Elizabeth Elliot and the Myth of Equality

How Feminism Misses So Many Things

I know the world has moved on from the question of Elizabeth Elliot to the more pressing concerns of Taylor Swift and the unseemly aggression of her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, but I am only just gathering my thoughts. The dust-up, if that’s what these sorts of Twitter adventures are called, began with an article in some publication called The Revealer which was then propagated by people like Scot McKnight. It is written by one Liz Grant who describes her relationship with the content of Elizabeth Elliot this way:

At 18, I consumed her words eagerly, hungry for romance, though I myself was single with no marriage prospects in sight. I loved her example of courtship, of “saving yourself” for ecstatic marital sex, of the hand of God directing a humble woman’s love life. But as much as I prayed to follow her example, it never worked for me. Now, at age 36 and in a happy egalitarian marriage, I see her words differently. Today, I lean decidedly progressive in my politics and Christian beliefs, and so Elliot’s words seem not just dated or fantastical, but misogynistic.

Before we go into the body of her argument, let me wonder about why, of all the people who have been torn down from their literary and theological heights, Elizabeth Elliot is on the list now. What is it about her writing, and her biography, that makes her the subject of this particular round of twitterly iconoclasm? I don’t know, I’m just wondering.

It has been a weary few weeks. Conservative Evangelical Twitter—sorry, X—has dealt, courageously so, with Alistair Begg, the After Party, Elizabeth Elliot, and that terrible He Gets Us video that so rankled America’s fatigued Christians during the Super Bowl. All these seem like the same story, the same meme, the same slogan being used to crush whatever remnants of Christian orthodoxy that might still be breathing in shallow, sickly breaths.

The meme that’s crushing American religiosity isn’t the least bit subtle. It’s impossible to avoid it. On the face, it is about gender and sexuality. But scratch barely below the surface and you find it is actually about Jesus. If you want to be a Christian, today, says the meme, you had better accept that your old, superannuated Jesus of the cross, of sacrifice, of sin-bearing, of suffering, of substitution and worst of all, of the vanquished cosmos with all things put in subjection under him—that old Jesus is useless. In fact, he is wicked. There is a better and newer Jesus who accepts everyone (He Gets Us), who is politically progressive (the After Party), who privileges feelings of compassion over questions of truth (Alistair Begg), and, in the case of Elizabeth Elliot, just wants you to be an empowered queer person. Each iteration of this meme, at its core, is about Jesus.

Liz Grant, a “progressive” in a “happy egalitarian marriage,” is on the side of good. Whereas, poor Elizabeth Elliot failed in goodness because she submitted herself, in various and sundry ways, to both men (her three husbands) and a particular theological view of the Bible. Though no doubt she meant well, she ended up committing “harm” to other people by propagating “complementarianism:”

Complementarianism is a theological justification for patriarchal gender roles; it is the ideological underpinning of “purity culture,” a movement that taught teenagers that pre-marital sex will harm themselves and their future relationships and encouraged sexual repression (especially for queer and female teenagers). Like other purity culture leaders, Elliot emphasized marriage as the “penultimate human experience,” only topped by pregnancy for women or a life devoted to the church for men (even better: martyrdom for God). Elliot’s triangle of authority—God on top, then man, then woman—has resonated for decades within evangelical communities, influencing at least three generations toward conservative views on gender roles and sexuality.

I just want you to note the throwaway line, “queer and female teenagers.” You may not like the “triangle of authority”, but you shouldn’t really bother (even though we are going to labor through it) with the rest of the article because of where Grant is coming from. She is imposing an anti-gospel frame over the work and life of Elizabeth Elliot. Her rubric is wrong. Her historical lens harms her by precluding rational Christian thought.

Beyond that, we must remember that, in the world of Elliot, there were no questions of queerness let alone “harm,” not the way it is being used here. I think we would be wise to observe, yet again, that the reason so many people were begging Elliot for advice and counsel, the reason she was even writing about men and women and marriage, was not because of complementarianism. It was rather because the piles holding aloft the civilizational bridge were being hacked at furiously by purveyors of the sexual revolution, by deconstructionists, by atheists, by Western Elites who thought they could cut down the tree but still continue to sit comfortably in its branches. Ordinary people could hear the sawing, could smell the dust, could feel the shaking of the tree. They wanted help and advice. They wanted something sane. Complementarianism was one way that Christians tried to patch bits onto the crumbling structure. It was the way they talked about ancient, though mostly vestigial, assumptions about the nature of marriage and the way men and women should relate to each other.

Dancing Couple (IV), from The Wedding Dancers, print, Hans Schäufelein 1480-1540

I know that history isn’t a thing, but that idea of a hierarchy of authority with God at the top, that’s a lot older than three generations.

Grant, however, can only see one thing:

Certainly, Elliot’s views have harmed women. Enforcing a culture of male dominance has consequences. Some of my friends have experienced marital rape and domestic violence in their evangelical marriages. Another friend found that her father expected her to become a “stay-at-home daughter,” and received limited education and even more limited freedom as a teenager. Others only recognized they were queer after they finally became sexually active in their heterosexual marriages.

