Fleeing Christian patriarchy: "They raise women who don't even know the sound of their voices"

As much as many of us would like to believe otherwise, the Christian patriarchy movement is not just a small group of Americans. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., has raved about the "sexual anarchy" that supposedly dominates our secular nation. Donald Trump's running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, has denounced childless women as "sociopathic" and "miserable cat ladies." Project 2025, the blueprint for how Trump would run a second administration, is above all things a Christian nationalist document that calls for a ban on pornography and policies to force as many women as possible into giving birth. Christian patriarchy is the belief system for a small minority, but thanks to Republicans, it's got outsized power and is threatening to be the law of the land.

Tia Levings escaped this world years ago, after suffering sexual and physical abuse by a husband under the conservative Christian ideology of "male headship." She is out now with a memoir titled "A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy," and a warning: Her past threatens to be our collective future, if the Christian right has its way. She spoke with Salon about her experiences and how they aren't as fringe as they used to be.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

In this book, you detail tremendous amounts of trauma as you fell into Christian patriarchy and then had to literally flee from an abusive marriage. Why did you feel the need to write this book and delve back into those memories?

I wanted to crawl my way out of it because I wanted to survive. I also take a different approach to my healing than what I've seen out there. Many believe that once you're severely broken, you're going to always be broken. I challenge that. I wanted to take a path that would be the exact opposite of what the Christian patriarchy had conditioned me to be, which was very silent and subservient. It almost cost me my life. I wanted to reclaim my own story. But I also was very aware that the patriarchy still sells this false promise, and it doesn't manifest that way in families.

So few survivors have gotten out and been able to tell their story without re-traumatizing themselves. It took me 10 years to write this book, and in the meantime, the headlines in our country changed. The world that I had worked so hard to escape was now coming for our country at large. Stories like mine can tell people what it's really like to live in the Christian patriarchy. It's urgent because Election Day is coming.

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You were in this world of extreme female submission that most people don't think has a relationship to their everyday life or politics. But now we're seeing politicians on the national stage that come from this far-right mentality, such as Speaker of the House Mike Johnson or Donald Trump's running mate, JD Vance.

From an insider's perspective, I saw these people rise. I know what they're doing and how and why because they're very open about that on the inside. They preach about it on Sundays. This was a strategy that they have had for decades: stacking our Supreme Court, getting into Congress, changing PTAs and school boards. Project 2025 is getting a lot of attention, but this has been their plan for a while. Project 2025 is written by a dozen or so organizations that are part of my background. The Heritage Foundation is something I'm very familiar with, from being in patriarchy. And now they're poised to take control of the presidency. Now they talk more openly about these things that used to be fringe, like ending no-fault divorce or taking away the women's vote. I know what it's like to be a woman and a mother in that society.

You won't usually hear major Republican figures say that women shouldn't have the right to vote, but now we have JD Vance pushing a kooky idea about how to water down women's vote, by giving men with children extra votes. He says "parents," but in practice, fathers would do most of the extra voting. You were in a world where they would openly talk about how women should not have the right to vote. 

Their ideal was a system where only the head of household would vote. You can see how they use the soft sell to push these ideas into the mainstream. When JD Vance says that fathers should have a weightier vote, he's reflecting a patriarchal culture that gives all power and all power flows through men who have children. Men who don't have children do not have the same kind of power in patriarchal systems. But they use arguments like that to warm people up to the idea that we don't need the women's vote. Men's vote is enough.

The way fathers outrank men without children in Christian patriarchy points to an interesting observation in your book.  There's a surface appeal in patriarchal ideology to a lot of men. They like the idea of being dominant, being powerful, and being important just by virtue of their gender. And they don't have it as bad as women in these systems. But you write movingly about how your ex-husband was not doing well in the Christian patriarchal system, financially or psychologically. 

It increases the amount of responsibility men have on their shoulders when you remove women's autonomy and women's responsibility for themselves. Men find themselves enforcing these strict rules, and it's more than they can handle. They can experience burnout and the health struggles that happen to others in an oppressive system. They're not being who they're supposed to be or living the way that they should.

Also, not every man has the same amount of power. It's sold to them as a power, but really they have to defer to their own authority chain. It leads to a lot of conflict between men vying for position. Not all men get to be the alpha man. There's a class of beta men. The men on top are white, educated fathers who have money. Everybody else is below them, including other men. A lot of young men sell their souls in pursuit of it, but find it doesn't manifest how it's sold to them.

You write bluntly about what sex was like inside this far-right world. Frankly, the Christian patriarchal attitudes about sex started to resemble. for lack of a better term, a non-consensual BDSM situation, where sexual violence is normalized. 

Basically, you give consent on your wedding day and it's seen as consent for life. Whatever your husband needs or wants. The kink community has consent and safe words and care. I was in a culture where there was no consent, there was no humanity, there was no safety. It was not about my pleasure. I was a utilitarian object, there for my husband's purpose. It's a dehumanizing experience. It's not, it's not anything like um a consensual adult who was using her agency to express her sexuality that doesn't exist. Does that answer your question?

