Jamie Loftus

So you grow up alongside the internet and then you start to see this influx of influencers who I first just saw labeled as trad wives, the like Mormon aspect and not, you know, whatever, hashtag, not all trad wives are Mormon, but many of them are many of the most successful influencers are either Utah Mormon based or create content that really a appeals.

So when did you start noticing this content? And yeah, what did you make of it?

It seems also because of how the algorithm works at any given point in time. There have been times where I have gotten content pipes to me from a Mormon influencer, but the content that I get, it's not immediately clear. Where a lot of TradWave accounts that have ended up in my feed, it takes me a little while to catch on that there is a specific religious reason element.

Is that something you've also noticed? Do you feel that there's sort of any reasoning behind that? Because you're saying, you know, the church wants you to talk about your religion as much as possible, but it feels like with some influencers to what end was not always clear to me right away.

We'll be right back with more with Alyssa Grenfell. Welcome back to 16th Minute. I sort of had to wear something like temple garments in my youth, but it was these shoulder-to-knee stinky cotton shirts I wore underneath my back brace. And unfortunately, there's no question about my personality that can't be answered with the sentence, I wore a back brace for my entire adolescence.

And now we continue our conversation with ex-Mormon influencer and great theory haver, Alyssa Grenfell. As I was sort of learning more about a recent subject I was covering, I found out that the family was Mormon, but didn't really talk about it. And a lot of people were saying like, oh, you should do an episode about like, why are there so many successful Mormon women in the influencing space?

And I was like, oh, I have no idea. And you mentioned sort of the most popular answer given, which is what I was encountering a lot, which was that young Mormon women are taught to journal a lot. So that's probably why they're successful at influencing. It doesn't not make sense, but felt just like a very incomplete answer. Could you take me through what made you start journaling?

asking this question, because people were telling you that they were getting ads for the Mormon church on your content. That was how that started, right?

As someone raised Catholic, I was like, wow, Catholics found dead in a ditch, like not a profitable YouTube career. I was truly blown away with how many times higher those keywords were scanning.

I had no idea how much money the Mormon church has. As you explained in the video, the church is welcome to pour as much money into these keywords as they like, but they can't control whether the keywords are being talked about favorably. So it seems like there's a world where the Mormon church is accidentally cutting you checks for... for talking about why you left the church in detail.

trad wife influencers that started by talking about mormonism quite a bit and probably don't talk about it as much now they are also sort of getting uh cuts of this even if they're not explicitly talking about the mormon church anymore do you think even if an influencer who started talking about mormonism isn't anymore does this still help the church

Final thing, I mean, I just wanted to mention and talk a little bit as far as your theory goes, is that this is a way to sort of have these poster board influencers kind of representing, if not the church explicitly, the gender roles and the ideals of the church in the day-to-day context.

Without having it be traced back to supposing Ballerina Farm, you know, wakes up tomorrow and is like, I'm done with the Mormon church. It's not like she can say, and the church has been paying me this much for this long to create this content. It creates this middleman.

We'll be right back with more with Alyssa Grenfell. Welcome back to 16th Minute. And now we continue our conversation with Alyssa Grenfell.

There's no one answer that's going to completely unlock why are there so many successful trad wife accounts at this specific moment. That answer ranges far beyond Mormonism, but I think your content has just helped me have a better sense of not just you and the culture that you had to leave behind, but also who is shaping Mormonism. the internet.

And it seems like the Mormon church has no small part in doing that.

People should be allowed to live their lives comfortably however they choose to. And so it's just like, let's not go after a specific woman. Let's go after maybe the system that you can trace it back up to, which seems like a lot of what your work is trying to do is interrogate the system that creates and not, you know, bully the byproducts of the system.

begin with thanks so much again to alissa for her time and patience i really recommend her youtube channel if you have any further questions about what it's like to grow up in the mormon faith what it's like to decondition oneself from a cult-like upbringing as well as some interesting interviews with fellow ex-mormons you can also check out her book at the link in the description so listeners to conclude why are there so many successful mormon wives in the influencing space today the answer is

money. Okay, see you next week. In all seriousness, thank you so much again for listening. Please remember to subscribe to the show if you like it, leave a friendly review, tell your friends, it all helps. I had a lot of fun making this episode. I learned a lot and it was really hard. So please let me know your thoughts.

And for your moment of fun, or I guess more of a moment of reflection this week, here is former American Idol contestant David Archuleta talking about why he left the Mormon church. See you next week.