I don’t know what to tell you, except that, guess what, cutting social taboos right down at their roots isn’t good for women. Nobody at all is arguing that women through the last century have not endured abuse. Of course they have. The first-hand testimony is all around us. But let me remind us all of Nancy Pearcey’s eye-opening findings about the two types of “evangelical” men—those who go to church, and those who don’t go to church. Those that actually go to church abuse their wives at rates much lower than the general population. Those that never darken the door except for the Super Bowl Sermon Series abuse their wives at higher rates. But it is awfully convenient to lump these two groups together and blacken the name of good men. But also, there is no way you can blame fathers, of any religious type, for not “supporting” their children who want to identify as queer. Indeed, these fathers should be praised for doing the loving thing.

Funnily enough, Grant’s “sexuality” emerged unscathed from reading Elizabeth Elliot (just like everyone else, if we were allowed to be perfectly honest). It was her “sense of self'" that was apparently ruined by consuming that sort of content:

Personally, Elliot’s teachings did not harm my sexuality as much as my sense of self. She taught that God was male. I took this to mean that men were holier and more like God, that I could never come close to the life demanded of me within the Scriptures, that I myself—my body, my femaleness—was inherently bad. As a result, I developed a binge eating disorder to hide myself, a disorder that I still struggle with to this day.

Elliot didn’t teach that God was male. She was an orthodox Christian and orthodox Christians don’t say that because they don’t believe it. Does Grant mean that Jesus was male? Because he is. And he is God. Just because Grant “took this to mean that men were holier” and that God is in his essence a biological male, just means Grant wasn’t taught any logic in school. Grant is, however, inherently bad, as indeed we all are. Except for the Lord Christ. He, who knew no sin, became sin, so that you and I and the writer of this article could gain eternal life.

Did the writer ever go to church? But then, so many churches are so confused and weird, I suppose it’s possible she thought some of this and was never corrected.

I’ve blogged about this before, but it is true that modern women need to be taught that God knows them not as a man knows a woman, but as they are in their biological selves. For some reason, this is very hard for modern female people. It was for me. At some point, I hope I can find a moment to dig around into this subject in greater depth and discover why it is so. I imagine it might have something to do with sudden and disorienting shifts in language. “Mankind” for ages and ages in English was so linguistically rich that women knew they were included therein. But as “inclusive” language filtered through the academy down to the dinner table, those truly inclusive terms lost much of their resonance. That, combined with mediocre and shallow biblical literacy, does leave women feeling left out. What should Christians do? Just go all in for the TNIV? Keep propagating weird conspiracy theories about the ESV like Beth Allison Barr? I know those are the most obvious options, but I think it is better to keep trying to use archaic language for as long as possible because it has so many more theological layers (thank you to the Pugcast, for pointing this out). Anyway, we have to continue or we will never get through:

In fact, one question still haunts me about the life of Elliot, the woman so enamored with love as to make it her career: was Elisabeth Elliot abused by her third husband? And if so, how should we evaluate her life and work?

Well, there you have it. The best of all worlds. Elizabeth Elliot was actually abused and so we don’t have to listen to her, but, at the same time, we can feel sorry for her, and even better, we can take her legacy, hollow it out, and wear it like a skin suit to mock our enemies. By “we,” obviously I exclude myself.

So, how did this woman become the female figurehead of the complementarian evangelical movement of the 1970s to 2000s, warning against the influence of feminism on the church? The answer to Elliot’s transformation can be found in examining her love life. Each of her three marriages led Elliot toward increasingly conservative ideas about the role and function of women within the home and church.

It was the men, in other words, who guided Elliot along her theological “transformation” from empowered woman to “figurehead” of complementarianism. It couldn’t have been that she was also living through that period and saw what was happening to people and to their marriages. It couldn’t have been that her own thinking changed, perhaps? Grant, and everyone, wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want women to speak the thoughts of their own minds, but only if those thoughts accord with everything contrary to the thoughts of a conservative man, especially if he is a husband.

Elliot “exchange[d]…freedom for security. She became a person whose highest value was the desire to feel secure.” Unfortunately, Gren had no safety to offer, and his presence only exacerbated Elliot’s pain.

I have no ability to litigate this. I’ve seen some tweets that Elliot’s family loved Gren and had no idea of her being abused by him. If you go and read the article, you will see that Grant’s chief evidence is that Gren was “controlling.” He managed her work, her time, her speaking schedule, her cups of tea, everything. He also, apparently, made her only write complementarian literature in such an engaging and helpful fashion that thousands of women hung on her very words. Grant goes on:

Elliot’s later theology reflected the authoritarianism of her third marriage. Both Gren and Elliot shared the conviction that a wife should subordinate herself to her husband. And so, a new theme emerged in Elliot’s writings: obey God regardless of your feelings. Elliot seemed to apply this statute liberally, seemingly substituting “Gren” for “God.”

