CW: SA, abuse, loss, trauma
What happens when the doctrines of faith and control intersect with a woman’s autonomy? In this episode, I sat down with Tia Levings, author of the powerful memoir “A Well-Trained Wife,” and her story will leave you speechless. Tia dives deep into her experience growing up in and escaping from Christian fundamentalism and the trad wife movement— before it was even called that. We talk about how patriarchal control impacts women financially, emotionally, and physically, and how that same mindset influences the political movements we’re seeing today.
Key takeaways:
- Financial control as a tool of patriarchy: Christian fundamentalism and the trad wife movement rely heavily on keeping women financially dependent, with limited access to personal finances, employment, or education, making it difficult for them to escape.
- Cult-like dynamics in religious movements: The evangelical movement operates similarly to a cult, using fear and control to maintain power over women and their families, extending from personal lives to broader political ideologies.
- The importance of personal agency: Finding the strength to leave an abusive marriage and a controlling religious environment was crucial for survival, demonstrating how vital personal agency and rebellion are in reclaiming one’s life.
- Religious influence on modern politics: There’s a clear connection between the patriarchal values of Christian fundamentalism and current political movements that restrict women’s rights, particularly around reproductive healthcare and equality.
- Healing through truth and autonomy: Recovery from religious trauma requires confronting indoctrination, finding external support, and reclaiming personal autonomy, as Tia illustrates through her journey of relentless healing and empowerment.
Notable quotes
“Patriarchy cannot even continue without female support. When women stand up and say, ‘I’m not doing this,’ everything changes.”
“The trad wife movement today looks pretty on social media, but it’s built on the same control and suppression of women. It’s just packaged differently.”
“Fundamentalist groups want to scale their family values to the nation—what happens at home is how they want to run the country.”
Episode at-a-glance
≫ 04:01 Tia Levings Story of Christian Fundamentalism
≫ 10:59 Defining Fundamentalist Christianity
≫ 15:16 Personal Experiences and Church Life
≫ 20:25 Marriage and Abuse in the Church
≫ 32:48 A Night of Danger and Realization
≫ 33:28 The Role of Patriarchy in Domestic Abuse
≫ 34:37 Financial Struggles and Blogging Success
≫ 37:04 Excommunication and Life in a Cult
≫ 40:59 Breaking Free and Finding Orthodoxy
≫ 47:48 The Trad Wife Movement and Its Implications
≫ 51:53 Fear, Shame, and Political Ramifications
≫ 58:50 Healing and Personal Agency
Tia’s Links:
Website: www.tialevings.com
Get Tia’s book “A Well-Trained Wife”
Special thanks to our sponsors:
Thrive Causemetics
Get an exclusive 20% off your first order at thrivecausemetics.com/FFPOD
Squarespace
Go to www.squarespace.com/FFPOD to save 10% off your first website or domain purchase.
Masterclass
Get an additional 15% off any annual membership at masterclass.com/FFPOD.
Rocket Money
Stop wasting money on things you don’t use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to RocketMoney.com/FFPOD.
This is Small Business
Check out This Is Small Business, an original podcast from Amazon, on your favorite podcast app.
Are you registered to vote?
RESOURCES:
Feeling Overwhelmed? Start here!
Our HYSA Partner Recommendation (terms apply)
Behind the Scenes and Extended Clips on Youtube
Leave Financial Feminist a Voicemail
Financial Feminist on Instagram
Take our FREE Money Personality Quiz
Meet Tia
Tia Levings writes about the realities in Christian fundamentalism, evangelical patriarchy, and religious trauma. She is also a podcaster, speaker, and content strategist. She’s been quoted in Salon, the Huffington Post, and Newsweek, and appeared in the hit Amazon docu-series, Shiny Happy People. Based in Jacksonville, Florida she is mom to four incredible adults and likes to travel, hike, paint, and daydream. Find her on social media @TiaLevingsWriter. Her memoir, A Well-Trained Wife, releases with St. Martin’s Press on August 6th, 2024.
Transcript:
Tia Levings:
I was in a spanking cult. So I was in this homeschooling cult where women were disciplined like children. It’s kind of the end of the patriarchal road, but they teach something called federal marriage, and federal marriage is the belief that the father is responsible to stand on judgment day before God and account for every single thing that happened in his family, including his wife’s thoughts and deeds. And so since he’s going to have that level of accountability before the Savior for his wife, he has to keep her in line. And so the way that’s done is through actual tangible correction.
Tori Dunlap:
Popeyes, if you’re watching, sponsor me. If you called me and you’re like, “I need a kidney,” I’d be like, “Which one? Let’s do it. Let’s figure something out.”
And second, aren’t there Popeyes and Raising Canes, there’s like a combo? Aren’t there places that do both? Because there was an Eat the Menu, there’s a Keith Habersberg, The Try Guys, Eat the Menu, where he did Popeyes/Raising Canes. I’m wondering if it’s, is it KFC Taco Bell situation where they’re both sold at the same place? Commenters, tell us below, is there a Popeyes X Raising Canes near you? Not two separate establishments across the street from each shop, but is it a mega chicken place? Because if so, I would like to visit this mega chicken place and I would like to immediately compare and contrast. I want to order Chicken tendies from Popeyes and Chicken tendies from Raising Canes.
And also, my last note about this, I know it was a big deal in 2018. I know everybody was talking about it. 2018? It was 2018. I have to do this in my head, no, it was 2019. I have to do this by who I was dating at the time. That’s the only way I keep track of time. So I was like, who was I with? Oh yeah, I was dating that guy I shouldn’t have been dating, it was 2019. I believe that the Popeye’s chicken sandwich is the best gift fast food has ever given us, ever.
And if you remember the big chicken wars in 2019, but you did not participate, you didn’t get a Popeyes chicken sandwich because there was too much hype, and you’re like, it can’t be that good. Or you’re like, I don’t want to wait in an hour and a half line. Don’t worry, because Tori did it for you. I did it so I can tell you. This chicken sandwich fucking slaps, it still fucking slaps. It is the best, arguably the best gift God has ever given us, but definitely the best gift fast food has ever given us. So if you love Popeyes, the girls that get it, get it. And if you hate Popeyes, you just haven’t had it yet. If you don’t think you’ll like Popeyes, it’s because you haven’t eaten it.
Welcome to the show. Today is a very, very important episode that is a little heavy. So, good thing we’re talking about fried chicken right off the top, but so important, about patriarchy, about evangelicalism, about cults. If you are a fan of cults or not a fan of cults but a fan of learning about cults, this is a very important episode to listen to. This was one of just my favorite episodes we’ve done in a long time, and I know I say that, but it was truly so good. And we’re just really excited to have this guest here, and this is an episode that you’re going to want to listen to, you’re going to want to listen to again, and then you’re going to want to send to your friends because you’re going to want to talk about it together.
Tia Levings writes about the realities of Christian fundamentalism, evangelical patriarchy, and religious trauma. She is also a podcaster, speaker, and content strategist. She’s been quoted in Salon, the Huffington Post, and Newsweek, and has appeared in the hit Amazon docuseries, Shiny Happy People. Based in Jacksonville, Florida, she is mom to four incredible adults and likes to travel, hike, paint, and daydream. Her memoir, A Well-Trained Wife, is out now and you can get it wherever books are sold.