To be even more frank about it, you were being spanked like a child. Except it was also sexual.

It's about power. The sex was also just power. There's no mutuality. Even when it's more gentle, it's still non-consensual. It was a service done for the husband on demand. It's saying: I have power over you and you will do the thing that I need. Your pleasure does not factor in.

In this book, you expose the lie that right-wing Christianity is pro-life and pro-family. You don't use the word "quiverfull," but you lived in a culture that believed you should have one child after another. They call this "pro-life," but in your experience it was anything but. 

One of the things that I just saw repeatedly was that it was the opposite. Most of our practices did not result in a better life, a healthier life, or a more sustainable life. Yet we would be calling them "pro-life." When you're having as many children as possible, your resources are depleted. Your ability to be a good parent is depleted. It's not pro-life. You're actively dying instead of promoting health, wellness, and safety. That's why I think the term "forced birth" is more accurate. We were forced to give birth. There was no option for contraception, abortion, or maternity care.

You lost a baby shortly after she was born. How did the community react? How were you treated?

On the surface, everyone was very compassionate. They had prayed for us a lot while we were in the hospital. But the overarching attitude was: You can be sad for a little while, but then it's time to move on and get pregnant with the next baby. Don't talk about hard things that make us uncomfortable. They didn't want me to come give my testimony anymore, because my baby had died. The stories they want in church are of a miracle. The only outcome that was acceptable for that was a living baby. And since she died, they felt like I needed to get over it pretty quickly and not talk about it. That was one of my breaking points. I couldn't go back and be the person I had been before she was born. I couldn't just tuck all that pain back inside and act like nothing had happened.

People feel drawn to religious communities because of that word, "community." People want fellowship, to have other people who will love and support you. But I was struck by how lonely you seemed when you were in this lifestyle and when you were married. It seems a lot of people feel alone in this community. 

I think the biggest reason is that we were all trying to keep up appearances of being holy. We were all trying to prove that we had our acts together. The cracks could not show. An example of that would be the Duggar's TV show. They were proselytizing to us through their lifestyle. You have to keep up this facade and can't be real with the people around you. In a true community, you would bear one another's burdens, but we weren't allowed to share those burdens. We had to act like nothing was wrong.

You describe being physically abused and sexually abused by your husband throughout your marriage. There's been a lot of attention recently to how far-right Christian communities are rife with sexual abuse of both women and children. 

The system's built for it. The power structure is meant to serve men. It's a community where even babies need to be "modest," so a man won't "slip." It means there's this hypersexuality that permeates everything. They mix sex and male lordship over other women and children. There are no safety measures in place. In many cases, the women and children are taught to either expect it or participate in it. The rhetoric that they're surrounded with all of the time teaches that it must be their fault. "I tempted him" or "I can't be alone with my father because men are too easily tempted."

Sibling incest is a real problem in Quiverfull families, but they don't want to look at what they're doing. Josh Duggar wasn't just one bad apple in the Quiverfull community. I would venture to say almost all of us know some family that's been touched by significant sibling incest. They don't want to look at the system and why this keeps happening. They just send the boy away and keep doing business as usual. So it keeps passing along like it's chicken pox.

This has been a heavy discussion but I can't let you go without asking about the "fundie baby voice."  Sen. Katie Britt gave the GOP response to President Joe Biden's State of the Union address and she used this weird, high-pitched and saccharine voice. A lot of people described it as the "fundie baby voice," and you wrote that in fundamentalism, they want women to "sound like sexualized children." What is the fundie baby voice and how did it end up in the mouth of the senator from Alabama?

We didn't call it the "fundie baby voice." We called it "keeping sweet" or being "childlike." It's a vocal manipulation that we're taught to do, either through direct instruction or just because of the atmosphere. We're taught there's a way for a man to sound and there's a way for a woman to sound. If a woman sounds robust or in any way a leader, she's not being feminine enough. She's not maternal enough.

With Katie Britt the outsiders were asking, why is she talking like this? We know that she has a normal voice, but she was selling something. It's always used to sell something. It's a vocal manipulation meant to get you to coax people along to whatever they're trying to sell. It was a dog whistle to other southern evangelical voters. This preschool teacher's voice is meant to hypnotize us and pull us along.

There's a reason why they want women to sound like young girls. It should disturb us. The sexy baby thing is part of patriarchy.

This is a printed interview, so readers can't hear your voice. I recommend they go check out your videos online. You don't speak with a fundie baby voice. 

I took vocal therapy to change it.

I've heard women say that it was hard to unlearn it.

I had to practice. I had to work with therapists. I spent a lot of time learning just to laugh like myself again, instead of forcing a high-pitched giggle. I let myself laugh with my belly and make a normal sound. I'd be honest with my audience. I'd tell them I'm training my voice to come down into the lower register, to sound like an adult voice, and not "sexy baby."

It's a metaphor for the entire movement. They raise women who don't even know the sound of their own voices.