Brief: Freeing the Well-Trained Wife (w/Tia Levings)
Exvangelical author Tia Levings joins Matthew to discuss her harrowing memoir of indoctrination, abuse, recovery, and advocacy, The Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy. It’s a wild GenX journey that tells us a lot about the logic of evangelical support for Trumpism, and how those caught within it can see their way clear the gender terror, rape culture, and fantasies of retribution.
Show Notes
Tia Levings
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Today's brief is called Freeing the Well-Trained Wife with Tia Levings, who is an ex-evangelical and the author of a brilliant new memoir called A Well-Trained Wife, My Escape from Christian Patriarchy.
So, this is a really precarious time.
I know that all of you can feel it.
There are a lot of emergency measures that are spinning really fast at the moment as citizens get ready to protect immigrants from ICE, anti-genocide protesters from fascist street gangs, trans people from the Moms for Liberty, and vaccine doctors from Bobby Kennedy Jr., But there's also slower work to be done when we can do it to understand how we got here as individuals and communities and how we get out.
And I find that the memoir format can be really powerful for that slow work.
And some of the best memoirs I've come across recently are written by ex-evangelicals.
This is an evolving literature that I really admire because it speaks to a double awakening that I think is crucial to understand, and it's also really inspiring.
Now, ex-evangelicals in general have to go through a process of waking up to how twisted their metaphysics and morality actually are, but then some of them also go on to wake up to the fact that that cruelty, exclusionism, misogyny, and superiority complex attitudes are such easy targets of co-optation by right-wing demagogues.
So, you may have heard me interview Reverend Rob Schenck back in episode 199. He's the former anti-abortion crusader who not only repents of his harmful views, but is now on a mission to undo the political alliances that accelerated his activism.
And the most haunting story he tells in his memoir is about the moment that he really arrived as a political religious player in Washington And then realized what was really happening when these mask-off oligarchs were basically saying, hey, we'll give you money for your Jesus.
You just give me those votes.
My guest today, Tia Lovings, had a similar double awakening.
First, she had to untrain herself out of the tortured postures of evangelical wifehood so that she could feel a sense of agency beyond all of the religious oppression.
And then she also woke up to the larger politics that have made evangelical women some of the most ardent but also dissonant supporters of Trumpian fascism.
I really hope you read this memoir, A Well-Trained Wife, because Levings is an excellent writer, and page by page I was moved and informed and surprised.
And in our upcoming conversation, we go deep on the implications of her story, so I'm just going to take a moment here to outline the basic narrative.
Tia's first idyllic ten years of life are spent in rural Michigan, but then family finances force a move to Jacksonville, Florida, where they become entangled in a charismatic megachurch.
And so she's thrown from reveries on forests and ferries to obsessing about the rapture.
And this early boot camp training and the belief that women are responsible for the peace and happiness of their homes.
And then her marriage to a Navy man is tortured by his religiously misogynistic and controlling behavior, a lot of emotional abuse, and also psychotic breaks that church leaders attribute to satanic possession, and so they don't really encourage him towards any kind of treatment.
Tia does what she can to toe the fundamentalist line, immersing herself in even more obedience and purity training, and also the exhaustion of homeschooling the children, which for them is the obvious choice.
But when Tia's daughter Clara died in early childhood from a heart defect...
Something started to break through.
Tia found online ex-evangelical communities where women in similar circumstances were daring to question their faith.
And all of this eventually brought her into direct confrontation with her husband and her church, and that led to their eventual excommunication.
And from there, she took a long winding road of recovery and rebuilding.
With the help of writing and therapy and, as we discuss, literal speech therapy.
I think...
What I love most about Leving's story and also her skill in telling it is that it reminds me that any wave of political cruelty is made up of countless individual drops and each one of them could be redirected by a kinder society into more nourishing streams.
And also, it's just so cool to talk with someone who was so lost, so beaten down, and nevertheless brought some wisdom back from the depths.
People can be horrible to each other, and people can also be amazing.
Here's my conversation with Tia Levings.
