The Year of the Fundamentalist Escape Memoir
On my desk sit two books with nearly identical subtitles: Cait West’s Rift: A Memoir of Breaking Away from Christian Patriarchy and Tia Levings’ A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy—released in April and August of 2024, respectively. Alongside those twinned memoirs is Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon, released in October 2023. Sinclair’s is also a story of flight from religious patriarchy, but her escape was not from patriarchal Christianity but Rastafarianism.
These books, all published within a year of each other, demonstrate that fundamentalist religious patriarchy results in abuse, regardless of the religion used to underwrite the behavior.
Fundamentalist patriarchy is essentially its own religion, mutable enough to take on the appearance of Christianity or Rastafarianism, until it boils down to a man as god of his house and everyone in it. The multiracial aspects of this movement are not to be overlooked. While both Rift and A Well-Trained Wife are written by white women based in the United States—“privileged women who [historically] benefit from patriarchal authoritarianism”(1)—How to Say Babylon provides a necessary corrective to a whitewashing impulse that would paint fundamentalist religious patriarchy as a phenomenon exclusive to a specific class or caste.
All three books trace the narrators’ lives from early childhood through adult emancipation (which Levings doesn’t achieve until much later). Readers who turn to these books seeking preventative blueprints—a guide for how to avoid being duped into participation in patriarchal, high-control religion—may be surprised or alarmed to find little in the way of preventative “advice.” In all three cases, the narrators were born into religious contexts, and their religious formation was overseen by a child’s most inescapable influence: their parents and caregivers. This trend is echoed across earlier escape-from-fundamentalism memoirs, including Tara Westover’s Educated (about escaping her rural Mormon upbringing) and Deborah Feldman’s Unorthodox: the Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots. Sinclair and West coincide quite closely on this point, in that their parents intentionally insulated them from external influences. West was homeschooled, a practice common among Christian parents who hope to protect their children from the corrosive influence of an evil world.(2) “Homeschool in the nineties was a Laura Ingalls, Oregon Trail, make-your-own-corncob-doll vortex,” West recalls. “The outside world—the realm of public schoolers and teen pregnancy and marijuana—was a depraved place, and family values were the only thing that would save us.” The parallel worlds established by these kinds of isolationist subcultures reinforce binary thinking and divisiveness, especially for people who experienced this kind of cultural sequestration as children. At home, West recalls being constantly fed prejudice and one-sided information. “I was quick to judge the neighbors for their heathen behavior, like celebrating Halloween and believing in the Easter Bunny,” she writes. “At home I was taught it was a good sign to be hated, to be different from the outside world.” In Sinclair’s Jamaican context, the Rastafari were a persecuted and maligned minority. Even though Sinclair attended a private school on an academic scholarship, her “father…instruct[ed her] to shun all outsiders, who were all the children of Babylon, as if they carried plague.” Stigmatized both racially and religiously, Sinclair found herself in an impenetrable bubble, subject solely to the influence of her domineering father, Djani. “More and more we were kept apart,” she writes, “kept apart from Babylon’s plague, so as to preserve our purity…No one was good enough for the sect of Sinclair, and there would be no other influence in our lives except for him.”
Because the narrators of these books were brought up within the cloistered context of all-encompassing religion, it’s worth asking what drove their parents to embrace such an extreme position. For many believers, religion is a source of purpose, meaning, and security. Sinclair describes her progenitors as “two parentless teenagers searching for some higher purpose. They’d always felt outcast, their burdens singular, driven by a profound belief that they were different. Chosen.” Of the three authors, Sinclair spends the most time inhabiting her parents’ consciousness, which creates a profound empathy for their actions. “I would eventually come to understand,” she writes, “that my mother felt called because she wanted to nurture, and my father felt called because he wanted to burn.”
