If Elisabeth Elliot's Marriage Advice was Supposed to Ruin Your Life, This is the First I've Heard It

Elliot as “romance heroine” in her popular interpreters

Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash

Elisabeth Elliot probably didn’t mean to become a fairy story. But she did. 

Elisabeth Elliot’s written work is, on the whole, geared towards the theme of self sacrifice – that giving things up, humbling yourself, following God, and rejecting personal desires or feelings is the way of the cross. This is not particularly surprising given the trajectory of her life – after all, Elliot became a public figure when her first husband, Jim Elliot, was killed while missionizing the Huaorani people in Ecuador. She then remained in the public eye by joining the evangelical anti-feminist backlash movement, and encouraging women to set aside their own desires and ambitions to do “God’s will” of serving husbands and children at home. This message of self-sacrifice up to and including self-martyrdom is a message that Christian people have returned to again and again through history, arguably beginning with Mark and Paul in the New Testament and continuing to the present day. 

Of course, while the theme of losing one’s life to find it is an enduring theme in Christian theology, this is certainly a theme that virtually anyone can agree must have some kind of limit. Few theologians today recall the flagellants of the Middle Ages with affection. Selling all one’s possessions and giving them to the poor has never been popular. Even the asceticism of singleness is rarely encouraged in many Protestant networks today. And of course, the way of the cross and self-martyrdom may apply more in some spaces than others. In the Gospels, the theme of self-giving is particularly associated with the rejection of power and accolades. In Ephesians it’s a multi-directional disposition in marriage – putting the other first. But self-martyring might make less sense in regards to, say, one’s overly demanding boss at a for-profit company. Or towards one’s children who may be verging on spoiled. 

While we might make those distinctions, there’s an extent to which in her writings to wives and mothers, Elisabeth Elliot actually didn’t make those distinctions. Blaming oneself for someone else’s actions was a habit that, according to the very good biography by Lucy Austen, Elliot seems to have had her entire life. In all three of her marriages (Elliot was never divorced, only repeatedly widowed), Elliot either took responsibility for her husbands’ misdeeds or consistently overlooked them. And she advised other women to do the same. 

In light of this, it’s strange that Elisabeth Elliot has become such a fixture in dreams-come-true, sexual-prosperity-gospel literature. By this I mean the proliferation of media, usually post-second-wave feminism, that counseled increasingly extreme forms of sexual abstinence and even personal seclusion (primarily for women) before their marriage, and then a strictly hierarchical marriage relationship in which the man leads and the woman submits. Usually, this pattern is held up not just as the “biblical model” (what God commands) but a model of marriage that will bring about the best results. By following this pattern for dating and marriage, which is God’s design, a couple will have the best, happiest, most sexually gratifying, prosperous, and harmonious marriage. 

At this point, there are two things to note. First, the “follow the rules and get the stuff” model of much literature of the “complementarian” era of evangelicalism does not match Elliot’s continued emphasis on personal mortification in her literature. Second, we might find that this is not surprising given that Elliot was probably a victim of marital violence in her third marriage. Both biographers Ellen Vaughn and recent biographer Lucy Austen note that Lars Gren – to whom Elliot was married for thirty-eight years –  was controlling, explosively angry, demanding, selfish, and cruel to his wife. This was also the era in which Elliot wrote the majority of her books on marriage, dating, and sexuality. This aspect of Elliot’s life – that she was counseling women to submit to abuse while she was herself being abused – was recently highlighted in an article by Liz Charlotte Grant in The Revealer, but the cruel reality of her marriage was long available to anyone who took the time to look into it. (It’s also not exactly the biggest surprise if you’ve read one of her books.) 

Elliot does not seem to have believed that her model of radical self-martyrdom in marriage would lead to a good marriage. She surely knew from experience that it didn’t. And yet, Elliot’s books were repeatedly employed towards the ends of encouraging girls to follow her example in order to have a good marriage. Why is this?

I would argue that, despite Elliot’s marital advice generally counseling wives to seek something besides happiness in marriage, this message is very difficult to square with the tone of her book Passion and Purity, a recounting of her highly tumultuous courtship with her first husband Jim Elliot and an advice book or Christians who are looking to also have a passionate but pure marriage.

What is Passion and Purity?

Passion and Purity is the 1984 book by Elisabeth Elliot recounting the events that led up to her marriage to Jim Elliot in Ecuador. The Elliots’ marriage lasted from Oct 1953 to Jan 1956 – a little over two years – and they had one daughter, Valerie. 

The real story of Jim and Elisabeth Elliot’s romance is not exactly good. For some time before Jim asked Elisabeth to marry him, Jim was profoundly wishy-washy – probing for sexual and romantic content with Elisabeth, stringing her along with grand pronouncements of love, vanishing for awhile, dating other girls, preaching on purity and singleness and the importance of a single-minded commitment to God, and encouraging other people to follow his example as a celibate man. As Jim Elliot’s surviving friend described it, Jim “played (Elisabeth) like a yo-yo.”