Tia Levings, welcome to Conspirituality Podcast.
Thank you for taking the time.
Thank you so much for having me.
It's a beautiful book.
It's harrowing to read.
Very brave of you to write it, so thank you for that.
Thank you.
Thank you for seeing the both and.
Let me begin by saying I think that most non-evangelicals and liberal or left commentators have pretty cartoonish views of evangelicals, but I was really struck by how long and winding your journey actually was.
Also, how foreign evangelicalism was to your, I think, your original life in the This is not something that you were born into.
It was really something that overwhelmed you and kind of changed who you were.
So can we start there?
Yes, and I'm so grateful for that tiny window.
I really don't go into it that much, but I do start the book there.
It's a very brief section, but it's very essential because it meant that I had something to go back to.
I think that indoctrination, one of the biggest crimes of indoctrination, is that it interferes with child development and the natural autonomy and actualization process that we go through as human beings, as young people who grow up.
It's a malformation to decide or be told what to believe before you know yourself.
And I think that children who are born into it, they're not given that right.
We're expected to make this faith decision, pray the sinner's prayer as early as we can.
I was four and a half the first time I prayed it.
And that life decision is going to be something that you carry with you the rest of your life.
So the reason why I prayed it at four and a half was because my parents had a pretty mainstream, ordinary Midwestern church church.
We went to church Christmas and Easter and occasionally my mom definitely liked it more than my dad because she was involved with the ministries there in the music and stuff.
But we were just as likely to stay home if there was work that needed to be done.
I grew up on 80 acres A farmland in Michigan, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
And I was like a lot of 80s kids, Gen Xers, very feral and allowed to roam more than we think is advisable for children today, which gave me a ton of time to self-form and daydream and was very precocious and an intelligent child.
I don't remember learning how to read.
I just always read.
And, um, so my first 10 years are very special to me because they feel like me.
That's the true, the trueness of me.
And I did have church experiences and I do have some early church religious trauma, but it was, um, pretty, pretty ordinary, um, like big deals to me because they gave me nightmares of hell, but not the kind of thing that makes you write a big memoir.
Yeah.
We'll come back to the original you at the end, but I wanted to note as well that I was struck by the paradox between how closed the evangelical ideology that you were drawn into is, but also then within it, that there is this competitive but also then within it, that there is this competitive entrepreneurialism with all kinds of influencers trying to out purify and out radicalize the others.
So, you know, as your story progresses, you're growing up in First Baptist Church, a megachurch in Jacksonville, But as you get older, the gothard, quiverful influence sweeps through and then suddenly there's a lot more women wearing prairie dresses and perpetually pregnant.
Did you have the feeling that there was diversity and choice even as your horizons narrowed into this evangelical, you know, throttled place?
Yeah, I love this question.
I think that you're really picking up on the scam and the mask that happens in these environments because it is the appearance of diversity.
You have levels of devotion and they're all acceptable because we're all saved.
But some people are going to go be missionaries in foreign lands and some people are going to be sold out for Jesus at their employer or at school.
We're going to carry our Bibles to school.
And then others are going to make last-minute conversions on the cross and be just as accepted.
And then still others are going to become these quiverful, which was not a word that we really used to describe a movement yet.
They just were these people that had been part of our church before.
And they had attended a big stadium event about the Bible, of all things.
Like, Bill Gothard's ministry was non-denominational, and it just studied biblical principles.
And so people would go to these conferences, and they were like Billy Graham events, which got a lot of social acceptance and standing.
And so still nothing controversial with that.
We were very accustomed to large crowds being very validating that we were right.
And all of our verbiage was to design, was focused on the fact that we were right, we were living the right way, and the rest of the world was looking to us as an example of how to be more holy and good and moral.
And it was just a matter of time before they saw things our way.
And so this was just a scale up.
It was just another thing.
And then they would come back into our churches and they would recruit from within and bring people into the IBLP.
And so this was not, they don't ever come out and advertise that.
Is this just, can I have a coffee with you?
Or can I help you with your baby?
Or can I offer you this suggestion of what the Bible says?