Wow. Tia’s story, okay. She basically has a borderline arranged marriage in her late teens, early 20s, with a man who is in her church who is part of this church cult. He is an abusive husband. The church is incredibly abusive. Talk about capital C control of women, and the expectation of them to just be wives and mothers, and to get by with very, very little money. We talk about her harrowing story of leaving that abusive relationship and leaving the church. How she fought her way out from having no financial independence, to raising four children as a single mom. We discussed the ways in which Christian patriarchy pushes women into unhealthy relationships through fear, shame, self-abandonment and abuse. How the same people who have been and continue to infiltrate our government and leadership, bring these anti-women principles to our laws. We also talk about the realities of the trad wife movement and how dangerous it is and what it inevitably leads to.
Now, I can see some of the comments already, but not all Christians are like this. Okay. Lump that into the not all men, not all white people argument. We know. We know that there’s plenty of people who are religious or non-religious, who are spiritual, who are not spiritual, doing really, really great things, period, but sometimes on behalf of their religion. I think I’ve discussed this before, I grew up Catholic. I don’t practice anymore for many reasons, and I think a lot of the reasons she actually lists out in this episode. So, there are many beautiful people, including my parents who are Christians and who believe in a God or believe in Jesus Christ, who are kind people, who have great values, who are feminists, etc.
There is also a massive subset of religious groups that use religion and patriarchy to control women and other marginalized groups, to abuse women and other marginalized groups, and that profit and use Christianity and religion as a veil to do horrible, terrible, awful things, and sometimes in the name of Christianity. And Kristin is nodding her head. I am not going to ask you to come on mic, but I know you have a really… Talk about lore. You have a lot of experience with the harmful side of Christianity, especially evangelical Christianity. We have all interacted with this in some way and some of us have literally been in it. If you are not religious, please know that a lot of the people who are religious and a lot of the people who are abusing Christianity are the ones who are leading anti-abortion movements, who are at the very forefront of the creation of Project 2025, of denying queer and trans folks access to gender-affirming care. I could go on a rant about this forever, but this is really what we talk about in the episode.
This is so crucial to talk about because it impacts our money, it impacts our rights, it impacts how healthy and stable and safe our lives are or aren’t, and I just want to put a trigger warning off the top. If you are someone who has a mixed relationship with religion, this will either be difficult to listen to or this will be very validating to listen to. I leave that up to you. But if you do have people and you do in your life, who have been through this before, or who have mixed relationships with religion, or at the very least are trying to figure out, how do I advocate for my rights, especially in an election year? Please send this episode to them. It’s very important. And a final trigger warning, we’re talking about abuse, in case that wasn’t obvious, but also sexual assault and pregnancy loss. Okay, let’s do it.
But first a word from our sponsors.
Where are you coming from? Where do you live?
Tia Levings:
I’m currently in Georgia, just outside of Savannah.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, I love Savannah. It’s so pretty.
Tia Levings:
It’s so pretty.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s all the moss and the trees, right?
Tia Levings:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
Is that Savannah? Yeah.
Tia Levings:
Yeah, and the squares, cobblestones.
Tori Dunlap:
I went with my family when I was a kid and my dad called it mold on the trees because it’s so-
Tia Levings:
Well, I think it’s fungal, actually. He’s not wrong.
Tori Dunlap:
That is the joke is that we’re like, oh, dad and the mold on the trees. It’s beautiful, if anybody hasn’t been, we have family outside of Atlanta, and so I think we went to visit them and then we went to Savannah to visit and that’s beautiful.
Tia Levings:
Nice.
Tori Dunlap:
Is it hot right now?
Tia Levings:
It’s very hot, it’s very hot. I’m getting ready to move to North Carolina and I’m looking forward to just those-
Tori Dunlap:
Nice.
Tia Levings:
… few degrees cooler, like the farther north I can go. They call Raleigh the Boston of the South, which should give us the culture without this deep snow, so yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, and the crazy rent, hopefully.
Tia Levings:
Yeah, right? It’s so expensive in Boston. Yeah, that was really the breaking factor. It’s so expensive.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. Well, I’m so excited to have you on the show. We like asking people what their first money memory is. What is the first time you remember thinking about money?
Tia Levings:
Yeah, the first time, so I had a wooden piggy bank that it had a music box in it, and I was very excited to put my coins in there. So I’m thinking I was three, and I busted into it to take my little sister up to the gas station for food. We live in this really small town, and all I can remember is we went up for a candy bar and I’m walking back with my sister and I successfully, I don’t know, must’ve put my piggy bank on the counter and the lady probably just took… like, why are these small children in my gas station? And we’re coming down the sidewalk and my mom is crying her eyes out with her arms out because her babies were gone. And now as an adult, I get it like, okay, maybe we were four and two, three and 18 months, something like that. But the thing is, I successfully pulled off the heist and got the candy bar. So that’s my first memory.
Tori Dunlap:
Giving your mom a heart attack in the process.
Tia Levings:
Yeah, I got what I wanted.
Tori Dunlap:
You did. You got a candy bar. What candy bar, do you remember?
Tia Levings:
Yeah, it was chocolate. It was Hershey’s. It was a Hershey’s classic. Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, that sounds about right. That would be me as well.
We have a lot to talk about on the show today, but your memoir, A Well-Trained Wife, is the story of how you escaped Christian fundamentalism and the trad wife movement before it was even called the trad wife movement. What are some of the tenets of fundamentalist Christianity and how does it differ from other Christian movements or Christian sex?
Tia Levings:
Yeah, I love this question because it can be a little bit confusing when we use that label. I sometimes refer to it as the evangelical patriarchy or evangelical fundamentalism, because fundamentalism as an ideology can be in anything, it doesn’t have to be religious. And to further complicate things, there’s an actual fundamentalist denomination. So some people think they’re not fundamentalists because they don’t have that name in their church title, but fundamentalism is by itself, it’s an ideology that approaches something with a promise and a formula. So you’re going to follow this recipe and you’re going to get this idealic outcome and that ideological purity is the priority of the entire movement. When you add religion to that, Christianity, now you have a faith-based fundamentalism where we are following a formula to get the promise of heaven or the promise of a happy life. People choose fundamentalist thinking in times of chaos because it answers the chaos in their life and the disorganization. So we all have similar desires for happy life, happy families, happy children. We want to have good outcomes. Fundamentalism comes in and promises that.
And so in the evangelical movement over the past 50 years, mainstream Christianity has become more fundamentalist in its approach because of things like prosperity gospel, some really rigid legalistic movements like Bill Gothard’s IBLP, and the trad movement, which is a means to an end. It’s this shiny, happy imagery of a perfect life, and if you do these things and you live this way, you will have the promises of all the happiness and peace and harmony that they can bestow.
Tori Dunlap:
I want to get a couple other definitions as you’re saying things to make sure we’re all on the same page as we’re listening to this.
Tia Levings:
Yes.
Tori Dunlap:
So, not all Christians are fundamentalists, correct?
Tia Levings:
Correct.
Tori Dunlap:
Okay, and what is the prosperity gospel?
