That time I went a little viral

The sexuality of an Evangelical hero was interesting. Who knew?

When you grow up Evangelical, nobody talks about sex. Unless I’d been born, I doubt I’d be quite sure that it had ever happened in our house.

When I started writing here on Medium about sexual themes in Christianity, it seemed an obscure subject. Evangelicals—and sex? I was interested in a range of sexual subjects in regard to the religion. I wrote a post on the religion’s great sex hero, Jim Elliot—the “purest” one of all.

A week ago, my “Stats” were skyrocketing.

My article from nearly a year earlier on the “purity culture,” which examined the sexuality of Evangelical hero Jim Elliot, was getting noticed? The Bible scholar Charles Marsh posted it to his Twitter account, with a note:

“Evangelicals of a certain generation, it all makes sense now.”

I was feeling the same way. Little in my background made sense, so I had to go in and figure it out myself.

Jim Elliot died in 1956, but many Evangelicals, like me, had grown up with his memory.

He was young, handsome, dynamic, interesting. That’s not how Evangelicals usually are. If you were a boy you’d be given copies of his published journals. I’d gotten them for Christmas — several times.

He was the very image of being “on fire for God,” whatever that meant.

Then, decades later, his widow, Elisabeth Elliot, launched the “purity culture” using the story of their courtship and marriage. Most any Evangelical teenager, boys and girls, would be given Passion and Purity, her dating guide.

Her advice for most everything was . . . don’t.

The “purity” guru Joshua Harris had gone on to re-write Passion and Purity for a new generation in his mega-selling 1997 book I Kissed Dating Goodbye. The Elliot story was re-told endlessly. But who was Jim? The man who’d been so reluctant to have sex, or get married.

Could it be because he…wasn’t heterosexual?

The article picked up 12k new views in hours. I was fascinated to see many Evangelical readers thinking about it, and commenting.

I’m so flabbergasted after reading this, I don’t know what to say.

This… really makes a lot of sense. And it makes me feel a lot of compassion for a young, confused, maybe not-straight Jim Elliot.

There were threads of discussion on many platforms. I was amazed: Were Evangelicals talking about sex?

A few scholars were chiming in, throwing doubt on my case. They were from Evangelical institutions.

I mean, it’s all plausible but I’d need to see a scholarly (i.e. footnotes, citations) to assess the validity of the claim.

It’d all been public. All the strangeness, the agonies and tantrums, the censorship and distortions of hero-worship.

There were so many attacks on me—it felt like a family reunion.

Was it mostly Evangelical men commenting angrily? I used to wonder if the mental institutions had overflowed into churches.

And the other way around?

This piece is Such. Pure. Crap. I can’t even believe I read the whole thing. The agenda is quite clear here.

Someone who doesn’t know me, and barely read a brief article, knows my ‘agenda’. What a gifted analyst! It makes determining sexuality from a mountain of biographical evidence seem trivial.

I guess my “agenda” might include trying to get Evangelicals to stop attacking gay people. There might be morbid self-reflection at having kept up their hateful campaign when their own “role model” was gay.

But for me the real “agenda” was trying to speak to a community that just doesn’t read people very well. Meanwhile, they say they have expert ability to read the Bible.

It was a culture of people who were now, in comments, saying they’d privately had suspicions about the Elliot romance.

Their intuition — had been suppressed? How confusing life would be without intuition, without a concept of sexuality, or much knowledge of sex.

There were commentators all over the world.

Many noted that the Elliot romance had been a formative influence on them. It had been the heart of Evangelicalism—constant focus on sexual restraint, trying to abandon “lust” in order to achieve some divine state.

Chrissy Stroop, the trans Christian scholar, was promoting the article, with an added discussion of ‘queer’ missionaries. Could the real story of the famous Jim Elliot missionary to Ecuador have been that Evangelicalism pushed its “sexual rejects” to leave America?

Gregory Thornbury, the Christian writer, calling my article a “must read,” notes: “Pastors & parents who made us all read Elisabeth Elliott’s Passion & Purity were participating in a massive fraud.”

