Charles Billingsley is Not Top Christ Following Man (and other SBC alumni testimonies)
But he'd fit right in on The Righteous Gemstones
*The following post doesn’t have any Gemstones spoilers.
Sometimes, when I take a step back for some quiet days away from social media, I wait for the merge lane to return to the highway and can’t find it. I’m stopped on the grassy bank, watching the traffic, and I can’t find a way back in.
“Tomorrow,” I think. “I’ll post the essay I’m working on tomorrow.”
But then the next day takes off before my feet hit the floor, or I rise from my morning reading and notice a trigger from the far field, and the pace zooms by again. I stand still and watch.
“Is now the time to say something?” Maybe not. I’m overwhelmed. I text my therapist, set something up, and check email compulsively for news. “Tomorrow,” I think. “Tomorrow I’ll post the essay I’m working on.”
That’s what happened last week. I have a post on secondary trauma that’s waiting to go, and a Trumpian troll I want to write about. A whole series on the emotional journey of deconstruction (this post is part of it). But last week was a Waiting Week—I was impatient for three big news drops related to my work—and also the lead up to one of the most trying weekends of a religious trauma survivor’s life—Easter—and I couldn’t find where to speak up and merge back into active conversation.
Sometimes it’s easy for even me to forget that before I’m an author, speaker, or thought-provoker, I’m Tia, a sensitive, neuro-spicy trauma survivor living among activators and deregulating stimuli just like everyone else. Most of the time, I’m steady and calm, and work hard to remain that way despite the storms that blow around us. But lately…well, I’m off my game. I’m struggling, and waiting makes it worse.
Right now is a pretty hard time to be a patriarchy cult survivor. It feels like every day there’s some reminder of the life I came from. No, ran from. Last week was no exception.
If you’re new here, I’m Tia Levings, and I wrote A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy. The book came out last August, and I haven’t taken my foot off the gas to promote it since the pre-order season this time last year. Some high points so far include recording my own audio, debuting on the New York Times Bestseller list, being chosen as an Audible Canada Best of Year Memoir, an Apple Books staff pick, a Goodreads Reader’s Choice finalist, and a two-part interview on We Can Do Hard Things. Reader feedback has made so much of the hard work worth it—you’ve helped heal me with your notes of support and stories of how relatable you found my book. Writing and releasing my memoir has been the positive pivot I dreamed it would be, and the publishing experience is far from over—we still have foreign rights, TV/film rights, and paperback announcements to make, and a second book, I Belong to Me: A Survivor’s Guide to Recovery and Hope after Religious Trauma coming out in 2026.
If you think my story is extreme or fringe, well… Once you read it, you’ll see the life I’m from all over our current headlines. Here’s a case in point:
I started out in a Southern Baptist megachurch, First Baptist Jacksonville, and everything I learned there shaped what happened in the years that followed.
It was a big place, with over 20k on the membership roll, and we had big music. Massive choirs and full orchestras—three of them. It got a little bit like The Righteous Gemstones at times, but I loved it there. It was difficult for me, years later in recovery, to retrace my indoctrination and radicalization to my origin church, because there was so much good there, too. I didn’t yet understand that’s how cults work—they lure with pretty promises and happy experiences, and at first, the water is fine. Groups also change over time, so the southern gospel “happy clappy” church of my childhood is not the same organization it is today, where they preach Calvinism and put divorced women under church discipline. By the time I was an adult, FBC had become more fundamentalist and Christian Nationalist, and that hasn’t changed for the better in the thirty years since.
There’s a short list of values FBC taught the youth group I came from that have stuck with me in sincerity. “Stand Alone” for what you believe in. Answer “the highest call” to be different than the world around you, kind to the people Jesus was kind to. “I am not ashamed” for standing up for what’s right. I clung to these values and learned to embody them, and frankly, I still call on them every day. Just not the way the evangelical church uses them for power, influence, and corruption. I use them for critical thinking, survivor allyship, and advocacy.
Something else I learned was to protect my testimony.
A testimony is a story about who you are, what you’re about, and why you care to protect your reputation. Protecting your testimony means avoiding scandal. Avoiding the appearance of evil. Someone who protects their testimony cares about what their choices say about their values, their faith, and the way their choices reflect on the church body. They take care of who their friends are and who they've seen with, avoiding guilt by association.
Testimonies also got a focus in The Righteous Gemstones, as Kelvin, nominated for Top Christ Following Man, shared his story at the Night of Testimonies.
