Escaping the Patriarchy: My Conversation with Tia Levings on Faith, Fear, and Freedom

Part 1 of 2

When Tia Levings joined me on The Weekend Show last weekend, she did not speak with bitterness or rage. Her voice was measured, reflective, and devastatingly clear. Levings, a New York Times bestselling author of A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from the Christian Patriarchy, had lived through the world she now warned the rest of us about. Her next book, I Belong to Me: A Survivor’s Guide to Recovery and Hope After Religious Trauma, due out in May, continued that mission, to illuminate the shadowy intersection of faith, gender, and control that continued to shape modern America.

What made her story so striking was not only its personal intensity, it was the way it mirrored the national story we are all living. As she said early in our conversation, “When I escaped in 2007, I had no idea the country itself would one day resemble the cult I fled.”

That line hung in the air.

Levings had grown up in an evangelical world that promised safety, belonging, and divine purpose. Like many American children raised in conservative churches in the 1980s and ’90s, she was told she could save the world for Jesus, but only from the home, as a wife and mother. “By 18, I knew there was one job for good Christian girls,” she told me. “To become a good Christian wife.”

Her childhood, like so many others in that orbit, had been filled with wholesome activities, summer camps, Bible studies, youth groups. It had all seemed benign. “You think you’re living a normal, moral, happy American life,” she explained. “But slowly, the walls start to close in.”

Those walls were theological, social, and political. What began as simple “family values” hardened into a hierarchy that placed men at the top and women and children in submission. When she married, she was told her husband was “God’s will for her life.” What followed was a cycle of spiritual and physical abuse, sanctified by religious leaders who preached obedience above safety.

“I did everything they told me to do,” she recalled. “And still, my husband was beating me. The fruit of that teaching was not what they promised.”

By the time she escaped, she had endured a decade of violence, isolation, and indoctrination. She had been excommunicated from her church for the crime of writing under her own name. “I had four children and no sense of self,” she said. “People think the hardest part is the trauma. But the hardest part was realizing I had never been allowed to develop as a person. Indoctrination replaces development.”

When Levings left her marriage and began rebuilding her life, she assumed the world she had escaped was fringe, confined to a few fundamentalist pockets of American life. But then came 2016.

“I was in trauma recovery, trying to heal,” she said. “Then I watched Donald Trump rise, surrounded by the same ideology I had just escaped. And I realized, it wasn’t fringe anymore. It had gone mainstream.”

Her perspective on Christian nationalism was chillingly informed. She had lived it before it had a name. What she called “the patriarchal household model,” a top-down system where a man ruled his home, his wife, and his children with absolute authority, had become a blueprint for governance. “They believe the family is the model for government,” she explained. “And in their model, there’s no democracy. No constitution. Just hierarchy. The husband rules the home, the patriarch rules the nation.”

In Levings’s view, the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade was not the culmination of the Christian right’s ambitions but their opening salvo. “That was their spark,” she said. “They will not stop with abortion. Next comes contraception, voting rights, bodily autonomy, even access to healthcare. The goal is total control.”

She pointed out that what many people called “Christian nationalism” was not Christianity at all. “They’ve built a new denomination around power, not faith,” she insisted. “It’s a political theonomy, the imposition of Old Testament law onto modern society. And they’re using the same language, the same scriptures, the same symbols as people who are genuinely following Jesus. It’s no wonder everyone’s confused.”

When I mentioned that Donald Trump seemed a strange messiah for this movement, a man with no real religious literacy, she laughed, but grimly. “He’s not a patriarch, he’s an authoritarian,” she said. “They needed a vessel, someone who could bulldoze through the system they despised. Usually the women are the vessels in that world. This time, they found a man empty enough to fill.”

Trump, she explained, gave permission to much smarter people, the ideological architects behind Project 2025, to carry out their agenda. “He’s the distraction,” she said. “They’re the operators.”

Our conversation turned to how this authoritarian theology reshaped not only politics but the American psyche. The country, she suggested, was being subjected to the same psychological tactics that kept women trapped in abusive marriages, gaslighting, guilt, and fear. “It’s emotional blackmail,” she said. “They ask, ‘Don’t you want to keep your family safe? Don’t you want to protect your children?’ It’s the same script, they just scaled it up.”

She likened it to living “in the upside down,” a world where truth and lies had traded places. “I used to say it felt like living in a snow globe,” she said. “People could see me, but I couldn’t reach them. Now, that’s the whole country.”

What felt especially prescient was her warning about technology’s role in spreading this ideology. Levings said that “sector-specific AI,” combined with curated data and media silos, could cement authoritarian control without anyone realizing it. “They won’t need soldiers,” she said. “If they decide only certain Christians can access healthcare or information, they’ll just change the data. You won’t even see the mechanism.”

That observation hit differently in 2025, when disinformation feels like background noise. Levings’s warning was not abstract. She had seen how belief could be engineered, how entire communities could be programmed to obey.

Despite the darkness of her story, Levings insisted her work was about hope, about rebuilding the self after control. Her upcoming book, I Belong to Me, is part memoir, part roadmap for survivors of religious trauma. “You can heal,” she said. “You can reclaim your agency. You can learn to trust your own mind again.”

And she wanted the rest of us, the ones who were never in the cult, to recognize how many still are. “Tens of thousands of women are living that life right now,” she said. “And many more are aspiring to it because it looks wholesome and safe on Instagram. But what they’re seeing is a façade. Fundamentalism always sells the promise, never the fruit.”

Her message, ultimately, was a plea for vigilance and empathy, for understanding how personal trauma could scale into national crisis, and for remembering that freedom, whether spiritual or political, is fragile.

“When I left,” she said quietly, “I thought I’d escaped that world. I didn’t realize it was coming for everyone.”

You can watch the full interview on the MeidasTouch network here.