1949.
“Soon it will be one year since we spent that short time together. It won’t be long, Bet, til we’re together forever. I continue to feel at oneness with you thus learning to experience that nothing can separate us from that love of Christ.”
Van’s letters often speak of her loneliness and yearning for Betty. It intensifies after Jim was killed. Van writes on April 9, 1958:
“One’s heart yearns for someone to enter in. If only we could do this together, my heart cries, but, no, it is not granted.”
The archives suggest a Jim Elliot misrepresented by his wife’s writings.
Her so-called biography, Shadow of the Almighty, has no manuscript in the archive, and no research files, and hardly any mention of it. Betty appears to have written it quickly, with cursory research, and the evident intention of conveying a ‘saintly’ character.
A different biography of Jim can be found, if in suggestions. In the Elliot archive there is a volume of his journals never published, and a total surprise to me. Jim viewed himself as a poet, and at key points in his life, wrote a poem marked by autobiographical cues. His first comes in high school when he’s singing the praises of a girlfriend.
Betty had not mentioned such a person in Shadow of the Almighty. But she wrote the girl’s name in an annotation to Jim’s poem: Wilma Cauble.
I focus on these lines by Jim Elliot:
“Thou art a bloom of flower,
Which, passing by, like richest alchemy,
Changes my being into that of your budding likeness.”
He sees himself transforming into her.
Unusual talk for a teenage boy.
He was known as a “woman-hater.”
That’s what Elisabeth Elliot so often said. Jim gave up girls so he could focus on Jesus. In a 1983 speech, she tells the story again:
“He had found out when he was in high school that he could spend an awful lot of time and money on girls. They were very attractive and very interesting and very expensive. So he decided when he got to college that he would just delete them from his schedule.”
In a letter to Betty of March 28, 1949, Jim explains his withdrawal from women. He broke up with Wilma, he said, and remained aloof from women because he felt his heart to be inconstant.
He writes:
“The very fact that I began going with her at 14 and would I look at another girl for four years warned me that my affections go out very easily and are jealously tenacious. Recognizing this fact, that I would lose my heart at every turn if I didn’t discipline myself carefully, I withdrew from dating and even close association with girls who I knew attracted me, or to whom I was somehow attractive.”
This letter does not appear in Devotedly.
Jim can seem an odd mix of—desires?
His journal is full of emotional effusion for men, and references to women and female anatomy—but the terms here are strange. Here he is on September 28, 1952, writing from Ecuador of his missionary work:
“The female breast has been so long and so intensely interesting to me that I cannot now explain my ‘calloused’ thoughts about it as I could not formerly explain my fascination. Twice this past week I have, in medical work, fingered the breasts of young Indians. I confess, with a great deal of surprise, that it does not now raise the slightest suggestion of lust for me. It is not that I have sort of depreciated the breast for having seen it suckled and noted it in all its shapes (U.S. women are brassiered into disgusting uniformity), or that I will not be aroused by her breast when the time comes for it.”
As in his last journal entry, which I have revealed in complete form, we see a man who found sex a torture and doesn’t want to be married to his wife. In his final days of life, he mulls having to make some kind of difficult disclosure:
“How can I ever make her understand this kind of thing — she apparently feels no passion ever except for me?”
The problem, again, is vague, but he says it will be a challenge to speak of “this kind of thing,” suggesting a conceptual novelty.
Did Jim’s ‘throbbing’ for Bill Cathers suggest a homoerotic leaning?
All his life, he certainly tends to male company. But it’s also notable how Jim expresses himself as a female. His journal has many passages of Bible commentary in which he projects into female characters. He writes:
“How like Orpah I am — prone to kiss, to display full devotion and turn away; how unlike Ruth, cleaving and refusing to part except at death (1:14–17).”
But what we’d come back to, over and over, was a sense of a problem that is not named—except that Jim calls it his ‘sin’ or ‘vice’. An unpublished poem dated December 10, 1949 is a long attack on himself:
“How long before I know
Deliverance from this monster, Vice?
Before my Spirit, all aglow
In Immortality shall rest?
Stilled, these accusings.”
To call oneself a ‘monster’ is strong talk.
I’d mostly noticed it in regard to transgender people. Jim reads as oddly feminine. He cries often. When he does approach the idea of being married to Betty, he seems to do so with the idea of her being the man, and he the woman, as in his journal entry of July 30, 1952:
“I don’t understand what there is about loving her that makes me such a damned woman. I can hardly begin to describe it; I only know that I feel it strong and that I can’t talk of it without twists coming to my mouth. Lips get dry and tears seem to brim at my eyes, and there is a crushing sense in my chest.”
