I did not know that Virginia Mollenkott would die several months later. But I imagine that she suspected it. And that’s why she told me.
I was interviewing Mollenkott for a new history of evangelicalism and homosexuality in the United States that I was writing, a history of how antigay stances came to dominate and define the evangelical movement. Back in the 1970s, Mollenkott had been part of a network of evangelical gay activists who knew that evangelical homophobia had not always been so dominant. This network advocated for the full acceptance of gay and lesbian people within evangelicalism, and for a few years, they were surprisingly influential.
During our interview, in May 2020, Mollenkott abruptly detoured: “I’m thinking about Elisabeth Elliot.”
A recent biography calls Elliot “one of the most widely known Christians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” After her husband Jim was speared to death while evangelizing the Huaorani people of Ecuador in 1956, Elliot became an evangelical celebrity and wrote multiple bestselling books, including Through Gates of Splendor and Shadow of the Almighty. Millions of evangelical women know her as the author of Passion and Purity, a crucial text for evangelical purity culture. In the 1970s and 1980s, she was one of the evangelical movement’s leading voices against feminism, which, as she put it, attacked God’s “glorious hierarchical vision.”
That’s why Mollenkott was surprised to see her at a conference for evangelical feminists, the Evangelical Women’s Caucus, over Thanksgiving weekend in 1975. As Mollenkott shared in our recorded interview, she had been standing in the cafeteria line at that 1975 conference when she felt two arms reach around her from behind. A survivor of abuse at the hands of her mother, Mollenkott instinctively pushed the arms away, then spun around. It was Elisabeth Elliot.
According to Mollenkott, she and Elliot had been “extremely close” for about a decade. Letha Scanzoni, who co-authored with Mollenkott a book called Is the Homosexual My Neighbor?, chose almost the same phrasing when I interviewed her in April 2020: Mollenkott and Elliot used to be “very, very close,” Scanzoni said.
Flustered by the uninvited embrace in the cafeteria, Mollenkott asked Elliot what she was doing at the conference. Elliot replied, “Well, I’m an evangelical, and I’m a woman, aren’t I?” In fact, Elliot was there to write a hit piece for an antifeminist evangelical periodical. “But the truth is,” she continued, “I came to straighten you out. And I want to see you alone.”
Mollenkott glanced around the cafeteria to see if anyone was watching them. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll come to your room.” She had unfinished business with Elliot.
When Mollenkott arrived in Elliot’s room, she wasted no time. “You know,” Mollenkott said, “I hear you’re telling audiences that I’m gay.” (Mollenkott was still in the closet, and would be until the 1980s.) Elliot did not respond, just stared back at her. As Mollenkott recounted:
So, I said, “If you keep it up, I’m gonna say to people, ‘Ask her how she knows.’” And she fell down on her knees in front of me and said, “You could destroy me, Virginia.” And I said, “Yes, I could, Elisabeth. Except that I’m not that kind of person.” So that’s how we ended that [here she paused] aspect of our friendship. Not only was she extremely close to me at one time … she was also very close to another woman, that I know of. And then she got married for the second time, and finally the third time.… Oh boy, what I’ve seen.
Elliot herself corroborated part of Mollenkott’s story. In her 1979 book Love Has a Price Tag, Elliot described her visit to the 1975 conference of the Evangelical Women’s Caucus: “A few women who had read some of my writings greeted me with an astonished ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘I’m an evangelical woman, am I not?’ I said.”
In the words of Letha Scanzoni:
For years afterward, in many forms, [Elliot] would speak negatively about that gathering [of the Evangelical Women’s Caucus in 1975] and single out Virginia Mollenkott and me by name for our views expressed there.… Nevertheless, a few weeks after the conference, she sent me a beautiful Christmas card and said it had been so good to see me even though our time was “tantalizing in its brevity.”
In Being Elisabeth Elliot, a biography authorized by Elliot’s family, Ellen Vaughn calls Virginia Mollenkott an “old friend” of Elliot. Lucy S. R. Austen, who wrote the more recent biography, provides more details: Elliot and Mollenkott had been students at the same Christian boarding school, and in the mid-1960s they exchanged letters and visited each other’s homes. Around that time, as both biographers reveal, Elliot articulated a remarkable reflection on homosexuality in a letter to her mother:
The problem is far more complex than a simple matter of sin…. Sin only enters when the law of love is transgressed if I understand Jesus’ interpretation of the law. David and Jonathan clearly had a much deeper love than the usual man-to-man friendship. They met in secret, they kissed one another, and they frankly said it passed the love of women. I’m not building a doctrine on this—I only want to face up honestly to what we are told in Scripture, not ignoring or explaining away any facet of it. Perhaps the truth is that there are no such things as lines drawn, coincident with sex. Love is the great thing.
Neither biographer lingers on the question of how this reflection might have been related to Elliot’s personal experiences of attraction.
As a historian, it is my job to ferret around in the closets of the deceased, which I do without apology. In this case, though, I wasn’t ferreting. Instead, a still-living subject chose to reach back into her own closet and give me something that she had previously given only to her closest confidants.
Why did Virginia Mollenkott do this? I confess that I do not know.
What I do know is that Mollenkott and Elliot were alike in many ways. Both were survivors of trauma. Both felt alone at times in their pain, their doubt, their desire. In short, both were like many of us.
I also know that Mollenkott despised hypocrisy—including her own. That said, she also respected hypocrisy. That is, she respected its power to teach us things we need to learn. When someone says one thing and does something else, it is important not simply to criticize what has been done but to reconsider what has been said. When someone’s professed ideals or instructions do not align with their own experiences, Mollenkott believed that we should take those experiences seriously. Let our experiences speak back to our professed ideals and instructions. Let compassion speak back to purity.
There is much that we cannot know about Elisabeth Elliot’s personal life. But Mollenkott’s testimony to me, in light of Elliot’s own words, suggests an intimate relationship with Mollenkott (and, as Mollenkott put it, yet “another woman”). If so, some would say that Elliot’s exalted reputation among evangelicals should be reevaluated. I think that they are right, but there is a bigger takeaway here: conservative evangelicals’ own lives testify to the untenability of their teaching. Even their most exalted teachers fail to embody the purity that they themselves demand. And this revelation, quite apart from any one individual’s legacy, is the secret that evangelicals want to keep in their closets.