Who Was Elisabeth Elliot? Part 2: Second and Third Marriages

Outline:

Single Years:

After Jim’s death Elisabeth really believed that she would never marry again, and she did stay single for 13 years before she remarried.

During these 13 years of singlehood, Elisabeth developed some surprising opinions that we might code as being “progressive” -- they were certainly out of the ordinary in the conservative evangelical context she lived and worked in.

• 1966: publication of “No Graven Image,” a fictional but very autobiographical story of a young missionary woman in Ecuador.

  • Highly critical of western paternalism in American missions.

  • Resists the broader evangelical impulse to tie things up into neat little bows. Major crisis happens when the main character accidentally causes the death of one of the Ecuadorians she is trying to evangelize to. This causes a crisis of faith that isn’t fully resolved by the novel’s end.

  • Sold well but made her a lot of enemies.

• 1969: publication of “Furnace of the Lord,”

  • Critical of Christian Zionism

  • So controversial that Elliot couldn’t get Harper Publishing - her usual publisher - to release it without major revisions that she wasn’t okay with. She ended up having it published through Doubleday.

• 1966-1969: Corresponded with Letha Dawson Scanzoni, who would later co-write the book All We’re Meant to Be, a classic biblical feminist text.

  • By 1968, Elliot and Scanzoni were engaged in a friendly debate about gender roles.

  • As a result, Elliot was reading the work of egalitarian theologians. She was beginning to at least consider other perspectives.

Husband #2: Addison Leitch

Addison Leitch had a lot of the same qualities that Elisabeth had seen in Jim. She was attracted to masculinity, which for her meant strength and assertiveness. In Passion and Purity she describes Jim as “strong,” “broad chested,” and “a real man.”

• Leitch was sixty years old when they met, but he was 6’ 2”, and athletic for his age.

• Like Jim, he had a charismatic personality.

• In addition, he had an imposing academic persona.

Elisabeth found his scholarly achievements both intimidating and attractive. Her diaries indicate that she was quick to defer to his opinion, and Addison’s opinion was usually on the side of convention and tradition, including on gender roles.

Elisabeth’s newfound conventionality: Most of Elliot’s more controversial opinions seemed to evaporate when her second marriage started. She stopped writing books that were critical of Christian culture and institutions. Most of her books after this point were much more palatable to the American evangelical audience. She wrote lots of devotional-style books that didn’t touch on contemporary issues. When she did write books on contemporary issues, it was almost always related to gender roles, and written from a strongly anti-feminist perspective.

Elisabeth & Addison’s unusual courtship: One thing that was not conventional about Addison and Elisabeth, was their courtship.

• Addison Leitch was a married man when Elisabeth met him in 1966.

• His wife, Margaret, had cancer and died July 16, 1968.

• Just six weeks later, Elisabeth and Addison were secretly engaged.

• From Elisabeth’s diaries it appears that Addison was pursuing her while Margaret was still alive.

• They were married on January 1, 1969: about five and half months after Margaret’s death.

Addison and Elisabeth’s furtive, whirlwind romance is a far cry from the five-year waiting game she played with Jim. But there is one thing that’s consistent: male leadership. Elisabeth had strong convictions, especially about sex and marriage, but she didn’t seem to have a place in her worldview for being an active agent in her romantic relationships. As a result, she was just along for the ride while the men she was involved with made stunningly poor decisions.

How did this marriage work out, on a personal level? Just like with Jim, it does seem like Addison and Elisabeth had a lot of good times. But also as with Jim, there was a lot of angst in the 4 ½ years they were married before Addison died of cancer.

Elisabeth’s writing: The circles that Addison Leitch moved in were very different from what Elisabeth was used to. Much of Elisabeth’s time was taken up in either attending, or hosting social gatherings. She had hardly any time to write.

Their social life also put a lot of strain on Elisabeth because she was a lifelong introvert, something that Addison didn’t understand and wasn’t sympathetic to. He would accuse her of making his life difficult with her reserved behavior.

Eleanor Vandevort: Before marrying Addison, Elisabeth had lived for seven years with an old Wheaton schoolmate, Eleanor Vandevort, who like Elisabeth was a writer with a background in missions. Vandevort played the role of “homemaker” in their shared household, and she was practically a second mother to Elisabeth’s daughter Valerie. Eleanor was also one of the few women who Elisabeth was able to connect with on a deep level.

Was Addison jealous? Addison demonstrated that he could be very jealous of Elisabeth’s relationships with men, even longtime professional contacts. Is it possible that he may have experienced a different kind of jealousy over Eleanor’s close emotional relationship with Elisabeth?

Addison clearly wanted Eleanor out of their lives ASAP. He convinced Elisabeth that Vandevort was a “sponge” who had taken advantage of her. Although he tolerated Vandevort living with them for a few months after the wedding, when they moved to Massachusetts for Addison’s new job at Gordon College, Vandevort was unceremoniously asked to find new living arrangements.

Ironically, Vandevort was one of the people who rushed in to, once again, keep Elisabeth’s household afloat when Addison was diagnosed with cancer in late 1972.

Addison’s death: Addison died in September of the next year, and Elisabeth was single again. She began supplementing her income by renting rooms to students at the seminary Addison had been teaching at before his death.

Husband #3: Lars Gren

Lars Gren was a seminary student who was studying to become a chaplain when he came to live at Elisabeth Elliot’s house.