In the Elliot archive is a collection of color slides, their date and origin unknown. I look over the ‘new’ photos of Jim, oddly sexual and flirty, taken in Ecuador but without any other context—wondering who he had been.
And then he was gone.
Betty spent a few years re-writing his character, editing out the sexual confusion and emotional shock. He became ‘Jim Elliot’, Evangelical hero.
She embarked on her own missionary work with the ‘Auca Indians’, which she then came to realize was rather futile. The very activity of being an Evangelical missionary began to trouble her, as she saw how much she was, in reality, acting as a servant of American power. The natives were not to the point of making any real choices about their spiritual status.
“We could have told them the moon was made of cheese and they’d believe it,” she’d remark years later.
In 1962, Van flew to Ecuador to be with Betty. It’s noted briefly in Ellen Vaughn’s biography, which mentions Van as a “smart, iconoclastic young woman” who’d been Betty’s college friend.
Betty’s diary from the time of Van’s visit is quoted:
“This week has been the happiest I’ve had since Jim died. My God–how happy! Van arrived from the Sudan. Our time together has been an island in the sun. Peace. Complete understanding. Dialogue. I and Thou — the encounter of two individuals which alone makes union of spirit.”
She and Van, with young Valerie, left together for America. They lived together in New Hampshire for the next six years.
During that time, Van wrote A Leopard Tamed, a book about her time in the Sudan. A recent reissue has two family photos. Do they tell a story? At home, Betty was butch, nearly mannish.
When she stepped out publicly, she’s done up as a woman.
Those photos were helpful in identifying others.
The slide show archive heavily features an androgynous woman.
Van seems to have regularly used a camera on a tripod and timer to make self-portraits—with sometimes odd results.
We’d have to recall that Elisabeth Elliot was a champion of traditional gender roles.
In her books like Let Me Be a Woman, she’d instruct Christian women to have ‘feminine’ appearance, and to have reverence for the difference between the sexes, imagined as divine.
But here, in her own house, for years — was Van.
I went looking for sources who’d talk about Van. A Christian scholar named Jeff Barker has done extensive work on the life story of a missionary woman, Arlene Schuiteman, who served alongside Van in the Sudan, and he knew ‘Vandy’.
He is unwilling to discuss her as a closeted lesbian, but he acknowledges the problems she presents. Van was unmarried all her life, and lived all her life among women. He writes me:
“By the way, you are correct in identifying Vandy as somewhat androgynous. She apparently had a lovely singing voice, but to look at her, one would see a skinny, flat-chested, short-haired person.”
The slides in the archive tell me a story of a ‘person’ making images of herself as a means of studying and pondering who, and what she was.
Unexpected looks for ‘Elisabeth Elliot’, too, are found.
They have circulated before—a Betty who was bizarrely different from any impressions I’d had of the religious leader. She was natural, warm and engaged, if…earthy?
I see that Van was photographing her—and herself.
Two women living together in New Hampshire, at least one of them very mannish, surely were read as a lesbian couple.
With Elisabeth Elliot’s daughter Valerie in tow, at least, Van was seen in positions where one might expect to find a husband.
In 1968, Elisabeth Elliot decided to re-marry.
Her marriage to Addison Leach, a prominent Christian scholar and journalist, feels calculated to bring her back into the religion’s mainstream—and certainly had that effect.
The archives include a long letter that Van wrote to Addison Leach, in two versions. In the first, Van seems to welcome ‘Add’ as Betty’s new husband. In the second, she sets out to explain Betty to him.
Each note reads to me as total worship of Betty, and devastation at losing her, however cheerfully she tries to present it.
Here is Van trying to explain Betty’s apparent coldness:
“She sounds terribly dogmatic at times and people (her mother for a poor example) tend to bristle, but they do not realize how what appears to be dogmatism is simply the expression of a very economic mind. She brings things down to the lowest common denominator at once, eliminating the intermediate steps which make for ‘brotherhood,’ perhaps, but blur the issue. Hence she is not too good at making conversation around coffee cups or in sewing circles.
This set of mind, indeed of her whole personality, gets through to people who then label her as being ‘aloof’ or ‘cold,’ terms which they use in self-defense, unable as they find themselves, to face up to what this woman is and what she is saying.”
