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Episode: Trad Wife Cults: How Tia Levings Escaped (Pt 1)

Author: Glennon Doyle and Audacy
Duration: 00:50:51

Episode Shownotes

369. Trad Wife Cults: How Tia Levings Escaped (Pt 1) Glennon, Amanda, and Abby sit down with Tia Levings, NYT bestselling author, to discuss her experience in a high control Christian Fundamentalist cult: her journey from indoctrination to freedom to healing from religious trauma. Discover: -Why strong women are often

drawn into Christian extremism—and how they can break free -Why parents are taught to hit infants, and husbands are taught to spank their wives -The hidden agenda behind why Christian Fundamentalists encourage large families -The moment Glennon busted her kids out of Christian school -The eerie crossover of wellness culture and Christian extremism More on Tia: Tia Levings is the New York Times Bestselling author of A Well-Trained Wife, her memoir of escape from Christian Patriarchy. She writes about the realities of Christian fundamentalism, evangelical patriarchy, and religious trauma. She also appeared in the hit Amazon docu-series, Shiny Happy People. Based in North Carolina, she is mom to four incredible adults and likes to travel, hike, paint, and daydream. Find her on social media @TiaLevingsWriter. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Full Transcript

00:00:12 Speaker_03
Okay, so pod squad. My sister and Abby and I have talked for the last couple weeks about how there is no one on the planet who is more important to talk to in this moment than Tia Levings. And there's many reasons why, but right now I think

00:00:34 Speaker_03
If you're going to listen to this episode, which will be about high control religious groups and women and freedom and the lore of fundamentalism, youth might think that you don't care about high control religious groups, but I assure you, they care about you.

00:00:56 Speaker_03
And I assure you, that we will all be feeling and seeing and experiencing the effects of the power of these groups over the next few years, because they are largely behind what has happened to our country and why we're in this moment right now.

00:01:15 Speaker_03
So this episode is for everyone. who wants to understand how we got here.

00:01:22 Speaker_02
Including the people who believe it right now. Like, that's what's so amazing about Tia's work is that it explains it in a way that does not demonize the people who are wrapped up in this, you know?

00:01:35 Speaker_03
Yeah, and I just want to start by saying that, Tia, I understand and have experienced a version of this in my own life that I am still I hear whispers of inside me all the time. So I just understand.

00:01:59 Speaker_03
And for anyone who thinks that a strong woman cannot be lured into and experience all of that, we are here to say that is wrong. That is very, very wrong. But I just know that your work, Tia, has healed and freed so many people.

00:02:22 Speaker_03
And you're also a freaking genius. Yeah. About understanding our world. And my heart feels connected to you. My mind feels connected to you. My work feels connected to you. And so I'm just really happy and honored that you're here today with us.

00:02:40 Speaker_03
Let me tell the pod squad, for anyone who doesn't know who you are, Tia Levings is the New York Times bestselling author of A Well-Trained Wife her memoir of escape from Christian patriarchy.

00:02:51 Speaker_03
She writes about the realities of Christian fundamentalism, evangelical patriarchy, and religious trauma.

00:02:58 Speaker_03
She also appeared on the hit Amazon docuseries, Shiny Happy People, which was so good and I had to breathe my way through, Abby knows, and take breaks and just, whoa, that really did a number on me.

00:03:12 Speaker_03
Based in North Carolina, she is a mom to four incredible adults and likes to travel, hike, paint, and daydream. Usually, I cut those parts out of people's intros. I just want to tell you this because I'm brutal about time.

00:03:26 Speaker_03
But I felt like that sentence was so important. Like, the fact that you like to travel, hike, paint, and daydream feels like the opposite of what came before. And it makes me really happy.

00:03:39 Speaker_03
You can find Tia on social media, at Tia Levings Writer, and her second book, The Soul of Healing, which I didn't know about, and I feel very excited about already, releases with St. Martin's Essentials in 2026.

00:03:53 Speaker_03
So Tia, thank you for being here with us.

00:03:57 Speaker_05
God, thank you so much. Yes, that is my anti-fundamentalism, that line in my bio, so thank you. That's the essence of it.

00:04:03 Speaker_05
This is a surreal moment because I'm a pod squatter and I know you relate to this because I have been talking back to my phone in so many episodes where I'm like, it's religious trauma. I want to talk to you. Thank you so much for having me on today.

00:04:19 Speaker_05
Thank you for this absolutely surreal experience of hearing you, not just off of the podcast app, but here in my heart today. This is so meaningful.

00:04:31 Speaker_03
So before we start with your story, are you saying that you listen to me talking about my problems and you think to yourself, this is religious trauma and she doesn't know it.

00:04:41 Speaker_05
I say it all the time, particularly to Abby. Yes, all the time. We have dialogues. You just haven't heard them. You haven't been privy to our conversation.

00:04:54 Speaker_03
Oh wow, that's fascinating.

00:04:56 Speaker_02
Will you come back and fix Abby with us?

00:04:58 Speaker_01
I know, maybe for sure, but like when you said that, I knew in my heart that you were talking to me. I was like, oh yeah. That's right. That is kind of a good answer for all of my struggle.