Tia Levings:
Prosperity gospel is the idea that you can get rich through Jesus. Yeah, it’s a get rich quick scheme, it’s a pyramid scheme. It’s a lot of things, but it’s again, the promise that if you do this thing, you’ll be richly rewarded. A great example of the prosperity gospel is Joel Osteen, mega church, mega shiny, big money, and everyone else in that church is not as rich as Joel.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, and that it’s your, correct me if I’m wrong, kind of your right to get rich. If you believe in God, that will happen. It’s the idea of, you believing in this, all of the riches will be bestowed upon you, and that also the pursuit of wealth is this act of God or act of getting to the destination that God has planned for you.
Tia Levings:
Yeah, they kind of twist it. It’s not just like, this is your birthright as a believer, although they lead with that. It’s, you have to follow this formula as well. So one is not separate from the other, and I think that’s really important when you’re separating it from, for example, when we focus on the divinity in all of us, or when we talk about manifesting, or something else that might be goal oriented. This is a blend of this and a twist of it, that you have to do these certain rigid things, very rigid things, in order to attain this wealth and wisdom and glory. And there’s privilege involved and there’s problems involved.
Tori Dunlap:
This is all over Dave Ramsey’s work as well, by the way, dear listener.
Tia Levings:
Oh my gosh. Dave Ramsey is a big part of my story too. He didn’t really make the book, but I was on his blog. I threw a beans and rice party.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, okay, then we got to talk about it.
Tia Levings:
I was one of the first beansandrice.com parties.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, I don’t know how much you know about me, but he is my super villain in my story. He is my least favorite person in my industry.
Tia Levings:
Yeah, that’s why I love your work.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you. Love it. Okay, yay.
Tia Levings:
Yes. You fight the patriarchy by helping people get rich. I fight the patriarchy by telling their secrets, and we have a lot of overlap, so.
Tori Dunlap:
I love it. Okay, so we’ll have to talk about that. So we’ve noticed a huge trend. Anyone who’s paying attention, between fundamentalism, Christian nationalism, right wing extremism. Can we talk about the tie-in of all three of those?
Tia Levings:
Yeah. That’s the braid of my story, and when I start my story, it starts with the big plot twist in my life. I grew up in this one quiet little way for the first 10 years in upper Michigan, pretty mainstream Christian, we went to church on Christmas and Easter. And then we moved to the south and we moved to this big city and we joined this mega church, and it’s 1984. So that time period, the mid ’80s, is when the evangelical movement as a whole was becoming more political, more fundamentalist, and it was growing towards a strategy with an agenda. It happens to also be the entire character arc of my life. By the time I’m an adult, we are fully nationalized, we are fully fundamentalist. Today, we are seeing the outcome of all that seed planting that happened in the ’90s.
Tori Dunlap:
So, where did your story start? Where did it start to get a little suspicious? And then where did you realize, oh shit, I’m kind of in over my head here?
Tia Levings:
It was pretty much a full immersion, which is really funny considering it was a Baptist church that taught full immersion. I was in complete and utter culture shock, from coming from a small town in upper Michigan to this big city when I’m 10 years old, it couldn’t have been more shocking. It was, I’d never seen a black person, I’d never been in a city. My new school, my fourth grade year was bigger than my entire school, just it was my fourth grade classroom. So it was culture shock across the board. And my parents joined this church so that we would have friends, so that we could acclimate, and it was an enormous church. We had 3,500 in service at that time. By the time I’m 18, we have 20,000 people on the roll. So it was an enormous church, 11 city blocks, and we were there six days a week. So I was in over my head immediately, because what was happening immediately is traumatic experiences that would shape the rest of my life.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, maybe tell me a bit about those, as well as the journey to meeting your husband.
Tia Levings:
Yeah. This part of my book is really relatable to people who’ve grown up in evangelical culture or anywhere near adjacent, during that same time period. You’ll recognize a lot of the purity culture teachings, modesty culture, major movement leaders, James Dobson, focus on the family. Things that were rising, in ascension at the same time. I was just always at church. We were always at summer camp, we were always on tour, and it was a wealthy church with a lot of opportunity and a lot of social life. And I would’ve told anybody until I get out of my story, I escape and I go through therapy and I’m starting to trace my decisions backwards, I would’ve always said I had a very happy childhood, a very happy life at church because it felt that way. We had so many opportunities, we had fun experiences in our youth group.
And I mean, it really was like this America within an America because we were in the world, but not of it. And so we had a Christian alternative for literally anything we wanted to do. Anything we needed, was either at LifeWay Christian books or it was we had our own entertainment. I had never heard of the Seven Mountains Mandate before, that was these seven pillars of culture that the Christian nationalists want to take over so that we can have world dominion. It’s not like they were talking about that. They were just saying, “Here’s this Christian movie. We’re going to have Christian entertainment industry, we’re going to have Christian music entertainment industry.” So I was just tapping into all of this stuff and thinking, da-da-da-da-da, having a great life. My only outcome in life can be a Christian wife and mother, had to start tamping myself down. I wanted to be a mom so that it’s really convenient when you want what the patriarchy wants for you. So I kind of rode that wave for a while. I wasn’t in opposition.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and that’s all you knew too.
Tia Levings:
Yeah, and I’m a mom. I was born nurturing, so I was like, all right. I come from Midwestern people who had a good work ethic, I felt like I could do everything. I felt like I could be an artist, I could be a writer, and I could be a mom, and that really wasn’t permitted. So my upbringing, my teenage years, where we’re supposed to be broadening our worldview, becoming a fully actualized adult, that wasn’t happening. Instead, I was becoming more childlike. I was learning how to keep sweet, be demure. These things that we joke about in the traditional, they’re all hashtags today. They weren’t hashtags back then. They have roots, and those roots made me smaller and more feminine and into this little strict gender box that we were all supposed to arrive in adulthood as a certain kind of woman, so that we would get married young, so that we would stay virgins, it was very important to be a virgin on our wedding day. And then have babies for the kingdom, ultimately towards dominion.
Tori Dunlap:
So you’ve already mentioned a few of them, but I would love to go into more detail. Yeah. What is the ideal woman? Virgin, virginal? Pure?
Tia Levings:
Oh, virginal, young, fresh, sweet, feminine. She keeps her voice very soft and sweet. My work today does a lot of exposure of fundy baby voice. We didn’t call it fundy baby voice, we just called it, sound like a young lady. You wanted to always smile and keep your legs crossed and be pleasing to men in every possible way.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, probably not have your own opinions.
Tia Levings:
No.
Tori Dunlap:
Not have your own voice.
Tia Levings:
No.
Tori Dunlap:
So as your story progresses, you realize that your relationship with your husband is not roses. Can you tell me more about that?
Tia Levings:
Yeah, far from it. So we had a trend in our church. We had weddings every Friday and Saturday, it was really a conveyor belt of brides. And we were heavily overtly encouraged to get married to people we didn’t know very well, get married quickly. Our virginity was the tantamount thing. They knew that the longer we stayed single, the more likely we were to stop coming to church, we would start forming career ideas, we would gain independence. And so they really wanted us married by 18,19, and so we were the fresh meat. When we graduated high school, we were called fresh meat, not freshmen, and we were moving into these departments, the singles department to get married very quickly.
So I met my husband in December. We were engaged in January, and we were married the following December. I hardly knew him, and I was encouraged to hardly know him because we had the rest of our lives to work it out. That was the line they said over and over.
Tori Dunlap:
We don’t have to cut the silence. I’m fully just… Okay, December, you meet in December, you’re engaged in January. You have a year long engagement. I mean, better than I… That’s, okay, you have a year. Oh, boy, but then you have your lifetime to get to know each other. Okay, so what happens? Who is this man?
