Christianity Today republishes article about Elisabeth Elliot's sexuality
Christianity Today republished an article Friday that had earlier been removed amid backlash for speculating on the sexuality of the late Elisabeth Elliot, wife of the famous martyred missionary Jim Elliot.
CT first published "What We Know—and Cannot Know—About Elisabeth Elliot's Sexuality" by Elisabeth Elliot biographer Lucy S.R. Austen on Oct. 15. Her piece was in response to a July 2026 essay published in ARC magazine by historian William Stell, who specializes in queer studies in the Department of Religious Studies at New York University.
Based on material from his book Born Again Queer: The History of Evangelical Gay Activism and the Making of Antigay Christianity, Stell drew on a 2020 interview he did with the late Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, a lesbian Evangelical feminist who advocated for LGBT inclusion in the church and co-authored the 1978 book Is the Homosexual My Neighbor?
In the interview, audio of which Protestia published Saturday, then-88-year-old Mollenkott described an alleged private encounter with Elliot at the Evangelical Women's Conference in 1975. According to Mollenkott, she confronted Elliot about telling audiences not to listen to her because of her lesbianism and threatened to reveal Elliot's alleged same-sex attractions.
Mollenkott claimed Elliot fell to her knees and replied, "You could destroy me, Virginia."
"And I said, 'Yes, I could, Elisabeth, except I'm not that kind of person,'" Mollenkott said.
Audio of Virginia Mollenkott making unfounded, unproven allegations against Elisabeth Elliot that the Christianity Today article ran with. https://t.co/FNocvSqZlE
— Protestia (@Protestia) October 17, 2026
Elliot, who famously evangelized the Auca tribe in Ecuador after they murdered her first husband in 1956 as he attempted to share the Gospel with them, died in 2015 at the age of 88. The author of nearly 50 books, including Through the Gates of Splendor and Passion and Purity, she taught for decades about the importance of sexual purity, evangelism and the role of suffering.
Mollenkott died in 2020, five months after the recording with Stell. Her last book, titled Omnigender: A Trans-religious Approach, was written to honor "intersexual, trans-sexual, or otherwise-gendered individuals" in the church, according to a description.
Austen wrote that Stell’s material, "in context, strongly suggests that Elliot was what we would now call bisexual." She acknowledged that both women are dead, Mollenkott's recollection was decades later and uncorroborated, and that "we can't know whether the conversation happened as Mollenkott described—or indeed whether it happened at all."
Citing Elliot's private papers archived at Wheaton College, Austen showed close interactions between the two women in the mid-1960s, including a 1964 letter in which Elliot reflected on the biblical friendship of David and Jonathan as love that "passed the love of women," along with other contextual details.
"There should be nothing shocking or scandalous about the mere discovery that Elliot was attracted to women as well as men," she wrote, arguing that a same-sex "crush" is "not intrinsically wrong" and that Pew Research has found that about a third of LGBT-identifying Americans claim to be Christians.
As backlash against CT and the article erupted on social media Thursday, with some accusing the publication of slandering a Christian woman who cannot defend herself, the article at first went to a 404 page that read, "Oops! Looks like this page is formless and void."
Hours after Marvin Olasky published a farewell as editor-in-chief of CT on Friday, the outlet republished Austen's article with an editor's note by Erik Petrik, who began last week as its new editor-in-chief and chief content officer. CT had announced on Oct. 2 that Petrik would succeed Olasky.
"On Thursday, October 15, 2026, CT published an article by biographer Lucy S. R. Austen regarding Elisabeth Elliot’s sexuality. Austen, whose Crossway biography of Elliot won a CT Book Award in 2024, was writing in response to a piece published earlier this year in the magazine ARC by historian William Stell," Petrik wrote.
"In the midst of internal leadership transitions, Austen’s article was not reviewed prior to publication by some key members of our content team," Petrik added. "I removed the article from our website until that review could take place and the piece could be properly framed. The review has now occurred, and the article is once again live on our site as of Friday, October 16, 2026."
CT did not respond to a request for comment from The Christian Post, though Petrik told The Roys Report on Friday: "When we make an error in process or content, we correct it openly and say so. That is what we did here and I will continue to be committed to making sure we hold to our policy as well as make sure our work makes sense to the broad CT audience."
CT's willingness to publish, delete and then repost speculation about the sexuality of a martyr's late wife, based on evidence critics described as thin, prompted pushback from many Christians.
"Christianity Today has officially lost its ever-living mind," Republican Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith wrote on X. "Trying to rewrite the legacy of one of Christianity's most influential women to fit today's cultural narratives is beyond ridiculous."
"What Christianity Today became in the last 10 years is one of the greatest losses for American Christianity in the modern era," wrote Josh Howerton, senior pastor of Lakepointe Church in Rockwall, Texas. "Has already been true for years, but 'Farewell, CT.'"
Howerton offered his explanation for why he believes CT has seemingly drifted leftward, noting it "was originally founded in some measure to be 'between' liberalism and fundamentalism (defined in terms of a 1970’s Overton Window)."
"In some ways I think that vision got translated so that CT picked a spot in the Overton Window and tried to stay there. The problem was that as culture sprinted radically Left, in order to stay in the same spot in the cultural / political Overton Window, CT had to spring Left too," he added.
Pastor Denny Burk, president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood who also serves as associate professor of biblical studies at Boyce College in Louisville, Kentucky, called the story "outlandish."
"The scandal here is not Elliot," Burk wrote. "The scandal is that the article provides exactly zero evidence to support the claim that Elliot was a bisexual. Zero. None. Nada."
Burk questioned the rectitude of basing a report on "a single interview with the late Mollenkott who recounted a story not of a lesbian affair with Elliott, but of Mollenkott threatening to smear Elliott as a lesbian if Elliott outed Mollenkott." He noted the alleged conversation between two deceased individuals took place more than 50 years ago and cannot be corroborated.
"It's entirely tendentious and salacious to spin this brief confrontation between Elliot and a Mollenkott as evidence of a lesbian relationship. It's preposterous, actually. Especially in light of Elliot's repeated public statements about the ethics of homosexuality," continued Burk, who went on to question how CT editors "could make such a claim based on the flimsy evidence and tendentious conclusions reached in this report."
The controversy comes amid reports of "chaos" in the publication founded by Carl Henry and Billy Graham, which has seen six editors-in-chief in the past six years amid widespread layoffs, according to MinistryWatch.