For the men who promote religious patriarchy, it provides them with a justification to exert control over their circumstances and a way to wield power. Men drawn to religious patriarchy often feel disenfranchised in some fundamental way. For West’s father, chronic economic hardship and professional uncertainty gnawed away at his sense of manhood, which he’d learned to conflate with his patriarchal role as provider. Even if he couldn’t control his family’s economic circumstances, he believed he could oversee their spiritual state. Harvard researchers Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks acknowledge, “In the patriarchal authoritarian’s view, men are not real men unless they have control over the women in their lives.”(3) As society pushes toward greater gender-based equality, men who have long possessed an unearned advantage over women will feel this recalibration as a loss in status. These men have to be provided with productive outlets or they will seek out subcultures and frameworks that confer righteousness on male dominion. For Djani Sinclair, the stressors were even more pronounced. “Through reggae music”—his gateway to Rasta thought—“he began to identify his own helpless rage at the history of Black enslavement at the hands of colonial powers, and his disgust at the mistreatment of Black Jamaicans in a newly postcolonial society.” After being thrown out by his mother when he was eighteen, “the one thing he could control,” Sinclair observes, “[was] his discipline—the way he lived his life as a Rastafari.”
Each author invokes her own buzzwords, illuminating a different dusty corner of the interconnected dungeon of repression. For West, the iconic phrase is “stay-at-home daughter,” which reflects the ancillary purpose allotted to women and the truncated process of development. Throughout her book, West incorporates pull-quotes from the various pro-patriarchy books and pamphlets that littered her upbringing. She traces the concept of stay-at-home daughters to a book titled So Much More, written by sisters Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin, both closely affiliated with the now-defunct fundamentalist Christian media empire Vision Forum. West explains that, according to the Botkins, “Daughters should stay home and serve their fathers rather than go to the “Babylonian” university or get jobs or rent their own apartments.” Babylon is a Biblical reference to a literal place in the Ancient Near East, ruled by King Nebuchadnezzar II, who conquered Judah and brought the Israelites into captivity for seventy years.(4) This period—the Babylonian exile, which I studied at Christian college—was one of spiritual rebuke and diplomatic humiliation for the Israelites. According to Jewish religious codes, the Babylonians were notoriously immoral, and the Jews had to resist the pressure to assimilate. Archetypally, Babylon represents an evil oppressor, intent on destroying you and your religious purity. This threat of compromise and occupation hums throughout all three memoirs.
Sinclair, like West, continued to live in her father’s house for several years after high school graduation without an exit strategy, but the moniker “stay-at-home daughter” doesn’t appear in her book. Instead, she writes about one’s “livity,” meaning the righteousness of one’s lifestyle. Livity emphasizes the subjectivity of righteousness and the way her father used that ambiguity to tighten his hold on his family. “Soon, he didn’t even allow us around other Rastafari people anymore,” Sinclair writes. “He trusted no one, not even them, with our livity.”
Levings’ repeated phrase is a metaphor that reveals the delicate interplay of fate and agency and the way that certain choices lead to other, narrower choices. Early on, Levings writes, “the dominoes of our lives began to fall.” Later, she employs this metaphor’s capaciousness: “there came a time when the dominoes had names—human, indelible benchmarks.” The forces that shaped her life were no longer inscrutable circumstances but discrete human actors: some of the same influences toward Christian patriarchy that appear in Rift.
Levings, like the two other narrators, grew up in a religious context, but she ventured much deeper into the wilds of fundamentalism than her parents. For both West and Sinclair, their primary abuser is their father. Levings’ experience is initially more normative, less extreme. Her parents, driven by economic pressure, move their family from Michigan to Florida when Levings is ten. They join an influential megachurch with the standard hallmarks of Christian fundamentalism: an emphasis on hell, damnation, and separation from the world. In this regard, my upbringing matches Levings’. My parents, both of whom came to Christianity in their mid-twenties, raised my brothers and me in church. Whereas Levings initially chafes within the structure of evangelicalism, I took to it naturally, happy to lodge myself within the framework of faith and family. “Sunday after Sunday,” Levings recalls, “I sat in the pew, crossed my legs at the ankle, and opened my Bible, leaning into the convenience of wanting what they wanted for me.” Just like Levings, I learned to “train my mind toward God,” and that “rules helped us keep our feelings in.” Our parents wanted to give us the stability and purpose they found in religion, but none of them had personal experience with the way Christian doctrine—total depravity, the need for salvation, eternity spend in heaven or hell—shapes a developing mind.