00:05:09 Speaker_05
Wow. It's just there. It's like they're like a fingerprint and I've just held it because you even have an episode called Religious Trauma and I've listened to it multiple times and I do that.

00:05:20 Speaker_05
I go back and listen to multiple conversations and your work has been a light to me through the whole thing. I mean, Glennon and I, we go back to a similar experience even in the writing online world.

00:05:32 Speaker_05
I remember your early blogs and I was an early blogger. It's part of my freedom story. So I just have felt a commonality for a really long time and no vilification for people who are going through a fluid experience.

00:05:46 Speaker_05
We're at different points in the journey and my life was saved by people who gave me the grace of being allowed to grow.

00:05:52 Speaker_03
Yeah, that's good. Okay, we want to get to your freedom story. What's the prequel of that? Can you talk to us about how you were raised and how it kind of groomed you to become susceptible to the high control group you became a part of?

00:06:10 Speaker_03
And then talk to us about that high control group. Mostly I just want to be quiet and I want you to just talk to us.

00:06:17 Speaker_05
Yeah, especially for anyone who's new to my work. It's good to start with kind of the general overview and I began my book where I did on purpose. I think my first 10 years growing up without a predominant religion, my parents

00:06:30 Speaker_05
took us to church on Christmas and Easter and a few extra Sundays. I grew up in Michigan where we had a lot of Midwestern type farm work to do. So if we had work to do on Sundays, we were just as likely to stay home and do that.

00:06:43 Speaker_05
But I knew that church was this pleasant place where we went to learn about God and just the average Christian experience that people think they have without any examination of the deeper themes.

00:06:55 Speaker_05
You just think you're going there for Bible stories and Kool-Aid and friends and these traditions and institutions that become part of our lay.

00:07:02 Speaker_05
And then my parents moved when I was 10 to Jacksonville, Florida, which was totally incomplete culture shock for me. I had not been in a large city before. I had never seen a black person before. I had never, gone into a big classroom.

00:07:18 Speaker_05
One classroom was as big as my school when we moved. And this is in 1984, so this is in a time period where a lot of us will resonate with this. There was no vocabulary for childhood depression. You didn't talk to your kids before you shocked them.

00:07:32 Speaker_05
You just brought them along. And as a highly sensitive likely very neurodiverse child, I felt every single aspect of this deeply. I have an ability to kind of anticipate and see clearly what others may not see, because they're busy.

00:07:48 Speaker_05
You know, I'm just intuitive that way, and I've always been that way. So I was flinching from danger that I didn't feel safe, you know, that kind of thing in the transition.

00:07:57 Speaker_05
And we moved to Jacksonville in the summer, the last two months of fourth grade. I mean, it just, when you stack up the situational stresses of the beginning of my story, children can relate to them.

00:08:07 Speaker_05
And I think one of the takeaways I hope people get from my story is that we get into these situations through very ordinary and relatable situations. They are not exotic. They are not being kidnapped to the jungles to go hang out with Jim Jones.

00:08:22 Speaker_05
This is an average American upbringing where I did average American things and my parents did the most normal thing in the world. They decided to take us to church to make friends. And

00:08:32 Speaker_05
In Jacksonville, that was a mega church was First Baptist Church, Jacksonville, Florida was one of the first mega churches in the country. When I say that, I mean, we had thousands of people on the roll. The church was set up like a stadium.

00:08:45 Speaker_05
And they were very specific that they were marketing to families, they were marketing to have Christian dominion in the country, that they believed Jesus came to save America and set the city, like we were going to be a city on a hill.

00:08:59 Speaker_05
And they told parents, you know, bring your kids down here and we'll raise them right, we'll keep bad outcomes from happening to your children.

00:09:07 Speaker_05
So the second thing that's kind of unique about my story that I refuse to diminish is that my parents aren't like these big villains that tried to hurt me and didn't protect me and were part of my root traumas.

00:09:18 Speaker_05
I know that's the story for many, many people. It is not mine. I had well-meaning parents that got into this so innocently, and I think in very relatable ways.

00:09:26 Speaker_05
And within a short year, I was going to church six days a week, and this became my upbringing.

00:09:32 Speaker_05
And my parents and my family and myself, until years later, thought that I had this great upbringing with a wealthy youth group and we did amazing things and we witnessed for Jesus and we stayed pure. We didn't have sex before marriage.

00:09:46 Speaker_05
We didn't use drugs. We didn't fraternize with the bad kids at school. basically learned how to live in a second parallel America. We were right out like, I call them like little Russian nesting dolls.

00:09:58 Speaker_05
We were in America within America and everything that we did taught us how to behave that way and blend in. And Christian girls grew up to be one thing. was a Christian wife and mother.

00:10:08 Speaker_05
And the other thing I talk about a lot is that when you are in a patriarchal environment, they will use what you want for yourself against you. So I bought into this hook, line, and sinker because I was a maternal person. I wanted five children.

00:10:21 Speaker_05
I wanted to be a wife. So that wasn't at odds. However, I had come from this background where women can do lots of things. We can roll up our sleeves and work with men. We can have careers. Having children does not preclude you from having a full life.