Lars’ pursuit of Elisabeth: Elisabeth eventually noticed that Lars - though ten years younger - was showing signs of attraction to her. Elisabeth wasn’t particularly interested in Lars at first. Their age difference presented a challenging obstacle since she expected strong leadership from a husband. She recalls her feelings for him changing was a night when he told her, “I would like to be the one building the fences around you, and I want to stand on all sides.”

Lars’ controlling and angry behavior: Immediately after Elisabeth and Lars married, she discovered that he was controlling and had a temper. Lucy Austen writes,

A pair of anecdotes from their wedding day shows this pattern. As the two of them were leaving the sanctuary, they had a choice of directions to turn. Lars started to go on way, and Elliot steered him the other. Friends chuckled over it at the time. But when the newlyweds got back to the house that evening to pick up their luggage, Lars declared himself not ready to leave - not because there was something else he needed to do, but because they weren’t leaving until he was good and ready.

Lars’ management of Elisabeth’s career: As Addison Leitch’s wife, Elisabeth had had a difficult time maintaining any sort of a writing career. As Lars Gren’s wife, she had the opposite problem. When he first met her, Lars hadn’t really grasped just how much of a celebrity Elisabeth was in the evangelical world. As he began to understand the impact she had had - and the impact that she could continue to have, with good management - he stepped in to handle the logistics of her writing and speaking career.

Elisabeth had always been spiritually-minded rather than practical, and she didn’t know the first thing about promoting her work or turning a profit. Lars, on the other hand, had a very good head for business.

• He started taping her speeches and selling the tapes

• He set up a table of her books every time she spoke

• He managed her schedule and travel arrangements

• He protected her writing hours from interruption and helped her answer fan mail

On the surface, it seemed like he was the supportive husband that she had always needed (even if she didn’t realize it) in order to really lean into her writing career. But privately, he was extremely controlling.

Elisabeth’s regrets and emphasis on suffering: Elisabeth privately told close friends that she knew she had made a mistake marrying Lars, but she didn’t believe she had a way out. The names of some of her books and articles during her marriage to Lars are telling:

• “Love Has a Price Tag,” 1979

• “Discipline: the Glad Surrender,” 1982

• “Loneliness,” 1988

• “A Path Through Suffering” 1990

• “Keep a Quiet Heart,” 1995

She didn’t write directly about marital difficulties in these books, but it’s during this period that she got her reputation for being something of an “expert” on suffering, and maybe that wasn’t a coincidence.

At the same time, Elisabeth was also developing a reputation for being an expert on gender roles. In 1988, Elisabeth accepted an invitation to run a radio show which she would call Gateway to Joy. Many of the episodes encouraged women to accept their “God-given role” as the subordinate party in their marriages.

Alzheimer’s diagnosis, retirement and death: In 1998 Elisabeth was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Lars pushed her to continue her work for six more years. She continued to write and deliver material for the radio program until 2000, when the show’s directors told Lars the dementia was too advanced for her to continue. Even after that, Lars would arrange speaking events for her until 2004, when - once again - someone took him aside and suggested that he stop her speaking career.

Analysis

Elliot’s main contribution was a unique emphasis on submission for its own sake.

Countless people have taught male authority and female submission as a kind of “prosperity gospel,” where couples, churches and society would experience blessing by following God’s formula for marriage. Elisabeth Elliot, however, never taught submission as a prosperity gospel. For her, submission was not about an kind of outside result: it was simply what women were made for.

Male and Female as “Interlocking Opposites”: In Let Me Be a Woman, Elliot says that “everywhere the universe displays its division into pairs of interlocking opposites.” Male and female - which corresponded with the concepts of authority and submission - were one such “pair of interlocking opposites.” Authority and submission were, for Elliot, the meaning of life itself; maybe even the meaning of God Himself.

Elliot’s early adoption of ESS: Elliot was an early adopter of the doctrine commonly known as the eternal subordination of the Son (“ESS”), which teaches that God the Son has a “submissive role” within the Trinity, and this authority and submission between the Father and the Son are what make them unique. In and outside of Elliot’s writing, ESS functions to persuade women that equality and subordination can co-exist in their marriages, just as it allegedly does within the Godhead.

This is significant, because if male authority and female submission are reflections of a cosmic order that has existed from eternity past, they don’t need any further justification. They are simply realities to be accepted, or not.

This, to me, is the single most dangerous idea in the entire complementarian corpus, because it goes way beyond sex roles. It corrupts our entire theological system by replacing the Bible’s statement that “God is love” with “God is authority.” That’s a damaging lie to live under, for both women and men.

Elliot’s personal agency in forming her views on gender: I think it would be a mistake to interpret Elisabeth Elliot’s theology of gender as simply a trauma response to being married to domineering men. She spent an unusual amount of her adult life single, giving her the room to reflect on gender roles without the external pressure of having a disapproving husband looking over her shoulder.

It’s more demonstrably true that her theology of gender informed what she was looking for in a man. It was impossible for her to marry a man she didn’t respect, and it was impossible for her to respect a man if he wasn’t dominant.

The fruit: In Matthew 7:20, Jesus gives a very practical piece of advice. He says, “By their fruits, you shall know them.” The application here isn’t to suggest that Elisabeth Elliot wasn’t saved, but to realize that the practical effects of a teaching do matter, and they should be investigated.

Elliot’s beliefs about gender resulted in a spiritualized attraction to domineering men, with the predictable result that she ended up in dysfunctional and sometimes abusive marriages time after time. That’s fruit that we shouldn’t ignore.