About this problem that you're having.
And then it's very subtle.
And so one of the things I hope to accomplish with the book is to show how relational and ordinary it is.
And when you're in a situation like I was, where I was going to church six days a week, and this is my only world that I knew throughout my teenage years, and that it looked so good on the outside.
I mean, we really did think we were having a great upbringing and we had no reason to question that.
It was white and wealthy and fun and they were giving us plenty of Smiles and friends and things that we would say are happy childhood.
We had no contrast.
We had no evidence-based, no testimony.
There's no information available to say, is this a good thing or is this not a good thing?
Because critical thinking is completely offline at this point.
And there are no ex-members so far as you know.
They're all gone.
They all leave because they were not part of the fellowship, not part of the fold.
So you say that you didn't have much reality checking.
And yet the first scene as you're walking up to First Baptist is that you describe the door greeter as somebody who looks like he's just off of the stage set of a game show, The Price is Right or something like that.
of the stage set of a game show, The Price is Right or something like that, that there's something too polished or strange about it.
That there's something too polished or strange about it.
And what I detected in the book was that not only was your story a story about indoctrination, but also this record of resistance.
And I know with a memoir, it must be difficult because you're looking back in hindsight, knowing what had happened, and maybe there might be sort of a, I don't know, a foreboding sort of interjection that your future self puts onto your past self or something like that.
But still there are these indications that you don't really like what's happening.
Like you're 12 or 13 years old, it's Sunday morning, you always have a stomach ache because church just feels wrong.
You tell this really, really touching story about the first friend that you make in Jacksonville, Hannah, who loses her mother to cancer, and then you're totally disgusted by the way the Sunday school teacher bypasses that just as God's will.
It just seems so cruel.
Then you meet this rebellious friend who introduces you to sexuality in a super dangerous way, but there's some exhilaration in transgressing the norms of your private school at that point.
And then one of my favorite parts is that you're spending long days at the library, you know, reading novels about all of these courageous girls that you would like to be who don't give a fuck about gender norms.
And then you're 18 and you're talking with your Gothard-influenced friend who tells you very frankly that husbands cannot rape wives.
And you know it's insane.
So the question I have about this process that you weren't born into but really took you over is, were you ever a true believer or were you also just trying to be accepted in this prison of circumstance?
Oh, that's a great question.
And it's, I'm going to say the both and again.
And it's something that I really try to hold when I'm dealing with evangelicals now is that they are so sincere.
I can totally relate to the drive to be accepted.
This is your origin attachment.
This is your primal attachment.
These are your first people.
And it's your eternity.
You want to go to heaven.
You want to please Jesus.
You're being accepted.
I call them the hook, line, and sinker girls now.
They're the good girls who really want to do whatever they need to to be secure and safe.
And that can mean different things at different times, from eternal security to not get raped.
My inner skeptic, there's a lot of machinations in place to help you shut that down, to lean not on your own understanding, to suppress your intuition.
I was not very good at that.
I tried to be.
I tried.
I really did try to shut myself down.
And that's why you see scenes where it's manifesting as stomach aches.
It's high anxiety.
It's doubts and questions that I had been allowed to ask as a young child.
I had been allowed to ask why.
And I asked why incessantly.
And then I get into this place as a teen, tween, I guess.
I was 10 and a half, 11 years old.
I think that's an important age for me in my character arc.
And I'm already a little skeptical the adults around me don't really have it figured out.
I don't like that they're being exclusive.
I don't like that there's people on the outside.
I'm an artistic nature so I liked stories and that included TV and the library and possibility and ambition and potential and freedom and all the things that thrill us as human beings in the humanities.
And that was always shamed.
So those sermons where they're shaming us for what we watch on TV or shaming AIDS patients of all things, I always pushed back at that because it seemed inhuman and incompatible with what they were telling me about Jesus.
Ironically, it is very incompatible with Jesus' own words.
So it's...
I was picking up on that.
But I think, again, it's my self-preservation that was born in me that I was able to kind of hold.
I learned to sort of split myself and hold this piece of myself back.