00:10:36 Speaker_05
But in church, that's not how it was. So I learned how to split myself and just kind of tuck the private part of myself away so that I could be pleasing. And that really gets us to the catalyst point of the story when I meet my husband.

00:10:49 Speaker_05
And I marry him very quickly, as was encouraged by our church. So I feel like I'm monologuing.

00:10:54 Speaker_02
You were 18, Tia? I was 18, yes.

00:10:55 Speaker_05
You were 18.

00:10:59 Speaker_02
And that was a December you met him?

00:11:01 Speaker_05
Yeah, we met at a hayride, a Christmas hayride, and we were engaged by the end of the month, and we were married within that year.

00:11:09 Speaker_03
Did you fall in love with him? Or did you even know what that was? Or were you told that he was the right one for you? Because God doesn't speak to women or girls in the teachings of your church, right? God doesn't speak to women. This is very convenient.

00:11:24 Speaker_03
So God only speaks to the men. So the men tell you what God has said, correct? Correct. Yeah.

00:11:30 Speaker_05
There was no talk of chemistry or compatibility. None of that was very important. What was very important is that you stay a virgin until you're married, that you marry who shows up and says they want you. So That's what would happen.

00:11:42 Speaker_05
Our church had weddings every Friday and every Saturday. And the only thing that would change are the color of the flowers.

00:11:47 Speaker_05
And they were turning out these weddings to hurry up and get us married because they did not want us to have sex before we were married. Both of our pastors had two week engagements. So the saying was, you have the rest of your life to figure it out.

00:11:59 Speaker_05
So don't worry about it if you're not feeling love. Love is a duty. Love is a job. Love is a decision. And I would have told you then that I loved him. I'm sure I told people that I love him.

00:12:09 Speaker_05
But I know now I was in love with love, and I didn't really know what love was supposed to feel like. I had been in this performative environment for about nine years at that point, and what love was was acceptance for your obedience.

00:12:24 Speaker_05
That's when you were loved. It was very conditional, and I did not know how to recognize that. So I ended up with somebody who I was trying to kind of retrofit onto my dreams. Okay, he says he's God's will for my life.

00:12:38 Speaker_05
I'm not supposed to argue with that because a man said it. And I can do this. We had this song that we used to sing, little is much if God is in it. And so I felt like with enough redheaded determination, I can fix this. I can make this great.

00:12:51 Speaker_05
And I will save him and I will help him be happy again. He had so many problems immediately. But I knew, I knew through my hard work and effort, I could make us great.

00:13:01 Speaker_02
Can I ask one question before, there's this little period of time where you're growing up and you're in the church thing, but you have this minute where you're like, I'm not sure, like you're running around with that one girl who is a lot of fun and is not from the church.

00:13:20 Speaker_02
Then something happens with a boy and you immediately come back to the church. Can you talk about that? Cause that was fascinating to me as far as like.

00:13:32 Speaker_02
what we're told, education, what leads you back when you start to stray, like that seemed to solidify it for you. That's like, oh, I'm done venturing out.

00:13:41 Speaker_05
It really did. And I'm glad you picked up on that. This is something I've had to learn in recovery since releasing the book. And this is a great example of how writing your story can help you externalize it.

00:13:51 Speaker_05
And so that you can start to see what's actually the pattern of injury. I wrote that whole book

00:13:59 Speaker_05
sent it to editors and sold it without realizing that the veracity of that sexual assault when I was 13 had been the actual catalyst that put me back in the fear box. I was hanging out with my friend and feeling like myself.

00:14:12 Speaker_05
And we were doing things that my church said wasn't okay, but that my body felt safe in. And while I was doing these things, I experienced this assault. And I blew kind of past it in the writing. I would have said it's not the big catalyst in my life.

00:14:28 Speaker_05
But then readers would be like, I want to talk about that. That's the moment where you really got in line and started obeying. It's absolutely correct.

00:14:37 Speaker_05
That is, that has set me up for, it taught me this lesson that when you, it's a twisted lesson, I had to unpack it. When you feel good and you're not obeying the rules, you're in danger. And the reverse is true. When you feel good, you're safe.

00:14:54 Speaker_05
Even if there's danger, if you feel good, you're safe. And so I had to, I had to reframe that in recovery.

00:15:00 Speaker_02
And in fact, it was the lessons from the church. Had anyone in your life been teaching about consent and about that boys are capable of bad behavior and they don't get access to you, you would have had the language to say, I'm safe over here.

00:15:13 Speaker_02
I'm not safe with him because he is a perpetrator. But instead you were like, it's my fault. I was out of line. Therefore, to be safe, I have to go back to this place.

00:15:24 Speaker_05
Yes, and you know what comes next. You've read the book. So if I had had the language of consent, just that, my life would have been so different. That would have saved so much.

00:15:34 Speaker_05
I have enough fight and spirit in myself to take information and run with it. That's the first thing they did was deny me information because that would have reinforced my willpower.

00:15:55 Speaker_00
Hey everyone, it's Aliza Kelly, astrologer and host of the Open Mind original podcast, Horoscope Weekly. Every Monday, I decode the universe to help navigate your life. Plus, I give detailed forecasts tailored to your unique zodiac sign.

