Jana Riess
Appearances
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
Yeah. It's a bit of a microcosm of many of the conversations that we're having right now in American society more generally about Certainly about families and about what we want with our lives, the decisions that we have. I think some of the traditional wife, the trad wife interest is driven by a sense of people feeling perhaps overwhelmed by the choices that feminism has brought for them.
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
I mean thank God for those options. Thank God for those opportunities and choices that women have now. But you can't say that it's not complex. You know you can't say that it's easy to make all of those choices about family and career and whatever else it is. So we talked about how we're not having large families anymore to anything like the degree that we might have generations ago.
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
But we're also not rural people. Most of us have no idea where our food comes from. I'm afraid I count myself in that group. I have a lot to learn. And so part of the fascination with some of these lifestyle influencers is not just the religion and it's not just about gender, but it's also about a disappearing kind of rural America that they have idealized.
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
And it's a rural America that is very tied with race, class and gender.
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
Yeah, it's not for me. I do not have a rural fantasy. I'm very happy to go to the grocery store.
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
You guys want to go get eggs with your brothers? So every day the kids have to gather eggs.
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
A reporter got to do a deep dive and essentially spend time with this family and found that it was hard to get the woman, Hannah, to speak for herself. Either she was constantly being interrupted by her eight children, which is understandable, or being spoken over by her husband, which is not going to be so understandable in today's world.
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
That is a really good question. I think that certainly it is a church that for decades has taught its members, quote, every member a missionary, unquote. That has been a mantra. And, you know, we see these missionaries who are going out into the world and they have their name tags and they're giving a year and a half to two years of their lives as volunteers. That's one kind of missionary work.
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
But even ordinary people who are just living their lives and raising their kids and going to PTA meetings and they are supposed to consider themselves to be missionaries as well. And so one of the things that we could see happening 20 years ago as these blogs start taking off, these Mormon mommy blogs that you were talking about, is
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
In the little corner, you would see discreetly, oh, you know, here's a link to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And it wouldn't necessarily be overt. It wouldn't be, let me tell you what I believe about Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
No, it was leading through lifestyle. So I'm going to show you my happy family and I'm going to show you that we're not perfect. You know, we're going to show you some cracks that are fine. Really nice looking cracks, right? I mean, as cracks in the facade go, we're going to show you just a few that are not that hard to look at just to make us seem more palatable, right?
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
Mormons have long been instructed to keep a record of our lives. One of the previous presidents of the church, Spencer W. Kimball, actually told Latter-day Saints in the 1970s that angels in heaven would be reading their journals someday.
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
You know, that our lives living in this particular time and place in history would be so inspiring that even the angels of heaven would want to know, how did you conduct your life?
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
Which is really an interesting thing that maybe if you do journal, you don't want to have that be the bar. Like that's a lot of pressure.
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
Right? No, you don't want to think that. But it does elevate the act of diary keeping to a sacred degree.
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
This is not just, and I went to the football game today and I saw so-and-so. This was casting your daily life in some kind of almost cosmic, holy umbrella.
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
Scrapbooking in LDS culture definitely has been a thing. Digital scrapbooking has kind of supplanted the stickers and having a crop night on a Friday night kind of thing that we used to do back in the day. But the impetus of recording this, of making it beautiful, making the record itself into an artifact that can be passed down, that's still very much present.
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
So there is a precedent for Latter-day Saints to do missionary work. There is a precedent for them to keep a record of their lives and their families for their posterity, so their descendants. And All of that, I think, feeds into the early success of Mormon women who are getting into this platform 20 years ago.
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
It's such a love-hate relationship. So on the one hand, you do have this emphasis from the church that this could be a tool that is used for good things. So in 2007, one of the highest leaders of the LDS church, M. Russell Ballard, gives a speech.
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
He said, I ask that you join the conversation by participating on the internet to share the gospel and to explain in simple and clear terms the message of the restoration.
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
And so the church explicitly promoted this idea that you would write something, that you would post something to present your religion and possibly also yourself and your family in a positive light. And they got a very good response to that in 2007 with a lot of members using their own personal social media or Internet presence to share the gospel.
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
And then on the other hand, at the same time, you have the church trying to control its own narrative in a way that it's always been able to. It's always been able to write its own history and publish its own books about that history. And suddenly on the internet, you have people saying, well, actually, Joseph Smith married a 14-year-old girl. And what do we think about that? And then
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
In the past, many Latter-day Saints, I think, would have simply responded and said, well, that's just an anti-Mormon lie. There's no evidence for that.
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
And then in the age of the internet, suddenly confronted with the mountain of evidence for a lot of things that people weren't necessarily taught about LDS history at church, suddenly they have to say, oh, what else don't I know about the church's own history? And so the church has...
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
not enjoyed, I think, that part of the internet, the idea that everything is available out there for better or for worse, and that it can no longer control even its own story, let alone all the other stories, right?
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
It's fascinating, right? And it's also ironic because on the one hand, they are billing their lives as being extremely traditional. And they're also grossing hundreds of thousands of dollars as businesswomen. So it is rife with a lot of irony that their business is making themselves appear like they don't have a business.
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
I would say that in the ballerina farm, it is probably more... upheld as a value, that women should be a certain way. I look at Nara Smith as being a bit more of a free spirit. That may simply be that I am succumbing to an algorithm that has decided that they want me to think of her as a free spirit.
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
But one of the things that these Mormon influencers, both male and female, have going for them is that we're very used to being rejected in And I think that if you are going to have any kind of online profile, that you have to be able to thicken that skin and handle rejection and get up the next day and think today is going to be the day when
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
Someone shares my content who is important and it will suddenly find this audience that I've been looking for. Hi, we're the Levitts.
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
Right here. I will say that the church has emphasized a lot of values that are consistent with capitalism, a particular brand of U.S. capitalism. And that has some theological problems. It also perhaps, though, has some business advantages. And one of those is that you are going to try again. You are going to emphasize that capitalism That was just one failure. That was just one problem.
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
Today is a new day and I'm going to do great at this. A lot of these people seem to be very optimistic and have a certain sales orientation.
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
I think that many people are interested because there is a nostalgia factor. I think some people have the idea that a Mormon family today might be like their grandparents' families were 50 years ago. And so they're interested because they can see how different their own lives are now. You know, they're not coming from families that have six kids, for example.
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
They're not coming from families where the husband goes off, leave it to beaver style, and the mother stays home with those kids. So part of it is, I think, a nostalgia for a lost sense of America. Now, as a historian, I'm going to stop right there and say that that particular vision of America was not actually accurate, even in the 1950s.
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
However, the idea persists that that was a vanishing kind of family in America.
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
Right. And we are having a national conversation right now about fertility and about how many children families should be having. And there is a movement among some quarters in the United States to get people to have more kids. And so part of the fascination, I think, is looking at families that do have more kids. And this isn't just Mormons.
It's Been a Minute
Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession
This is also evangelicals, even stretching back to looking at the Duggars, right, with 19 kids and counting. And then however many they wound up with, I don't know. It's not just in that sense Mormons. It's all families that are different from our own families. How do they feed that many people? What's it like to go to Costco and try to buy for 19 kids? We have a lot of fascination.