And I thought that if I could be...
I'm very high capacity.
So I kind of had a confidence that...
I can do this well enough to blend in and I can obey the rules good enough and still have over here on the side, I can still kind of watch what I want to watch or read when I want to wait.
That was high sin.
This whole thing is high sin.
The idea that you want to hold on to any piece of yourself is preached against very heavily.
And the paradox is that you hold this part back, you are split, there's incredible stress that comes from that, but then that also becomes a kind of way in which you're able to make your way clearer.
But what about the hook, line, and sinker girls?
Because I wonder what happens when the contradiction or the crisis just gets too profound.
The person who you believe, because we don't know, we're kind of assessing from the outside, but it seems that they have successfully repressed the inner skeptic completely.
What does it look like when their crisis really cracks open?
I deal with this on the daily and I'm constantly evaluating.
I look for somebody who will fight.
If they are arguing, if they're willing to argue, that shows me there's a crack in their mind.
If they're willing to be curious enough to be voyeuristic about other people, I think that's a healthy crack.
I can do that.
I can do something with that.
The ones I can't do anything with are the ones that march off to Truth Social.
They're not interested in interacting with anybody.
Their bubble is watertight.
They want to just perform patriarchy because it benefits them and they're not curious.
They're completely incurious people and they don't want to have any ties with the people that they claim to hate so much.
I have been on the other side of this as a little firebrand and I have fought against liberals as a little conservative hothead.
And I said all kinds of things.
But it was the fact that I was willing to engage in those arguments that was the thing.
That's how they were able to get their light into me and break some of that cult programming that I was under.
So that's what I look for, as difficult as it is to interact with somebody who's just argumentative.
It's a paradox because it does sound like the willingness to fight means or indicates a willingness to communicate.
Yeah, yeah.
I haven't really thought about that before.
It's their humanity.
No one wants to hear they're in a cult or that someone thinks that they're not smart.
And you can't really cognitively argue with somebody that's in that position.
But if you can show them that you're curious about them, that you care about why they would land where they would land, if that gentleness can open enough of a breath of a whisper to say, can I show you some evidence, you never know where that will take root and that will manifest in their lives immediately.
It usually doesn't happen in the interaction for me.
It's usually something that they come back to and that matches my experience too.
I would hear something and then I would later be confronted with a situation and I would say, oh, wait a minute, maybe it's not that black and white.
Yeah.
In my experience with cult recovery literature and investigative journalism, that kind of delayed response, I think, is quite common.
That the person that showed you kindness and was able to open some kind of doorway for you, whether or not you were able to walk through it or not, it hangs open there for a while.
Yeah, it does.
And we grow in degrees.
Nobody makes it overnight, and you shouldn't really trust it overnight.
Well, exactly.
Right.
Let's turn to gender, because so much of the experience you describe involves the totalizing torture of evangelical gender norms like clothes, leg crossing, being embarrassed of development, feeling sinful, attempting always to be demure.
I'm definitely not hearing it, but I'm wondering if you ever developed a baby fundy voice.
What physical activities or realizations began to break these patterns for you?
First of all, I'm so grateful that you don't hear it.
That's the reflection of a lot of speech therapy and deliberate retraining on my part to not sound like a baby anymore.
Literally speech therapy?
Like you went to a speech therapist?
Yes, literally.
I had to learn to come down into my lower register and sound like an adult woman.
That's what happens when you go through voice maturation.
And in fundamentalism, we're taught to keep it up high and stay as a baby.
I'm not going to do it right now because it'll activate my nervous system a bit if I do.
But that baby voice is a prosody that's used to coax and manipulate and It is a sign that you're not threatening.
It's sexualizing infants.
There's a lot of things that go into the vocal training, but it's the denial of your own sound.
And so when I came out of all of that and I got sick, I got really sick after my escape.
I actually lost my voice and had to kind of go through all this trauma therapy.
I went through 10 years of trauma therapy and one aspect of it was just learning to laugh like myself and sound like myself and then all the psychology that came with that of what it means to be a self and have your own sound and your own thoughts and your opinions and autonomy.