00:16:12 Speaker_00
Follow and listen to Horoscope Weekly, an Odyssey podcast in partnership with Open Mind Studios, available now on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts.

00:16:33 Speaker_03
Talk to us about the marriage.

00:16:39 Speaker_05
This is a place where you've been with me on my journey, Glennon. It doesn't feel like love. It doesn't feel like union. You have to work at it. You have to work at it. So the marriage was work.

00:16:49 Speaker_05
It was nonstop vigilance, fear, working to accommodate and protect the environment so that we could keep the peace.

00:16:59 Speaker_05
I thought I was being a good helpmate, so I interpreted all of my manipulation that I was learning to do of my environment and of my children and all of that. I thought I was being a good support to a very erratic man.

00:17:12 Speaker_05
So my young husband, which we should not forget that he was young, he was 23 years old when he married me at 19, and that's a young man who might look like today's incel, you know.

00:17:24 Speaker_05
That's the young man you meet online who loves theology, loves to argue, loves to study God's word and learn how to be more holy, and really is craving external structures in order to regulate what they cannot regulate inside. That is who Alan is.

00:17:41 Speaker_03
Can you say that again? People who are looking for external structures to regulate their inner selves.

00:17:49 Speaker_05
They are so disorganized inside. They need external forces to tell them how to behave, tell them how to live, tell them where they're safe, who they're safe with, what they can do in order to earn favor, where their eternal security lies.

00:18:01 Speaker_05
All of this will come from outside of you. That is the big lesson that I take away from high control religion is that it's a consistent numbing of your inner wisdom and it is

00:18:10 Speaker_05
constant validation of external wisdom, which keeps changing and narrowing and becoming more extreme as you go. So they don't start with the final result.

00:18:19 Speaker_05
They didn't tell me when I was a little girl, if you marry this man, you're going to get spanked. They didn't say that. They said girls should be submissive wives and honor their husbands. And that's in the Bible. And that's what God says.

00:18:32 Speaker_05
With no awareness of how that manifests in families, what actually is being said in these theological books by these pastors, how it works when you put that kind of load on a mentally ill man, none of it was discussed.

00:18:46 Speaker_05
So my marriage was a constant effort in, in trying to make a happy life. I mean, I'm a high capacity person. In 14 years, I had nine pregnancies, five live births, and four surviving children.

00:18:58 Speaker_05
That alone, you can do the math of the heartbreak that would come on a normal day. And he wasn't stable through majority of it.

00:19:07 Speaker_05
So I had to be the stable one while also homeschooling and growing our food and getting involved in the wellness movement at that time. The trad movement today is the same trad movement before. We just didn't have social media.

00:19:19 Speaker_05
So that's what it looked like until it broke.

00:19:23 Speaker_03
And for the person who's listening who doesn't know, talk to us about what your particular sect was, what your religion was, and then would you talk to us about how that was set up, like the umbrella of it all, the umbrellas.

00:19:39 Speaker_03
And then I just want people to understand what the teachings were and then what that manifested in your daily life as?

00:19:48 Speaker_05
Yeah, I think that's really important. So the evangelical church that I went to, my pastor was the president of the Southern Baptist Convention.

00:19:55 Speaker_05
So if you're familiar with evangelical Christianity, that comes with all the mainstream veggie tales, Lifeway Christian Bookstores, True Love Weights movements, CCM, all the mainstream Christian living was part of my upbringing.

00:20:10 Speaker_05
By the time I get married and We're not supposed to use birth control. They were kind of light cell on the quiverful stuff.

00:20:18 Speaker_05
In mainstream church, quiverful refers to a verse in the Bible that says, happy is the man who has his quiver full of arrows, as children are like arrows unto weapons of war. So you want to have as many of them as possible.

00:20:29 Speaker_05
And this was kind of a light sell at church. But then when I got married and was quickly pregnant, I had my first miscarriage three months into the marriage. And then I was pregnant again at six months.

00:20:40 Speaker_05
I really had a volatile situation on my hands and I needed wisdom. I needed guidance. I needed to learn how to be a good wife.

00:20:47 Speaker_05
So I did the thing that they told us to do, which is based on Titus 2, let the older women be teachers up to the younger and how to be keepers of the home, to love their husbands.

00:20:57 Speaker_05
So I went to a mother who had 10 children and I said, would you please teach me how to be a good mom? I knew how to take care of infants, but I didn't know how to make the baby cooperate to keep the household smooth.

00:21:10 Speaker_05
So I went to this professional mother, unbeknownst to me, did not know we had these. I called them special Christians in our church because they were a little extra devout. They were willing to have lots of kids, wear prairie clothes, be hyper modest.

00:21:25 Speaker_05
They homeschooled before it was a movement. It was still very fringe. And I just noticed they're a little like extra. They got a lot of respect in our church because they were willing to step out of society a little more than the rest of us.

00:21:37 Speaker_05
and they were tolerated. Tia, would these be like the, these would be like the Michelle Duggars?

00:21:41 Speaker_03
Yes. Church, right?