Tia Levings:
Oh, he was carefully masked. I didn’t know that, I didn’t have that language, but what I knew was he was charming, he was very dashing. He was a sailor, he was super magnetic, and I had been groomed at this point to accept who said they were God’s best for my life. So God’s best for your life is code for, this is the person you’re going to marry. You’ve been preparing for him your whole teenage life, and he will know who he is because he will come on the scene and announce himself as such.
Tori Dunlap:
Wow.
Tia Levings:
He will say, “I want to marry you. That means I’m God’s best for your life.” So I was trying to retrofit my vision for my partner onto him, because this is the person who said he was God’s best for my life and we were getting married. It really felt like I was fully taking a passive role in my life now, like there had been this tension in me growing up, like this call for independence, which is normal and healthy child development, differentiation, it’s how you become your own person. I was under all this tension to become more passive in my life, and it started with meeting him.
So I was trying to accept that, okay, I’m not really attracted to him, I don’t really know him, and he’s hurting me because he was very quickly violent, but I didn’t have any way to know what violence meant. I always just interpreted that as something I did wrong. These were fights and they were my fault, and it was my job to fix it, as his help me in training, I was preparing to be his wife. So it was my job to fix our outbursts. And I started learning how to just hide my reality from anybody who might guess at it, even though I didn’t know what I was hiding or why. You just have that instinct of, well it’s embarrassing that he bruised me, but I’ll wear a turtleneck, that kind of thing.
Tori Dunlap:
So he was physically violent? As candid as you’re willing to be, was he sexually violent, emotionally violent? I imagine maybe all three?
Tia Levings:
He was high pressure, sexually, high pressure. I was really committed to being a virgin bride, and he had had experience before. Previous relationships, eerily similar to mine, but I didn’t again, know that until hindsight. And he was all the things, he was very volatile, very disorganized person. Well-meaning and sincere, but he had a mental illness that was showing and presenting, and no, we had no vocabulary for that. We also had no permission to go see a doctor. It’s important to note that in the ’90s, we didn’t even say the word anxiety out loud. There was so much stigma against that. So he was struggling, and our church’s answer was more theology, more doctrine, more control, and I was supposed to submit and learn how to obey and support him in the best he could do.
Tori Dunlap:
I mean, you already mentioned just now the submission. What are the other tenets of the patriarchy that your husband upheld in your relationship and that the church then echoed, or vice versa, maybe?
Tia Levings:
Yes. This is why I call it church sanctioned domestic abuse, because the behaviors were abusive but the church said this was God’s design for marriage. So we’re really talking now about complementarianism, very distinct gender roles based on your genitalia. Men are the head of the household, women are submissive servants. Everything is subject to his leadership. He took it very much to heart, he took it very seriously. He wanted to be a man after God’s own heart. He studied his theology very carefully. And so everything, all the books that we were reading, all the teachers we were listening to, all the pastors, everybody had this very consistent through-line of, if you can just get your household in order, everything else will fall into line. And my role as a keeper of the home was meant to enable him to be a better authority.
Top down, you might’ve seen the umbrella of authority that was in Shiny Happy People on Amazon, and they had really good graphics for the umbrella of authority, which is very top down, and it is meant to shelter everyone underneath it. It’s not really how it works. Even in the graphic, the rain’s hitting each little umbrella, but forget having any personal strengths or anything to offer your relationship.
Tori Dunlap:
You’re fully in service. Yeah.
Tia Levings:
Yeah, exactly, yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
All of this just sounds like control. It’s utter control of women generally, but you as a person, making sure that, yeah, you don’t fall out of line, that you are completely controllable. And one of the things we talk about in the show, of course, is how money is a form of control. And how money when abused can be a form of manipulation, of control, of power. What was your financial situation like? I imagine there wasn’t maybe much of a financial situation in the church and in your marriage.
Tia Levings:
Oh, there was one, but it was bad. So these homes, which I conclude mine in the movement, I think this is very common, are poor. We’re having a lot of voluntary poverty because we’re trying to live off of a single income in a culture that was rapidly starting to call for two incomes, and I had no money. What my focus was, was constantly making the changes I needed to do in order to live off of his one income. And he was not such an ambitious person, so he was not trying to make a big income. He was trying to really, really, if we’re honest, he was trying to get through each day. He was not a happy person, he was a very troubled person, but he was trying to just kind of stay in his mediocrity.
So this is not, I don’t want to paint a picture of somebody who had a lot of ambition and he was going to provide for us with his single income by constantly trying to get a promotion or a raise or anything like that. None of that. This was, he barely made $2,000 a month, ever, in our entire marriage, and I was supposed to learn how to support a quiverfull on that. That meant we were not using contraception, we were trying to have as many babies as possible.
So in my marriage, in this 14 year span I’m talking about, I had nine pregnancies, five live births and four surviving children, and I was supposed to do that on less than $2,000 a month, which meant I had to be really creative in everything that I did, which really welcomes in the trad movement, is in one way, this heroic Herculean effort of single stay at home moms trying to fit within this ever narrowing box because there’s never enough money, there’s never enough food. And life has to be hard and time consuming, because you’re literally having to do everything from scratch. You can’t afford to hire any of that out.
I also had no bank account in my name. There was never a talk about retirement savings, agency. I had to ask for permission for everything. We had one car and it had been, used to be my car. It became his car, and yeah, I was home.
Tori Dunlap:
I will get to the trad wife movement in a second because I have a lot of questions about that. But 14 years?
Tia Levings:
Yes.
Tori Dunlap:
That’s a long time. And then you had even more time in the church prior to that marriage. What was a typical day like?
Tia Levings:
This is another place where I mentioned when I was growing up, I had these conflicting memories because I thought of them as very positive, and it was hard for me to unpack it with deconstruction. If your listeners are familiar with deconstruction, it was hard for me to de-tangle my experiences and look and see which had produced rotten fruit and which had produced good fruit, and what actually formed the person who said yes to this marriage and then stayed in it. I had to look at that really hard. It’s very similar when I look at my young motherhood years. They’re conflicted, because remember, I wanted to be a wife and a mother, and I wanted my children.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, and there’s nothing wrong with that, by the way.
Tia Levings:
There’s nothing wrong with that.
Tori Dunlap:
To every listener, we are not demonizing motherhood. We are not demonizing being a wife. It’s more that, I don’t know if you had a choice, right?
Tia Levings:
Right. Well, I had no option. I had no choice, and it was exploited. This was the whole thing. My role was to serve their agenda, it was not for just the glory of my own fulfillment. This was not because I was making a decision that was right for my family. I was serving the movement. That’s why I was a daughter of the patriarchy, a wife of the patriarchy. Then it was all a means to an end, and it’s very important when we’re in our current political condition, looking back and seeing what they have planned for us, that we remember that. This is in service to the movement.
So an average day in one set, in one way was very beautiful because I was home with my children. I love them very much. I love spending time with them and mothering and nurturing and homeschooling and gardening with them, and I loved being with them. And I’m so grateful that I had that span of years actually, where I couldn’t go anywhere. The flip side of that is that I have such deep bonds with my children because of that, the early childhood attachment. But it was grueling, it was isolating. It was unnecessarily harder than it had to be. It stifled all of the efforts that I could have used to make our lives easier by contributing in external ways to the household. It’s condoned abuse and neglect because it shut me off and isolated me from mandatory reporters, resources.
