The Tragic Love Life of Elisabeth Elliot

Elisabeth Elliot wasn’t anything like I thought she was. And she had a string of tragic relationships with men, including an emotionally abusive relationship.

Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

It was a gut punch to finish Ellen Vaughn’s two-volume biography of Elisabeth Elliot (Becoming Elisabeth Elliot and Being Elisabeth Elliot). I expected to find human flaws, such as her infamous bluntness. I wasn’t prepared to find that Elliot, controversial in more recent years over her strict positions on submission and male leadership, was a surprisingly liberal and sophisticated reader and thinker. I also wasn’t expecting to find her love life so sad. I wasn’t expecting to find that she was stuck for decades in what appears to have been a dysfunctional, and yes, even abusive marriage. 

As I told my husband, I’m shook. 

I had planned on waiting to write anything about Elliot until I had also read Lucy S.R. Austen’s acclaimed biography, Elisabeth Elliot: A Life. But I wanted to reflect on this new (to me) information while it was still fresh. So buckle up! This is a longer piece on what I consider Elliot’s tragic love life. 

It was at times very painful to read this beautiful and sad life, which isn’t something you expect to say about one of the most successful female Christian authors and speakers of her time. (If you are unfamiliar with Elisabeth Elliot, here is a brief bio.)

Vaughn wrote the authorized version of Elisabeth Elliot’s biography and thus had access to all of her personal journals and many letters. Elliot wrote about her deepest concerns and struggles and one has to wonder how comfortable she would be with us peering over her shoulder. That said, it was a gift to see behind the veil of public persona to the beating heart of a real person, not just a person put on a pedestal by many. 

This is why it’s even more tragic that her last husband, Lars, chose to burn all of her journals from their 38 years of marriage. Why would he choose to do such a thing? One can easily imagine that it was because those journals showed what an unhappy marriage she was in and how ill-treated she was by him.¹

This was the relationship she would say nine days after her marriage, was the greatest mistake of her life. I think she was correct. ²

Oh, I’m sad for her. Sad that she tricked herself into the marriage, by essentially thinking, “I want a man, and here he is, so it must be from the Lord.” Sad that she seemed unable to read the people around her well. Lars had waved so many red flags, and she didn’t seem to pick them up. 

I’m sad that she felt her only option was to stay chained to this controlling man, who likely directed and changed the course of her life in ways she didn’t plan for herself. The fact is, with the few details that Vaughn offers us of this tragic marriage, we find nearly all of the earmarks of an emotionally and psychologically abusive marriage. It was a marriage that Vaughn said “confined and controlled her for the rest of her long life.” ³

And that is a tragedy. 

While there doesn’t appear to have been any reports of physical abuse, if you review basic information on the signs of being in an abusive relationship, you would find many in Lars and Elisabeth’s marriage. Look at the graphic on this page about power and control in abusive marriages, and then consider those dynamics in relationship to the following quotes. It’s far too easy to see the control, isolation, economic abuse, emotional abuse, and “using male privilege” in their marriage.

Here are a few quotes from the biography about her marriage to Lars. ⁴

“Like many women to whom she spoke, Elisabeth found herself in a marriage characterized by control. Her husband dictated the thermostat setting, listened in on her conversations, interrupted her time with others, criticized her habits, and often pulled her away from people she enjoyed. Elisabeth did what she counseled other women to do: she submitted. She saw Lars as her head. But she suffered.” 

“After every speech, she’d head back to the hotel room she shared with Lars and gauge his response to her presentation. If he was happy with it, all was well. If he had thought she had done a poor job, he would not speak to her and remove himself from her physically.” 

“Elisabeth could write viable truths about freedom in Christ even as her husband checked how many miles she put on the odometer and unpredictably denied her access to the daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren she loved.”

“There were also many instances when her husband’s rage, control, verbal abuse, and abrupt departures broke Elisabeth’s heart. Lars would physically leave for a while, or he would not speak to her for days.” 

Elisabeth’s brother would tell Vaughn that Lars would be “subsumed by irresistible tides of anger, his face becoming ‘purple with rage.’ Every day.” 

And it gets even worse. Elisabeth was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1995. “She was tired and did not want to travel anymore.” But yet, Lars refused to let anyone use the “A word.” and “kept her on the speaking circuit.” Why did she allow this? Because she felt like she had to submit to Lars, even as sick as she was. 

Over time she started to be unable to remember important dates and hymns, she would lose her place, and the usually neat-and-tidy Elliot would be on stage “disheveled, her blazer misbuttoned.” “On at least one occasion Lars had Elisabeth sit in a chair on the stage, mute beside a large tape recorder that played one of her messages given back in the day when she was strong and well.” 