Levings recounts the powerfully prescriptive messaging of purity culture, disseminated to millions of American youth through churches, youth groups, rallies, media, and abstinence-only sex education in schools, funded primarily by the Adolescent Family Life Act and Title V funding under the 1996 Welfare Reform Act.(5) Because purity culture and abstinence-only education instruct girls that their highest calling is within heterosexual marriage (a message explicitly reinforced to Levings by her family pastor, when he refuses and mocks her request for tuition aid from the church), Levings gets married at age nineteen to a young man who’s already displayed several red flags. Her ex-Navy husband (who bears the alarming nickname, Psycho Eyes) becomes her gateway into extreme fundamentalism, as he demands increasing submission from his wife and leads their family into dramatically more restrictive and patriarchal churches.
Levings and West both enumerate the cultural artifacts and influences that contributed to their abusers’ radicalization. Even before social media algorithms could provide content targeting vulnerable viewers to lure them down a rabbit hole of extremism, religious groups have long known how to control marketing and distribution networks to get select ideological content into the hands of their confirmed and prospective followers. For readers familiar with conservative Christianity, many of Levings’ and West’s references will spark recognition: books like Elisabeth Elliot’s famous purity culture memoir, Passion and Purity; Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood; and the anti-feminist manual, Fascinating Womanhood. The influence of fundamentalism appears early, with “Gothard homeschoolers” (a reference to the stringent followers of Bill Gothard’s Institute of Biblical Life Principles, or IBLP) forming their own subculture within Levings’ Florida megachurch. Levings is initially dismissive toward “the thick red textbook” of rules that contained Gothard’s Biblical principle, but she is steered there eventually: swaddling her several babies in cloth diapers, dressing herself and her children in denim jumpers (cheap and shapeless!), even foregoing haircuts and toilet paper to make ends meet.
I shouted with identification when West mentions reading the Elsie Dinsmore novels: a twenty-eight book set (yes, you read that correctly) from the nineteenth century that follows the precocious and saintly Elsie, whose unwavering Christian devotion eventually spurs her father’s conversion. In analyzing her own exposure to the Elsie Dinsmore novels, West identifies the asymmetry in Christian households run by parents who expose their children to devotional materials or activities they haven’t fully vetted. “My parents didn’t read the Elsie books themselves,” West acknowledges, “so they never knew about the scenes of Elsie being whipped by her father, of her sitting on her “daddy’s” lap or of him kissing her on the lips when she is an adult, of the Mammy character…” Levings also captures the danger of parents condoning, implicitly or explicitly, teachings they aren’t fully aware of. When Levings is exposed to a bracingly homophobic sermon at sleep-away camp, she wonders, “Did our parents know this is what they were teaching us?” The blanket approval of anything designated as “Christian” undermines critical thinking and paves the way for passive acceptance of fundamentalism and abuse.
I experienced another instance of uncanny recognition when West confesses, “my one vice was reading Christian movie reviews on the family computer.” As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, during my adolescent years, I sated by narrative hunger with Christian film reviews, likely sourced from the same website as West. For children with discrete artistic impulses, religious repression—devoid of any outlets for creativity or wonder—is particularly devastating. Embedded within each of these memoirs is the story of an artist cultivating her own aesthetic sensibilities from within a dome of deprivation. Levings and West both slowly unearth their own voices, and in the most distinctive artistic autobiography of the trio, Sinclair chisels herself into a celebrated poet. That triumph of creativity is galvanizing to witness.
