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There was something frighteningly different about the violent energy that night – the way her husband abruptly left the house, the forces she felt telling her to run – that made Tia Levings finally bundle her four kids into the car and flee a man who hid abuse under the cloak of strict religion.
It was only as she passed her husband’s vehicle, his headlights pointing in the opposite direction – back towards the family home they’d just fled – that she realized he’d left to get the gun stored in his office.
“I was still driving; it was the middle of the night,” Tia tells The Independent, recalling with knife-edge clarity “the adrenaline of knowing that we just narrowly escaped the murder-suicide that I’d always feared.”
It was 2007, and Tia had lived for nearly 15 years in an increasingly fundamental Christian marriage. By the time she worked up the courage to escape, they were living in an unheated, isolated urban homestead in Tennessee – and her controlling spouse was forcing her to obey orders while calling him “my lord.”
Fast-forward a little more than a decade and a half, and Tia, now 50, is telling her story in a bone-chilling book – while simultaneously watching, with great concern, the continued glorification of the “trad-wife” lifestyle on social media and in pop culture.
She knows firsthand that the back-to-basics idyll being sold far too often hides a dark and dangerous reality. And she hopes her book, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy – which began as a journal to help Tia process her trauma – is getting into the hands of those women still trapped in the same types of life-threatening, open-air prisons.
“I [wrote] it for the woman in her kitchen who is washing dishes endlessly and doesn’t get to go to a bookstore and needs a book like mine, but she’s going to have to throw it in her cart at Target,” she says. “So I knew I needed a certain publishing path in order to reach her. I knew I needed a big publisher.”
She says readers are also helping. “They’re putting my book without its jacket in the little libraries that are around, and they are donating it, and they are sharing it reader-to-reader,” Tia says. “The story is getting out; it is spreading. And I think that there is so much power in that – you never know where it’s going to land.”
The story began far more benignly, with Tia and her parents joining a megachurch in Florida when she was an adolescent. There she was introduced to families following the Gothard movement, a fundamentalist ideology and way of living that was the brainchild of American minister Bill Gothard. The increasing number of Gothard families within her First Baptist congregation promoted homeschooling and could be spotted because the “women dressed like prairie wives, always pregnant and holding a baby,” she writes in her book.
Tia attended church six times a week and, after high school, was told the congregation only helped males advance to further education. So she instead prayed desperately for a husband and, when she met a sailor with a skull tattoo whom she calls Allan in the book, married him a year later – ignoring abusive and controlling red flags and even the advice of a church counselor who warned the couple of their total incompatibility.
Tia gave birth to five children – including baby Clara, who was born with a heart defect and survived just weeks – as Allan moved the family to more and more conservative congregations. Many fellow congregants were adherents of the quiverfull theology, which encourages large families and forbids any type of birth control or family planning.
On the outside, Tia attempted to project a happy family life, even running a successful website in the heyday of the mommy blog – discovering in herself a knack for writing and online content creation. Behind closed doors, Allan was threatening to kill her, leering that he’d take the kids “forever,” calling her a Jezebel and terrorizing Tia physically, mentally and emotionally.
It got worse as she began earning money and accolades for her blog work; Allan began drinking and doubling down on the abusive, patriarchal behavior. Tia tried to shield her children, but his insidious influence crept in as they aged; he traumatized their oldest by making him kill animals, and the same son struck Tia in a scuffle just hours before the then-33-year-old determined to leave – for her kids’ sake and her own.
She sought the help of a new, more progressive church – an Eastern Orthodox congregation they’d recently joined – and even went into hiding with her children until it was established that Allan was no longer a threat to them.
Her parents were also supportive; she’d hid from them for years how bad things were at home. Tia knows just how deceiving outward appearances can be, particularly when it comes to families projecting pious, traditional households – like those flooding social media as “trad wife” influencers.
“I see the trap,” she tells The Independent. “I see the lifestyle that is so all-encompassing that you can’t get out of it. I see the systematized denial of agency and options so that you might wake up one day and want to be out of it, but you’ve closed door after door after door so that there’s no one there to help you. There’s not a bank account to turn to. There’s no agency to just start asking questions or to change your life, if you decide you want something different.
“And that really underscores why this is not just an alternative lifestyle choice,” she says. “It is part of a movement.”