In Elisabeth Elliot’s words many years after the fact, though, this all sounds less obnoxious and more sexy. The book is a frankly overheated and occasionally goofy account of two people who, like all young people, have very intense and primarily interior problems that don’t make sense to anyone over twenty-five. Passion and Purity, though, is told through the perspective of a much older woman who actually does seem to agree that these problems are very serious, and that the tortured process of wondering if you’re touching your boyfriend too much or if he loves you too much is actually part of preparation for marriage. How do we make sense of this? 

The status of Jim as martyr baptizes the proceedings of what would otherwise be a frivolous book – namely, a story of two young people who, like thousands of young people before them, struggle with hot-cold feelings for one another and anxieties about settling down. If this book was about any other man, Jim Elliot’s behavior would seem ridiculous. But the time Elisabeth Elliot had written Passion and Purity, Jim was remembered as a martyr and had functionally achieved evangelical sainthood. His behavior, and by extension hers, had a ring of importance and sacrality to it because of the sudden death of Jim Elliot, not because the way the two of them are dating makes any sense. 

Second, the abrupt, tragic end of this marriage means that Elliot, now on her third rocky marriage, is necessarily looking back on a very short relationship. The intense on-again, off-againness of their courtship, culminating in a short marriage with many periods of separation, may have meant that Jim Elliot died during the midst of what we might call the “honeymoon stage” of a relationship. By this I mean the one to four years in a relationship in which a couples’ brains are flooded with dopamine and feelings of intense “in-loveness,” which eventually settle and give way to “lasting love.” If the two of them had been married for fifty years, it seems highly unlikely that either of them would have seen the period in which Jim strung along Elisabeth as an event that had deep theological significance. But his unexpected death so early into the marriage, and the decades to reflect on the marriage, gave the events an air of gravitas they otherwise might not have had. It’s easy for the reader to imagine that Elisabeth Elliot may have gone on feeling passionate, intense feelings for Jim for fifty years, and their marriage would always be as ecstatic as it was when they were in their twenties. And, by extension, it’s easy to imagine that a reader following Elliot’s advice would also experience a fifty-year marriage of romantic and sexual rapture. But the reality is, we have no idea what year ten, twenty, or thirty of the Elliots’ marriage would have been like, and if it was anything like any other marriages, it probably would have at least settled into something more companionable – as most marriages do.

So there’s a real tragedy here that Elisabeth did not have more of her relationship to reflect on. Her long hot-and-cold courtship with Jim Elliot (five and a half years) was more than twice as long as the marriage itself (two years, four months). Jim died before anything more stable and tried-and-true could develop. So when Elisabeth reflects on this relationship, it’s clear she doesn’t reflect on the kind of companionship where a husband and wife regularly do dishes and laundry together. It’s a courtship story, not a marriage story. It’s the part of the love story that takes place during the romance novel, not after. It’s about big, overwhelming, incomprehensible feelings for a sexy man – not what happens when it’s time to do (as husband Waymond puts it in the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once) “laundry and taxes.” We actually don’t know what kind of marriage Elliot’s advice could lead to. 

The third thing is that this book is that Elliot actually does seem to think that her advice leads to some kind of happiness, not just the satisfaction of doing God’s will. For example, towards the end of Passion and Purity, Elliot recounts the story of a woman who is married to a permanently restless doctor who regularly moves their family between jobs and cities (why on earth a doctor, of all people, would do this is truly beyond me). However, the wife reflects that if she does not continue to wander the country following her husband’s whims, one day he will be very resentful of her that he did not do so. So, of course, the happier course and healthier course is to continue to make frequent moves from city to city for a husband who works in a field where frequent moves are usually penalized, not rewarded (185). The goal of this permanent, irrational selflessness isn’t just “doing the will of God,” as Elliot imagines it. It is also assumed to lead to practically better outcomes.

And of course, part of the “happiness” hoped for here is the desire for what we might call the momentous marriage – the marriage that is theologically significant, world-changing, historically memorable, and emotionally intense. It’s noticeable that when Elliot writes about love on the way to the altar, you might not even know from the text of her book that she walked this road three times. Her focus stays on her famous husband. She continues to write under his name. Her marriage with Jim Elliot the martyr is the marriage, the one worth recounting, the one we should aspire to.

So there’s certainly some kind of implied if-then here. If you follow Elisabeth Elliot’s guidelines for marriage and purity, then you will have the same kind of florid, bosom-heaving romance with a man of intense theological significance that Elliot did. This might seem silly, but remember that this book is largely marketed to teenage girls and women in their early twenties. Elliot herself does not generally strike me as a woman with her head in the clouds, but she reflects a part of her life where, owing to youth, immaturity, and hormones, she certainly seems to have been – and remembers it fondly. 

So these themes – a guide to having a swept-off-one’s-feet, important, permanently passionate marriage in Passion and Purity, and also nailing yourself to a cross to suffer trials forever as in most of her other books – seem like they’re in obvious conflict with one another. Is the goal of following Elliot’s advice to have a blissful marriage, or to suffer faithfully in a way that Christ will honor? It can’t really be both, can it? 

