Tia Levings was recruited into a Christian fundamentalist movement as a young wife.   She quickly learned that being a godly and submissive wife in the Christian patriarchy included strict discipline and isolation, and required women to be silent keepers of the home.  Years of pain and abuse followed. After becoming a mother, Tia realized that she was the only one who could protect her children from becoming the next generation of patriarchal men and submissive women.  That's when she fled with her children.

One of the things Tia says a lot that really gets to me is  that if we continue to ignore the messages that the fundamental evangelical Christian community are sending out to us, then we're just plunging this country right into the near future of the book The Handmaid's Tale.  Tia was a trad wife and today she is an independent woman living the kind of life she always dreamed about. She has written wisely about the inhumanity of trad wife life and why it is not something to be celebrated with beautiful images on social media.  

All of this is documented in Tia's new book, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape From Christian Patriarchy and on her Substack, The Anti-Fundamentalist. You can also follow Tia on Instagram here. She is a delight. 

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