I have a series on my social media. At this point in time I was working with mentors in Bill Gothard’s Institute of Basic Life Principles, and I called them my Gothard Fundy mentors. And so this series is ordinary parenting things that my Gothard Fundy mentors said I could skip in order to have a quiverfull. And so the whole movement was focused on, you need to have as many babies as possible. You should always be pregnant, you should always be nursing. That’s what you’re doing for the kingdom.
But as your listeners are probably very aware of, children are expensive, and if you want to raise them to healthy self-development, you… they take resources. And so those things are going to make you limit your family size, because 20 children is a lot to provide for, so maybe we should have two. You need to cut those things out. So this list is all the things that we would skip. It’s things like pediatricians, the gynecologist, educating our daughters, asking for help, consent, pants, toys, separate bedrooms, college educations. All the things that people probably assume children need, we would just cut because we didn’t want anything to interfere with our mandate to have as many babies as possible.
Tori Dunlap:
One of the kind of poll quotes from your book, quote, “Today, it hit me when he hit me, blood shaking in my brain. Maybe there wasn’t a savior coming. Maybe it was up to me to save me.” First of all, wow. Literal tears to my eyes immediately. What was the impetus of like, wow, maybe this is not my life? This is not what I want. There is nobody who’s coming, there’s no Jesus Christ coming to save me.
Tia Levings:
Yeah, yeah. That is an ultimate confrontation point. It was one that, dangerously close to the edge of too far. That same night that that scene was written, I almost died. I was held hostage for four hours and almost died. Left that, escaped that situation with my children, my laptop, and a load of laundry at midnight. So I really waited until the last possible moment. That’s my tenacious nature, insisting that Jesus is coming, someone’s going to see, I can fix this. That I had to really exhaust every single element of that. And then what did it was realizing, hold on. I’m the only other adult in the room with my children, and I’m the one that’s letting this happen. We do so much from a passive place when we’re in patriarchy that allows patriarchy to continue having the amount of control that they have. Patriarchy cannot even continue without female support. And so when women stand up and say, “I’m not doing this.”
Tori Dunlap:
Hold on, can I just, I’m sorry.
Tia Levings:
Yes.
Tori Dunlap:
I don’t mean to cut you off. Will you say that again? Because, wow. And we also don’t want to victim blame either, right? The domestic abuse is not your fault.
Tia Levings:
No, it’s not.
Tori Dunlap:
And also, right.
Tia Levings:
Yes, and also, I’m their mom. And if I’m raising the next generation of abusers and I’m raising the next generation of women who stay with their abusers, that’s my example saying, “I stayed in this and I’m calling it the best. I’m calling this something you should do.” And I absolutely was not willing to die on that hill and I was not willing to do that to them. It took me a long time to realize that, mostly because of the control I was under, the indoctrination and the brainwashing, and not having any resources or any help or any agency. But once I realized it, it galvanized me really quickly and I got out of there.
Tori Dunlap:
Okay, load of laundry, your children, a laptop. What was the most difficult thing, financially? Because that is the thing that we get dozens of emails a week from women who say, “I’m in domestically abusive relationships. I’m in emotionally abusive relationships, financially abusive relationships, and I can’t leave because I don’t have the money.” What was, even those next few days, what did that look like?
Tia Levings:
Yeah, that money is such a big part of it and having traceable, untraceable money is a big part of it.
Tori Dunlap:
Yes, yes.
Tia Levings:
He had control of everything and the only thing that I really had to my benefit is in that window of time, in 2007 when I was… There’s a plot line here with my blogging success. I was one of the early mommy bloggers and early homesteading bloggers, and so I was finding success very quickly. I have a knack for writing online, a knack for keywords. And I had gotten the interest of business people around me who were like, “Hey, can you teach me how to do that for business?” So suddenly I was like this blogging coach, completely made up career, but I was used to making things up because I made everything from scratch. So I made my career from scratch too, and I was like, sure, I will be your blog-sultant.
And I had opened a secret bank account a few months before, and so I had a little bit of money from that, just we’re talking maybe $1,500, and people gave me gift cards once they realized that I needed to get to Florida to my family, I needed to leave the state, needed to hide. And my sister, my sister took me in to, at one point, I was dependent on others completely for a few years. It took a lot to get on my feet from nothing, but I had my skill, my tenacity, my ability to make something out of nothing. I had the support of a village and a universe that helped catch me once I started telling the truth. They didn’t know, they didn’t know what I was in then. Then that’s the disservice that we do to our community when we uphold a facade. But once I started telling the truth, people wanted to help.
And I had the internet. I mean, I will always be grateful to the internet. It saved me so many times by having online connections and online resources. And untraceable money, those gift cards, people would give me gift cards and I could buy food, I could buy gas. I had to go into hiding for months after I left, so untraceable money was a big part of that.
Tori Dunlap:
Does your husband try to find you? Did the church try to find you?
Tia Levings:
Yes. He also experienced a massive psychotic break after. Two things happened. We were excommunicated from our cult, and so the external religious control that he had used to help him function was gone. And then I left.
Tori Dunlap:
Was it because you left?
Tia Levings:
We were excommunicated first. Yeah, we were excommunicated in April, and I left in October. And in between those months was hell.
Tori Dunlap:
What was the reasoning behind that?
Tia Levings:
I was excommunicated. Oh, you’ll get a riot, this is fun.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s so fun. Here we go.
Tia Levings:
I was in a spanking cult, so I was in this homeschooling cult where women were disciplined like children. It’s kind of the end of the patriarchal road. Let’s process that for a second since you gasped. So yes, I jumped churches.
Tori Dunlap:
Adult women?
Tia Levings:
Adult women.
Tori Dunlap:
Adult women were spanked?
Tia Levings:
This is taught, this is practiced today.
Tori Dunlap:
And not in a kinky, fun way. Sorry, I have to make a joke because that is so, wow.
Tia Levings:
No, it’s not kink. Let me tell you. When I talk about discipline and spanking, the kink community always pushes back and say, “Hold the phone. We have safe words and consent and aftercare, and that is not this.” And they’re absolutely correct.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s not consensual too. It’s not consensual. That’s the biggest thing.
Tia Levings:
It’s not consensual. To an environment of no consent, to an environment where you’re disciplining your children from babyhood in order to get them to comply and you’re doing this child training method. Listeners might be familiar with Michael Pearl’s work. I went down this train of Bill Gothard’s Institute of Basic Life Principles, which happened within my Baptist megachurch. And then we became independent Baptists. We became Presbyterians, and we became covenant reformed Presbyterians. And this is a movement based out of Moscow, Idaho, and it’s still thriving. It’s actually stronger today than it ever was. But they teach something called federal marriage. And federal marriage is the belief that the father is responsible to stand on judgment day before God and account for every single thing that happened in his family, including his wife’s thoughts and deeds. And so since he’s going to have that level of accountability before the Savior for his wife, he has to keep her in line. And so the way that’s done is through actual, tangible correction.
