Wife reveals dark underbelly of being in a deeply conservative Christian marriage
Tia Levings reveals the dark underbelly to being a wife in a deeply conservative Christian marriage in “A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy (Macmillan, Aug. 6).”
Levings was raised in a Southern Baptist church that railed against homosexuality and abortion while encouraging women to marry early and procreate. She met her future husband Allan at 18 and married him the following year despite numerous red flags including physical violence.
Despite Allan’s protests, Levings remained a virgin during their year of courtship. However their wedding night was certainly not the stuff of romance novels.
Allan “tore into me like long-awaited mail, shocking me with dry, hard stabs and strokes,” she writes. “I gasped from searing pain as my skin broke, and then my body went numb.”
Four days later, Levings went to see a doctor who told her she had a terrible infection and advised her to take a rest because “your body can’t handle that much battering.”
Things only worsened as Allan became more immersed in strict Calvinist theology.
At one point he insisted that Levings call him “My Lord” and “submit” to his every want.
Other traditional wives advised her to follow the tenets of the controversial Institute in Basic Life Principles, which stresses the absolute “surrender” of wives to husbands.
Levings bore five children and home-schooled her brood. She desperately tried to please her husband, but it was never enough. He constantly berated her, calling her a “s–t mother and s–t Christian.”
Eventually Levings fled her marriage in 2007 and has devoted herself to exposing the perils of Christian fundamentalism.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/wife-rev...00598.html
Tia Levings reveals the dark underbelly to being a wife in a deeply conservative Christian marriage in “A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy (Macmillan, Aug. 6).”
Levings was raised in a Southern Baptist church that railed against homosexuality and abortion while encouraging women to marry early and procreate. She met her future husband Allan at 18 and married him the following year despite numerous red flags including physical violence.
Despite Allan’s protests, Levings remained a virgin during their year of courtship. However their wedding night was certainly not the stuff of romance novels.
Allan “tore into me like long-awaited mail, shocking me with dry, hard stabs and strokes,” she writes. “I gasped from searing pain as my skin broke, and then my body went numb.”
Four days later, Levings went to see a doctor who told her she had a terrible infection and advised her to take a rest because “your body can’t handle that much battering.”
Things only worsened as Allan became more immersed in strict Calvinist theology.
At one point he insisted that Levings call him “My Lord” and “submit” to his every want.
Other traditional wives advised her to follow the tenets of the controversial Institute in Basic Life Principles, which stresses the absolute “surrender” of wives to husbands.
Levings bore five children and home-schooled her brood. She desperately tried to please her husband, but it was never enough. He constantly berated her, calling her a “s–t mother and s–t Christian.”
Eventually Levings fled her marriage in 2007 and has devoted herself to exposing the perils of Christian fundamentalism.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/wife-rev...00598.html
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
