Tia Levings is the New York Times bestselling author of A Well-Trained Wife, which I got to engage with her on previously for BNG, a frequent resource for the media on conservative Christianity, religion and politics, and the author of the new book I Belong to Me. I’m so grateful for Tia’s time and for this conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Greg Garrett: Tia, it’s a joy to talk to you about the new book. For anyone who hasn’t read A Well-Trained Wife yet, could you talk a tiny bit about the connection between why you wrote that book and how it led to I Belong to Me?
Tia Levings
Tia Levings: Once I saw the evangelical church embrace Donald Trump and Jerry Falwell and Franklin Graham, I knew everything I lived through was coming for the whole country and I couldn’t stop that, but I could make sure other people know what it’s like to live in the idealized way they describe.
They want to push the trad wife. They want women not to vote. They want women out of the public sector. They don’t value education. They don’t love their neighbors.
What does it look like when you live in a closed-minded ideological cult like that?
I knew, and I could say: “Well, here’s what it’s really like. They’re going to tell you what they think it looks like and what you might get if you do it perfectly. But I can tell you, I did it as close to perfectly and this is the outcome.”
And as I was talking online, I was getting all these me-toos. So I knew I wasn’t alone. And once I knew I wasn’t alone and I was entering solidarity and at the same time, do you remember this? The words “religious trauma” were being formed and talked about. “Deconstruction” was mentioned. Language became available. And wow, I mean, that just really changed everything.
I found myself forming a platform, which you have to do as an author, but I didn’t know how I was going to. How am I going to tell this Handmaid’s Tale story in a way that’s appealing, because who wants to hear about marital rape and mental abuse and all this? And politics gave me the in. Politics provided the platform and then that led to solidarity.
So that’s kind of the whole process here for both books. I sold A Well-Trained Wife in 2022 and almost immediately I’m getting all these letters from my fellow survivors and I was like, oh, they didn’t have any books or guides and they’re really looking for one and I just want to write them a big sister letter.
“It’s a self-help book that helps you help yourself.”
I Belong to Me is a self-help book, but it’s a self-help book that helps you help yourself. It’s not prescriptive. It’s more like a trail map. Here’s what it looked like to recover from this. We are all under Christian fundamentalism now, so you may need this. And when you look back, which is what I did, I looked back to why I chose all these things. Why did I stay so long? Why did I believe them?
All these things always came back to the way I was raised and groomed and prepared for this mindset. And then you have to contend with your faith and God. And I personally don’t believe you can deconstruct with a determined outcome, a predetermined outcome. I don’t think you can do an honest inquiry and say, “I already know what the answer’s going to be, so as long as I land there, I’m safe.”
So that catches you up. I mean, there are two different books. One’s a memoir, one’s a self-help, both are based on my experience and both come from that same time period.
GG: You’ve made a really important point about how all the stuff you lived through has blown out into the larger American culture. You talked in the first book and late in this new book about information and the truth, gaslighting, manipulation, people telling you what you know is true is not true, and vice versa.
Why is it so important that we call out when people don’t tell us the truth, either in faith circles or in government or in our friend circles? Because you grew up and I grew up in this place where people did not tell us the truth and they told us up was down and black was white.
TL: Oh, this is a good question. I remember being a kid and my mom saying, “The truth always comes out.” And there are certain messages that really became encoded on my system, and that’s one of them. The truth always comes out. And I have a good bullshit detector, but they taught us not to trust it, “Lean not on your own understanding.”
From a very young age, I could feel when someone was lying or being manipulative, but I was told, no, that’s who you actually trust. Even if they don’t tell you the truth, they have a good intention, and you can trust their intention.
One of the big lessons of my young adult life was learning my trust was so displaced, and the person who’s left holding the bag when the intention goes poorly is the user. It’s the person on the street, it’s the person in the home.
And that’s really who I’m trying to reach today, someone who means well and they’re giving it their all, but it’s the three little pigs. This is built on lies. This is a straw house. It’s not going to last. And they’re telling you it’s going to last and you’re trusting it like a little piggy, but it’s not going to last. And it didn’t.
“What they taught me to construct did not withstand real life.”
What they taught me to construct did not withstand real life. When real heartache came, I didn’t have the tools. When the promises failed, I didn’t have the tools, I didn’t have the skillset. Now I know, having done the work, that indoctrination replaces child development and there were skills I was supposed to develop as a young child that I didn’t, and I had to do them late in adulthood.
