Passion and Purity

That's a difficult place for a young woman to be in, but I think God honors our faithfulness.

I would recommend a book by Elizabeth Elliot called Passion and Purity, which is a great book as people are waiting for that perfect person to come along.

Perfect.

I use that with great quotations.

Hi.

When I was a young Christian woman in my early 20s, Elisabeth Elliot's book, Passion and Purity, came out.

And it revolutionized my look at romance and love in marriage.

I took her teachings to heart.

And so steeped in this, a treasured copy of Hannah's book, was passed down through her family line and ends up on her bookshelf, right? But in Elizabeth Elliot's hands, ultimately, total surrender, this total surrender to God becomes conflated with total surrender to the man that God has placed in authority over you.

And this is what we see take hold in Passion and Purity, in her anti-feminism, and how she ultimately becomes a leading voice for complementarianism, for the sexual purity culture, for the double standard, right? This applies to women more than to men, and that for women to obey God becomes reduced to to obeying the man that God has placed in authority over you.

I think Hannah would be horrified by what would become of her teachings in the hands of somebody like Elizabeth Elliot, even though I think she would be extremely sympathetic to Elizabeth Elliot as a person, because in a way, their lives mirrored each other's.

Hannah Smith herself did not receive the promise happiness that her theology had guaranteed.

Elizabeth accepts this as God's will and comes back to the United States as an evangelical celebrity, really an evangelical saint.

And she is held up as this example of Christian faithfulness and sacrifice.

Then later in her life, she writes anti-feminist books and helps ignite modern purity culture with her book, Passion and Purity.

Again, total surrender to God means total submission to men.

Also, you know, writing books.

Elizabeth Elliot wrote Passion and Purity, which for many women was kind of a defining book on modesty and dating.

I jokingly say sometimes that my wife almost didn't date me because of an Elizabeth Elliot book, but...

But they went and wrote this long article basically by a woman, Lucy Austin, who won an award in 2024 for her biography of Elizabeth Elliot.

I loved missionary stories because they were so interesting, and then being bitterly disappointed entering the message because she had no slides, no pictures, not even any cool stuff from when she had been a missionary.

Fast forward a dozen years or so, and Elizabeth's book, Passion and Purity, as well as Let Me Be a Woman and Keep a Quiet Heart, shaped a great deal of my life as a teenager.

And then when I was 18 or 19, I had the extreme privilege of meeting Elizabeth and Lars in person.

And the impact that that left on me was how extremely real and down-to-earth Elizabeth was.

And she had a vision of Christian faithfulness that did not align with where evangelicalism was moving.

My chapter on Amy Grant sets her side by side with Elizabeth Elliott in her Passion and Purity era.

I mean, my mind was blown when I realized that Amy Grant's Unguarded album, right, with the leopard print jacket, the scandalized, you know, conservative Christians, because it was a little too sexy, even though she, you know, had her shirt buttoned up to her neck, as she liked to point out.

You know, so she was taking it a different way.

That came out within a year of Elizabeth Elliot's Passion and Purity, which really ignited the modern purity culture.

And so it's this really interesting juxtaposition.

But I love how Amy Grant navigated these really challenging circumstances and ultimately rejected a version of Christianity that, you know, really told women to submit everything.