On Saturday afternoon, my article was being promoted by the religion journalist Jonathan Merritt, who gave it a dramatic framing: the Eliot story “may have all been a fraud.”

A comment on his FaceBook page summed up how I view my writing.

And a brush with celebrity.

Joan Thomas, author of the well-reviewed novel Five Wives, about the wives of the missionary men who’d been killed, had a useful caution — that “it’s almost impossible to cut through the ideological jargon in both Jim and Betty’s writing and know of what either of them felt.”

That was true. They were each highly concealed beings. As one would expect, perhaps, for an Evangelical hero.

People were recalling the strangeness of meeting Elisabeth Elliot—who was the great sexual teacher of the Evangelical world, and often described as weirdly cold in person.

I remember meeting her in 92. Had a fairly long conversation & thinking to myself how what she said & acted in person was far different than how she came across in her books.

And the story seemed to be continuing? A Ph.D. student studying religion and sexuality at Princeton tweeted that he’d “acquired some very related evidence about Elisabeth Elliot.”

I reflected on the culture that made heroes of two odd people whose relationship was just weird.

It’s as if many were suddenly seeing through the Elliot illusion?

Incredible piece. For those in the Wheaton orbit of evangelicalism, the Jim and Elisabeth Elliot story is the stuff of sacred legend.

The “official” narratives were being set aside in order to look at reality. The hero might not be some divine servant, but rather, a Jim Elliot who’d been panicked at heterosexuality and seemed eager to die, long before he did.

Not an uncommon 1950s-era story.

An Elisabeth Elliot who’d re-written his journals and letters into a fiction the Evangelical world wanted to hear. It became a crown jewel for a culture that both warred on LGBT people, and used them as models of divine detachment from sexuality.

I attended a fundamentalist Bible College in the ‘80’s and a lot of the boys spoke exactly like Jim. I understood when I matured a bit that most were battling with their sex drive and in many cases taking out their hate for themselves on the hapless young ladies they strung along.

Would it be time now to discuss other Christian heroes who were arguably LGBT?

When Charles Marsh’s 2014 biography, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, had broached that Christian hero’s apparent homosexuality, it was met with horror. The review at the Evangelical site, The Gospel Coalition, called it “reprehensible,” “unnerving,” and encouraged people not to read it.

I checked the stats on my article: 50k, and climbing.

Some readers were going on emotional journeys. The “purity culture” in the 1990s — and still — left many feeling damaged. It told you the great achievement of life was having sex only after marriage.

Not getting to know someone. Or yourself.

Gay readers were picking up on cues in Jim’s story to their own lives.

“Damn, if I had a nickel for every time I was told my feelings were irrelevant, or that feelings would lead me away from God. . . . And I bought into this bullshit story.”

Others were reading Jim as not gay, but something related?

I loved the process of sympathetic discussion of an Evangelical hero’s sexuality, whatever it might be.

Yeah I don’t know that we could really know if Jim Elliot was gay, and it’s not really the key point. Their marriage was clearly not the joyous one we’ve been led to believe in by purity culture hawkers, and that’s true regardless of either one’s sexuality

Maybe it’s just me, but I interpreted him as a homoromantic asexual, who had no idea that any other identity than cishet was acceptable. Lots of self-hatred on both their parts.

The ‘sacred legend’ was a lot easier.

“Elisabeth Elliott was always a walking contradiction. A career author and speaker whose central thesis was that men are leaders and women are to know their place.”

A podcast on progressive Christian ideas of sex was discussing my article, not wanting to go near the gay possibility. Well, it’d been a long day.

Would higher-ups in Evangelical clerical circles take notice?

I checked Beth Moore’s Twitter account—finding a new thread, not about anything Elliot, but urging Christian leaders to be honest about themselves.

I had a feeling she was thinking about the Elliot story. She writes:

“How much better to lead with authenticity so we can share how God got us through? So people will know they’re not alone? And maybe have courage enough to do what it takes? I’ll tell you this from 40 years of servant-leadership. Pedestals are good for one thing: falling off of.”