Van and Bets, and the things we sacrifice to be acceptable

I totally understand if you don't want to read my 2500 words on Elisabeth Elliot

If you know one thing about Elisabeth Elliot, it’s probably this: that in January of 1956, her husband Jim and four other young American men hoping to reach an isolated tribe with the gospel of Jesus disappeared in the jungles of Ecuador. The story of their death was told in the New York Times; Life magazine gave it a nine-page spread. 

Equally remarkable to the watching world, the widows didn’t leave Ecuador. They continued in their work of translation and teaching, and two years later, Elisabeth Elliot and her daughter Valerie moved in with the tribe that had taken Jim’s life. Elliot wrote about that decision, and about her time with the Waorani, for an article in Life magazine that was read by 76 percent of American adults. 

That same year – just two years after the men’s bodies were found – Elliot published Through Gates of Splendor, a full-length book about the missionaries’ endeavor that drew heavily on Jim Elliot’s journals.

I read the 40th anniversary edition of this book in 1996, when I was fifteen, and the story  was captivating, truly. Jim Elliot said, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose,” and how could I disagree? To have a life propelled by such transcendent meaning and purpose  – the thought was intoxicating. 

At what must have been around the same time, I read Elliot’s Passion and Purity (1984), an account of her and Jim’s courtship and an exhortation to unmarried people to embrace traditional gender roles as she understood them, and to avoid physical intimacy before marriage. I say I read this book, but I don’t think I finished it, and I never picked it up again. Something about it felt off: too preachy, too rigid, and neither biblically grounded nor culturally insightful. It annoyed me. Of the 28 books Elliot published, I read only one other in my teenage years: her biography of Amy Carmichael, the late 19th century missionary from Ireland to India. I liked it, but not as well as I liked Carmichael’s own writings, which were infused with Keswick holiness and decades of cross-cultural life (I still come across the 3x5 notecard I carried around through college with her words on it: Verily, the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul. As the kids would say, so metal).

So I can’t say Elliot was deeply important to me; I liked the high adventure of Through Gates of Splendor, but dismissed Elliot herself as ultimately just another stodgy patriarchal evangelical Christian. A disappointment.

Then in my twenties I moved overseas, a little younger even than Elliot had been, and had my own bit of adventure and heartbreak and grief in foreign places, and as I was trying to figure out what had happened, what I had done, and whether I had helped or harmed, I read These Strange Ashes, Elliot’s memoir of her first year in South America (before she and Jim were married), written nearly twenty years after the experience. I found in its pages exactly the complexity I needed. All her work that year came to nothing, and so she learned that it wasn’t her usefulness God needed; she could offer up her failures and losses to God, and God would give Godself in return. That’s what I had found, too (and what I wrote about in Dangerous Territory, which is out this week in a second edition). 

Another five or eight years after that, I read her one and only novel, No Graven Image, and I was astounded. Not only was it beautifully written, it was unbelievably honest about the realities of missionary life: the mundanities, the doubts, the absolutely unexceptional months. By that time, I had read a lot of missionary stories, but I had read no story quite like this one. (It was published by Harper in 1966 to critical acclaim, and it was their bestselling piece of fiction that year.)

How had these startlingly and unflinchingly real books been written by the same woman who had glorified missionary life for me in Through Gates of Splendor and then straightjacketed our definitions of womanhood and purity (to damage a whole generation) in Passion and Purity? 

That’s the question, I think, that drove me to drop all my other books and immediately dive into Lucy S.R. Austen’s Elisabeth Elliot: A Life (2023) when it showed up on my doorstep last week. Elliot has never been one of my personal heroes. She’s been a conundrum, a puzzle, containing contradictory multitudes, and I wanted help understanding her.

Austen’s biography is, I think, masterful. Other than a middle section that got perhaps a bit too in the weeds, the narrative moved swiftly, characters well-drawn and research beautifully organized. From time to time Austen’s perspective came into view, offering the reader a way to make sense of what was happening in Elliot’s life, or how to think Christianly about it, but the distinction between these authorial voice notes and the researched material was always clear and appropriate. 

In other words, she would never make the kinds of interpretive statements I’m about to make.

What seems evident to me after reading this book is that the greatest tragedy of Elliot’s life – and the hinge that swung her back into conservative evangelicalism after some years in some more fertile, interesting, fruitful directions – was her belief that wives must submit to husbands (and more broadly, women to men), joyfully and unquestioningly — and her tendency to fall for guys who were kind of arrogant jerks — and a system that wanted to support this vision of things.

It was this belief that kept her from fully expressing her misgivings about the endeavor Jim and the others planned that would ultimately lead to their death. She believed she had to submit to their sense of how God was leading, and was hesitant to share her own sense of how God was leading.