It’s a movement that’s deliberate and strategic, dating back decades and beyond, and she says it’s chilling to hear echoes of proclamations made from pulpits during her childhood in the words of influential politicians today – “especially when JD Vance opens his mouth,” she says.
“He floats the ideas of women not voting; he floats the ideas of no-fault divorce … even though we know that having access to divorce has reduced suicides and domestic violence deaths,” she says. “He floats all of those agendas that are part of Project 2025, which is not anything new.”
The talking points are all there, Tia says. “They are often divorced from the theology that fed them, and I think that’s for a mass audience – but that’s also a good opportunity for someone who comes from that background to say, I know why they are teaching that, and I know what they intend to accomplish with it.”
She’s been hearing it since childhood, when ministers preached regularly against Democratic leaders like Bill Clinton and Al Gore.
“They were pretty open about this when I was growing up – preached it every Sunday,” she says. “We sat in sermons and they said, ‘This election might not go our way … but we have a strategy in place to take over the Supreme Court, and we’re going to get the justices in place, and we’re going to pick God’s man.”
She points to the many US lawmakers and politicians raised “in that viewpoint: That America is a Christian nation, and that we are supposed to have Christianity as a dominant faith and a dominant religion across the globe, and the leadership looks like a patriarchal white male – and women stay at home and raise children and they don’t have access to health care or contraception or equality or employment.”
Tia sees the appeal of the lifestyle on paper, however, as Americans, and particularly mothers, grapple with the multifaceted demands of daily life.
“When we’re exhausted, we turn to very simplified solutions, where fundamentalism can step in and say, Oh, are you tired? It’s because you’re working too hard. And the two-income family really doesn’t work, and women need to stay home,” she says.
“And at the same time, that system is not advertising the outcome. They shut down the evidence, the testimonies, the science, everything that would say, This isn’t actually a good way to live. We’ve actually lived this way before.”
“That’s where a survivor can come in,” she says.
While she watched the mass popularity grow of reality shows featuring families like the Duggars, where she recognized tell-tale Gothard fingerprints, Tia was caught off-guard by the latest pop culture fad across TikTok and Instagram.
“I really did not see the trad wife social media movement happening, because there have been so many advances for women’s liberation,” she says. “The closest thing [that came] before was the mommy bloggers movement, which I was part of – so I thought we had kind of evolved past it. I was very surprised.”
The glossy content plugs into “this idea that there’s something better out there; life is hard,” Tia says.
“Maybe it speaks to … the very clear binaries of the gender roles, easy answers, the simple formulas,” she tells The Independent. “Sometimes it can just be comforting to watch, because we like process videos and we like pretty aesthetics, and we can tend to think it’s benign and that it’s not part of something greater.
“And some creators are not very plugged into the wider movement. They don’t understand how their work is contributing to this conversation … It’s easier to hold your phone and watch somebody make gentle cheese crackers with a smile on their face and unplug from society a little bit and hearken to what we think is a simpler time.
“They’re not representing the complexity of that age, either,” she says. “They’re showing one dimension of it.”
The current cascade of content can not only be personally triggering for Tia – though she consumes and deconstructs it for her work, writing and speaking about the ills of fundamentalism – but also sparks a range of other emotions.
“I do get angry when I see it celebrated, because it’s glorified abuse – and that’s angering, because there’s victims involved, and they’re usually voiceless victims, like children,” she says.
She’s well aware that, had technology evolved earlier, she could have been one of the aforementioned influencers herself.
“If I’d had social media, I would have been a trad wife social creator,” Tia admits. “I was good at blogging, and I was there when the movement was new. And complicity is something that everyone in recovery has to look at.
“Patriarchy needs women to perpetuate it, so it grooms our participation, and then it holds us there with the guilt of our complicity, and then we become perpetrators. So it’s like the cycle that just keeps going.
“And I had to definitely sit with the complicity of my mask, because I wasn’t presenting the truth of the situation either, not even to myself.”
Now, instead, she’s sharing her story with searing honesty – not just for the woman it might save at Target but for wider members of the community.
“I always call this the cult without walls, and the members are really used to being isolated in plain sight – so they will be your neighbors or someone you see at the grocery store or the park, and they feel alone and separate,” she says, “Try to connect, try to engage in conversation … because if they can trust you, you might be the one they ask for help when it’s time to get out.”