The cultural references in How to Say Babylon take a different form. While fundamentalist Christianity has found ways to perpetuate itself through the marketplace, Rastafarianism propagates in a different manner. Alongside her own story, Sinclair provides readers with a primer on Rastafari history and theology. After the prologue, the book opens with a retelling of Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie’s 1966 visit to Kingston, Jamaica (known as Grounation Day). A framed portrait of Selassie—believed by many Rasta to be the “herald of Black liberation,” the Black King prophesied by Marcus Garvey—hung in the Sinclair family living room, alongside the red leather belt her father used to discipline Sinclair and her siblings. She introduces the reader to the “three main sects of Rastafari” and its religious priorities, while also acknowledging “there is no unified doctrine…There was only the wisdom passed down from the mouths of elder Rasta bredren,” Sinclair writes, “the teachings of reggae songs from conscious Rasta musicians, and the radical Pan-Africanism of revolutionaries like Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X.” The lack of binding authority in Rastafari supports Djani’s gradual descent into extremism. He meets with fellow Rastamen in circles for “reasoning,” but that’s where young Sinclair sees the cost of Rastafarianism for the women who orbit these circles. At those gatherings, Sinclair “observed the Rasta sistren. All their faces were drawn and exhausted, their hands burned and calloused from housework like my mother’s were.” As she begins to carve her identity away from her father, How to Say Babylon pitches toward poetry and literature: peppered with references to William Blake, Sylvia Plath, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Derek Walcott, and more. This shift reflects Sinclair’s process of individuation and her investment in the world that will eventually grant her freedom.
All three of these books excel at illustrating the insulated contexts that preserve unilateral patriarchal power. The devaluation of external knowledge is one of an abuser’s most essential tools in securing the dependence of his victims. Religion offers a highly effective means of discrediting the outside world and secular knowledge, because many religions operate on an exclusivist binary that projects evil onto outsiders. This control over information is dramatized when Sinclair’s mother—who committed herself to Djani at nineteen—visits Sinclair in the United States and the two women visit the National Air and Space Museum. “I didn’t think it was real,” the old woman confesses, “until I saw the rockets for myself…For a long time I believed him, that it was all Babylon’s propaganda.” This coming of knowledge—a delayed coming-of-age—marks a turning point in each of the books. However, these women’s dependence is enforced by more than a lack of education about the outside world.
Fundamentalist patriarchy is maintained by violence and the threat of violence. This is a reality witnessed across all three books. Levings’ relationship is manipulated by the threat of physical violence from even before her wedding: while on a date at the beach, her fiancé punches her in the throat. Over the course of her marriage, “physical correction” becomes entrenched in their relationship in many disturbing ways, including the adult spankings her husband administers, often in conjunction with sex. Sinclair’s experiences with patriarchal violence are less consistent but still terrifying. Her father, depressed after an unsuccessful work trip, takes to spanking his children with a red belt. In one of the most alarming scenes of the book, Djani chases her through the house with a machete, apparently intent on murdering his own offspring. Even when violence isn’t enacted, the threat of violence is used to maintain order and elicit obedience.
Within certain interpretive strains of Christianity, retributive violence is seen as a divinely sanctioned corrective tool. In a movement that explicitly encourages corporal punishment to discipline children—a parenting strategy condoned and propagated by the late Dr. James Dobson’s bestseller, The Strong-Willed Child—and in which women are seen as little more than children with mature wombs and ovaries, it follows that women would also be subjected to demeaning “correction.” The scenes of explicit violence in these memoirs are chilling but necessary to convey the true stakes of patriarchy. A patriarch crossed is willing to cause any damage in order to restore his dignity and sense of power.
Pseudo-feminist rhetoric is employed by the trad-wife movement and even more mainstream sources to “co-opt and distort concepts such as equity and empowerment to [serve patriarchy’s] ends.”(6) Such depictions render female submission desirable, which is the way it was pitched to me while I was growing up evangelical. I was taught that I was naturally suited to being protected and provided for. “The combination of being invested in one’s own status—often tied to a man—and being socialized to deprioritize your own autonomy and ambition can be incredibly politically disempowering for women, while also feeling aspirational,” Harvard researchers Marks and Chenoweth report.(7)
These memoirs offer a study in what that socialization looks like. In Rift (the most simplistic of the three), West explains its this way: “Men, I’d been taught, were created to be in charge. End of story.” When the socialization to see yourself as inferior is echoed even across your holy texts, it can be next to impossible to imagine a way out. West recalls, “I saw this patriarchy represented in the Bible I read every morning. Genealogies were liased through the male line, and the few stories of women seemed to show them mostly as abused, assaulted, sacrificed, or murdered.” She goes on to identify why religion and patriarchy make such dangerous, but effective, bedfellows, stating, “patriarchy thrives anywhere men are praised for their will to dominate—and Christian patriarchy blesses this pursuit of earthly power by imagining it’s a heavenly duty. Like abuse, Christian patriarchy, at its core, is about power and control—at any cost.”