And that was after defying the people who told me it was too late, you can’t redevelop them, which also is bullshit. Yes, you can. We have flexible, elastic minds that can learn. And I learned how to be an autonomous adult late, but I should have gotten that as a differentiated teenager. But they really take away those whole teenage years.
One of the reasons why truth is so important to me is because it’s always there. And it’s not a matter of if the lies are going to win, it’s a matter of when the truth is going to come out. And I like to know the truth. I like to know upfront.
And so heeding my intuition, listening to my bullshit detector, understanding we can learn from history, that’s a big one for me because we have this trad wife movement. One of the first things that happened was people treated it like a brand-new internet trend. I knew this was not a brand-new internet trend. This is the exact same thing I lived through, except now there’s social media to spread it. It’s an old strategy. And that’s true for the whole cultural movement we’re in right now.
“This is the exact same thing I lived through, except now there’s social media to spread it.”
This was an old strategy late in the 1980s and 1990s, come to fruition with the really dark, bad villains in control. They succeeded and they succeeded because they’re successful wolves, but they ultimately cannot win.
What is also true of today is that we have truth-tellers and survivors with platforms. And for the first time, someone can Google, “Are there survivors from this movement? Are there exiles? Where’s the Consumer Reports for being a Christian?” You can do that now. We didn’t have that in the 1990s.
GG: What does it feel like to be Tia Levings in Donald Trump’s America?
TS: Well, they say it’s sometimes more scary the smarter you are about something. And that is what I feel. I can’t have my naivety and innocence back. I know I see right through the ideals and promises. And so all I can do is warn people that they really do mean what they say and it really is serious.
I’ve lived it and I know it’s not as far as they go. I know the extent of their mission. I can see through their spiritual division. There are multiple kinds of Christians at the top right now. There’s the Dispensationalists, the Calvinists, the Charismatics. They all are also pulling in Catholics. They’re pulling in different directions most of the time except for the power they bought into. Because I’ve had a foot in so many of those worlds, it’s very sobering, very serious. There’s no time to waste. There’s no time to be blasé about it. It is dire.
I knew two years ago, longer than that, that the woman’s vote was in jeopardy. They’ve been talking about the SAVE Act at the moment that we’re talking. I wasn’t allowed to vote. I knew this was going to be a thing.
When Roe fell, everyone was like: “Oh, well, they’ll be placated now. This is as far as they wanted to go. “And I was like, “It’s absolutely not as far as they want to go.”
You need to look at the way they live in their homes and that is as far as they want to go because they believe the way they live at home is the way everyone should live at home. And that process changes America.
GG: Two years ago I asked you a version of this question and you talked about the hymn “Pass It On,” which you and I shared from our youth. It only takes a spark to get a fire going.
Your response to me was, it only takes one sparkle of light to start lighting up the darkness. So we are in a much more difficult moment than we were in the first Trump administration. How do you speak back into that darkness? Where are you finding courage?
TL: Well, I’m very equipped with healing tools right now. That’s very helpful. I have things to pull from every time. If I’m feeling overwhelmed or scared or burnt out or really terrified, I have practical, actionable things I can do that are a lot more effective than getting on my knees and praying to a silent sky.
I found a lot of sustenance in the practical day-to-day being really present in my life and connecting with human beings. That’s the new thing for me — that out here, I have people I can talk to. We have comrades, we have fellows, we have fellow exiles, fellow survivors, we have people who are daring to do what is strong for them.
My strengths are not someone else’s strengths. And that camaraderie is so sustaining to me. That is the equivalent of all of us having one little match in the darkness and then joining them together and building a fire.
So, the metaphor holds. It really does. That fire burns both ways and we can light the dark and this is how we do it.
Greg Garrett is an award-winning professor at Baylor University, where he is the Carole McDaniel Hanks Professor of Literature and Culture. One of America’s leading voices on religion and culture, he is the author of 30 books, most recently the novel Bastille Day and The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity. He is currently administering a major research grant on racism from the Eula Mae and John Baugh Foundation and finishing a book on racist mythologies for Oxford University Press. Greg is a seminary-trained lay preacher in the Episcopal Church and Honorary Canon Theologian at the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Paris. He lives in Austin with his wife, Jeanie, and their two daughters.