Undoing The Lord’s Work
Artwork by Ted Nunes
Tia Levings social media: Instagram - Facebook - TikTok
Yes, that is a repurposed Gilead bonnet in the image. As a reminder that Christian patriarchal extremism in the US is very real, and can lead to the life-threatening fundamentalism that this week’s guest narrowly escaped with her and her children’s lives. The dandelions signify hope and resilience, which Tia Levings has in abundance.
The New York Times best-selling author first chronicled her religious, domestic and sexual abuse in her 2024 memoir A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy. This year, she published I Belong To Me: A Survivor’s Guide to Recovery and Hope after Religious Trauma, walking us through all the professional help she has sought and received since her escape, along the way reclaiming her body, her voice, her very sense of self.
I met Tia when a friend took me to see her speak at Parnassus Books in Nashville. My friend also grew up in a high-control religious sect, and like Tia has been working to “deconstruct” the damage done in the name of the Lord. I’ve just recently learned these terms - high-control religion, deconstruction - as more and more religious trauma survivors dismantle and speak out about their religious trauma.
They’ve helped me understand that religious abuse is like the high-control dynamics of domestic or intimate partner violence – but on steroids.
So, all abuse is based on power, control and supremacy; it just varies in scale. A domestic abuser exerts it over their family. An abusive boss over employees, a workplace Widen the scale further, and you can subjugate entire congregations – even a nation.
Abuse is predicated on stripping people of their intellectual, emotional and physical autonomy and punishing any critical thinking. And when you teach people that an unseen force wants half the world to submit themselves to the other half, it should be obvious that this is a game, a very rigged game. But we’ve all fallen prey, in one way or another, to stories of supremacy that take the shape of social norms.
Tia wrote her books to help people leave situations like hers, and to explain thereligious extremism that for decades has been increasingly shaping US politics.
She writes that living your life shouldn’t be about disappearing yourself or calling abuse love, or God. That deconstruction and recovery are possible, with a lot of patience, time, resilience, and, hopefully, no new gurus to replace the old ones.
A full transcript of our conversation is available here.
Women Like Sex is a Flipped Script production
Executive Producer / Editor: Natasha Senjanovic
Website Design and Artwork: Ted Nunes
Associate Producer: Edecio Martinez
Music: Funky Fortune by Danny Shields