Satire aside, testimonies are a value I took with me, adapting as a personal integrity more than group belonging. I care about who I’m affiliated with and what their words and behaviors say about them, and me as I relate with them, even as I actively honor that we are individuals with boundaries. But there’s a line between where one person begins and where I end. Our choices are not necessarily incorporated with one another. It’s a both/and. There is a level of endorsement present when we choose friends, and we are who we are, separately. And yet, for MAGA evangelicals, testimony and affiliation seem lost in group belonging, along with the rest of what Christianity taught me.
One of our home-grown role models was a boy named Charles Billingsley. He was cute, could sing, and was a pastoral favorite with a squeaky-clean testimony. Music became Charles’s career: he sang at Jerry Falwell’s funeral, and his name surfaces in gospel news often. From a very young age, he had a knack for performance, and that hasn’t changed.
Fast forward 30 years, and here we are—with evangelical fundamentalism as the spine of MAGA. Knowing people I once worshiped God with now cosign the atrocities happening in our highest offices isn’t unusual. My youth group alumni include a January 6er, a football celebrity, a sex offender who still preaches, and a MAGA state senator who once tried to have breastfeeding art removed from a museum.
Some of us fight this, like me and fellow survivor advocate Tiffany Thigpen. FBC churned out a generation of evangelical and exevangelicals who are still very tangled in what we learned there. It still sometimes catches my heart when I see my past in the news. How can so many FBC alumni be in news headlines now? From little-big-town Jacksonville? It’s baffling.
Like the day of Trump’s 2025 Easter luncheon, when who should appear but Charles Billingsley?
Right there amid headlines of American immigrants deported to foreign concentration camps. As America reels from a reign of chaos. During a constitutional crisis. There was pretty Charles—at the president’s easter thingie—not caring a bit about what that says about his testimony. Actually, that’s not it. He applauded the president for his strong stance. He thinks it’s a good thing.
Seeing him celebrated in the FBC History group made me sad. It was one of those days when I wished scandal was just a teen pregnancy or some drugs or an R-rated movie or something.
I only saw it in the history group because I was kicked out of the alumni group last year. They only want certain kinds of alumni there; the quiet kind who only say nice things about our background. Comments that FBC had been traumatic for some were banned. The testimonies that advocates and survivors mention about the dirty reverends and the traumatic sermons are unwelcome. While both the alumni group and the history group purport to celebrate notable accomplishments, the mods have never celebrated the accomplishments of a bestselling author whose book opens in that congregation, or even mentioned it to me individually. I’ve never seen the alumni group celebrate Tiffany’s tireless work in bringing awareness to the abuses within the Southern Baptist Convention. We are the castaways, the ones who still stand alone (because they won’t stand with us), who are not ashamed (to call out abuses), who consider it the highest call (to protect victims, not systems). This is not surprising, but it's often discouraging, particularly to my younger self, who really believed these people’s earnest testimonies.
I shared this experience in a reel on Instagram, thinking the takeaway for those who follow my work would be another confirmation of hypocrisy in evangelical MAGA-Nation. Scandal isn’t what it used to be. Billingsely never had a scandal about what movies he watched or if he smoked in school, and he doesn’t see endorsing a racist rapist who is illegally putting untried people in foreign concentration camps as a negative. Somehow, we live in a time where that sentence makes sense. That’s evangelical Christianity now—nothing like Christ.
But the takeaway in the comments wasn’t about hypocrisy or testimonies—it was empathy and understanding. Your comments were love. Messages of solidarity, kind and gentle grace for my humanity. My readers have not forgotten that before I’m an author, speaker, or thought-provoker, I’m Tia, a sensitive, neuro-spicy trauma survivor living among activators and deregulating stimuli just like everyone else. I held every word with gratitude for this journey that began with my willingness to tell my story but is sustained by those who receive it.
Today, I wrote a new essay—this one—and by Thursday, I’d gotten answers on most of what I was waiting on. I’m pondering that maybe the lesson isn’t to merge back onto the highway at all, but to walk on the grassy bank with friends, at the pace of our own making. Maybe right now, deconstructing fundamentalism includes divesting ourselves of their news and spaces, so we have bandwidth for our own. Not as ostriches with our heads down, about what they’re doing, but as clear-voiced rebels who see clearly and hear loudly, yet refuse to merge and match their energy.
Please!!!! I feel like there is no safe space for me to talk about my fears and worries. 90% of the people around me keep moving forward as if nothing is happening and I’m just flabbergasted.
I love your take on not necessarily merging back onto the highway but strolling with friends on the grassy banks. The pull is SO strong though. The fear and dismay is overwhelming. Thanks for verbalizing the need to respect our bandwidths while at the same time not burying our heads in the sand.