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Some obscure footnotes of white evangelical history

Some obscure footnotes of white evangelical history

Last updated on: October 19, 2026 at 4:26 pm by Fred Clark

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Some obscure footnotes of white evangelical history 2026-10-19T16:26:26-04:00 Fred Clark

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• If you know who Mark Noll and Francis Schaeffer are, then you’ll find this snippet of history from Dan Silliman fascinating: “Mark Noll, Evangelical Traitor.”

If you don’t know who Francis Schaeffer was, well, he was a brilliant autodidact and an irascible crank whose mission in life was to be respected for being really smart, which is why he had a goatee and wore knickers. He made a movie where he stood on the shore of the Dead Sea surrounded by naked plastic baby dolls bobbing in the surf and that is why white evangelicals to this day consider voting for Republicans to be the central, essential core of their faith.

Mark Noll, on the other hand, is a top-tier historian and a brilliant guy in his own right, but one who, in this case, wasn’t quite smart enough to appreciate that good-faith engagement with bad-faith zealots is usually a waste of time.

• Here’s another obscure, behind-the-scenes snippet of late-20th-century white evangelical history: “Christianity Today pulls, then restores, Elisabeth Elliot sexuality article.”

I read William Stell’s ARC piece — “A Rickety Closet” — when it came out this summer, which is his make-of-this-what-you-will account of his interview with Virginia Mollemkott late in her life in which she hinted at a past relationship with Elliot. The CT article is by Elliot’s biographer, Lucy S.R. Austen, who discusses Mollenkott’s remarks thoughtfully as a biographer would — as an unverifiable single-sourced anecdote, which may or not be true. Auten weighs that against all she knows about her subject and doesn’t regard it as impossible (or even unlikely), emphasizes the inability to confirm or deny Mollenkott’s story, and muses a bit about “OK, maybe, and what would that mean?”

Mollenkott told Stell about seeing Elliot at “a conference for evangelical feminists, the Evangelical Women’s Caucus, over Thanksgiving weekend in 1975.” The feminist Mollemkott and the anti-feminist Elliot had, according to others who knew both of them, once been “very, very close,” but Elliot had angered Mollenkott by telling evangelical audiences that the then-closeted Mollenkott was gay. So Mollenkott says she told her, “If you keep it up, I’m gonna say to people, ‘Ask her how she knows.’”

• That Evangelical Women’s Caucus meeting in 1975 was way before my time, but I came into the orbit of this story years later. The EWC was a by-product of the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern, the conference/manifesto that launched Evangelicals for Social Action, where I worked throughout the ’90s. (I typed and edited the 20th-anniversary follow-up “Chicago Declaration II” in 1993.) The original 1973 Chicago gathering included a handful of women, but they were marginalized and felt their voices were not fully heard.

It turns out that not all socially active progressive men in the 1970s were fully on board with regarding women as their equals. That led to the formation of the Evangelical Women’s Caucus, which was originally part of ESA. This history was something I pieced together awkwardly from hints and comments and conversations with the older generation of ESA types who always seemed, on this topic, to be sizing me up to see how much of the story I could be trusted with knowing. (This was a lot like how people my age learned about Vietnam.)

That’s still how one has to piece together this awkward history. The fuzzy accounts in the Wikipedia entries for the EEWC (now the Evangelical and Ecumenical Women’s Caucus) and for Christians for Biblical Equality tend to euphemize and gloss over much of how this all happened. Under a heading titled “Schism of the EEWC and the CBE,” the former entry says:

From the late 1970s through most of the 1980s, the biblical feminist movement faced several crises concerning the authority of scripture, particularly in the case of Christianity and LGBTQ+ issues. This eventually caused more conservative members of the EEWC to split from the mainline organization to form Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE).

Yes, OK, the formal, public-facing conflict here involved “the authority of scripture” and the various conflicting things different factions of people mean by that. But even more so it had to do with perceptions about perceptions — with concerns and fears about how the case for “biblical equality” might become insurmountably difficult if it were allowed to include the claim that Mollenkott and Letha Scanzoni made in their 1978 book Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? (The answer to that title, they suggested, was Yes, Duh.)

It was partly about disagreements over exegesis and interpretation but also partly about disagreements of exactly the sort we see today between progressives and centrists about how much “compromise” candidates for office should be making in order to improve their electability. And then, as now, this involved both timidly pragmatic “centrists” making a strategic calculation and ideological centrists who personally opposed the more progressive position.

But also there’s what I think was a big part of this split, an unwritten history for which, like Stell, I can offer nothing more than second-hand accounts of sometimes-snide remarks I personally heard from participants in that history who are no longer around to be interviewed. There was a widespread panic that Virginia Mollenkott and a few others in that rickety closet were going to make converts out of their wives and sisters, sliding through evangelical inner circles like Tallulah Bankhead and Barbara Stanwyck and Kate Hepburn back in the Golden Age of Hollywood.

That accounts for the ferociously angry reception to Austen’s discussion of that anecdote about Elizabeth Elliot. It’s not just indignation at the suggestion that a revered icon of evangelical anti-feminism may have had a side they didn’t know about in her long, complicated, and often unhappy life. It’s also a revival of the howling panic over fears of some imagined clandestine evangelical Sewing Circle.

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