So I’m in this church, I’ll bring you up, I’ll speed you up. We’re in this church in Tennessee where everybody believes this way. It’s everyone homeschools, it was the like-minded, kindred spirits, families. All of us were quiverfull. All of us had lots of children, and we homeschooled, homesteaded. Women weren’t allowed to get together and talk. We had to be silent. It’s the ultimate fruition of everything that we had been taught as an ideal, was now manifest in this congregation. And in this congregation, I had also started blogging as a way to keep up with my family, and then that led to the blogging explosion when my blog did well online. I was getting 80, 90,000 hits a day from my blog posts-
Tori Dunlap:
Wow.
Tia Levings:
… as a lifestyle blogger when it was brand new. And that was no bueno for the elders who did not want women writing, let alone writing in their own name. So my first disobedience was that I refused to put my writing in my husband’s name. Then I refused to stop writing because I was successful and my family was involved. And so I was like, I’m not going to quit. I was starting to find my feet at this point in the story too.
And then I blogged about the Virgin Mary and how important she was to Christendom and that men needed women. Big, big, no-no. And then just to top it all off, I read a book on Eastern Orthodoxy and it influenced my husband away from the elder board. And because it was my influence that turned his head, they excommunicated me. So that happened in April, and we escaped in October, and in between was hell.
Tori Dunlap:
So it wasn’t a relief, it was, oh, we’ve lost everything we’ve ever known.
Tia Levings:
When I left?
Tori Dunlap:
Being excommunicated.
Tia Levings:
Oh, excommunicated was kind of a relief because we got out of that congregation. We found Orthodoxy, which was much more ancient and traditional and family oriented and healthy, psychologically healthy. So it didn’t… Like the spanking stopped. We became more egalitarian than we had been in our relationship. However, he couldn’t function without high control religion. High control religion had given him the guardrails to stay somewhat sane and once it was gone, he couldn’t function anymore.
Tori Dunlap:
You used the word cult before even I was going to, because I was about to ask, this sounds like a cult. I mean, we’ve talked to cult experts before. We’ve talked to victims of cults before on the show. I just want to recap in case people haven’t listened to those episodes, cult is all about, again, control. But it’s all about to specifically belonging and giving you a sense of, especially if you feel lost or confused, a sense of, oh, I finally found my community. I finally found what my life’s purpose is. And it sounds like, especially for your husband, that was a necessary through-line and also the thing that he was completely dependent on in order to live even a, I’m not going to call it semi normal, but a life that he understood, maybe. Is that accurate?
Tia Levings:
Yeah, yeah, and I would say it’s kind of both and, because the movement changed around us. I call it the cult without walls, because the idea is that as a movement, the mind control are the walls. The teachings, the indoctrination, the ways that we affiliate with belonging that doesn’t have anything to do anymore with the location. We belong to groups and ideologies without walls around us. We’ve built the walls in our minds. And so when you’re in a high control group like that and you’re not allowed to question it, you’re not allowed to become an individual. Your own agency or your own success is not only irrelevant, but heavily shamed, you’re in the group. And no one joins a cult, they join something that they think is a good thing for their family.
So the ways those extreme views manifest in your family life is very subtle. It takes time, it’s very thorough, and it’s really important for us to examine it because the way the Christian patriarchy runs their families, what happens behind closed doors in those households, is their model for the rest of the country. That’s how they scale it up to government and it’s why we see when we have Speaker Johnson is a Christian patriarch. Amy Coney Barrett is from a Christian patriarchy church. All of this together brings us back to the way they live in their family life. And so what we can know what their view for America is just by, and how serious they are about these legislative changes they’re making, by looking at the way they live their lives at home. And sure, it’s cult-like. Getting out of it is like escaping a cult. You have to break down all the indoctrination and the mind control piece of it separate from, I mean, it’s everything you know. It’s so comprehensive. The first thing you have to do is tease things apart, and it’s so complicated.
Tori Dunlap:
So at what point did your marriage fall apart? At what point do you feel like truly you were, because on your own, you had left, but when did you actually feel free of that?
Tia Levings:
That’s a great question. When I left, I didn’t even let myself say divorce because I was so conditioned to believe that divorce was worse than death, and I didn’t think we’d get divorced. So I was surprised when I was kind of forced into that because the violence made it too dangerous to go back. But really free from it, I mean, you don’t divorce somebody like that very easily, and it was very complicated for 10 years. So I think I felt a big one when, well, there were levels. When I remarried, that was one level. I won all sole custody and all of that, that was another level. The real big one was when my baby turned 18 and I no longer am beholden in any way. And the ultimate freedom is when I was able to tap into compassion for him, because patriarchy hurts men too.
Tori Dunlap:
Obviously, very clearly both from the ability to sit here with me and talk about it and write a book about it, you have gone to a lot of therapy. What else was helpful?
Tia Levings:
A lot. A lot.
Tori Dunlap:
Because thinking of, maybe there’s somebody listening out there who in the most dramatic potential was in some sort of cult or evangelical movement or maybe still is, or has maybe just been through something traumatic and is trying to figure out, how do I move forward from that?
Tia Levings:
Yeah, I really take kind of a bulldog approach to my healing. I challenge the notion that I had to stay broken, and I have applied really and truly that entrepreneurial, trad wifey spirit that I had with me all along that’s so resourceful, that can find my way through hard things like poverty and make a beautiful childhood for my children. That whole mindset, I took and applied to myself.
So I said yes to every therapy modality. I get out there and try when something intimidates me. I’ve learned the therapeutic movement has also matured in tandem with my healing. So there’s language available today that I didn’t have in 2007. This stuff is hashtags now. You can get memes on therapy for things that weren’t even named in 2008. So I mean, I say yes to all of it, and I take really good care of my body and my nervous system. I’m constantly educating myself and learning. I refuse to accept that trauma, it gets to take my present or my future. It has already had so much of my past, but I’m in charge of me now, and I can decide how much of my life I’m going to give over to that.
So I feel whole, I feel like I have healed to and come full circle, and some of that is being able to write my story, hold it tangible form, speak it when I read the audible, and now it’s outside of me and I can finally externalize what happened. But I can also apply meaning and interpretation to the wider movement, because everything I ran from is coming from my country and the only person who can tell somebody that is somebody who lived it and came through it, which is a real short list of people because this can be re-traumatizing to talk about. And without that kind of work, who’s going to do it? So I felt very called to make this, like I said, fighting the patriarchy by telling their secrets. I feel empowered and emboldened to do that, that that’s my strength and that’s what I’ll do.
Tori Dunlap:
So this was, you said 2008, is that when you left?
Tia Levings:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
So we have, I think as a society and as a country, progressed a lot since 2008, and in many ways we have not at all. And in the past, let’s call it year or so on social media, we have this trad wife movement. We’ve discussed it briefly on the show before, but I do feel like it is sensationalized. It is this idea of this idyllic life where you hand make Cheerios for your children, and you are completely financially dependent on a man, yet you also are creating content and making money. So really, you still run a business though, when you monetize it. But what is the trad wife movement in its current state? And how is it similar and maybe different, but really, how is it similar to what your existence was for a very long time?
