How Tia Levings Quit Being a ‘Well-Trained Wife’

Tia Levings made a decision for herself and her children on October 28, 2007. With the help of a priest, she planned for an escape from her abusive husband. “I heard a voice say, ‘RUN,’” she writes in her memoir, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy. With a few belongings and a couple of cats, the mom drove her children to safety. This freedom came years after Levings began suffering at the hands of a man whose violence was supported by religion. She had cared for and homeschooled her kids, and quietly educated herself, while balancing the tightrope-walk of Christian fundamentalism. Yet even in an oppressive environment, Levings found and used her voice. 

Levings made her escape the year before Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar of Northwest Arkansas gave Christian fundamentalism a fresh packaging on their TLC reality show, then titled 17 Kids and Counting. And in recent years, Levings has educated thousands of social media followers about the harm of fundamentalism and was interviewed for the 2023 Amazon Prime Video docuseries Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets.

An imaginative child with a love of storytelling, Levings “met God in the trees, not at church. Sweet witches and fairies too,” she writes. When her family moved from Michigan to Florida, God was obscured by rules and religiosity in a Southern Baptist megachurch. “I was trying to find and replicate that experience in the religious setting because they were telling me this is where I would experience [God’s presence],” Levings tells Sojourners. “I was following every rule to the letter, but I was never, ever getting that emotional reward of feeling connected to the divine.” Instead, the imposed fundamentalist faith of her teen years was driven by fear in an environment where women were subordinated to men.

Evangelical and fundamentalist Christian practices could be mapped out on a Venn diagram, with the size of the overlap fluctuating depending on the times and political climate. Distinctions vary depending on a given community’s gradations of both severity and open-mindedness, but often, fundamentalists tend to separate themselves from worldly culture while evangelicals might use culture to point people to God. Levings’ work is helpful both to readers who carry religious baggage and to readers who haven’t interacted much with high-control religion but want to better understand its effects.

A Well-Trained Wife skillfully illustrates that harmful religious teachings, instilled in youth, can have detrimental effects into adulthood. Levings was introduced to a system of patriarchal teachings from the Institute in Basic Life Principles, or IBLP, founded by Bill Gothard (who has since been accused of sexual harassment and abuse by multiple women) and popular among large homeschooling families.

A recurring theme throughout Levings’ work is that authority figures and mentors promoted “dying to the self.” This mantra seems to be an interpretation of scripture: “For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again” (2 Corinthians 5:14-15). But in Levings’ case, it was women who were expected to die to men’s desires and whims.

When she learned as a high schooler that a college scholarship from church would only be allocated to male students, she threw up when she got home. “Boys got what they wanted. Girls gave it up for God,” Levings writes. When she disliked that the Proverbs 31 woman had no name, a mentor told her, “Women of God don’t care about having a name for themselves. She’s a utensil, useful to her husband and blessed by God. What could be better?”

Constant death to the self “annihilated” Levings’ self-development. “Having a sense of self is what you need in order to survive and to thrive,” she told Sojourners. “It even could be argued in Christian circles that your sense of self is important enough for Jesus to die for. And somehow, at the same time, you’re not supposed to have a self.” 

This indignity was, tragically, reflected in Levings’ marriage. Her spouse shifted the family’s allegiance from the IBLP to Doug Phillips’ Vision Forum Ministries, ushering in “Head of Household voting,” in which a husband was encouraged to vote on behalf of the family, usurping a wife’s vote. Then came Doug Wilson’s “Federal Vision,” or simply “federalism,” wherein a husband’s “family is his dominion; if they misbehave, it’s his job to address it,” Levings explains in a supplemental “Fundie Cheat Sheet” published on her website. Readers unfamiliar with Christian fundamentalism will see these dangerous ideas in motion in A Well-Trained Wife.

One of the most distressing abuses in the book is Christian Domestic Discipline, a patriarchal policy instructing wives to consent in writing to not accuse their spouses of domestic violence as a result of “Christian discipline.” In other words, churches who subscribed to CDD policies sanctioned husbands hurting their wives. In 2018, Sojourners, We Will Speak Out, and IMA World Health commissioned a LifeWay study to learn about churches’ responses to domestic and sexual violence. Of the 1,000 pastors surveyed, 90 percent “report having dealt with issues of abuse and harassment, [but] only half report they’ve had formal training to address it.” 

Many churches have swept abuse under the rug or struggled to find a helpful way to support victims, but Levings’ former religious community outright endorsed abuse.

Reflecting on the domestic abuse contract, she writes, “No one told me there’s no level of submission that’s ‘enough.’ In a cage, a tiger can circle. In a maze, a rat can run. She can determine the bounds of her freedom and move her will within them. But submission is not a cage. It’s a vacuum. As you give, the container squeezes harder, removing all air.” 

Levings was groomed for this abusive marriage under the guise of biblical womanhood, but she also endured heart-rending loss as a mother: The author’s daughter Clara passed away in infancy. In Levings’ grief, writing was a comfort. Online forums were sacred spaces to commune with other moms and to examine art and culture away from the watchful eyes of church leaders. She read library books, became a highly successful blogger, and fought to protect her writing when religious leaders discovered it and objected to it. “Old corners inside of me filled with light,” Levings writes. “Words—essays, novels, posts, ideas, films, classics, cracked the layers of suffering, hardship, and ugly secrets.”

In A Well-Trained Wife, Levings crystallizes a thought many deconstructing Christians have had in one form or another: “I needed to find a different way to be a Christian.” Her desire was answered, for a time, by the Orthodox faith tradition, which she introduced to her then-husband. Temporarily, this faith brought solace to the family and introduced Levings to a trustworthy priest who helped facilitate an emergency departure in the face of her spouse’s anger and threats.

Speaking with Sojourners, Levings references the song “This Little Light of Mine” to illustrate finding her light while struggling to hide it from unsafe individuals and institutions: “I used to sing that in my head and think, ‘I’m hiding myself all the time.’ I didn’t know at the time if I was hiding my light or if I was hiding my sin.” She adds, “Except that there’s a self-preservation that takes over. And I eventually had to give air and light to what felt sustainable. And joy and discovery and curiosity are what kept me breathing. So I had to let that shine.” 

A Well-Trained Wife shows readers that we shouldn’t live our days dimming the brightest parts of who we are. Levings reveals in her final chapters that addressing religious trauma is a process that is different for each person. But in leaving high-control religion, victims are no longer in a vacuum of submission; they can begin to breathe and work toward new chapters, as Levings has. We have a responsibility to support victims of religious trauma and survivors of domestic and sexual abuse.

If you or someone you know is in danger, please call 911, your local hotline, the National Domestic Violence Hotline: 800-799-7233 / TTY 1-800-787-3224, or contact the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) Hotline: 800-656-4673 or http://online.rainn.org.