Christianity Today put the disputed piece back online Friday after yanking it Thursday. The restored version carries a new note from incoming editor-in-chief Erik Petrik. He attributed the removal to an internal process failure during leadership transitions. Key content team members had not reviewed the article before publication, he said. After the review, the piece returned “properly framed.”
On Thursday, October 15, 2026, CT published an article by biographer Lucy S. R. Austen regarding Elisabeth Elliot’s sexuality. Austen, whose Crossway biography of Elliot won a CT Book Award in 2024, was writing in response to a piece published earlier this year in the magazine ARC by historian William Stell.
In the midst of internal leadership transitions, Austen’s article was not reviewed prior to publication by some key members of our content team. I removed the article from our website until that review could take place and the piece could be properly framed. The review has now occurred, and the article is once again live on our site as of Friday, October 16, 2026.
-Erik Petrik, Chief Content Officer and Editor-in-Chief
The article itself shows no substantive changes. Lucy S.R. Austen’s text stands as originally published. It still centers Virginia Ramey Mollenkott’s 2020 oral-history recollection of a 1975 encounter at an Evangelical women’s conference. Mollenkott claimed Elliot approached her privately, grew alarmed when confronted about public comments on Mollenkott’s sexuality, and reportedly said, “You could destroy me, Virginia.” Austen presents this as plausible evidence that Elliot experienced same-sex attraction, while conceding the obvious limits of memory decades later and the absence of corroboration from Elliot’s papers.
The restoration did nothing to quiet the backlash. Pastors and theologians who objected Thursday continued to press the same points. Others described the episode as an attempt to retrofit the legacy of a prominent 20th-century Evangelical figure with the homosexual movement. The speed of the pull-and-restore cycle drew additional comment.
The restored note frames the episode as a procedural correction rather than a substantive retreat. Readers can judge whether the underlying argument gained or lost credibility from the added context. The piece still treats Mollenkott’s uncorroborated account as a meaningful data point worth elevating, even while acknowledging that neither woman can now clarify what happened.