In her years of singleness in South America that followed, her world expanded. While still fervent in her desire to connect with the Waorani, she began to question the notion of “salvation” she’d come to South America with, and wondered what exactly she thought she could bring to the tribes there. She was always reading, and reading broadly: Salinger, Tillich, Freud, Tolstoy. Dylan Thomas. George McDonald. When she became a Harper author, Harper mailed her all their latest books, and her conversations with photojournalist Cornell Capa exposed her to ideas she hadn’t been exposed to in her Christian-school upbringing. She was grateful. She soaked it all up. 

In 1962, Elliot’s college best friend, Eleanor Vandevort (who went by Van, and called her Bet, or Bets) had to leave the Sudan, where she’d spent 13 years translating the Bible. She joined Elliot and Valerie in the Amazon jungle, and the following year the three of them moved to New Hampshire, where they would live together for six years.

*Excursus on Van and Bets*

“The first time I saw her,” Elliot wrote in the introduction to Vandevort’s memoir A Leopard Tamed, “she was sitting on the floor of a college gymnasium waiting for the class to begin. She wore a blue gym suit, and her long legs were stretched out on the floor in front of her.” Elliot wasn’t an easy person to be friends with¹, but the two became close while studying together at Wheaton, and exchanged letters regularly over the next decade from their distant mission posts; Van was instrumental in re-shaping Elliot’s understanding of “the will of God,” helping her to believe that it wasn’t like walking a tight-rope, that there might be room for more than one right answer.

Elliot invited Van to visit her in South America; the invitation arrived just weeks before Van learned she would have to leave her country. Elliot’s invitation, she said, “literally saved me out of a  total darkness.” Though it had been fourteen years since they’d seen each other, they fell into immediate intimacy, talking nonstop for days. Austen writes, “In Vandevort, Elliot found a mind to rival or surpass her own. ‘She is a truly remarkable person…She knows me as no other friend knows me, so  this in itself gives a freedom in dialogue which I have rarely known…The joy of being with Van goes on and on, day after day, like a pure stream, and still it is hard for me to believe the love God had for us both in working this out.’ They kept talking and talking, sharing experiences, discussing things that puzzled them, talking over possibilities for the future.”

Over the next few months, Elliot found a “new sense of rest in God’s love,” Austen writes: “Her conversations with Vandevort over the past sixteen weeks had encouraged her to trust that God was not a hard taskmaster; that where her desires were not proscribed in Scripture she could do what she wanted and still be within his will.” When she decided to return to the States, she invited Van to join her. Elliot, Valerie, and “Aunt Van,” as Valerie (who had loved her immediately) called her, lived together for the next six years. Both Elliot and Van worked on books during those years, and Van also took care of the household and often watched Valerie while Elliot traveled to speak.

Elliot’s letters and journals in this period reflect her deep discontent with Christianity as it was practiced around her: with its “lazy thinking and even intellectual dishonesty,” with its expectations that she herself would soften the edges of her stories to drum up more support for missions, and with its lack of virtue among professing Christians. She spoke with other former (I think now we’d call them deconstructing) missionaries about her strong belief in “the ultimate redemption of all creation.” The way she spoke about the meaning of Jim’s death changed.

She and her mother sometimes struggled to find common ground. When her mother wrote to her about someone she cared about who had been “living with same-sex attraction,” Elliot reminded her mother of the story of David and Jonathan, noting that they kissed, and David said their love was greater than the love of women. “I’m not building up a doctrine on this. I only want to face up honestly to what we are told in Scripture, no ignoring or explaining away any facets of it. Perhaps the truth is that there are no such things as lines drawn, coincident with sex. Love is the great thing.” In another conversation with her brothers around this time, she admitted to not being sure of any absolutes in life, except, maybe, love.

And then No Graven Image was published. Missionaries loved it. The rest of christendom didn’t. They wanted their gates of certain splendor back. Harold Ockenga took her out to lunch and took her to task over it, calling it a caricature. Speaking invitations were rescinded. After one event, an angry man accosted her, telling her she was headed for hell. It was the best selling novel for Harpers that year, but even they were hesitant to promote it, fearing they’d alienate religious buyers of books.

Austen notes that No Graven Image ended with an unanswered question, and that in Who Shall Ascend, the book Elliot worked on while the novel was in copyedits, the final two pages contained thirteen unanswered questions. But after this, there came a shift in her tone. Elliot had understood her vocation to be to witness: to tell what she had seen. Now, she began to teach, to write not just about what she’d seen, but to tell readers what it meant.

Is it a coincidence that just after the negative response from the Christian public to Elliot’s honesty and complexity in these years, she fell in love with a man, a Christian academic twenty years her senior, and then began spouting more certainties in her writing?

