Jana Riess
speaker
36 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Jana Riess’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
However, the idea persists that that was a vanishing kind of family in America.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And it's a rural America that is very tied with race, class and gender.
Yeah, it's not for me. I do not have a rural fantasy. I'm very happy to go to the grocery store.
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