00:21:43 Speaker_05
Exactly like the Michelle Duggars, because Michelle Duggars- And Michelle Duggar was your group, right? Same group, different church. Yeah. And I didn't know about her until 2003. So on the timeline here, we're 1996.

00:21:54 Speaker_05
And so the IBOP, which is Bill Gothard's Institute of Basic Life Principles, this is what was covered in Shining Happy People, would hold these large conferences, like stadium events, like Billy Graham stadium events,

00:22:05 Speaker_05
And people would come from all different walks and different denominations to study the Bible. And so they didn't think that they were belonging to any kind of single group. They were just being extra biblical.

00:22:16 Speaker_05
Similar later would come the promise keepers and that's another similar movement. And then they go back into their churches and they recruit from within. So I didn't know I was playing into a greater narrative.

00:22:26 Speaker_05
When I asked her for help, she was also looking at me and saying, here's a needy young mom. I'll bring her under my wing. And I became an IBLP mentee without ever having attached myself to a conference. I never paid any money to the IBLP.

00:22:40 Speaker_05
I didn't know that I was joining that kind of mindset. I just thought I was asking an older woman for advice. And she took me seriously. We had meetings at her house, sometimes one-on-one, sometimes as a group with younger women.

00:22:54 Speaker_05
And she taught me how to run a Quiverful, how to give up birth control, how to submit to my husband, how to discipline my children, skip the doctor, skip educating my daughter, how to parentify my daughter so that I, cause I needed a little helper.

00:23:08 Speaker_05
All of those kinds of things came through her instruction.

00:23:11 Speaker_03
Okay. So let's stop there. My understanding is that the way that there's corporal punishment is an extremely important part of disciplining. not only children, but wives. So can you talk to us about that?

00:23:24 Speaker_05
Yeah, that's a really important key piece of this entire thing.

00:23:28 Speaker_05
So when I looked out and saw this woman with 10 children and these families that were being so respected in our church, the reason why is because their little darling ducklings would follow in a very perfect line right behind them.

00:23:41 Speaker_05
And everyone wondered, how do you get your children to be so behaved? And these are working moms, people who are struggling. They're like, I can hardly keep up with two. I don't know how you take care of eight.

00:23:51 Speaker_05
that how you do it turned out to be through high control spanking. So there's a material out there called To Train Up Your Child by Michael Pearl, and it teaches a system called blanket training.

00:24:02 Speaker_05
I cannot believe this stuff is still in print, still on for sale on Amazon, but unless more of us don't talk about it, you know, it's going to continue.

00:24:10 Speaker_05
Blanket training teaches you to take an infant and you put it on a blanket and you switch it with a rod of correction. anytime that it starts to move off the blanket. So you start teaching the child, pain will ensue if you do not do what I say.

00:24:25 Speaker_02
And this is at four months old, right?

00:24:26 Speaker_05
At four months old, as soon as they start to be mobile. It's not something I could do to my babies.

00:24:31 Speaker_05
I was too, like that root system that I spent some time setting up, that's that root Tia who has this wild streak in her and this identity would come through and say, I'm not spanking my infants. But they did, they did spank their infants.

00:24:45 Speaker_05
They did it at church in front of people. They were not afraid of being held responsible for this. And she gave me instructions on how to pick my switch and what kind it should be and where to do it. And they coach you on how to do this.

00:24:57 Speaker_05
The idea is that if you switch your children well enough now when they're little, they won't misbehave when they're older. And they don't tell you the reason why they won't misbehave when they're older is because you will have broken them.

00:25:10 Speaker_05
They will have nothing to fight you with when they're older.

00:25:14 Speaker_03
But it's also they won't have desire. if they learn young enough that the second they have agency or desire or want to leave the blanket, that they will be punished.

00:25:25 Speaker_03
If your body, when you're tiny, is trained with that kind of conditioning, you will not leave the blanket when you're older.

00:25:33 Speaker_05
You won't. And it manifests in many ways. You won't think for yourself. You won't defy and push your own will at the table. You won't eat what you want, do what you want, think what you want. You're completely shut down.

00:25:44 Speaker_05
What this actually turns to, I mean, if we listen to survivors, we have lots of evidence of how this actually manifests in families. We don't have to wonder what it's like or listen to just psychologists. We can listen to survivors.

00:25:55 Speaker_05
And what we hear of is rooms full of spankings that, you know, hours long, hundreds of switches. It does go into years because the offenses that you're getting spanked for, they extend. You looked at me wrong. I think you have sin in your heart.

00:26:09 Speaker_05
I read your journal. Those are all things that children have been switched excessively for. And then if you notice, take a real careful read of all of these parenting materials, there is no age limit on it. So again, let's turn to survivors.

00:26:22 Speaker_05
Older daughters being spanked in their teenage years. Daughters being turned over their father's knee. women being spanked. And this was my big secret for a long time.

00:26:32 Speaker_05
When my husband started spanking me, I thought there wasn't another humiliation I could have possibly suffered that was greater. I submitted to it to protect my pregnancy, and my will was completely broken.

00:26:46 Speaker_05
And for a long time I thought, I'll never say that out loud. I will never let anyone know that this happens. the reverse turned true. And I'm not, I'm not sorry for a second that I tell about it, but because I hear me too.