This is just me armchair psychologizing, but it sure seems like Elliot was in a creatively fertile, intellectually stimulating, domestically satisfying life, learning and growing, and when she pushed on the boundaries of the Christian culture she’d grown up with, she was slapped back into place. And then almost immediately, she declared herself in love with Addison Leitch, a sixty year old theology professor, conservative Presbyterian, and editor-at-large for Christianity Today, a safe, establishment choice. They met in 1966; his wife died after a prolonged struggle with cancer in 1968, and six weeks later, he and Elliot were engaged. Like Jim, he was tall, extroverted, charismatic, certain – and willing to direct Elliot in how to behave. For a woman who constantly agonized over knowing the will of God, such direction may have felt like a relief. 

When they married, she found herself suddenly once again receiving speaking invitations. She also started talking differently: “Leitch wrote in opposition to the idea that behavior could be judged on ‘the one general Absolute of Love.’ Elliot, who had told her brothers that love might be the only absolute in human existence, began to argue for many absolutes.”

When they had returned from their honeymoon, Van (who had stayed with Valerie) had been there with a hot supper on the table. Van continued to live with the family until Leitch told Elliot that she had to leave. Austen writes, “To Elliot, Vandevort was the person she knew best in all the world, the friend who had imitated Jesus and “laid down [her] life” for Elliot day in and day out, the friend whom she missed ‘dreadfully’ when they were apart, even after her marriage. To Leitch, she was a sponge.” 

In this and other ways, Leitch began to police Elliot’s life, becoming jealous, possessive, critical, and controlling, but Elliot let him shape her thinking, believing that he was her superior. “In fact, she wrote, she now saw Leitch as her and Valerie’s and Vandevort’s redemption. It is hard to see how she could make such a statement  – especially in the face of her own and Vandevort’s suffering – unless she had come to view the situation from Leitch’s perspective. Perhaps, as with Jim’s decision to contact the Waorani, Elliot had to believe that her husband was in the right in order to live with the consequences of his decisions.” (emphasis mine)

It was in the next few years that Elliot began to campaign fiercely against women’s liberation.²

After a few years, she was widowed again. And then, when the next man was persistent in pursuing her, a man she hadn’t thought of romantically, she wondered yet again if God was calling her to submit. She hadn’t been interested, but he was, so maybe she needed to submit? She agreed to marry him. But as early as their honeymoon, this third husband lost his temper with her, a pattern of control and anger that would continue. She realized almost immediately that she had made a mistake, but didn’t know what to do, how to get out of an abusive situation. For years, the pattern of control and anger continued.

Meanwhile, publishers kept asking her for the kinds of books that she had used to despise, fluffy books, mass-market ideas. And so she kept producing them.

Maybe I’m wrong to see it this way. To see that the patriarchy and conservatism of the Christian publishing structure slapped her hand when she ventured too far out, and so she returned to the safety of the structure she’d been raised in? And being so strong herself, she sought men who acted stronger, and in submitting to them, lost both the one person who had loved her well, and the spiritual freedom she had begun to taste? She lost the creative power she’d found, and instead started spouting certainties about masculinity and femininity and absolutes, things a younger Bets would never have said. It feels like there was this beautiful little season of possibility, and such a tragedy that it turned the way it did.

I know we all contain multitudes, and I don’t mean to try to reduce the complexity here. But there are enough parallels in our lives, mine and Elliot’s, that I feel some urgency to understand this.³ I am now in that “ultimate redemption of all creation” and “love as the only absolute” moment in my life. How can I keep from retreating into old, damaging certainties for safety’s sake?

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Three Things:

• Part of the legacy of Through Gates of Splendor was examined in two new documentaries this fall. Read Alissa’s take on it (she gets it):

  Savior Complex, The Mission, and the culture behind toxic missionary work.

• It is still possible to understand the Good Samaritan in fresh ways, like this one from a missionary doctor.

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  Where Goodness Still Grows is available wherever books are sold. My first book, Dangerous Territory, has a second edition coming this November; you can pre-order it now at Bracket Publishing.

1. Bad at small talk. Blunt, direct, to the point. Unaware of how other people felt about her, or what they might feel (once she dated a boy for six months and was shocked that he was upset when she ended things). Either an extremely clear sense of right and wrong or a tortured anxiety about right and wrong. Exhausted and anxious about public speaking. Extremely high achieving. No social niceties, no flirting. Extreme self-discipline. Interesting.

2. At one point, for instance, she said it was wrong for a woman to give a man directions in the car, even if she knew where they were going and he didn’t.

3. IDK, we were both high achieving socially awkward girls from big, close-knit families, who went to Christian schools and read voraciously and were inspired by Amy Carmichael and went straight to the mission field after college, had a devastating first year, went back, fell in love with a tall guy and got married (I definitely chose better than she did), wrote books that intentionally tried to disrupt the heroic missionary narrative, transgressed, became Episcopalian. And she’s woven into my life a bit more than that, too — my dad interviewed her on the radio, and helped in the transition of her radio program when it ended.