Christianity Today just published, promoted, and then quietly deleted an article suggesting that Elisabeth Elliot, one of the most prominent conservative Evangelical voices of the twentieth century, may have been a homosexual deviant. The magazine’s own promotional post framed historian William Stell’s claims as plausible based on her private papers. The piece, written by Elliot’s biographer Lucy S. R. Austen and titled “What We Know—and Cannot Know—About Elisabeth Elliot’s Sexuality,” is now gone. The URL returns a page-not-found error. Austen has publicly stated that she has received no explanation from CT, noting that the removal appears to contradict the outlet’s own corrections policy.
This is not neutral historical inquiry. It is an attempt to normalize homosexuality in the church by retroactively rewriting the life of a woman whose public teaching and example stood firmly against the sexual revolution.
The Thin Evidence Behind the Speculation
Stell’s claims, detailed in his July 2026 essay “A Rickety Closet” and his book Born Again Queer, rest almost entirely on a 2020 oral history interview with Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, a longtime Evangelical feminist and gay activist who co-authored Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? with Letha Scanzoni. Mollenkott recounted a private 1975 confrontation at the Evangelical Women’s Caucus conference. According to her account, with no other witnesses, she told Elliot she would expose how Elliot supposedly knew of her sexuality if Elliot continued speaking against her. Elliot allegedly fell to her knees and said, “You could destroy me, Virginia.” Mollenkott interpreted this, along with earlier closeness between the two women (who had known each other from boarding school and exchanged letters in the mid-1960s), as evidence of a past intimate relationship.
Stell and Austen also point to a 1960s letter Elliot wrote to her mother reflecting on the biblical friendship of David and Jonathan. In it, Elliot observed that their love “passed the love of women,” that they met in secret and kissed, and that sin enters only when the law of love is transgressed. She concluded that love is the great thing and that rigid lines drawn by sex may not capture the full picture. Biographers had already noted this letter. It is a thoughtful engagement with Scripture, not a confession of personal same-sex attraction. Elliot’s extensive published writings, journals, and teaching, including books such as Let Me Be a Woman, Passion and Purity, and her critiques of feminism, consistently upheld biblical distinctions between male and female, the goodness of marriage between one man and one woman, and the call to purity and self-denial. Nothing in that public record supports the homosexual framing.
A critical review of Stell’s work notes that his allegation about Elliot appears to rely on this single uncorroborated recollection from Mollenkott, delivered decades later in an interview conducted for a book arguing that antigay Evangelicalism is a relatively recent historical development rather than a consistent biblical stance.
Promotion, Backlash, and the Memory Hole
Christianity Today did not treat this as cautious speculation. Its social media promotion stated outright: “Historian William Stell has published an interview suggesting Elliot was bisexual. Her private papers make it plausible too.” The outlet amplified the most sensational reading. Within hours of publication on October 15, 2026, readers and observers noted the article had disappeared. Users reported dead links. Austen confirmed the removal and said she was still waiting for an explanation from the magazine.
This sequence is revealing. CT was willing to platform and promote claims that undermine a beloved conservative figure, using the language of historical inquiry and “what we cannot know,” but unwilling to defend the piece once ordinary Christians objected. The deletion without public clarification or correction leaves the impression of an institution testing how far it can go in revising Evangelical memory to fit contemporary sexual ethics, then retreating when the cost becomes clear.
The Larger Pattern
Elisabeth Elliot is not a peripheral figure. She was the widow of Jim Elliot, killed with four other missionaries in Ecuador in 1956. She returned to live among the Waorani people, wrote bestsellers that shaped generations of Evangelical women, and later articulated a clear complementarian vision of manhood and womanhood against the rising tide of feminism. Progressive historians and activists have long sought to claim or complicate such figures, reinterpreting close same-sex friendships, private reflections, or single-source recollections as evidence of suppressed queer identity. The goal is not merely to tell a more complex story. It is to demonstrate that even the most orthodox leaders could not live by the standards they taught, thereby softening resistance to full affirmation of homosexuality within the church.
Stell’s broader project in Born Again Queer argues that Evangelical opposition to homosexuality was not inevitable or inherent but the result of later political and cultural developments that overpowered an earlier, more open conversation. Placing Elliot in that narrative serves the same purpose: if one of the movement’s most disciplined and traditional voices can be plausibly read as homosexual or at least deeply conflicted, then the hard line against same-sex practice looks less like biblical fidelity and more like selective enforcement or hypocrisy.
Christians who hold to the historic sexual ethic, rooted in creation order, the words of Jesus, and the apostolic teaching, do not need to defend every detail of Elliot’s private life or personality. She was a sinner, like the rest of us, and her later marriages have been the subject of other scrutiny. What we do need is clarity about method and motive. Speculative reconstruction of the dead based on activist recollections, framed as “plausible” by a flagship Evangelical magazine and then withdrawn without explanation, is not serious history. It is ideological work.
Christianity Today has spent years drifting from its earlier commitment to biblical orthodoxy on these questions. This episode, publication, sensational promotion, and sudden disappearance show the current state of that drift more clearly than any mission statement. Discernment requires recognizing the pattern and refusing to let institutions rewrite the past to make the present compromise easier. The church does not need its icons queered to be faithful. It needs the truth, plainly spoken, without the memory hole.
One Response
After reading her biographies and journals and reading her endless guilt and struggle over what many of us lesser mortals consider trivial sins, I can’t even begin to accept that she could engage in something of this nature.