Jamie Loftus

This feels like a skeleton key to a lot of Mormon content, to why Mormons are so online. Whether they are overtly discussing their religion or not, modern Mormon missionaries will very often vlog their experiences. This is from a missionary named Grayson Hardman from last year.

Posting is all but baked into the religion in the modern day, probably in a sourdough that took five hours to make. By the time Mormon tradwives and mommy bloggers become mainstream famous, they're not wearing their religion on their sleeve as much. It's It's more of a soft pitch.

You usually find out they're Mormon, whereas if you scroll all the way down to the beginning of their profile, they often used to be more overt about the values they held. But again, to connect it back to that piece, this heeding to espouse a vision of an ideal Mormon family without defensiveness or belligerence, it kind of makes sense. Okay, back to Ballerina Farm.

Because Hannah Nealman starts in the waning days of mommy blogging, she kind of straddles different eras of social media and Mormons online. She starts mommy blogging on We Took the Train in the 2010s at the end of the mommy blogging trend and then is at the forefront of the Instagram and TikTok Mormon mommy blogs, which are wildly different in tone.

They're not at all confessional and are far more defined by their aesthetic and this sense of sterile, So to give you an idea of how her narrative voice shifts, here's an example of how Hannah would speak in her early blogging days in 2013.

It's still praising the lifestyle, but even acknowledging her own insecurity or the doubt that people in her life had about her religion is not something you would see today. In these early posts, you can really feel Hannah grappling with, "'I love dance, but I love my husband and motherhood. Am I doing the right thing?' She also talks about going to McDonald's and loving it."

something that wildly differs from her current stance as a trad wife slash farm-to-table influencer. In these early days, she's working part-time teaching dance while raising her eldest son, trying to sort of find a balance between traditional values and what her passions are. This is not at all what ballerina farm content sounds like. Here's a post from this year.

So Hannah Starts is a completely different kind of Mormon influencer. When I started looking for an answer to this question, why there are so many Mormon women that are successful online, I was seeing the same answer over and over. Well, it's because Mormon women are taught to journal a lot. The Instagram and TikTok content on the farm is wildly successful.

And Hannah and Daniel continue to grow their family that now consists of eight children. And they quickly expand this success to start a series of businesses. They start a beef farm. They start a lifestyle brand.

And Hannah goes from a middling blogger to a leading TikTok and Instagram creator, racking up millions of views on her videos of making meals from scratch, talking about the advantages of her farm-to-table and family-first lifestyle, and doing it all in full makeup in these cottagecore flowy dresses. There's also quiet advertisements and Ballerina Farm content.

For most of her videos, you can find affiliate codes on her website for basically anything you saw her use in the course of the video. In 2021, Hannah had 200,000 Instagram followers. Now, she has 10 million. So the days where Hannah was teaching dance part-time are long gone. Now she's a farmer who isn't just running a business and making meals.

And as these responsibilities pile up, viewers began to question how she was doing all of this. Like sure, Surely someone is helping with the kids and the business, right? Because the kids are homeschooled and the meals took hours and Hannah appeared to be making content and co-running multiple businesses while also upholding conservative values. That's a lot of jobs.

But we're not really allowed behind the curtain. Part of the content's appeal is that Hannah made this all look so easy. And as she was doing all of this, she continued to compete in the occasional pageant, winning the title of Mrs. America in 2021 and 2023.

She's projecting the super mom image, right? It's unclear to viewers how it's attained. And you get the feeling that it either requires a lot of personal sacrifice, a lot of other people working just outside the frame or both. Because the alternative is, well, what the fuck is wrong with me? But this virtuousness.

This emphasis on disciplining the body, the emphasis that, ball gowns aside, my marriage and family are the most important thing, that's a solid add for Mormonism. And even so, the Ballerina Farm family doesn't often reference the Mormon church online. It's implied they get ready for church on camera.

There's extreme emphasis placed on the gender roles in nuclear families, but for someone who comes across their content by chance, there's nothing that screams, these are Mormons. unless you know what to look for in terms of home decor. And this feels by design.

You don't build an empire with the ninth most popular religion in the U.S., according to Pew Research, behind dominant Protestant and Catholic practices, behind Judaism, and behind other subcategories like atheist, agnostic, and quote, nothing in particular, unquote.

If you're six places behind, nothing in particular, and want to keep growing your business, it makes sense that they avoid endorsing their often controversial religion. So in most places, I've seen Ballerina Farm classified as a soft advertisement for the church. And for feminists with careers who openly advocate on issues like queer and trans rights and open abortion access,

I understand why Ballerina Farm's success is triggering. And for people who work on farms that are not bankrolled by JetBlue, the account scans as even more of a performance. And then this past summer, Ballerina Farm has been a popular point of discussion for years with evangelizing followers and snark blogs with readership in the six figures.

But she comes to widespread mainstream attention this past summer when a Times profile written by Megan Agnew suggested that beneath this content was a very disturbing dynamic. Main takeaways from the article include... Hannah and Daniel said they met on a plane.