I’m no fan of authoritarianism, of course, but the idea that you should “obey God regardless of your feelings” is, again, an excessively old idea. In fact, Jesus, at least two thousand years ago, told his disciples that the way of love is the way of obedience. If you loved me, said Jesus, you would obey my commandments. His disciples, at the time, did not understand what he was talking about. Their feelings, being confused by grief, made it impossible for them to do the simplest of tasks, like stay awake to pray for the one they professed to love before he had to take up his cross to save them from their deathly disobedience.

Obedience, along with forgiveness, are the two solid pillars that hold aloft the Christian. Liz Grant imagines herself to be wise, to be on the side of women, but, the fact that she could so blithely write a sentence like that, shows she does not have even a grain of a clue of what she is speaking.

You know one thing that happens as you grow older? Whether you are a man or a woman? As you suffer, you stoop low. It isn’t men or women who cause you to bow your head, who crush your spirit. It is God himself. God is the one who deals the blows that make you holy. And as you are crushed, as you suffer, you discover that you are not going from strength and vitality to empowerment and platform building. Rather, you discover that in obedience to other people, you have been obeying God. And as you obey God, your feelings gradually catch up. You become grateful. You become willing to sacrifice yourself, your ego, even your desires for the sake of knowing Christ and being found in him.

Grant, on the other hand, continues to betray her anti-Christian, anti-gospel ignorance:

In fact, she did not understand her own worth; she saw herself as a slave of men and God alike, subservient to their whims and feelings even as she suppressed her own.

How can I put this gently? We are all slaves, either of Christ, or of his enemy. There is only service in this life. Either you will serve one master, or you will serve the other. Saint Paul says it the most clearly:

Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.

A very hard truth for people of this generation is that obedience is often painful. Sometimes God lets us come upon difficult and terrible circumstances—either of our own making, or the making of others—and, through the endurance of injustice, anxiety, suffering, and many other trials, he begins to work out the freedom we so desperately need from sin.

I think Elliot very much understood her own worth. I think she lived out a long legacy of knowing Christ as her savior, the way every Christian does. I think she counted everything as loss compared with the surpassing worth of knowing Christ. Maybe that included a difficult marriage, I don’t know. But I think it’s interesting that Grant, whether meaning to or not, is cutting away the very meaning of marriage itself—that the way you give yourself so wholly to another person is a picture of the way Christ and the Church cling to each other. Your marriage becomes a blaze, a glory of obedience and sacrifice.

Now, I’m left pondering Elliot’s legacy. Consider how different her legacy would have been had she divorced her abusive husband. How would a celebrity divorce like Elliot’s have changed evangelicalism? How might Elliot herself have changed? In fact, how might evangelicalism be changed now by this revelation about Elliot? That is, if the public hears the truth at all.

I’m grateful that Elliot didn’t get a divorce, even if she wanted one, which we don’t know that she did. If she had, I think we wouldn’t have had as many years of “evangelicalism” as we have had. We are seeing all around us the very thing she spent all her words, nor counted the cost, to prevent.

I know this is quite long, but let me just sketch for you a different kind of “harm.” It doesn’t count as “abuse,” but I think it is pretty silly, if not awful. Remember, a long time ago, how Jory Micah declared that she was going to be the head of her husband? I looked for that original post, but behold, it has been taken down, perhaps because the marriage did not make it. Micah was arrested in 2022 for aggravated assault of a police officer in the aftermath of being caught driving under the influence. She also had a major meltdown about John McArthur at one point. She is still on Twitter with 46K+ followers and I’m sure would say she is doing all that God called her to do.

Micah has interested me over the years for her brash ability to say what others think. She drew a lot of mockery for coming out and saying that she would be the head of the church and the head of her husband. Most people, when they come across a word like “egalitarian,” instinctively feel that it means the equality of two people. But there is no such thing. No two people are the same, and so no two people can be equal. There will always be a complicated, hidden, intricate hierarchy of age, rank, looks, personality, wisdom, education, social position, and yes, sometimes even class. You may be the top of the heap in the morning while you are teaching a classroom full of children to spell, and in the afternoon be the bottom of the heap when you go out with your much prettier and richer girlfriends because they are being kind to you. Egalitarianism is a lie. And Jory Micah illumined the lie, first by saying out loud that she would be in charge, and second by flaming out so spectacularly.

She, in fact, is the icon of what “egalitarian” feminism has done to women. It has made them anxious, sad, selfish, and isolated. It has been the devil’s work to get women to accept that “knowing their worth” and only obeying God if they felt like it was the quickest path to happiness.

Consider how Jory Micah might be known if she had listened to someone like Elizabeth Elliot. First, what little education she had might have been put to good use in serving the church, for real, instead of making everything about herself. Second, she might have been the joyous mother of children who rose up to call her blessed. Third, she might have the consolation and delight of a healthy marriage, full of banter and give and take, all grounded in that strange joy of sacrifice and submission. All these she could have had. Instead, she has a lot of Twitter followers and is doing advocacy for a country full of men who make their women wear the hijab.

It’s interesting that the name of the website that published this piece is “The Revealer,” for, indeed, much has been revealed, and all of it is disappointing.

Have a nice day!