From Hulu's The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives to your favorite homemaking TikTok influencers, the women of the Church of Latter Day Saints have been gaining mass audiences via social media for over a decade. This week, Brittany is joined by Jana Riess, senior columnist at Religious News Service and author of The Next Mormons: How Millennials are Changing the LDS Church, to discuss how Mormon culture provides some of TikTok's most powerful influencers with heavenly tools for success.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: Why are Mormon women gaining popularity on social media?
Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. I gotta say, I am kind of obsessed with Mormons. And I'm not alone. The Church of Latter-day Saints has been a source of public fascination for years.
There's the hit musical, The Book of Mormon, HBO's Big Love, about a Mormon fundamentalist family that practices polygamy, and, of course, former presidential candidate Mitt Romney. But lately, there's been an influx of content around a specific part of the Mormon church. It's women. And people have been eating it. This year, Mormon women have been everywhere.
They are dominating reality TV on Hulu's The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.
Do you think I'm a bad person for those mistakes that I did? I don't think you're a bad person. I just think that you've done a lot of bad things.
And two of the biggest trad wife influencers on TikTok are Mormon. Nara Smith.
My toddler stumbled into my room this morning asking for cereal for breakfast. So I caved and just made her some.
and Hannah Nealman, better known by her handle, Ballerina Farm. Today, we're making some Turkish eggs. Hannah is a former Juilliard-trained dancer turned TikTok influencer, and she got insanely popular. I'm talking 10 million Instagram followers and even the stamp of approval from the Martha Stewart, all by making little bite-sized videos about how she raises her eight kids on the prairie in Utah.
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Chapter 2: Who are the key influencers in the Mormon mommy culture?
You guys want to go get eggs with your brothers? So every day the kids have to gather eggs.
Me?
Those needs a project. But all this fame, it's also brought controversy. In late July, the Times of London published a profile on Hannah Neal Lynn that seemed to poke holes in her picture-perfect life. And it called into question the level of agency she had over some of her life choices.
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.
That's author and journalist Jenna Reese, senior columnist at Religious News Service and author of The Next Mormons. And she's here to take us behind the curtain and understand why millions of us, Mormon or not, are tuning in to watch these women live their lives. Is it just a coincidence? Or is there something about the culture of the Mormon church that primes them for popularity?
So Jana, you're someone who's been in the Mormon church for over 30 years now. And you've seen Mormon mom influencers adapt to new online platforms for a long time. And I have to ask because I'm not seeing a ton of like Muslim wife content or Hindu wife content. And I do not see evangelical wife content being this popular, truly.
Is there something about Mormon culture or within the religion that makes people in the church more open to using it as a way of sharing their lives?
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Chapter 3: What controversies surround Mormon influencers?
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.
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
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.
Not like outright evangelizing like one might think of.
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?
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.
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Chapter 4: How does Mormon culture influence online sharing?
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?
God bless you in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
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.
Oh yeah, to think that like the saints are going to be looking over your shoulder at all your worst thoughts. I could see that being a little stressful, yeah.
Right? No, you don't want to think that. But it does elevate the act of diary keeping to a sacred degree.
You're going to receive so many spiritual promptings and guidance from the Lord in your life. It's so important to record those thoughts.
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.
Friends, welcome back to the channel. We all know one of my biggest passions in life is journaling. This can look like taking notes in my Bible, prayer journaling.
That makes a lot of sense when you think about some of the social media accounts that are dedicated to more like creative and advanced forms of journaling, like scrapbooking.
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Chapter 5: What role does journaling play in Mormon culture?
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.
But we cannot stand on the sidelines while others, including our critics, attempt to define what the church teaches. Most of you already know that if you have access to the internet, you can start a blog in minutes and begin sharing what you know to be true.
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.
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
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.
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...
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?
Coming up, we get into what the intrigue in Mormon Mommy content says about the kind of country we want to live in. Stay with us. One thing people have noted about these influencers, specifically Ballerina Farm and model Mormon mommy, Nara Smith, is that their content leans heavily into the trad wife aesthetic. For those who don't know, trad wife is shorthand for the term traditional wife.
a brand of social media influencer that is all about keeping things simple, taking care of her husband and taking care of her home. Now, both of these women, Nara Smith and Ballerina Farm, have pushed back on the term trad wife. And they say they are proud of the careers that they built for themselves. But that's kind of the irony in this whole situation.
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Chapter 6: How has the LDS Church reacted to social media?
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.
What kind of values do you see creators like Nara and Hannah upholding, either explicitly or implicitly?
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.
We need your help to flex back and make this the most liked video on TikTok.
Put a Tesla right here.
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of Mormon influencers on societal views?
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.
Mormons are producing the domestic lifestyle content we're discussing today. But they're definitely not the only ones watching. Right? It can't be that y'all are the only ones watching, right? Why do you think other people are so interested in watching this content?
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.
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. We've seen a lot of changes, both in the past 50 years and in the past two or three years, in how people... can access family planning tools. But additionally, even outside of that, it seems that many people are just across the board less interested in having children or interested in having as many children.
And something that seems to pepper a lot of Mormon or Mormon-adjacent content is a big, bountiful family.
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.
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