When you laugh like yourself, something feels quite different and quite rapidly, I imagine.
That's right.
And it also, the vagus nerve is in your abdomen so that you are, the abdomen is your emotional brain center.
We store a lot of our anxiety and trauma in our abdomen.
That's why people have abdominal issues like IBS and Upset stomach and GERD and all of those things.
And so laughter helps massage all of that and get the somatic energy out.
So if you're suppressing it, you're probably suppressing a lot.
There's a lot that goes into the polite ladylike laughter that fundamentalists prefer.
Sorry to fixate on this, but I had some vocal singing training way back in the day, and I guess I'm wondering whether the mandate for Baby Fundy Voice happens, whether you get the instruction as soon as you're 12 or 13 years old and you start making a rounder, lower sound.
Does somebody tell you, get it back up there?
Or is it something that just is never allowed to develop?
It's funny because we didn't call it fundy baby voice.
That's an outsider's term that we'd use in education now.
But what we called it was keep sweet, sound childlike.
You want to sound sweet and child-pleasing.
You want to be feminine.
That's not ladylike.
And so there's a little bit of both.
And again, you're having actual instruction to bring it down and correction if you step out.
You're also just in an environment, especially in the South, where this is part of the culture.
You hear it on TV. You hear it with Marilyn Monroe.
So it all blurs into this.
It's still the same thing.
You're still trying to sound like a little sexy baby to please men.
So if we can just stay in that category, it helps when you're unpacking all of it.
It's like, is it this or that?
Do you sound like you or do you sound like you're trying to perform for someone else?
Are you trying to artificially modulate your voice so that you sound...
Like what somebody else wants you to sound like, whether that is baby-like or pleasing or gentle or not threatening, it's not you.
And you should be able to speak in a normal tone of voice with inflection and it not be threatening to anyone.
There's nothing threatening is the way I sound right now, but it's just my own voice.
No.
No, there is not.
Tell me about clothes for a moment, because the impression that I get from modesty culture, purity culture in general, is just a somatic feeling of rigidity and hypervigilance and danger.
And not only is this being a woman in that culture and knowing that you have to be self-protective, but also projecting a certain type of self that will be withdrawn or will be ready to serve or will be deferent.
What did you do or did you come across that let you feel like you could move in a different way?
Oh, you mean when I came out of all this?
of all of that modesty culture.
Yeah.
Because they focus on your genitals constantly and they focus on sexuality constantly.
And we see this from the bathroom discussion that's happening in Congress right now to the constant modesty police.
I think in deconstruction, what really helped me step out of it was being involved with people who are more interested in other things and it rendered it a non-issue.
People who were willing to accept me as an adult peer and have an intellectual conversation with me about a book were not so obsessed with what my bra strap was showing.
And so I didn't worry about my bra strap showing.
I'm not a performative fashion person anyway.
This is one of my own personality.
No shame to people who are fashionistas.
It's just not me.
And so my big confrontation points were modesty lines.
They're called eye traps in Bill Gothard's world.
And eye traps are something...
It's a fashion design element that might make you look slimmer or might draw attention to your bust.
Or they do this in swimsuit design a lot to minimize a tummy by emphasizing other body parts.
All of those are eye traps.
And so what they want to do is dress so modestly that the only thing you look at is a woman's face.
Which is why they have the ruffled...
Collars and things like that.
And they'll put tights on their babies and things like that to make sure that they're modest.
They're constantly thinking about what's under there and what's going on in there.
And so it was really just becoming less of a sexual object in mainstream society, which is irony.
It's paradoxical, like you were saying.
It's...
They're telling you where you are that you're in the modest place, but it's not actually because there's this continual obsession that gives the lie to that entire idea.
It's not even biblical because in the Bible it says that if a man has lust he should pluck out his eyes.
It doesn't talk about women's fashion or their modesty at all.
And as a mom of boys, I didn't want to raise sons that thought that the women's behavior had to mandate their own.