The last note from Van in the archive is from 1972, a tiny slip of paper that seems to have been attached to gift at Betty’s birthday. It reads:
“Sweet Bet —
You’ve been a true witness to me of the love of God yet another year.
Thank you so much. Col 1:9–11
I love you — very quietly.
Van”
Elisabeth Elliot ascended to the heights of Evangelical commentary culture.
She was, first, the warrior against feminism. As in Let Me Be a Woman, she valorized a feminine presentation that never characterized her.
Then she just kept lecturing. She told men how to be men. (Her book Mark of a Man has almost no references to Jim.)
In Passion and Purity, she lectured Christians on avoiding premarital sex. We see Elisabeth Elliot, that is, instructing on how to manage a heterosexual interest she didn’t herself much feel.
With women, she was dominant, a butch femme queen. With men, sexually, she seems to have reached for an erotics of submission, an essentially S&M orientation. It’s noticed by Ellen Vaughn, who quotes Betty’s diary when she’d been dealing with Jim in Ecuador:
“Never have I been treated like this before — especially by a man! What worries me is that I seem to thrive on it.”
Whatever she’d say, she’d realized, was believed. It’s just how people are in the face of those who pose as ‘authorities’.
She gave the feeling of being someone else.
“Who’s the real Elisabeth Elliot?” a young woman once asked her.
She replied: “I don’t know, and may God keep me from ever finding out.”
Her deceptions included being an Evangelical. In step with her beloved brother Thomas, whose 1984 book Evangelical is Not Enough described his becoming Catholic, she was herself becoming Catholic.
A 2007 blog post by an ex-Evangelical Catholic blogger, Heidi Hess Saxton, an established figure in Catholic publishing, has her recalling working the CBA Conference in Anaheim in 1996. At breakfast, the subject of Saxton’s becoming Catholic seemed to interest Elisabeth Elliot.
“Do you know my brother, Thomas Howard?” Elisabeth Elliot said. “He entered the Catholic Church some years ago. I only wish I had his courage.”
Saxton was shocked.
She writes: “After she had sung the praises of the Catholic Church for several minutes, I worked up the nerve to ask Elisabeth why she did not follow in her brother’s footsteps.”
Elisabeth Elliot replied: “Cowardice, I suppose. My listeners and readers simply would not understand.”
But Elisabeth Elliot’s odd courting of Catholicism had been noticed. At an event in 1997, she was questioned about it, as noted by the fundamentalist Christian writer David Cloud:
“Question: ‘Can a person be Catholic and Christian in union?’
Mrs. Elliot: ‘Yes, we can have unity in diversity; my brother is a Catholic and a Christian.’
Question: ‘Then is it acceptable to celebrate the Eucharist?’
Mrs. Elliot: ‘Yes.’
Question: ‘Of Mary, ‘queen of heaven’?’
Mrs. Elliot: ‘Excuse me, time will not allow me to expound on these questions.’”
To read back over Passion and Purity, and even into Let Me Be a Woman, is to see many Catholic cues. Oddly for an Evangelical, at least, Elisabeth Elliot valorized virginity as a sacred state, with links to Mary the mother of Jesus. “I think Protestants really have no idea of the glory of virginity,” she’ll add in an interview around 2000.
In Passion and Purity she quoted Francis of Assisi and Teresa of Ávila. Fine sources of wisdom, to be sure — but Catholic saints. Her focus on ‘purity’ can seem to have shadings of Mariology, a personal devotion to the ‘Virgin’.
It was always there, for those with eyes to see.
Van went on to work at Gordon College, a Presbyterian school.
The archivist there sends me a packet of media clippings of Van’s career. She was seen as a cheerful and helpful presence for years of Christian service. In 1984, the year Passion and Purity was released, she was in a horrific car accident that nearly killed her.
She was nearly invisible to its plot, but Passion and Purity was a kind of love triangle, or quadrangle. The action of the plot was not about refusing to have premarital sex. Jim didn’t even want to have post-marital sex.
The “purity” was achieved by each rejecting queerness. Jim and Betty were intent on a heterosexual marriage that would make them religiously acceptable. Van had no such options.
I look through images of her before returning to her looking at herself.
Separated in life, Van and Betty rejoined in death?
Betty died on June 15, 2015, Van the following October 26th. The famous Elisabeth Elliot was lionized— as Eleanor Vandevort slipped away quietly.
To offer her an obituary now, I’d say she was the only one in the story who had any ‘passion’, as she was the ‘impurity’ who had to be erased. 🔶