You might be wondering where her friends and family are while this is all happening. Friends and family that it sounds like Lars had spent decades cutting her off from. 

But yes, they were concerned. So concerned that they convinced Elliot at one point to allow them to take her to an undisclosed location outside the United States after she expressed “fear and confusion” and it was obvious she needed rest. They worried that her spirit had been crushed. So they helped her escape. But in the end, she asked to be brought back to “her head.” Perhaps by then, her misery was so normal to her, she couldn’t find the will to leave it behind. 

This is tragic. 

This is abusive. 

Elisabeth Elliot’s views on female submission have come under more fire in recent years. Does it change, I wonder, how we perceive her teaching when we consider that she was writing them while living in an unhealthy marriage? This is not the first time a woman who wrote the strongest words on what submission should look like, was found later to have been in a toxic and abusive relationship. 

Christian marriages should aim for mutual flourishing, not suffering, regardless of your position on male leadership and female submission. 

How did this strong woman, known for her ability to use her words for both healing and harm, find herself reduced to such a state? 

I have wondered if her earlier relationships set her up for this final one. I know that’s a surprise, considering her first marriage was to THE Jim Elliot. The man who bravely let himself be speared to death instead of defending himself as he tried to bring the gospel to an unreached tribe. The man who inspired a generation of Christians. 

But she does appear to have a pattern of accepting the unacceptable in all three of her relationships. Lars is the most obvious and painful of the three. But a brief word on her other relationships. 

The great love of her life, we find in her words, was not Jim, although it’s clear she dearly loved him. The great love of her life was Addison Leitch, a beloved seminary professor, and her second husband. It seems that sparks flew between them when they first met, even though he was married. The next time she was in town, they met up, without his wife who was dying of cancer. 

Here they not only had long conversations, but Addison made suggestive remarks to Elisabeth such as, “You’re the best thing that’s happened to me in a long time. Is there any way I can show my affection for you?” and “If you’d find the place I’d kiss you goodbye. And it wouldn’t be a holy one, either.” And yes, he did in fact, a married Christian man, kiss her “lightly two or three times upon leaving.” ⁵

Yes, this was the Passion and Purity author flirting with and kissing a married man whose wife was dying of cancer. (!!!!) 

They would marry soon after his wife died. 

His death, five years after they married, was the biggest blow of her life. He was able to meet her intellectually, was able to support and encourage her talent, and was able to bring her into his lively and intellectual life. He was able to become a father to her child Valerie. He was someone who was not intimidated by his wife’s talents and prestige but seemed to delight in her. In many ways, these short years with him were the happiest of her life. And their short years together, before cancer killed him, were incredibly sweet to read, if you ignored the creepy way their relationship started. 

But there was a fly in even this ointment. In the past Addison, in the words of Vaughn, as a “sensual person” had tried to go “too far in his relationships with female students” and “other behaviors that would never be tolerated today.”⁶ Vaughn doesn’t offer enough information to understand the categories we are talking about here: was Addison dating students before he was married? Was this happening when he was married to his first wife? Was he sexually harassing? Abusing? What lines are we talking about here?

Regardless, even here in her happiest relationship, you have to wonder whether she was tolerating the intolerable. With very little information given to us, Vaughn tells us that Elisabeth “understood and forgave him” for this past crossing of lines. 

I can only wonder whether a professor who used his position to “cross lines” with female students, if he had lived long, would have caused heartbreak and scandal for them both. Addison seemed to understand, appreciate, and love Elisabeth best of all of her husbands. But there was arguably unhealth here too. 

This isn’t to say that she didn’t love Jim Elliot, her first husband. It was clear that she adored and loved him passionately. She waited around for five years, allowing Jim all the time in the world to decide whether to marry her or not. After his death, she would dream for years of being reunited with him. And she even seemed in a nearly suicidal state at times, half-expecting and almost wanting to also be speared to death, like he was.

“If Valerie survives,” she chillingly wrote to her parents as she planned on going to the once-violent tribe that had killed Jim and his four friends. She, like Jim, was ready to die for Christ. But maybe a little too ready. 

She certainly seemed to love Jim. 

One had to question how Jim’s views of Elisabeth’s unattractiveness impacted Elisabeth’s views of herself. Jim, at times, treated Elisabeth as not good enough. When Jim confronted Elisabeth about how she was treating another woman, he told her that he hadn’t been proud of her that day. She wrote in her journal, “Has he ever said, “I was proud of you today?” ⁷

If they had lived long together, maybe some of these rough aspects of their marriage would have gotten worked out. After all, all marriages have problem areas. Yet, he died early, leaving these early words of their relationship hanging in the air, even though there were better, softer, passionate, more loving words there too. His last journal entry bemoaned his sexual struggles and discussed how he had to “steel himself” for their sex life. This is hardly romantic. He admitted feeling unworthy of her love. There were times as I read their love story that I would agree with that assessment. ⁸

I’ve questioned what impact Jim’s not-so-romantic perspective of Elisabeth’s worth had on her. That perhaps she bought into the lie that she didn’t deserve anything better than the way Lars treated her. 

