Shiny Happy Wife: Tia Levings on Christian Fundamentalism (Part 1)

A Little Bit Culty

Sarah Edmondson & Anthony “Nippy” Ames

True Crime, Society & Culture, Education

4.6 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 12 June 2023

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Just as roses have thorns, so too do pristine, seemingly blemish-free families have their own dark sides. For example, we have the Duggar family and their show 19 and Counting, which broadcasted the daily lives of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar and their army of children between 2008 and 2015 to millions of viewers around the world. Now, a new documentary on the family called Shiny Happy People, according to TIME, “includes testimonies from daughter Jill (Duggar) Dillard, her husband Derick Dillard, niece Amy (Duggar) King, as well as several former IBLP members, reveals that the family and larger religious group was dealing with allegations of sex abuse, child abuse and financial mistreatment.”

Our guest today, author Tia Levings, spoke in this documentary based on her experiences as a thought leader on abuse within Christian Fundamentalism, but also a survivor of such abuse herself. Having grown up in a Southern Baptist Megachurch, Levings gets into how she slowly but surely slipped into a high-control group (read: cult) wherein men are considered accountable for their wives before God, and therefore must lead and discipline them.

Her memoir, A Well-Trained Wife, will be released in August of 2024. In the meantime, you can keep up with Tia at the below links:

Twitter

Website

Please note, this series includes details of sexual abuse. Listener discretion is strongly advised. If you, or someone who know, is a survivor of sexual assault, abuse, grooming, child abuse, or human trafficking, RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline offers support at 800.656.HOPE (4673).

Also…

Hear Ye, Hear Ye:

The views and opinions expressed on A Little Bit Culty do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the podcast. Any content provided by our guests, bloggers, sponsors or authors are of their opinion and are not intended to malign any religion, group, club, organization, business individual, anyone or anything. Nobody’s mad at you, just don’t be a culty fuckwad.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The views and opinions expressed by a little bit callty are those of the hosts,
0:04.0	and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the podcast.
0:08.3	Any of the fucking maizeball content provided by our guest,
0:12.0	bloggers, sponsors, or authors are of their opinion and are not attended to
0:15.2	malign any religion group club organization, business individual, anyone or anything.
0:19.1	We're not doctors, not psychologists. We're certainly not the AP.
0:22.1	It's associated press for those of you listening at home.
0:24.7	We're two non-experts, we're found ourselves making a little podcast
0:28.1	that people happen like. Okay? Okay.
0:40.8	Hey everybody, Sarah Edmonds in here.
0:43.2	And I'm Anthony Ames, aka Nippie, Sarah's husband, and you're listening to a little bit callty.
0:49.6	aka a lbc. A podcast about what happens when devotion goes to the dark side.
0:54.6	We've been there and back again, a little about us. True story, we met and fell in love in a cult,
1:00.7	and then we woke up and got the hell out of dodge.
1:03.1	And the whole thing was captured in the HBO documentary series The Val.
1:06.8	Now in its second season. I also wrote about our experience in my memoir,
1:10.9	SCART, the true story of how I escaped next year, the cult that bound my life.
1:15.3	Look at us, couple of married podcasters who just happened to have a weekly date night.
1:19.9	Where we interview experts and advocates and things like cult awareness and mind control.
1:24.0	Wait, wait, wait, this does not count toward date night bait. We gotta schedule that that's separate.
1:28.5	So there's two days we gotta hate.
1:30.5	We do this podcast thing because we learned a lot on our exit ramp out of next year.
	...

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