What was up with Elisabeth Elliot's third marriage?

Processing the book Being Elisabeth Elliot

Last week I inhaled the book Being Elisabeth Elliot by Ellen Vaughn. Last year the book Becoming Elisabeth Elliot was one of my favorites. It describes the childhood and well-known part of Elliot’s life as a missionary who lost her husband tragically, but what was most fascinating to me was the part about Elisabeth and Rachel Saint going in and working among the Waorani after Jim Elliot was killed, and the subsequent breakdown of the work because of conflict between the two women (which truly seemed like it stemmed from Rachel Saint being pretty emotionally unhealthy and unable to work in a team). As someone working overseas that has also seen a team fall apart terribly, that was incredibly relatable. The author, Ellen Vaughn, was given access to Elliot’s journals and I love how deeply you get to see the humanity of the people usually painted in evangelical hagiography.

Well, Being Elisabeth Elliot is the rest of Elisabeth’s life, after leaving the mission field. The first half of the book was fascinating because she is this cultured, intense, and slightly cynical single mother who hobnobs with intelligent and famous secular folks but really struggles with the evangelical world. She wrote a novel about a missionary that was a bit of an anti-hero story that bombed because of how untriumphant it was, causing people to doubt her faith. Again, I found her so relatable, and I wondered, how does she go from this person to the one who wrote prolifically for the evangelical world and was known for being a rather conservative figure? Well, the end of the book was kind of a bomb for me and I’m dying to talk to others who read it. At this point, if you haven’t read it, you should probably stop reading this and go ahead and read the book first so you don’t spoil it for yourself.

There’s a lot of fascinating stuff in there. A passionate second marriage in middle-age. The intense grief and tragedy of a second loss of a spouse. Thing is, most of Elisabeth’s life is described in such detail, from her journals and from interviews with her friends and family. It’s an intimate and detailed portrait of her years, and she’s real and raw, admirable and human. Until the end. When she marries for the third time, the strokes turn from intricate to broad brush, and the rest 30+ married years are summed up in one disturbing and ultimately unsatisfying chapter. This seems to be mostly because the journals from that entire stage are gone (destroyed?). And it seems that the marriage was hard and friends and family were loath to speak of it for a public audience. But the broad-brush strokes tell of a marriage that was hard, a husband that was not a match for her intelligence and love for words (I wondered from a quoted section of his writing if he had dyslexia, his spelling and writing remind me of my son’s). More than that, though, he was angry and controlling. But to what extent, it’s not clear, and I just can’t even handle it.

Did he keep her from talking to people? Did he make her withdraw into herself so that the person who was so strong in the years prior to that marriage… just disappeared? How is that possible? Surely not. She had such deep friendships, she hobnobbed with so many people and kept in touch with intimate letters, surely there are people that can witness to what was going on, letters that tell the story. She traveled and spoke at so many events, wrote so many books. She can’t have been totally silenced. Was it just a challenging marriage and the journals are not there to give us the details so we are left unsatisfied? Or was she forced into a caricature of an evangelical speaker and hero by a man that was prone to anger and control, and her own strict complementarian

ism made her submit to it? Which of those realities is true is not clear to me, and that drives me crazy because the two part biographies are so detailed in other ways, and I just think there has to be more evidence than was presented here.

Either way the books are amazing but the end of her story (and by far the longest stage of her life) is not great. If her husband was as bad as one imagines by the end, it’s really tragic. It does seem that there was a family intervention to remove Elisabeth from her husband in her old age, which failed, which indicates her daughter and son-in-law were quite against the influence of this husband.

Also, as I’ve googled I discovered that Tom Howard, Elisabeth’s closest sibling, converted to Catholicism. Tom taught at Gordon College while Elisabeth’s second husband also taught at Gordon, so he was close to her at her sweetest stage of life, and close to her husband. He was there as the husband died of cancer, and he and Elisabeth shared a deep love of literature and CS Lewis. Fascinating.