These women got out, but their abusers did not. As dispersed movements without a central leader, there is unfortunately no pope of patriarchy who could take note of the accumulating stories of abuse and denounce this behavior. Even if there was such a figurehead, we can deduce from the character of patriarchy that he would do no such thing.
One of the heartbreaking realizations present in both Rift and How to Say Babylon is that the world beyond fundamentalist religious patriarchy is also a harsh and dangerous place that does not value women as equal to men. “I had imagined,” writes West, “that I was leaving patriarchy behind me, that this new world would accept me and let me heal, but it didn’t take long to realize that this world wasn’t new at all, that the confines I’d grown up with hadn’t disappeared, only expanded.”
Sinclair details in cutting prose her awakening to American racism. “At last, I understand,” she writes. “There is no American dream without American massacre…Here is the invention of whiteness, a violence. Here is the original wound…For the first time since I left home, I understand how frightened my father must have been for me, a Black daughter walking through the inferno.” The Babylon from which Djani sought to protect Sinclair is real and nefarious, just as he warned. Each of these women learn that navigating the often-unpredictable waters of the world involves learning new coping mechanisms and tactics that aren’t as rigid or formulaic as the rules prescribed to them by fundamentalist religious patriarchy.
Levings, by contrast, chooses to reject “the idea that the world was inherently dangerous.” She writes, “I didn’t know then…that we’d been guided to make these decisions as part of a wider cultural movement. In our fear, we’d lived inside a bubble of our own making, only to choke on fumes.” While she disagrees with the fundamentalist assertion that the world is dangerous, she asserts that the real and present danger lies in the growing influence of fundamentalism. “The thoughts that kept me kicking my sheets at night centered on what I knew deep in my soul,” Levings writes. “The fundies want to run the country the way they run their homes. What I knew about that world was more valuable than useless trivia. It was insight.” This connection to contemporary politics and the United States’ rising authoritarianism gives Levings’ book its urgency. Toward the end of A Well-Trained Wife, Levings gets explicit about her motives: “I began creating social media content…to show how these practices are connected to our headlines,” she writes. “My nudge was the news.”
Religiously sanctioned patriarchy is nothing now. However, its modern expressions have developed more recently than its proponents would like us to know. As religious historian Dr. Kristin Kobes du Mez makes clear in her book, Jesus and John Wayne, conservative Christian “family values” politics became prominent as recently as the 1970s. Religious patriarchy movements romanticize a past that never existed. For example, the iconic television series, Little House on the Prairie—based on the autobiographical book series by Laura Ingalls Wilder (and referenced, like family values politics, by West)—is a major aesthetic influence on the tradwife movement. The books were first published in the 1930s. However, the tv show began its nine-year run in 1974, and could be interpreted as part of the immediate cultural backlash against the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize abortion via Roe v. Wade, which happened the previous year.(8) Basing the show on earlier historical novels allowed show runners to imply that female submission and homemaking were values inherent to American life. They manipulated an aestheticized version of history to communicate a contemporary message with political ramifications, which is exactly what the tradwife movement—with its emphasis on “traditional” values and gender roles—does now.
It’s all connected: white supremacy, Christian nationalism, the Great Replacement theory, white male rage and gun violence and mass shootings. The right-wing Republican Party and abortion bans and anti-trans legislation. bell hooks cued us into this decades ago, when she summarized the conflated powers-that-be as “the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”
So what do we do, to resist an ideological enemy so pervasive as to feel omnipresent? We testify. We share stories, and we share resources.
