The “Purity” Hoax
Elisabeth Elliot was the Evangelical sex guru because of a love story. Did it happen?
If you were Evangelical in the 1980s and 1990s, you knew about Elisabeth Elliot. She was the religion’s central teacher on sex. What were her qualifications?
She was the widow of Jim Elliot, of course. He was the missionary killed in Ecuador in 1956. She’d written his story in Through Gates of Splendor (1957), and a biography, Shadow of the Almighty (1958), each received as “classics,” as he became known as a “martyr.”
So that made her pretty close to God.
She was anti-feminist, anti-gay, pro-female ‘submission’. But the great war of Elisabeth Elliot’s life was against premarital sex, which she called ‘impure’. She made the case in a 1984 book, Passion and Purity, which for many Evangelicals was God’s guide for dating and marriage.
She told the story of her courtship with Jim.
In 1948, they were at Wheaton College, a Christian school in Illinois. She describes him as “a real man, strong, broadchested, unaffected, friendly, and I thought, very handsome.”
The action began when Jim was a junior, she a senior about to graduate. They took a walk together, and out it came.
“Come on, Bett. Don’t tell me you didn’t know I was in love with you?”
“I had no idea.”
There followed five years of occasional meetings and letters, all marked by the great Elliot themes: suffering as ennobling, waiting on divine guidance, and not having sex.
She sold a dream of controlled eroticism.
She writes in the book: “It is possible to love passionately and to stay out of bed. I know. We did it.”
Even before Elisabeth Elliot died in 2015, some were thinking the courtship story was looking a little funny. Dr. Kimberly B. George, the Christian feminist scholar, writes in 2010:
“When I re-read Passion and Purity I was actually appalled at how her boyfriend/husband Jim had treated her. Here was a relationship I had idealized in my teenage years, and yet when I read the story now (especially having a psychology background), I am deeply disturbed at all the ways he led her on, criticized her, refused to commit to her, and yet spiritualized all his actions. The story somehow seemed so romantic when I was sixteen; now it seems to verge on emotional abuse and manipulation.”
You had to take Elisabeth Elliot’s word for most of it.
In 1978, she published Jim’s journals— or some of them. The archives page at Wheaton College notes: “In several places in Elliot’s journals, comments have been cut out.”
I visited in person. They weren’t kidding.
What’s left didn’t really indicate the story she’d told.
About their courtship, Jim wrote almost nothing. When mentioning Betty, he can seem less in love than in doubt. “How can I know my heart as regards Betts?” he writes. “I cannot.”
His journaling was mostly a lot of Bible analysis. It seemed heavy with personal meaning, but very vague. He writes on Old Testament “purity” laws, saying he’s impure:
“Lord, Thou must put an end to my fleshly issue. Stop it, Lord. Staunch the flow of this defilement which springs from rotten flesh.”
We could’ve used help in understanding Jim’s story.
He’d grown up, apparently, never having a girlfriend. In Shadow of the Almighty, a childhood friend was quoted:
“Jim was extremely wary of women, fearing that they only intended to lure a man from his goals. ‘Domesticated males aren’t much use for adventure,’ he warned me.”
Around the Wheaton campus, Betty would note, there was talk of Jim as a “woman hater” — but then he fell in love with her. He declares his love a few days before she’s to ship out for parts unknown.
A curious story.
Once they got corresponding, as Shadow notes, he writes his parents that he kind of has a girlfriend — “not on account of a fine-featured face, a shapely form, nor even on account of rare conversational powers. Of the former two she possesses little of appeal.”
He likes that she’s religious.
Jim was bright, devout, a leader, a star wrestler—and not too interested in women.
Dave Howard, Betty’s brother, offers his memories of his roommate and friend in a 2002 documentary, Beyond the Gates of Splendor.
“He was really a holier than thou type of guy, and dating girls? He wouldn’t touch a girl. He wouldn’t look at a girl twice. He really believed that the highest calling of God was to be celibate.”
Evangelicals had little idea what Jim even looked like. The documentary had a few shots. It was an unexpected look at the Christian hero.
Jim also appeared in a 1949 promo video for a new student center at Wheaton College — featuring a fake girlfriend.
After her mother died, the Elliots’ one child, Valerie Elliot Shepard, rounded up their love letters.
A few had been quoted in Elisabeth Elliot books, especially in Passion and Purity. Most hadn’t. In 2019, Shephard publishes about half of them as Devotedly: The Personal Letters and Love Story of Jim and Elisabeth Elliot.
Snippets of Betty’s journal were also published, with lots (and lots) of editorializing by Shepard, trying to keep the story on track. But collating the accounts, I started to wonder what the hell was going on.