They needed to be self-controlled and respectful because of who they are and treat her with respect regardless of what she's wearing.
And that humanizes boys too.
Turning now to the present day, this will be published in December of 2024. This coming Trump term is going to be hell for so many people.
It will.
What are you hearing from the evangelical women that you grew up with or you're talking to now or if you're not in touch with many?
What do you see happening in that space at this moment?
Yeah, I am in touch with them because I listen to what they're listening to and I want to see how they form their ideas and why they are where they are.
What I hear is a lot of ugly gloating and it's a lot of dismissive scoffing.
That is what scares me the most.
It's not so much the substance of their opinions, it's that they really think they one-upped half of America.
And it's boastful and it's militant and it's...
It scares me because it ties into that call for power and violence.
These women are going to ask their men to do the fighting for them.
That's how they're going to be.
And these women are very skilled manipulators that turn the neck, that turns the head, the soft voice that gets the man to do the thing.
They feel so vitriolic.
A lot of their imagery is red, bloody waves, and we really stuck it to them.
Listening is harder when it's in that kind of frenzy.
I just kind of have to notice it and say, wow, what does this have to do with the behavior of Christ?
One, I call them out and say, I do this on Facebook a lot.
I heard that Republicans were as worried four years ago about being put in concentration camps.
Can you please tell me where in the administration you heard that?
And it's crickets because they don't have video of Biden saying that they're the enemy within and we're going to put political dissidents in camps.
We do have video that says that.
That's an inequality.
So, yeah, I just kind of like point out those contrasts.
But you're describing a wave of wrath, actually.
Yes.
Is part of what is being expressed a feeling of, oh, we're not actually the losers.
We're not actually insane.
We are actually the ones who know the reality of the world, or we have the truth at hand.
Is that part of what motivates that sense of wrath?
Yes.
I think that's the surface.
I think underneath it is their inability to be tolerant of other people has felt like suffering to them.
And they feel bad about it.
They feel bad about it.
And so now they don't have to suffer because they don't have to tolerate.
They don't have to feel bad about having been taught to hate other people.
Right.
They can just let it go and no more discomfort, no more dissonance, no more, I have to put up with your purple hair, I have to put up with your gender change, I have to put up with your loud liberal voices.
They don't get to behave that way even when they want to.
They have to suppress and that hurts.
It hurts to be in evangelism.
It hurts to deny constantly yourself over and over and over again.
And so now they're going to get to inflict this on everybody and everybody else is going to have to see what it's like.
You can always look at how they're living and know what their model is for the country.
I say it a lot.
The way the patriarchy runs their homes is the way they want to run the country.
Because the family model is their model that they're going to scale up to government.
Well, in the family in evangelism, you don't have female autonomy.
You don't have women voting.
You don't have going to the doctor or education for girls or equality.
None of that exists.
So They've suffered.
They've had a hard time with that.
And they've also had a hard time tolerating seeing other people live free.
And now they're not going to have to do that because none of us are going to be free.
That's what's going on in there is, ha ha, we're going to be the same now.
I guess this leads to my next question, which is that, you know, ex-evangelical spaces are very important to people who are able to step over that particular lake of fire and start to recover, you know, as you have done.
What do you think of the political value, the rhetorical value, the power of self-identified progressive evangelicals?
I'm thinking like the people who do the Holy Post podcast.
Like they are vehemently anti-Trump on moral grounds.
David French, take him or leave him, but he went so far as to endorse Harris.
They think it's a huge mistake to live with power or to rule with power in areas like reproductive rights instead of to actually persuade people, which they view as the Christian way.
So do you think that they have good tools for reaching some of the women who were in your situation?
My personal deep observation is that anyone who sits with those questions doesn't stay a Republican.
That's been what I've observed.
But those people who are in that tertiary step, the idealist in me that values a pluralistic society and also understands the ardent sincerity of Christians who love Jesus— And want to be kind and actually model tolerance and respect for women and the things that Jesus did give us.
Those people I have a lot of respect for because they are reaching this middle ground.
I don't trust they'll stay there.
