Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Conservative's biggest culture war lie is that the culture war has been their own established war for centuries.

"1:10 -- Who's hung up on woke, conix. You and the dick comedian who is 'so
sick and tired of speaking about woke culture' that he's debating about it."

Related:

Weird (Culture) War Tales
[...]WEIRD.
Sorry, dorks, it ain’t our fault the straightjacket fits y’all so snugly. If you don’t wanna get labeled “weird,” maybe don’t spend every waking moment shrieking about Jewish space lasers and bamboo fibers and furry kids shitting in litter boxes and pizzagate and frazzledrip and the second coming of JFK Jr. and horse dewormer and the ten million other equally loony things that’ve set you nutjobs off since you decided to start worshipping a rapist game show host. Shit, y’all can’t even attempt the violent overthrow of the federal government without dressing like psychos. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174859199

conix, No, no problem at all "Having a problem with cited news outlets, fuagf?"
When i disagree with an opinion i give reasons, and or evidence, for the why.
P - I don't just dismiss it as so many culture war conservatives as you do with the word woke.
P - And i don't abuse a concept which was obviously a positive effort to warn American blacks to keep an eye
open for dangers around them by ridiculing it, either to boost my own ego or to boost my audience.
P - As janice said who talks about it other than those who decry talking about it as
Maher and others and those who want to keep your culture war going as you ..
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174645034

B402, Well, your conservatives have nurtured the idea of 'woke' as in a woke part of culture war.
Your conservatives have stripped it of it's original very decent, well meaning and very cool
meaning to blacks, that is the idea of being awake to the dangers around them.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174642711

Elisabeth Elliot, Flawed Queen of Purity Culture, and Her Disturbing Third Marriage

by Liz Charlotte Grant
Published on February 6, 2024

Was the famous evangelical woman in a manipulative marriage?


(Illustration of Elisabeth Elliot. Image source: East West Ministry)

Like many millennial evangelical women of the 2000s, I read Passion and Purity as a teenager, the memoir and advice book by purity culture pioneer, Elisabeth Elliot. Elliot’s 1984 epistolary account offers dating tips and tells the story of her courtship with Jim Elliot, her famed martyr husband who died of impalement at the hands of the “unreached” Waodani tribe in the jungles of Ecuador in 1956, while making passing references to the two husbands who followed him (she was widowed twice).

At 18, I consumed her words eagerly, hungry for romance, though I myself was single with no marriage prospects in sight. I loved her example of courtship, of “saving yourself” for ecstatic marital sex, of the hand of God directing a humble woman’s love life. But as much as I prayed to follow her example, it never worked for me.

Now, at age 36 and in a happy egalitarian marriage, I see her words differently. Today, I lean decidedly progressive in my politics and Christian beliefs, and so Elliot’s words seem not just dated or fantastical, but misogynistic.

I’m not the only one to find Elliot’s words polarizing. During her five-decades-long writing career—she published 48 books, spoke internationally at Christian churches and conferences, and gained household recognition through the 13-year run of her daily radio show—where she stoutly defended marital “complementarianism” as fundamental to the Christian faith. Complementarianism is a theological justification for patriarchal gender roles; it is the ideological underpinning of “purity culture .. https://therevealer.org/tainted-love-reckoning-with-the-damage-of-purity-culture/ ,” a movement that taught teenagers that pre-marital sex will harm themselves and their future relationships and encouraged sexual repression (especially for queer and female teenagers). Like other purity culture leaders, Elliot emphasized marriage as the “penultimate human experience,” only topped by pregnancy for women or a life devoted to the church for men (even better: martyrdom for God). Elliot’s triangle of authority—God on top, then man, then woman — .. https://bible.org/seriespage/25-essence-femininity-personal-perspective .. has resonated for decades within evangelical communities, influencing at least three generations toward conservative views on gender roles and sexuality.

Certainly, Elliot’s views have harmed women. Enforcing a culture of male dominance has consequences. Some of my friends have experienced marital rape and domestic violence in their evangelical marriages. Another friend found that her father expected her to become a “stay-at-home daughter,” and received limited education and even more limited freedom as a teenager. Others only recognized they were queer after they finally became sexually active in their heterosexual marriages.

Personally, Elliot’s teachings did not harm my sexuality as much as my sense of self. She taught that God was male. I took this to mean that men were holier and more like God, that I could never come close to the life demanded of me within the Scriptures, that I myself—my body, my femaleness—was inherently bad. As a result, I developed a binge eating disorder to hide myself, a disorder that I still struggle with to this day.

Because of Elliot’s prominence and ties to influential organizations and leaders, such as Bill Gothard of Shiny Happy People fame and James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Elliot became a controversial figure. Both conservative and liberal Christians made her a symbol of what’s right (or wrong) with Christianity’s relationship to women.

Yet as I read two recent Elliot biographies published in 2023, I did not see a symbol or figurehead, but a real live breathing woman. Lucy R.S. Austen’s Elisabeth Elliot: A Life (Crossway) released in June, and Ellen Vaughn’s Being Elisabeth Elliot (B&H Books), the second installment in a series on Elliot, came out in September. Elliot’s foundation and family commissioned Vaughn’s biographies and gained praise in conservative evangelical circles. Austen, on the other hand, undertook the task independently and earned praise from both the author of Jesus and John Wayne, Kristin Kobez Dumez, a respected feminist historian of evangelicalism, and The Gospel Coalition, a conservative evangelical online magazine known for its support of traditional gender roles.