Tia Levings:
Yeah, in many ways it’s the same. Trad is just short for traditional, and they’re doing the same thing, to an end. They are the face, they are the branding. So patriarchy and high control government can legislate control over us, that’s one way they can change our culture. They can also lure us in. So it’s hard out there. We’re tired. The economy’s hard. Women want to, of course they want to go home. It’s lulling. It’s very soothing to watch somebody make something from scratch and smile and dress so feminine and la-da-da. I would’ve been a trad wife influencer if I had social media back then. Absolutely, because that’s really happening. They’re really smiling. I mean, there’s this, there’s pressure like, oh, the trad wife content that’s online today isn’t really showing you what it’s like, and that’s some truth. They’re not showing the neglect and the child abuse and the parentification of older daughters and the poverty, and they’re not even being transparent about the entrepreneur aspect of it, which is allowed in the movement, by the way, because you’re contributing to the family. Anything for the family is allowed.
Doesn’t mean the Ballerina Farm is truly a co-CEO, it means that she’s a submissive wife and she’s contributing to her family’s industry. That’s just her bringing her strengths to the kingdom of God. So it’s the same in that regard, and that’s really happening, it’s generally that lovely. She’s really smiling, she’s really dressing feminine. She’s really being a soft and soothing mother.
What we have to look beyond is, to what end? To what end? Is this bringing us home so that we’ll get out of the workplace, so that we can have a male dominated society again? Is this reducing women’s options and encouraging this simplicity that’s from the 1500s? There’s a reason why the 1600s happened and why we continued to evolve. Being a Puritan wasn’t so great, especially for women. So, why are we romanticizing Little House on the Prairie? Because it’s hard out there. So they create this self-fulfilling prophecy. They refuse to pass legislation about child care. They refuse to give us our healthcare rights. They refuse to give us equality and freedom and an ERA. And then exhausted, we do the most natural thing. We go home and we think it’s going to be simpler. And that’s the big lie.
It’s not simpler. It is not easier to make your own cheese crackers because you can’t afford a box of Cheez-Its. And it is not fun to be stuck in abuse and know, I can’t even drive the car five miles over my mileage limit, he’s going to know. That’s not good for women, that’s not good for society. And then it’s, we can go on and on about the supremacy and privilege aspects of this. There’s a reason why the trad wives all look the same.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and also, I think making Cheez-Its from scratch is both a potential, I can’t afford Cheez-Its so I have to make them, I have to get scrappy, and/or I have the luxury of privilege to spend eight hours baking these cheese crackers from scratch.
Tia Levings:
Yeah, there’s a third one too. The adjacent pure ideology of nutrition. So we get very, very, very focused on our vaccines are bad, nutrition is good. Heal the body without a doctor worldview, it’s manifested in you making your own crackers so that you can keep the government out of your child’s body.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, boy. Okay, one of the things about your story that I find really interesting. You talked in your book about how when a potential boyfriend assaulted you, it scared you back into the church and religion, rather than what happened later with your husband of, oh, I have to get out. Can you talk about why that fear and shame tactics seem to work so well?
Tia Levings:
That’s a great question. Fear, fear is very, very motivating and I think this entire movement is built on fear. My earliest childhood trauma that’s religiously motivated is the fear of hell. I’m as a five-year-old, tasked with making a decision for the rest of my life to decide my faith tradition and accept Jesus into my heart. Why? Because if I don’t, I’m going to burn in a literal lake of fire. It’s not going to be Noah’s Ark in the water, we’re not drowning in water, we’re drowning in flames forever. So I mean, it’s impossible.
Tori Dunlap:
I grew up Catholic, so.
Tia Levings:
You know. It’s fear.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, it’s not as intense but it’s, yeah, I mean, you’re told, because I went to a Catholic school, I went to 18 years at Catholic school, and one of the first things you’re taught is Adam and Eve, an original sin. And you get baptized because you are born sinful immediately.
Tia Levings:
Yes, yes.
Tori Dunlap:
And so the baptism is the acknowledgement of original sin, that you were born imperfect, which I do agree with. However, yeah, the fear mongering was intense.
Tia Levings:
The fear mongering and the way it turns you on yourself, so you can’t trust yourself.
Tori Dunlap:
Yes.
Tia Levings:
You’re born sinful, you are born bad, and you can’t trust yourself. So we’ve automatically taken intuition and instinct and conviction and all of that, and we’ve taken it offline. You are now completely reliant on an external interpretation of what you should do and what is good and bad, and you’re expected to conform to this external morality.
So my story could also be called the way I learned to listen to myself, the way I learned to find my voice, the way I learned to choose myself, because I had to go back all the way to, was I born bad? Can I trust my own voice? This love hurts, their love hurts, their love is going to kill us. Am I really willing to die for this? I wasn’t. I wanted to live.
Tori Dunlap:
I don’t want to harp on this point too much because I think it’s very obvious as we’re talking about it, and as anybody who’s read the news in the past six months knows, but all of this is now political as well. All of this is political, and there is one party in particular, the Republicans, that this is a huge part, especially in the last eight years of the policies that they are trying to focus on, which is limited, if not no access to reproductive healthcare and reproductive rights, a severe lack of safety for queer or trans people. I mean, the list goes on and on. But to be very clear, we’re recording this at the end of August, right before a big presidential election. What’s at stake here, not just for us as individuals? I think most people listening have not experienced everything you’ve experienced, but we have potentially a particular set of individuals running for office and running for government, or who are in government already who want to uphold some of the ideas that you experienced firsthand.
Tia Levings:
Yeah, it always was political, and I think it’s important to note that the Project 2025 architects, which include predominantly, it’s 110 conservative organizations, but predominantly the Heritage Foundation, is over 50 years old. And they set out way back at the beginning of this timeline that we’re talking about, the early ’80s, late ’70s, to get us where we are today. Where they’re going to have dominance in the Supreme Court, they’re going to have dominance in Congress, and it’s with this worldview in mind. So while it was political in the ’80s and ’90s, they didn’t that kind of power in place yet. They were grooming us for where we are today.
So now we are today, we’re on the last exit of the highway. This election determines so much because of the rest of the structure that’s in place, and because of the articulation of the goal, the way that they are ready to implement so much. And that’s why, just to swing it back to how patriarchs live at home is how they want to live or how they want to run the country, I wasn’t allowed to vote. They have women’s suffrage on the table. I wasn’t allowed to work. They’re going to restrict women’s abilities to have education, employment. I mean, at this point, Iran and Afghanistan are good examples for the way their women’s movement was pulled back because it is the same thing. That is what happens when a fundamentalist regime takes over mainstream, women suffer. And they just said that women aren’t allowed to even make a sound in public anymore. That was the news a week ago coming out of Afghanistan. They’re not only in full burka, their hands are not allowed to show and they are not allowed to make sounds. That’s how we lived.
I used to call my story the American Burka, not because of Islamophobia or anything like that, but because my denim jumper and my code of conduct matched what at that time was the Gulf War. The Christians around me were spouting off about the fundamentalists overseas and I was like, I’m not allowed to do any of those things. How is it different? I mean, the only thing that’s different is I look like I’m in mainstream America because I have cute kids and we get to take pictures and go to the park and I am visible, but I wasn’t allowed to do any of those things. So all of the reproductive freedoms, contraception, we didn’t have contraception. Women won’t have contraception. We already see that movement in place.
So I know that it scary and it seems extreme and it seems like, oh, they don’t really mean that. I would ask listeners to sit with, what makes you think they don’t really mean that? They live that way at home, that’s how they raise their daughters. When we in the liberal side say, “Oh, well, we don’t want our daughters, our granddaughters to have less freedoms than our grandmothers.” Well, women in the Christian patriarchy don’t have their own credit cards, they don’t have their own bank accounts, they don’t have their own agency. So why shouldn’t we take them seriously? They’re in power, they’re going to run the country the way they run at home. We have no reason to doubt that whatsoever. They’re sincere people of faith.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, and although they are in the minority, they are very, very powerful.