00:26:58 Speaker_05
And as soon as I heard my first me too, I was like, all right, let's burn it down. Let's go. Because no one's going to believe they're spanking their wives unless they listen to the wives. The wives have to come out and say that. And so, yeah, it's,

00:27:11 Speaker_05
That's the sum picture. To the umbrella of authority, you mentioned that. The Bill Gothard authority model, the patriarchal authority model that's still being used across the board in Doug Wilson. He's out in Idaho.

00:27:24 Speaker_05
Joel Webben has talked about this recently online. It's a top-down power structure under nice terms at the table. They like to call it complementarianism.

00:27:32 Speaker_05
It means that men and women have different strengths based on their genitals and that the power is up top. The man is in charge. The woman serves. The children are the labor force.

00:27:41 Speaker_05
And it's meant to protect you, but then when you say, what are you protecting me from? It's them. So it doesn't really work.

00:27:49 Speaker_02
It's protecting you whether you like it or not?

00:27:51 Speaker_05
Yes, exactly.

00:27:51 Speaker_02
Is that what it is?

00:27:52 Speaker_05
Fundamentalism can be in anything. The evangelicals do not have a corner on it. It's just how this particular brand of fundamentalism is manifesting in our government.

00:28:02 Speaker_02
Why is it important in the churches to have a quiverful? Yeah, dominion. And this means all the children, to have 10 children, to have 12 children, to have whatever. Why is that push so hard as your goal?

00:28:15 Speaker_05
The real reason is political dominance through population. And this is where the white supremacy comes into play. They are threatened by their numbers and they need lots of white babies. So they need us to stay pregnant as much as we can.

00:28:28 Speaker_05
You can quickly multiply a congregation. If 10 adults decide to have 10 children, you now have quite the population, you know? So that's the idea behind it, is that you're baby makers.

00:28:40 Speaker_05
Also, when you're busy making babies, there's lots of other things you're not doing.

00:28:43 Speaker_05
So some of those pesky problems like female employment and childcare and the things that we gripe for in modern society, they just go away because the women are busy at home having babies. It takes care of itself.

00:28:55 Speaker_03
Yeah. Tia, I want to ask you about what happens when, so you're in this family and in this marriage and in this culture and you are feeling that something is wrong.

00:29:11 Speaker_03
Now, what listeners need to understand is that when you're in one of these cultures and you feel that something's wrong, you know what that is and that's the devil. You're taught that your heart is wicked. You're taught that

00:29:25 Speaker_03
You know, if you say, my heart hurts, you're taught your heart is wicked, don't listen to it. If you say, I don't understand this, this doesn't make any sense. I don't think this is right. You're told, do not lean on your own understanding.

00:29:36 Speaker_03
God is mysterious. If your body is hurting or you're yearning or you're desiring something different, you're told that your body is wicked. So it is a complete and total separation from all the innate wisdom that God has given you, right?

00:29:56 Speaker_03
It's a complete hijacking of the God in you. But when you think, why don't you get out? It's because of that sort of brainwashing.

00:30:03 Speaker_03
I mean, Abby knows this is like, I can't believe this, but I have found journals of my own from this time when I was in a high control religious group and I was married to my ex-husband. And I cannot believe what I was saying to myself in those.

00:30:20 Speaker_03
I was saying, please God, help me be quiet. Please God, help me be sweet of spirit or gentle in spirit. Please God, help me let Craig lead. Help me let Craig lead.

00:30:32 Speaker_03
Help me be, like, just, and then I remember, Tia, like, there was this writer back then who used to tell you, I won't say her name even though I'd love to, but she used to write these books about how particularly you pray for your children so that nothing bad happens to them.

00:30:49 Speaker_03
And I remember sitting on,

00:30:53 Speaker_03
this particular morning sitting on it, I used to try to write down every single bad thing that could ever happen to them because I was told you have to pray this particular way for each of your kids and if you don't do it, it'll be your fault.

00:31:09 Speaker_03
All of these horrible things will happen. And I just remember being in this family where, honestly, I was the leader in the family. That was what we signed up for. Craig was like, wait, what the?

00:31:25 Speaker_03
But then I was shaming him to step up and lead because that's what the church was telling me had to be. So is that what you called self subjugation?

00:31:37 Speaker_03
I want you to talk to us about how, what is self subjugation and what is self gaslighting and how did those things keep you where you were?

00:31:46 Speaker_05
That is, there's so much happening in the, what you just shared. Um, and yeah, that's the, that's the heart of it. It's how we make ourselves systematically smaller, ever smaller, ever smaller. And it has taken me years to reclaim that

00:31:59 Speaker_05
I was trying to be good. I was trying to do it right. I would take their advice so deeply to heart and I would do every single thing that they said. Why? because I wanted it to work. I wanted to be satisfying and happy.

00:32:13 Speaker_05
And if they were telling me this was right, I didn't spend any time questioning if it was right. I said, okay, I love you, I trust you, I believe you, let me help you. But I was always the problem.