Early on, Betty sees herself as “wholly set apart.” She attends a wedding, weeping for joy because she’d been given some private message from God she’d not marry—so “winning victory in that realm.”
But Betty had some kind of inner ‘struggle’, left unstated. “I cannot write it even here,” she writes. “O God, purge me, take away all desire!”
The prospect of a romance with Jim was unsettling.
She writes in her diary: “Each of us has built up a sort of code, his on Matt. 19:12, mine on 1 Cor. 7 and Is. 54. Now what about these? Have we failed? Have we lost our vision?”
Jim was citing Jesus’ teaching to be a “eunuch for the kingdom.” Her “code” from Isaiah 54 would’ve been: “Sing, barren woman.”
But then Jim asks her to go on a walk and says he loves her. Their dialogue in parting seems less than lovestruck. As Betty records the scene, Jim is oddly muttering, “It is going to be hard . . . harder than we’d like to think.”
Not hearing from Jim, she writes that she “misses” him.
He starts writing her, and she arranges to visit him again. We see Jim in his journal trying to talk himself into being “natural.” He writes:
“I am learning, I think, what Billy talks of, the giving out of natural love — it wastes easily with possession. If ever I am to love her, it must be God’s love in me — my own will not last, I know. I fear that the excitement of her presence roused me to an aggressiveness in my ardor that I do not really feel.”
I’m struck by the regular references to ‘Billy’, ‘Bill. C.’, i.e. Bill Cathers, a friend lurking around the edges of Elliot lore. With the letters in Devotedly, we can now see Elisabeth Elliot trimming Bill out of the narrative of Passion and Purity. Jim’s letter to her of October 1, 1948 is quoted saying this:
“What makes me tremble is that I might allow something else (Betty Howard, for instance) to take the place that my God should have. Now something tells me that I can maybe have them both.”
As Devotedly reveals, the actual second sentence was: “Now something tells me that I can maybe have them both, as both you and Billy have ministered to me lately.”
Even Jim’s letter as presented was strange.
He thinks of sex, he tells Betty, as a ‘monster’. He continues:
“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.”
Jim goes on to say he and Betty must not touch anymore.
“I must confess to you, Betty, that I have had regrets about going even as far as we did in our physical contact, and that was very little as most judge.”
Jim quotes Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra to her: “For too long hath there been a slave and a tyrant concealed in woman. On that account woman is not capable of friendship: she knoweth only love.”
The solution to the problem of a woman’s love, Jim says, is Billy’s example.
To have a man write his sort-of girlfriend telling her to act like his best friend, on the advice of Nietzsche . . . was a little weird?
Jim loved that ‘David and Jonathan’ thing.
Over and over in his journal, he sees himself as Jonathan, the biblical prince of 2 Samuel who, out of love for a divine young man, gives up his own kingship. This is the love that “passes the love of women.”
He writes in his journal:
“The love of David and Jonathan (1:23–26) — felt again today for Bill C. upon receipt of a letter from him en route to China. How great shall be our fellowship in heaven! Oh, to spend eternity with such whose spirit quickens my own — makes me throb just to hear his soul’s surgings.”
When Bill got a girlfriend and was fading out of his life, Jim prays for a replacement: “Lord, give me a David, I pray — one whom I can know as David knew Jonathan — ‘sweet, swifter, stronger…’”
But commenting on Betty, Jim seems self-lacerating, even panicked.
He writes in his journals, January 17, 1949. “O God, how can she desire me? Have I played the part so well that she actually thinks me worthy of woman’s love? I tremble, Lord, at what surprises she shall know when all secret thoughts of men shall be manifest.”
He returns to longing for a male companion, as in his entry on July 23, 1949: “Restless to do other things more directly related to the Lord’s work. Longing for a companion, who will be a David to me, and me his Jonathan.”
He has low periods.
He writes: “Heavy and sorrowful because of my coldness, insincerity, and fruitlessness. Oh, how needy — what emptiness I feel. I am not ready to see the King in his beauty.”
The next day: “My love is faint; my warmth practically nil . . . I don’t love; I don’t feel; I don’t understand; I can only believe.”
Then Jim’s took to traveling with Peter Fleming. Intending to become an English professor, Pete was doing a thesis on Melville’s overtly homoerotic novel, The Confidence Man.
As Olive, his future wife, reconstructs Pete’s dialogue of the time: “How can I spend my career talking about material that dwells so much on the base part of life? It is so contrary to Christian truth.”
Then Pete thought he might become a Bible scholar. But under Jim’s influence, they decided to be missionaries — together — in Ecuador.
Jim’s correspondence with Elisabeth is often cold, agonized, and sometimes hostile.