Tia Levings:
That’s the thing.
Tori Dunlap:
We know from polling, right? Most people believe in abortion access. Most people believe in contraception access. Most people believe that queer folks should have safety and autonomy, but the people who don’t are very, very intelligent and are very, very well-organized and are very, very powerful.
Tia Levings:
Correct, and they’re in some key leadership positions.
Tori Dunlap:
Yep. Okay, you talked about searching for safety and answers, but the church obviously weaponizes that. Do you still deal with any of that residual fear or anxiety that the church instilled in you?
Tia Levings:
I have generalized anxiety, I think from the amount of trauma that I deal with. I have complex PTSD, and so I do deal with triggers as information. Again, I’m still very relentless for my own personal healing. So when a trigger comes up and I feel activated, I work with my nervous system, I work with my parts. I do internal family systems, combined with somatic experiencing right now, and that seems to be a really good mashup. Definitely use meds. There’s things that I do to take care of myself.
But I also, when I encounter fear, I’m more likely to start uncovering that and unpacking it because I do not lead with shame. Shame is not useful to me, and I also will not give into or be led by fear. So there is always something you can do when you’re afraid. And sometimes it might not be like a big act of heroism. It might be something small, like say it honestly. Say what’s happening, say the truth, write it down, journal, take a walk, take yourself out of the situation. There’s a lot of things that we can do when we feel afraid, but I refuse to be manipulated by it anymore.
Tori Dunlap:
For someone listening who, let me say it in the most general way possible, feels like they’re in a situation where they have little to no control of their life anymore, what do you have to say to them?
Tia Levings:
First of all, I would say I’m so proud of you for realizing that, because that’s an awakening all by itself. When you wake up and you realize, I want to do something and I don’t have the ability to do it because there’s a control force that’s keeping me from doing that. That is such a big, big, big mind shift. And then you can trust one will lead to another. That is also the first domino in a series of many and you will find windows to the universe that will open and open and open, as you seek more control and agency. So I really feel like that’s a process that starts to reward itself. Once a rebellion kicks in, once a match is lit, it doesn’t have to be a very big light in order to change the darkness around it. It can just be a tiny little flame, a little spark, and you’ve changed the conversation, even if it’s just in between your own ears.
And then opportunity will find you if you’re looking for it, it’ll be thing after thing. It’s really individual, so it’s kind of hard to give a blanket advice but there are some common things. Like there’s making sure that you can do what’s necessary to have personal finances, personal agency, untraceable money, access to books, education, and the internet, being at least honest with one other person in your life. You can find one other person to be completely frank and honest with. It’s stone step two, because it’s hard if that person’s the reflection in the mirror. Then start there.
Tori Dunlap:
And it sounds like for your story and I imagine many others, when you do start realizing, oh, this is awful, this is not what… this is terrible, the shame sets in of like, how did I allow this to happen for so long? So especially for women, how can we use that shame and turn it into action rather than making it make us feel smaller? Does that make sense?
Tia Levings:
Yeah, it does, totally, and it’s really a personal individual rebellion inside your body first. The first thing I always tell people is sit up straight and stop taking on more responsibility than is yours to take. You were part of a system that overpowered you and manipulated you, usually from early childhood when you were a defenseless baby. You are here for many reasons that are beyond your own control.
The only thing that you’re in control of or bear responsibility for right now is how much further it goes into your future. So you might have complicity in things you have to contend with in your past, but that’s not today’s job. Today’s job is to draw a line and say, “I’m aware of it now, and now I’m going to make the change.” And it’s going to be an excavation. There’s no way to get out of a lifetime, there’s no way not to do this work. It’s going to be transformational, it’s going to be hard work, but the reward is life and agency and freedom on the other side, and I promise you it’s worth it.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you for sharing your story. Thank you for your work. Where can people get your book, find out more about you? I’m very excited to read it myself.
Tia Levings:
Oh, yeah. So, A Well-Trained wife is available in hardcover, ebook, and audio, everywhere books are sold. It is a New York Times Bestsellers-
Tori Dunlap:
Yay.
Tia Levings:
… It is instant debut, bestseller, so I’m very excited about that. My website is Tialevings.com, and my Substack is Tialevings.substack.com. That’s the anti-fundamentalist where I unpack and deconstruct fundamentalism as it shows up in our headlines, families, news, entertainment and recovery. And then on social media, I’m Tia Levings Writer everywhere, and I share reels and educational content on the abuses in Christian fundamentalism.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you. Thank you for being here.
Tia Levings:
You’re welcome. Thank you for having me.
Tori Dunlap:
Anything we didn’t cover that you want to cover?
Tia Levings:
Just that I’m really proud of this generation of women. I’m very excited for your power, your smarts, your resources. This is an honest conversation, creates a space for truth, and truth is contagious. So, I thank you for your work.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you. You’re going to make me cry. Thank you.
All right. Thank you to Tia for joining us. Thank you for sharing her story. This is one of the ones where we could have captioned, Tori cries a fourth time. I fucking love inspirational women. I fucking love women who are the fullest, best version of themselves, even though life and society and the world has constantly tried to make them not that way. So please, purchase her book, it is a bestseller. It’s called, A Well-Trained Wife. It’s available wherever books are sold. It is her memoir. I can’t wait to read it. You can also find her on social media at Tia Levings Writer. So T-I-A L-E-V-I-N-G-S Writer.
All right, team, thank you for your support of the show as always. Please share this episode with a friend. We appreciate you being here. Go get some Popeyes and we’ll talk to you later.
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist, a Her First $100K podcast. Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap, produced by Kristen Fields and Tamisha Grant, research by Sarah Sciortino, audio and video engineering by Alyssa Midcalf, marketing and operations by Karina Patel and Amanda Leffew. Special thanks to our team at Her First $100K, Kailyn Sprinkle, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Taylor Chou, Sasha Bonnar, Rae Wong, Elizabeth McCumber, Claire Kurronen, Daryl Ann Ingram, and Meghan Walker, promotional graphics by Mary Stratton, photography by Sarah Wolfe, and theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound.
A huge thanks to the entire Her First $100K community for supporting the show. For more information about Financial Feminist, Her First $100K, our guests and episode show notes, visit financialfeministpodcast.com. If you’re confused about your personal finances and you’re wondering where to start, go to herfirst100k.com/quiz for a free personalized money plan.
Tori Dunlap
Tori Dunlap is an internationally-recognized money and career expert. After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori quit her corporate job in marketing and founded Her First $100K to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money. She has helped over five million women negotiate salaries, pay off debt, build savings, and invest.
Tori’s work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC, TIME, PEOPLE, CNN, New York Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, BuzzFeed, and more.
With a dedicated following of over 2.1 million on Instagram and 2.4 million on TikTok —and multiple instances of her story going viral—Tori’s unique take on financial advice has made her the go-to voice for ambitious millennial women. CNBC called Tori “the voice of financial confidence for women.”
An honors graduate of the University of Portland, Tori currently lives in Seattle, where she enjoys eating fried chicken, going to barre classes, and attempting to naturally work John Mulaney bits into conversation.