00:32:23 Speaker_05
I was always too vocal or too creative or too loud or too opinionated or I would have a doubt. And so then I would take myself to my prayer mat and I would go into my quiet room and I would self-flagellate. because clearly I'm the problem, it's me.

00:32:41 Speaker_05
This is me. This is the thing, and I need to beat it out of myself. And if I could just be, oh my goodness, if I could just be a little smaller, a little sweeter, and goodness gracious, I mean, back it all up. I was born with a tooth. I've had red hair.

00:32:57 Speaker_05
We moved to Florida. I don't tan. I have never fit in a day in my life. So there is no get with it sweet enough. I can't be the big hair blonde girl that's the kind, the type. I can't do it. And I can't pull it off no matter how hard I try.

00:33:13 Speaker_05
So, I mean, I was just meant to be me. And here I was trying to put myself into this little box and get smaller. And there was no small enough. That was the big heartbreak of Christian patriarchy is there is no point where it's enough.

00:33:28 Speaker_05
You're never submissive enough, sweet enough, calm enough, obedient enough. There will always be more. And that's why a metaphor, my metaphor for it is a vacuum, not a box so much because the air squeezes out.

00:33:40 Speaker_05
and you get smaller and smaller as the air squeezes out and you can't breathe and you can't be, and there's no space for you. This is the thing. And we're taught to do it to ourselves, which is so convenient for them. They get to go lead the world.

00:33:53 Speaker_05
Meanwhile, we're over here trying to figure out how to help them go be free. Like, I wish somebody was spending that much time helping me be free, like doing all the labor so that I could be free. No, that's not, it's so upside down.

00:34:07 Speaker_05
And so this is what I think of when I see women perpetuating the patriarchy woman to woman. The man, this is very complicated too in deconstruction, is you don't always see a man teaching women how to forcefully obey.

00:34:21 Speaker_05
You'll see women coercing, the way we're taught to manipulate from down here below the head and the neck level, coercing other women to get into the box. Come here. This is what tradwife content does. It's lulling you. Just come in here.

00:34:35 Speaker_05
You don't need those rights. Don't worry about child care. It's just too hard out there. Come over here and make your cheese crackers with me from scratch. If we don't even stop to question it, that's what's happening.

00:34:46 Speaker_05
And at this point in my story, I was Calvinist by then. So if you're familiar with Calvinist doctrine, It's all based on how worm-like you are. You are a worm. You are disgusting.

00:34:57 Speaker_05
You are so gross that Jesus had to come save you, but you are so disgusting you're not even worth saving. And that's after he saves you. You're still nasty.

00:35:04 Speaker_05
So the self-hate, the self-loathing, I mean, I remember coming out of that into recovery and being told I needed to have a healthy self-esteem, that one of the problems was that I had no self-worth.

00:35:15 Speaker_05
And I just looked at my therapist like she had five heads. having a self-worth is sin, number one.

00:35:20 Speaker_05
And number two, how in the hell would I have ever had a self-worth when everything around me for 30 years is telling me that you are disgusting, you are gross, and Jesus had to shed blood for you, and it still wasn't enough.

00:35:50 Speaker_03
First of all, two things. If you're thinking that this is just about Jesus and you're cool because you don't do this Jesus shit. No, this is at the heart of every fundamentalist group. That's right. So think about wellness culture.

00:36:04 Speaker_03
I think about all of my friends, which I'm included in this of like, I'm just so terrible. Like, why am I still hungering for this thing? Why can I not do enough yoga and running and whatever? Why am I at my core bad? Like every

00:36:19 Speaker_03
every cult, every high control group has this thing at its core which is like you are bad and you cannot save yourself and so you need us to save you and so you will always feel like shit at your core. This is just the Jesus version of it, right?

00:36:36 Speaker_03
So tell us how, for me, the thing is that if you listened to yourself your kids would be unsafe.

00:36:51 Speaker_03
And I don't know how that became so ingrained in me, but I do remember learning about the infidelity in my marriage and a woman coming up to me in the hallway of my kids' Christian school and saying, I've heard what happened.

00:37:08 Speaker_03
I know it's hard, but you know what we do. We just stay If you leave, you will also leave, literally her words to me were, if you leave, you will also leave God's umbrella of protection. Okay, I have to say something.

00:37:24 Speaker_03
And it was an older woman, and she was revered in the church. And I was freaking so confused. So please say whatever you want to say.

00:37:31 Speaker_05
I mean, just to honor what just happened, I want to delineate and say this little box over here. True Jesus words do not oppress women. True Jesus words are kind and liberating to women.

00:37:44 Speaker_05
What's happened in the Jesus tradition and the Christianity and the absolute blaspheme of his teaching is what we are talking about today. advice that is given to mothers that harms their own children is how we perpetuate patriarchy ourselves.

00:37:58 Speaker_05
The first thing it does is make you complicit in their system so that you will feel ashamed and you will feel guilt if you take a step out because now not only are you concerned and worried for what will happen, but you're part of it.

00:38:10 Speaker_05
this happened because you chose it. This is what you did. And that guilty woman voice that shames you and keeps you in line is what happens way before the men get you. The Gilead men are not first line defense. They're way up in the offices.