Jim writes: “If Betty Howard is a block of ice, Jim Elliot is a hunk of marble.” He calls them “brother and sister” as he returns to talk of an “aching void.”
He notes, over and over, his duty not to marry. “I feel quite confident that God wants me to begin jungle work, single,” he writes her.
She visits his parents’ home. It’s an utter disaster. His parents hated her, Jim reports in a letter, with details on why they hate her. His mother, he reports, “thinks you uncommunicative, possessed of a ‘meek and quiet spirit,’ but a very poor maker of friends, and hence a poor prospective missionary.”
He quotes his father sizing her up: “no face, no form, a spindly dreamer who has cleverly set her cap on you, and you have bitten.”
Jim agrees with them? “I don’t write now as if they were all wrong and that you must be excused from all these charges.”
Betty replies: “I could hardly believe what I read, and I was utterly crushed by it.”
They debate whether to continue writing. He says: “My answer from the Lord about marriage is now a decided ‘no’ so long as present conditions prevail.”
Betty wants to get married, and doesn’t?
She’ll wait for whenever God gives him permission, she says. Someday in the future, they’d maybe be together?
In the meantime, she fumes: “You and Pete must be having the time of your young lives. My, what a contrast your situation is to mine!”
She has her own doubts about the relationship, writing in her journal: “My conscience (I guess it is my conscience) condemns me constantly.”
They meet occasionally. From his journal: “And then I cried, and we walked. I couldn’t understand why I was unable to explain sensibly just why it was not time for engagement.”
Jim writes love letters . . . to Jesus.
“ . . . if only I may see Him, smell His garments, and smile into my Lover’s eyes, ah, then, not stars, nor children, shall matter — only Himself.”
And he writes Betty too.
The biblical references and God-talk are so heavy that it’s never clear what anyone is really feeling or experiencing.
But many passages suggest unclear psychosexual profiles. When Betty gets to Ecuador, she’s troubled by male behaviors. She bemoans: “Men here do not know the meaning of the ‘cold shoulder,’ and ogle and whoop at me.”
She sees unclothed men bathing in a river, washing clothes. She writes:
“My whole being recoils at such sights — not that I am shocked, in the sense of ‘surprised’ or horrified, but it is a shock to my nature. I cannot express just how it affects me.”
It makes her long for the Second Coming.
Betty joins the missionaries, as Jim vacillates.
He writes in his journal: “Spoke of engagement. She thinks I’m inconsistent, Lord, seeming to be self-contradictory so often in speaking plainly of marriage and then seeming to be so unsure about it all. ”
On July 11, 1952, he writes a prayer: “Give me not to be hungering for the ‘strange, rare, and peculiar’ when the common, ordinary, and regular, rightly taken, will suffice to feed and satisfy the soul.”
The phrase “strange, rare, and peculiar” is from homeopathy, and refers to symptoms of illness which elude explanation. In The Principles and Art of Cure by Homoeopathy (1936), the phrase points to “abnormalities of the sexual functions.”
Jim has passages of affection for Betty. They tend to oddly feminize him. He writes in his journal on 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 October 1953, they marry!
In Elisabeth Elliot’s tellings this was the happy result engineered by God, who finally gave them the “green light.” But the new official biography, Becoming Elisabeth Elliot, by Ellen Vaughn, notes the marriage happened mostly because a job came available for a married couple.
“How soon can you marry me?” Jim asked Betty.
In Jim’s long-suppressed final journal entry, which I found in the Wheaton archive, he goes to his death talking of regretting the marriage, with hints of a divorce in the works.
And then he died.
Then, through Elisabeth Elliot’s books, a character named “Jim Elliot” became the great Evangelical devoted husband-lover—tender, godly, insisting on correct morals.
She could get prickly when mentioning Jim’s early talk of ‘woman-hating’. In a 1983 speech, when talking to a crowd of college students, she says:
“It had nothing to do with being Jim’s ‘thing.’ It had nothing to do with his temperament or preferences. He really did like women.”
Elliot fans weren’t ones to scrutinize details.
Starry-eyed effusions over the great love of Jim and Betty continue to this day. The Evangelical blogger Ann Swindell writes:
“Their story of God’s provision and their commitment to purity is truly incredible; their love is the stuff of fairy tales.”
I ask Kimberly George how she’d wrap it up. She replies:
“I remain convinced EE wrote a story for the public based on very little actual truth of their relationship. I think she was likely miserable in their dynamics, but she loved to write — her writing meant a great deal to her. I think he was emotionally abusive. And yes, not so sure either was ‘straight’ in any conventional way…but were trying to fit into a toxic script that they then reproduced in mass through Christian media.”
And that’s the love story of Jim and Betty Elliot. 🔶