I think they will be forced either because the vitriol that's hurled at them from high control Christians or their own widening expanse of empathy.
I don't believe that they will stay in a progressive middle place for very long.
That's a really fascinating perspective.
I can see, I can understand what you're saying, that, you know, partial measures avail as nothing.
And that it's actually, given the noise of radical evangelical Christianity, it's very hard to carve out a quieter space.
Yeah.
And they make it really hard to align with them.
When you are trying to let a crack of empathy in, empathy widens and is contagious in your spirit and you'll become more empathetic for going through that.
But they are drilling down on their high control and they will make statements and do things that you will find untenable.
And eventually you'll have to pick a side.
Yeah.
That's what I see happening in the deconstruction testimonies.
We hit a point where we're like, I just can't go that far.
I just can't do that.
And now I have to make a public stance.
For David French to say that he didn't endorse Trump was a massive personal stance.
And he'll pay for it from his cronies on the right, and he'll be welcomed on the left.
That's the truth of that.
You know, I'm going to let our listeners absorb the back half of your amazing journey on their own, because it's incredible.
You survived a brutally abusive marriage while you were also searching, and you were searching together with your ex-husband for a different way to be Christian for your different reasons.
And you both landed in the Orthodox Church.
And so I'm wondering whether that form of Christianity helped you see more clearly that you had to leave the marriage for one thing.
And then I just want to hear about whether you are still devout and what you gain from that church now, and does it connect it all back to that original self in the Michigan woods?
Yeah, I love that.
So my step in Orthodoxy was very grace-giving at the time.
The Orthodox Church is not so much this way anymore because it's been infiltrated by fundamentalism.
Yes.
I'm shaking my fist.
It's so heartbreaking to see, but...
But the parish I was in in 2007 was very community active.
They cared about women.
And it was such a contrast to high control patriarchy that it saved my life.
My priest was ready to be active and helpful in getting me free and helping me be safe instead of upholding the institution of marriage.
The idea was not more important than my life.
I'm very, very grateful for that.
2016 broke me when it came to Christianity.
I now identify as spiritually private because one of the things, going back to little me, I should have been allowed to have some privacy and autonomy as a child as I was sorting out what I believed.
Also, spirituality is very fluid and we don't stay in one place.
We don't land places.
We don't, or we shouldn't.
We shouldn't land in fixed places.
We should allow our spirits to grow and ebb and evolve.
And so also like the people pleaser in me really wants to please the asker.
I'm always trying to suss out like, Do they want to hear I'm a Christian?
Do they want to hear I'm a not Christian?
Which one will get me liked in this interview?
So to stay away from that, because I really work on not being codependent and a people pleaser, I can't give you a direct answer.
I can say that I don't think I'll ever have a place for groupthink and congregational behavior ever again.
I have yet to see a safe one where I truly am not susceptible to groupthink.
And American evangelism does no longer deserve the word Christian, so I just, no, I am on the side of survivors.
That's where my advocacy works and my limited life points, and that's where I spend my time.
I think spiritually private is a direct answer, though.
Yeah.
I mean, we had Brad Onishi on for an episode where he described his concept of being a secular person of faith.
That's beautiful.
I mean, even just the phrase, spiritually private, does sound like a denomination that I think you should grab the URL for.
No.
You should start to Patreon.
Cult Recovery 101. No gurus.
Never again a guru.
I can't become one either.
Yeah, okay.
Well, that's an interesting point.
Are you getting some of that kind of attention, however?
Yeah, people look to role models.
They look to examples.
I always try to center stories, that it's the plurality of our stories that makes a movement.
Mine is an extreme example in some ways, and then the majority of the feedback is that people find things they relate to.
And I did try to make sure that this was culturally relatable and that many people will feel That they had a similar enough journey and we may have taken a different direction at a cross point or something and I had this outcome and they had a different outcome, but that it's relatable.
I am a voice that is willing to be loud.
I am willing to go first so that someone else can say me too.
But I'm an imperfect, highly sensitive person.
Nobody should look to me to be an organized leader of any kind.
