What I Learned From 'A Well-Trained Wife'

My education on Christian patriarchy

I was reading a New York Times profile of Natalie Winters, a young woman described as Steve Bannon’s protegee, when I came across this line, tucked away at the bottom.

One day, she would like to settle down with a man she can be “submissive” to, she said.

Huh? Winters, 24, is ambitious, a White House correspondent for Bannon’s War Room podcast who has appeared on conservative television and at CPAC. That aside would have stood out to me under any circumstances, but it was also perfectly timed.

Photo by Diana Vargas on Unsplash

I had been making my way through A Well-Trained Wife by Tia Levings, a memoir about the author’s experience in an abusive, Christian fundamentalism-approved marriage. It’s not my typical read. But I had picked it up as a way to understand book banning, and frankly the current conservative moment, from a different angle.

Levings was a member of the First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida when she met the man she calls Allan in the book and got engaged to him just a few weeks later. She weathered his descent into alcoholism and eventually, homicidal madness, through the birth of five children (one died from a heart defect soon after she was delivered).

It’s a harrowing read, not just because Levings has had an objectively difficult life but also because of what she reveals about fundamentalism in this country. Mainly, that the entire power structure of these churches mimics that of an abusive relationship, which then proliferates through the satellites of people’s homes.

Couples are encouraged to have lots and lots of children: a quiverful, in fundie-speak. These kids are either educated at church schools or homeschooled; they’re intentionally isolated from the outside world and the moms are responsible for doing the isolating. Wives are ordered around by their husbands. Deference is sacred. Kids obey their mothers who obey their husbands who obey the pastors who obey the church’s founders. Poverty is blessed and it’s up to the mothers to keep the family afloat by living as frugally as possible: growing food, clipping coupons, stretching meals, reusing everything.

Women are utensils:

“Women of God don’t care about having a name for themselves,” a member of the Institute of Basic Life Principles (IBLP) — the same church organization that the reality TV-famous Duggar family followed — told Levings. “She’s a utensil, useful to her husband and blessed by God.”

There’s so much freaky stuff in this book. For instance, I’d never heard of “blanket training,” which some fundamentalist mothers start with babies as young as four months old. It goes like this: you put your baby on a small square blanket and if it tries to move off, you hit it. The baby learns pretty quickly that to exercise its will is to expect pain.

I feel sick to my stomach just typing that out. I thought about it for days after I read it. (Levings was encouraged to try it by some of her peers but couldn’t bring herself to do it with her kids.)

The entire system is kept in check by violence. Violence against the children, who are “switched” if not from birth, then still from a very young age. Adult women, like Levings, who are spanked by their husbands. Everyone, including the men, lives under threat of a fire-and-brimstone God who will send his worshippers straight to a colorfully terrifying hell for stepping even a little bit out of line.

Terrible, you might be thinking, but what does this have to do with books.

Throughout A Well-Trained Wife, I was consistently struck by the overt political ambitions of the Christian fundamentalist movement. I’ve known forever about the evangelicals and their longstanding alliance with conservatives around things like school segregation as far back as the 1960s and obviously, the anti-choice and fetal personhood stuff that’s still dominating our politics today. But I don’t think I grasped — even after skimming Project 2025 — how much American Christian fundamentalism is about using politics to achieve religious dominion. The way Levings spells it out — the most important parts of the book to my eye — makes me realize how these blatant political aspirations are sort of baked into the faith.

Back to the conversation with the IBLP woman. This next speaker is her daughter, who is the oldest of 10.

“A quiver holds arrows. The Bible says children are like arrows unto God and happy is the man who has his quiverful of them. If you were headed into battle, wouldn’t you want as many arrows as possible?”

Levings, still naive: “Well, yeah, but we’re not headed into battle.”

“The women laughed. “‘Y2K is coming! And America is becoming more liberal and godless every day. Of course we’re headed into battle … especially at the polls.””

Levings doesn’t necessarily agree but she gets the drift: “The point of Christianity is propagation toward the end goal of taking dominion.” Later, “Christians had to study discipline, theology, and war so we’d be ready to usher in the Christian Golden Age.”

Uh-oh.

You’d think this would mean that fringe fundamentalist churches would encourage all of their congregants to vote but no, it turns out women who are being beaten and used like breeding stock and free 24-hour labor are just too damn unpredictable at the polls.

A few years into their marriage, Levings’ husband Allan introduces her to a new concept: Head of Household voting. It is what it sounds like — the husband casts a vote on behalf of his entire family.

It instantly calls to mind the SAVE Act, which could potentially disenfranchise the millions of married women who’ve changed their names. And that would be okay for certain fundamentalist Christians. Convenient, even. Here and now, in 2025, women’s voices are still considered dangerous. Women’s bodies, too — at one point in the book, Levings describes the shapeless denim jumper worn by many fundie women as an American burkha.

I should note that Levings wasn’t raised Christian fundamentalist, at least not right away. Her parents moved and joined the First Baptist Church when she was 10. She attributes the inner strength it took for her to leave to that first decade of her life, when she was able to develop a sense of personal identity and tap into the inner voice that would eventually set her free.

After escaping the church, she developed a platform on social media, now 98,000 followers strong on Instagram. I checked it out, and this pinned post immediately stood out to me.

I think what many Democratic voters miss is that evangelical Republicans aren’t stirred by the outcry our democracy is in danger, because they don’t believe in democracy, Levings writes in the first of a series of white-backed tiles. Evangelicals believe in an authoritarian power structure. A king or a dictator matches their theology.

This hit me hard, in the way of something you already know but can’t put your finger on until you hear someone else articulate it. The SAVE act, school choice, defunding the WHI, book removals — all of these policies make sense from the standpoint of advancing Christian nationalism. It’s not just about Conservatism, or religion, but an ideologically extreme, high-control strand of fundamentalist Christianity.

Just for fun, I looked to see whether A Well-Trained Wife had been officially challenged or removed anywhere since its publication last August. I couldn’t find anything, which is funny, because it seems a hell of a lot more dangerous than Uncle Bobby’s Wedding.