To my surprise, after spending nearly 900 pages absorbed in the life of Elisabeth Elliot, I found myself less disturbed by her ideas and more disturbed by the trajectory of her life. Widowed twice, a wife of three husbands in all, her marital relationships appeared to become more dysfunctional the older she got, culminating in a third marriage both biographers describe circumspectly as loveless, disappointing, and manipulative, to put it mildly. In fact, one question still haunts me about the life of Elliot, the woman so enamored with love as to make it her career: was Elisabeth Elliot abused by her third husband? And if so, how should we evaluate her life and work?

Who was Elisabeth Elliot?

Elisabeth Elliot (Betty to her family) rose to prominence after her husband Jim was murdered in 1956. The couple had been serving as Brethren missionaries in Ecuador, translating the New Testament for Indigenous tribes when Jim and a group of other young missionary men undertook a dangerous mission to meet with the Waodani tribe, an uncontacted and war-torn Amazonian tribe. The men were killed within days of landing in the tribe’s territory, each speared through with a lance. Though Elisabeth and Jim had “courted” for years, they had only been married for three; their daughter was barely ten-months-old at Jim’s death.

Suddenly, alongside managing her grief, Elisabeth needed to decide whether to stay or leave the region (to her family’s astonishment, she chose to stay to try and reach the tribe that had murdered her husband). She had to adjust to single parenting while responding to dozens of interview requests. The deaths of five American missionary men in South America made headlines, including as a feature story in Time magazine. The other widows elected Elliot as their spokesperson. Over the next decade, Elliot published several books about her husband Jim and their missionary team and became a sought-after speaker.


(Elisabeth Elliot. Image source: International Mission Board)

This Elliot was not the “toe the party line” Elisabeth Elliot of purity culture fame. No, this intellectual widow in her thirties taught the Bible to both men and women (though it was controversial for women to teach the Bible to men), left her daughter at home with a friend to travel for her career, moved freely amongst the New York City literati (she shared a literary agent with Robert Frost and Madeline L’Engle), and openly expressed disdain at Christian publishing for habitually making stories “neat and tidy.” This Elliot courted the ideas of feminism and gained a reputation as being argumentative and opinionated. In fact, during this period, Elliot even published a controversial novel, No Graven Image, that, in no uncertain terms, criticized the church’s idolization of missionaries. (She received very mixed reviews.)

So, how did this woman become the female figurehead of the complementarian evangelical movement of the 1970s to 2000s, warning against the influence of feminism on the church?

Becoming an Advocate for Traditional Gender Roles

The answer to Elliot’s transformation can be found in examining her love life. Each of her three marriages led Elliot toward increasingly conservative ideas about the role and function of women within the home and church.

First, Jim Elliot: his journals inspired her own work for decades, and their relationship came to serve as an example she held out for others to follow in the coming years.

Then, Addison Leitch: an older conservative Presbyterian seminary professor who the biographer Austen describes as “tradition[al],…against questioning, an institutionalist to the core” who once wrote that “the conversation around women’s liberation is ‘stupid.’” Before her second marriage, Elliot had openly expressed disgust at the way Christian institutions adopted legalistic rules and expectations, such as advocating temperance despite Jesus turning water to wine. She had also conversed curiously with feminist Christians. However, after marrying Leitch, friends and family noticed that her views rapidly shifted to match her new husband’s, taking on an institutional bent, and arguing alongside her husband for the “unconditional obedience” of wives.

Last, Lars Gren: here lies Elliot’s most disturbing theological turn. When cancer overtook Leitch in 1973, Elliot was again widowed. She remained unattached for five years even as Gren, a seminarian who had rented a room from the middle-aged author, pursued her. Eventually, he proposed, telling Elliot, “I want to build…fences around you, and I want to stand on all sides.” The fifty-year-old woman often felt overwhelmed by the demands of her career and interpreted Gren’s words as protective and supportive. Unfortunately, Elliot misunderstood the intention behind these words. Gren meant his words literally: he wanted to fence her in.

Biographer Ellen Vaughn describes the logic of Elliot’s third marriage like this: “I could see… Elisabeth’s understandable loneliness, deep need for affirmation, physical hunger, weariness, and desire to be ‘protected’ [that] gradually, insidiously, led her, step by cajoling step, into a difficult third marriage that confined and controlled her for the rest of her long life.” Elliot “exchange[d]…freedom for security. She became a person whose highest value was the desire to feel secure.” Unfortunately, Gren had no safety to offer, and his presence only exacerbated Elliot’s pain.

His intentions became clear immediately, and Elliot later admitted to close friends that within hours of their wedding ceremony she realized she’d made a mistake in marrying Gren.

[...]

As I read reviews of Austen’s and Vaughn’s biographies and interviews with the authors, I discovered a troubling trend: evangelical publications who reviewed the books—such as Christianity Today, The Gospel Coalition, and World’s podcast and magazine—leave off mentioning Lars Gren. They never address the dissonance between Elliot’s teachings and her third marriage. Not one review uses the word “abuse.” In fact, both Elliot biographies omit the word, too.

What do evangelical institutions today gain by obscuring the truth about Elliot’s third marriage? What makes them so hesitant to admit the failures of their leaders when doing so might offer healing to their victims?

Perhaps they find the truth threatening. In her best moments, Elliot didn’t. She once wrote, “It is truth alone which liberates.”

I suggest we follow her advice.

Liz Charlotte Grant (on Threads, Instagram and Facebook @LizCharlotteGrant) is an award-winning freelance writer in Denver, Colorado whose newsletter, the Empathy List, has twice been nominated for a Webby Award. She’s published essays and op-eds at Religion News Service, Huffington Post, Sojourners, and elsewhere, and her debut book, Knock at the Sky: Seeking God in Genesis after Losing Faith in the Bible, releases in 2024 with Eerdmans publishing.

Issue: February 2024

https://therevealer.org/elisabeth-elliot-flawed-queen-of-purity-culture-and-her-manipulative-third-husband/