00:38:26 Speaker_05
It's this women that censor other women and don't encourage you to be a parent that you need to be. And I think that this is part of my story so passionately, because while I didn't have any self-worth, I did think my children were worthy.

00:38:39 Speaker_05
I did think that they were vulnerable and needed me. And I was the only person who was home with them most of the time. So if anybody was going to keep them safe, it had to be me. That ultimately became the conflict I couldn't solve.

00:38:52 Speaker_03
Yeah, that's so amazing that it's always what happened to me a few weeks after that moment with that mother. but I walked into that school. It was a Christian school that was very rigid. And I walked in and saw Matish.

00:39:09 Speaker_03
She was in kindergarten and she was in line. All I remember is that she was in line. She was in a little line. She was in one of the ducklings in a line behind a teacher that I knew was very rigid. And there was something about seeing her in that line

00:39:25 Speaker_03
and getting chills thinking about it. I grabbed her. I grabbed her. I went to the principal's office. I said, get the older one who's always in there, in here anyway, because he's always getting in trouble.

00:39:34 Speaker_03
He's always asking you, is God, are you sure God's a he? And then I get the call and then he tells the teacher, my mom does yoga and have tattoos. I'm back in the office.

00:39:42 Speaker_03
Anyway, I grabbed him, grabbed Tish, grabbed Emma, who was tiny, tiny, and we walked out. And I actually remember It was a dark school. Everything was very dark.

00:39:52 Speaker_03
There wasn't a lot of light in there, and I remember opening the door, and my little ones following behind, and it was just brightness. I don't know what we did next, and just brightness, just freedom from that place.

00:40:06 Speaker_03
And when you said that Jesus's words are freeing, I think a lot about all the people who have excused hurting their children. I don't, I'm just here to say like, it's not okay. It is absolutely never okay to hit a child. There is no excuse.

00:40:33 Speaker_03
There is no teaching that it is not okay and it should stop everywhere. Hard stop. Hard stop. Hard stop. They always say, spare the rod, spoil the child. Spare the rod, spoil the child. This is what we, this is the scripture.

00:40:47 Speaker_03
And every time I hear the rod, I think of what the rod would have been back then, which would have been a shepherd with his rod gently guiding. The rod was not used to hit the sheep. Right.

00:41:04 Speaker_03
The rod was used to gently make a path so that the sheep moved in a certain way because the energetic use of that rod was loving guidance. Yes. It's always hijacked. It's the rod of guidance turns into hitting children and women.

00:41:24 Speaker_03
There's like this tiny element of truth in it that then is just taken and used to oppress instead of free. That's the trick, right? There's always a little teeny truth in it.

00:41:37 Speaker_05
That's the trick of every cherry-picked scripture that there is. They take that little element and they malform it. They're counting on your lack of education and ability to question, and that you're just going to swallow it.

00:41:49 Speaker_05
I liken the rod to a guardrail, a guardrail that's meant to make you feel safe. You could jump it if you need to, but it's there to tell you where the line is so that you'll feel safe and comforted.

00:41:59 Speaker_05
One of my very first reels when I first started speaking out about this online was to share that it wasn't the wolves in sheep's clothing that I had to watch out for. It wasn't even the other sheep so much. It was the shepherds.

00:42:11 Speaker_05
It's been the leadership that I needed to question the hardest because that's where the rot is. It's up high. It's in the power-seeking, the power-aligning. That's why they're using their oppression on the ones down here.

00:42:24 Speaker_05
And I don't want to be suspicious of my fellow sheep, and I also don't The wolves never manifest as real scary, you know, as you know, Wolfpack. It's like, they're the good. These are our people.

00:42:37 Speaker_05
And we're like here in this moment with our fellow Americans. And I just will not get in line in an us versus them Braveheart war. Forget that. That's not what's gonna happen here.

00:42:48 Speaker_03
That's right. I wanna stop here because we're gonna start again. We're gonna start another episode. Thank God. because I think it's fascinating and beautiful that it was the women who groomed you and kept you there. It was also women who helped free you.

00:43:06 Speaker_05
That's right.

00:43:09 Speaker_03
So when we come back, I want to hear your freedom story. And then I also want to talk about the trad wives of it all and what this all looks like right now and what we're going to see coming.

00:43:21 Speaker_02
And what I want to hear about is that when you're talking about how this fundamentalism, whatever it is, does not attract bad people. It attracts good people who are so afraid.

00:43:34 Speaker_02
and are so desperate for an answer to keep them safe from chaos and a formula to provide an alternative to the world out there that is so scary and so hard, which see election results. Yes, all of that. We have a lot to do next time.

00:43:52 Speaker_01
Yeah, I do want to talk about how you recovered from the shame of it all. Yes. That's what I'm here to listen to.

00:43:58 Speaker_03
I'm glad we have more time. We'll see you back here, Potspun. Bye. If this podcast means something to you, it would mean so much to us if you'd be willing to take 30 seconds to do these three things.

00:44:16 Speaker_03
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00:44:27 Speaker_03
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00:44:39 Speaker_03
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00:44:52 Speaker_03
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00:45:00 Speaker_03
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