Before the protagonists of these memoirs could identify the oppressive nature of their circumstances, they needed access to stories that empowered them to question their oppressors’ narrative. Levings, West, and Sinclair were what Brazilian literacy activist Paulo Freire calls “submerged” in a situation of oppression.(9) Then, these narrators needed access to resources in order to materially affect their escapes. In West’s case, she needed basic things like a cell phone and a plane ticket off Hawaii to the mainland. Levings needed a safe place to take her children. In one of the most harrowing scenes from all three books, Sinclair needed the literal key to the gate of the family compound to escape her father’s homicidal wrath. Resources required for people to escape abusive situations are literal, felt needs: food. Shelter. Transportation. Paid work. Health insurance. Birth control.
In the time since these memoirs were published, the United States political context has shifted. While these are stories of individual survival, Levings and West have both acknowledged how they’ve seen the conditions of the Christian patriarchy they escaped creep into the American political scene, writ large. They continue to be active online, attempting to help people decipher the connections to Christian nationalism.
Project 2025, authored by the Heritage Foundation, was one major warning sign. Tr*mp promising a room full of Christian voters that if he was re-elected, they wouldn’t have to vote again was another.
The question no longer seems to center on facilitating escape for specific individuals but how to rescue the psyche of an entire nation. “Study your history with the thing that healed you,” writes Mike Magnuson.(10) Sinclair immersed herself in poetry and wrote her way to self-actualization. In 2026, Levings is releasing a second memoir, I Belong to Me: A Survivor’s Guide to Recovery and Hope After Religious Trauma. On her substack, Levings recently posted a string of recommendations for folks resisting the Christian nationalist takeover of the United States drawn from the same tactics practiced within isolationist fundamentalism. “Here’s what they did,” she writes, “and how we can do the same thing our way to resist them.”(11)
Resistance is possible. Survivors already know this, and their stories can teach us. These books are a beginning.
NOTES
(1) See Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks, “Revenge of the Patriarchs: Why Autocrats Fear Women," published in Foreign Affairs on Feb 8, 2022; https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2022-02-08/women-rights-revenge-patriarchs
(2) “The modern home-schooling movement…led by deeply conservative Christians, saw home schooling as a way of life — a conscious rejection of contemporary ideas about biology, history, gender equality and the role of religion in American government.” Peter Jamison, “The Revolt of the Christian Home-Schoolers,” published in the Washington Post on May 30, 2023; https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/interactive/2023/christian-home-schoolers-revolt/
(3) “Revenge of the Patriarchs”
(4) II Kings 24:2
(5) “A History of Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Funding,” by Sex Ed for Social Change, Siecus.org, 2019; https://siecus.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/AOUM-Funding-History-Report-5.2019.pdf, p. 2
(6) Quote from “Revenge of the Patriarchs,” but for evidence of pseudo-feminist rhetoric in patriarchal spaces, see reporting rom Amanda Marcotte on the trad-wife movement via Salon [“The Insidious Rise of ‘Trad-Wives’” and “Trad-Wives Offer an Alluring Version of Right-Wing Christianity — Online Warriors are Fighting Back"] and articles from the Cut examining the trend of marrying older men [“The Case for Marrying an Older Man” and “The Cult of the Provider Man”; https://www.salon.com/2023/11/27/the-insidious-rise-of-tradwives-a-right-wing-fantasy-is-rotting-young-mens-minds/
https://www.salon.com/2024/03/08/tradwives-offer-an-alluring-vision-of-right-wing-christianity--online-warriors-are-fighting-back/
https://www.thecut.com/article/age-gap-relationships-marriage-younger-women-older-man.html
https://www.thecut.com/article/tiktok-dating-influencers-marry-rich.html
(7) “Revenge of the Patriarchs”
(8) See Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters from an American,” published on Substack, March 8, 2024; https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-8-2024?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
(9) See Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
(10) Mike Magnuson, Heft On Wheels
(11) See “Beating Evangelical MAGA at Their Long Game,” from Tia Levings on Substack, Sept 20, 2025; https://substack.com/@tialevings/p-174122756