I don’t know. What surprises me is how unattractive she seemed to consider herself, despite the fact that many men appear to have found her attractive. She would write about herself in Passion and Purity as being a wallflower and not attractive to men and repeated honest descriptions of how unattractive Jim found her. Yet before she met Jim she had many boyfriends and young men seriously pursuing her, and she appeared to always have men falling in love with her throughout her life, even when they, or she, wasn’t available. But it seemed like Jim’s assessment of her was the one she adopted. 

When she had a dream while married to Addison that Jim Elliot was alive after all, and that she had to choose between them, she decided that it would make the most sense to choose the one who cared the most about her decision. She wrote, “Jim, I decided, could hardly care less.”⁹ Which was fine by her, because she realized that she loved Addison best. That she would feel that Jim would care so little is a sad sign. 

When I think of her as she was as a single woman before she married Addison and later Lars, I see a different person than the straight-laced woman she became known as. This was a woman who enjoyed hampers of wine, given to her by her secular photographer friend (a male friend who propositioned her, and she turned him down). This was a woman who loved to hike and read secular novels, and hoped and dreamed about writing beautiful works of fiction for the secular world. This is a woman who met a female friend and writer at a cottage where they sunbathed and ate lunch naked. This was a woman who retreated from unfair criticism from her Christian audience by diving into a Hemingway book. This was a paradoxical woman who was both very formal and offended at things like mini skirts, yet also bought herself a Playboy to check out both the writing and to see what sort of women they featured. This was a woman who was severely against the Christian machine in missions and the evangelical world and wanted, above all else, to proclaim truth. Truth, she saw, sometimes more easily found in the shadows of redemption in a secular novel, than the pious, simple-minded truism shared from many pulpits. 

How confusing and ironic that she would become such a cog of that same machine in the decades that followed then under the “strong control and shrewd management” of Lars. 

Who, I wonder, would Elisabeth Elliot become if she had not married Lars? 

I have no doubt that she would continue to follow Christ in everything. But her path might have looked different. Maybe she would have hiked more, cried over beautiful music more, and written her next novel. Maybe, like her dogs she loved to watch run free, she would have been able to create out of freedom instead of coercive control. 

Here is what Elisabeth Elliot knew well. Life is tragic. The one novel (No Graven Image) she wrote early in her career greatly confused her Christian audience who were used to neat and tidy storylines. Her novel, like her life, showed that following God doesn’t mean understanding his ways. It doesn’t mean looking for redemption tied in pretty bows. It means accepting when you don’t understand. 

A review at the time of its release called it “A curiously sombre and moving book.” 

Her main character, Margaret, a single female missionary, who has experiences much like Elisabeth did, finds through gut-wrenching losses that God was not “merely my accomplice” to her plans. If he was, then he had betrayed that role. No, God wasn’t her accomplice, but rather her God, and in that realization “he had freed me.” 

At the end of the book, Margaret lies near the grave of a man, Pedro, who had been her greatest hope for translating the Bible. She had accidentally killed Pedro by giving him antibiotics for an infection, and then he had an allergic reaction to it and died.  As she lay by his grave, a condor flies above them, and over the surrounding mountains, lakes, and valleys. Margaret may not understand why God had failed to help her do good work for him as a missionary, but perhaps here she lay at peace and acceptance, giving up her ideas and hope for the life she longed for.  

“This is just not the ending you want for anyone,” I told my husband after finishing Vaugh’s biography. 

“Maybe her life ended like her novel,” He told me. 

Yes, maybe it did.

But like her Christian audience reading her fictional character Margaret, we find ourselves wishing more for her. 

1. Vaughn’s biography ends abruptly because of this. We get very little information about the last 38 years of Elisabeth Elliot’s life, because of the loss of those journals, which Vaugh used as a main source. This was a disappointment to me, and another reason I will be reading Lucy Austen’s biography, as I understand those years of her life are more fleshed out in her version.

2. Being Elisabeth Elliot, page 264

3. page 269

4. All quotes found in chapter 38 of Being Elisabeth Elliot

5. page 104

6. Page 154

7. Becoming Elisabeth Elliot, page 148

8. Page 149

9. Being Elisabeth Elliot, page 169