The Life and Choices of Elisabeth Elliot

A new biography leads one to question why people make certain decisions

Elisabeth Elliot: A Life. By Lucy S.R. Austen. Crossway Books. Retail: $39.99. Amazon.com: $31.93

I recently finished reading Lucy S.R. Austen’s excellent biography of Elisabeth Elliot. (You can read about it here.) It is probably not a book I would have picked on my own. I had previously known two versions of Elisabeth Elliot: one in which she was the wife of a missionary martyr, and one in which she was an enthusiastic proponent of patriarchy. Neither of these things particularly attracted me, for I had a sense that the missionary story was not as neat and tidy as I had been told in elementary school, and the patriarchy story I am living with every day that I attempt to be a woman within a conservative Christian space. At least let me have a break from it in my limited reading time!

But Austen reached out and asked if I would read the book, and that personal request led me to give it a chance. Ultimately, Austen won me over with her complex and nuanced depiction of a woman who has admittedly had an enduring impact on American evangelicalism. The research was exhaustive—the analysis thorough without being heavy-handed. Austen made allowance for Elliot’s humanity, neither whitewashing the story nor engaging in a campaign of character assassination.

In fact, about three-quarters of the way through the book, I was very much liking Elisabeth Elliot. I even felt a kinship with her. Although Elliot was educated at bruisingly fundamentalist institutions—the kind that have a lot of skeletons in the closet—and though her early missionary fervor was colored by sentimentalism and relative ignorance about the people whom she sought to evangelize, her real-life experiences taught her much. She came to a deeper understanding of who God is and the purpose of a human life. She also recognized some of the problems within evangelicalism and made efforts to confront them.

As I read of Elliot’s struggles wrangling with executives in the book industry and good old boys in the Church, I found myself connecting with her. Her belief in the dignity of the Ecuadorian people—the need to give them true Christianity and not just American culture—was touching and ahead of its time. Her passion for Bible translation was admirable, and her struggles to make wise decisions eminently relatable.

Then, as I had feared, the narrative took what I would label a turn for the worse.

By the late 1960s, Elliot had made several enemies within the evangelical world. A series of books in which she did not sugarcoat the realities of missionary life caused a decrease in speaking invitations. She may not have been a complete pariah, but she was certainly seen as a threat by many: an educated, unmarried woman with friends in New York City and a willingness to speak the truth. But this all changed in the 1970s, and Austen’s narrative suggests that it was Elliot’s marriage to Addison Leitch—a conservative Presbyterian theologian—that helped to push her in a different direction.

Elliot had always held some views about marriage that would be considered über-conservative by many people today. In her marriage to Jim Elliot, her understanding of submission to and respect for her husband meant striving not to contradict him. While she was happy to engage in verbal give-and-take with him before marriage, she felt that the bonds of wedlock prevented her from offering the same kind of push back when she felt he was in the wrong. One key occasion when this may have come into play was Jim’s decision to attempt contact with the “Auca” (Waoroni) people, an extremely isolated tribal group known for their aggression toward outsiders, including missionaries. Elisabeth felt she had to support her husband’s decision to make the trip, even though she suspected it would result in his death.

The years of singleness that followed Jim’s passing allowed Elisabeth a greater amount of freedom, but when she married Leitch, she returned to a state of extreme deference. Leitch could be very moody and jealous, as Austen’s research demonstrates, and there is no evidence that Elliot called him out on it in any serious way. It was also around this time that Elliot began talking more and more about the importance of wifely submission, adopting talking points that are typical of the patriarchy movement today: women was made for man and not the other way around,¹ her main purpose is to serve her husband, she shouldn’t be valuing a career over her family, etc.

Elliot would go on to oppose feminism for the rest of her life. After Leitch died of cancer, Elliot entered a third marriage with Lars Gren which, as Austen has established through conversations with people in the know, was very rocky. Gren was even more overbearing than Leitch had been. He essentially became her manager, arranging all her speaking trips down to the minutest detail. Elliot always felt she had to obey him. When she began succumbing to Alzheimer’s disease, Gren pushed for her to continue these speaking engagements along with her radio program, even as her mind and body struggled to cope. It was only the intervention of other persons that allowed Elliot to retire.

This begs the question, why did Elisabeth Elliot’s life turn out the way it did? In the early to mid-1960s, she seemed to be on a very different trajectory: closer to the progressive side of evangelicalism than the conservative one. Yet, by the 1980s, she was spending much of her time working with Bill Gothard’s organization. (Gothard’s name is now synonymous with the cover-up and enablement of abuse through an extremely hierarchical theology.) How did a woman of great intelligence and education end up in an ill-advised marriage, spend her time critiquing a nebulous feminism (Austen demonstrates that Elliot’s understanding of feminism was somewhat uninformed and contradictory.), and even pushing a view of the Trinity that denied the equal authority of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?

I could ask a similar question about many people today. Eric Metaxas was widely respected in the evangelical world fifteen years ago, but is now considered toxic by many of his former friends. Rod Dreher had a hit with The Benedict Option, but is now in a kind of self-imposed exile in Hungary and seems less and less interested in liberal democracy. Even people who were my friends and whom I personally respected are going in increasingly concerning directions, leading me to wonder if everything I thought I knew about them was a lie.

What makes people do these things? Are they the victims of some bizarre brain swap operation?

No, not at all. In fact, the germ for these new identities was within them all along, and circumstances eventually allowed it to flower.

Elliot always had a highly hierarchical view of marriage. This fact was obscured for some time as she lived life independently, focusing on other issues, but her marriage to Leitch took that germ of that idea and fertilized it, while the sexual revolution provided it with sun and water. Thus, the fruit was born. Metaxas already had fears about whether American democracy could be preserved, and he found his savior in Donald Trump. Dreher feared the increasing marginalization of Christians by a dominant progressivism, then he found someone who convinced him it is possible to impose Christian morality from the top: Viktor Orbán.

In fact, all of us have things inside us that, under the right conditions, have the potential to grow into something big and scary. But a choice remains before us: we can nurture those feelings and allow them to grow, or we can be courageous enough to put our ideas to a true test and uproot what is inaccurate.

Elliot took the path that she did because, on some level, she wanted to. She found identity in her version of wifely submission, and she believed other women would as well. The fact that her status within evangelicalism rose as she started opposing feminism, providing a bigger audience for her writing, may have helped convince her that she was doing the right thing. Many people enjoy an increase in worldly success when they begin towing a party line, but is it the path of faithfulness? That is the question.²

I therefore find myself very thankful for Austen’s biography of Elisabeth Elliot, but the lessons I take from it may be different than those Elliot herself would have desired.

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1. This is based on a verse in the Bible, but removed from its intended context such that the overall point is missed.

2. Elliot genuinely believed in her patriarchal doctrines, so I am not suggesting her actions were entirely cynical: only that all of us can, even subconsciously, be subject to social pressures.