I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

In the days since Grant’s article on Elliot’s abusive marriage dropped, it seems that Elliot’s interpreters have largely drifted towards the second explanation. Christians are not promised happiness and bliss, they’re promised trials and pain. Elliot’s advice is not about how to be married well, but how to suffer well. It’s about how to bear up under the pain of a terrible spouse, not how to have a good spouse and certainly not how to get away from a bad one. Marriage, don’t you know, is supposed to make you holy, not happy, and Elliot knew that her place was to give her life for her husband.

But this is just not the way Elliot writes about her first marriage. Above all, her commitment to personal suffering in marriage cannot be separated from texts in which she recounts deep love and personal ecstasy, which is the repeated theme in Passion and Purity. The theme of accepting your spouse’s faults without complaint and bearing up under them is thoroughly braided with the theme of passionate love in this book – if pain, then pleasure. 

Secondly, this is not the way Elliot’s work has ever been received in the wider Christian community. The back matter of Passion and Purity calls the book a “love story” that is clearly meant to be aspirational to readers – “only by putting their human passion and desire through His fire can God purify their love.” No one, and I do mean no one, had a discussion group on Passion and Purity in high school where we all agreed we were reading a guide to having a bad marriage.

If anything, the opposite was true and Elliot’s story became canon for later authors promising lifelong sexual and romantic thrills by following their example. Elisabeth Elliot’s advice to girls was quoted in Eric and Leslie Ludy’s book When God Writes Your Love Story and When Dreams Come True, guiding young people through the thorny process of dating and courtship by setting before them the fairy tale story of the Ludy’s themselves. Her (and her husband’s) books are also frequently cited in the Elderidge’s books Wild at Heart and Captivating, which promise epic Hollywood love and grand quests to those who follow Christ. The message of these 2000s-era texts was absolutely not the importance of living a life of suffering, dying, abasing, and self-martyring for Christ. The promise was not for a marriage where a woman would lose her life and everything that made her who she was for Christ’s sake. The promise was to be the heroine in your own romance story. 

Indeed, even now when you read hierarchical marriage advice on The Gospel Coalition or Desiring God’s website, a huge part of the justification of the advice is that this kind of marriage is one where people find more joy, fulfillment, and desire than in other marriages. Greg Morse’s Globtrop letters depict egalitarian marriages as demeaning and sexless, whereas Morse’s marriage is bold and exciting and sexy. Elliot’s interpreters, and those who have adopted her message, insist not just on the theological rightness of their beliefs regarding marriage, but on the superior quality of marriages that look like their own. 

The idea that a hierarchical marriage is actually not supposed to be a good one seems to be exclusively a second-string defense when a hierarchical marriage turns out to be terrible – as it was in the case of Elliot’s marriage. The promise starts that hierarchical marriage is a better marriage than one would otherwise have. But, when it’s not, suddenly a hierarchical marriage is reframed as a way to bravely suffer for Christ. Now, instead of insisting on the harmony and rightness and eroticism of the hierarchical marriage, all that is swept off the table and we’re told that marriage is not supposed to make the people in it happy. It’s supposed to be holy. And, by suffering through one’s sad, painful, unfulfilling marriage, one becomes more holy.

But this is, transparently, an excuse. “Happy” and “holy” are not opposites, especially if we think of “happiness” not as a superficial dopamine rush but a general experience of peace and wellbeing. And of course, it would be odd if God designed us and ordered our lives while fully aware that his plan for our lives would result in permanent suffering. In the Torah, obedience to God is associated with blessing, and in the New Testament, God is depicted as selfless and generous towards his people. The idea that following God’s design for marriage would be a significantly worse than anyone else’s marriage does not seem characteristic of that God to me. And indeed, purposeless marital suffering is simply not what is promised by the hierarchical evangelical camp – until it’s what happens.

What Now for Elisabeth Elliot?

Austen’s biography and Grant’s article about Elliot are not hit jobs. They’re deeply empathetic pieces that truly do try to understand Elliot as she was. Indeed, I actually felt that learning about Elliot’s painful final marriage increased my empathy for the voice I heard in Passion and Purity. Without the context of Elliot’s difficult, controlling marriage, it’s easy to see her as sort of a Quisling for wives, rather than someone who was in the same impossible circumstances as the women who wrote to her and was trying to cope. 

Elliot did not deserve what happened to her. It was not her fault. Leaving an abusive marriage is hard in the best of circumstances; Elliot’s stature as an evangelical heroine likely made this unthinkable. I do not blame her for what happened, and I understand why she wrote what she did. And yet, I think a responsible reading public deserves the whole story. Elliot was a complicated woman who used theology to cope with a bad situation. This does not mean she did not believe what she said – self-sacrifice and self-blame seems to have been a key part of her psychology long before she met Lars Gren. And yet, it is okay for us to say that Elliot’s marriages were not necessarily aspirational, and following the advice that led to them might not be wise. We can say this without blaming her as a victim, and without invalidating everything she ever wrote. 

But we can stop telling her story as a fairy tale.