Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)

Here are a couple of our favorite episodes of Jamie Loftus' Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) podcast series.

why are there so many mormon influencers? pt. 1 & 2 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media Robert Evans here and for the holiday season
the end of the year, all that good stuff we
are continuing are normally scheduled behind the Bastards episodes, don't
you worry, but we also are running some special episodes,
compilations from new shows we launched this year and the
very best episodes they did. We've dished a couple together,

(00:22):
so you've got less ads. You can listen to something
that maybe you haven't had a chance to check out yet.
And today you're going to hear sixteenth Minute. As in
sixteenth Minute of Fame Jamie LOFTUS is excellent news podcasts
about the main characters of the Internet and what happens
to them after Internet start them. And here's your wonderful
two parter on Mormon influencers.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
Welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where we talk

(01:38):
to the Internet's characters of the day and see how
they're fifteen minutes of fame affected them and what it
says about the Internet and us. But this week we're
taking a bit of a side quest to answer a
question I've been asked quite a bit lately, and I
didn't know how to answer. Why are there so many

(01:59):
Mormon women at the top of the social media influencing pile.
After a recent episode, I saw this question in the
comments everywhere. I saw it on the sixteenth minute Reddit board, which,
by the way, someone made if you're interested or have
thoughts after episodes, And while it did resonate with me
that the subject of the episode had been raised Mormon,
I didn't want to touch that within the episode for

(02:19):
a couple reasons. First because they never talk about Mormonism
in their content and have generally avoided questions about it.
And second, I didn't have a fucking clue what the
answer to this question was, even though I understand why
it was being asked. So this week we're going to
attempt to answer that question in a two part deep
dive series, the second of which we'll release on Thursday.

Speaker 3 (02:43):
Because to understand the root.

Speaker 2 (02:44):
Of why Mormonism and present day Mormon mommy influencers are
so successful, you've got to understand where the overlaps in
their interests are and how the values of both of
these communities line up. So this week we're going to
get all up to speed on that, and on Thursday,
Alissa Grenfell will unpack how Mormon mobs have stayed on

(03:06):
top of Internet influencing for the last twenty years. All right,
let's jump in and take a brief God, I really hope,
actually brief look into the history of the Mormon Church
in America, and I'll link to some additional resources in
the description of the episode. Okay, let's learn about Mormons.

(03:26):
Mormonism is a nineteenth century religion formerly founded by Joseph
Smith in eighteen thirty. He was born squarely in the
middle of the Second Great Religious Awakening in the US,
a religious revival that would strengthen movements like Methodism, Presbyterianism,
and the Baptist Church and would birth a lot more
and Joseph Smith was a kid of this era. He
grew up without a firm religion, but was curious to

(03:49):
try things. The Mormon Faith, often called the LDS or
Latter day Saints, came up shortly after the Shaker's movement.
The LDS came to prominence around the same time as
a number of black church movements like the African Methodist
Episcopal Church. The LDS shares a little bit of DNA
with Spiritualism, and you could listen to my limited series
Ghost Church for more about the history of that. The

(04:12):
mid nineteenth century was a big time of religious change
and upheaval in the US, and after Mormonism took off,
new religions continued to pop up.

Speaker 3 (04:22):
For example, Jehovah's.

Speaker 2 (04:23):
Witnesses and Christian Scientists weren't far behind Mormonism, but very
few specific movements from this time still have the cultural
hold on America that Mormonism does. So Joseph Smith releases
the Book of Mormon and the religion is formalized in
eighteen thirty, but the religion's origin story connects to two
incidents from the previous ten years. One was from eighteen

(04:44):
twenty when Joseph was fourteen and asked both Jesus and
God which religion to follow, and was told by them
follow none of them. It is your job to prepare
the world for the second coming of Jesus. The other
incident was in eighteen twenty three, when a seventeen year
old Smith is said to have been visited by the
angel Moroni to repeat this calling, and was also told

(05:06):
that there was an ancient record regarding God's dealings with
the quote unquote American continent that he needed to translate
with a series of tools. When he was a little older.
After the angel Moroni's visit, Joseph Smith says that he
retrieved and divinely translated the text of the Book of Mormon,
which was inscribed on thin gold plates. There is a
bit of a wizard of Ozzi equality to the way

(05:28):
that this translation is dictated.

Speaker 3 (05:30):
There's magic stones.

Speaker 2 (05:31):
He's going behind curtains, and sometimes he wouldn't even use
the gold plates. He would instead put a special stone
in a hat, then bury his face and said hat.
But if you're a prophet, he explained, the stone lights
up within the hat and then you just.

Speaker 3 (05:44):
Dictate from there.

Speaker 2 (05:46):
This whole mystical plates thing also comes up in modern scientology,
where members in Florida are engraving the words of l
Ron Hubburn on to titanium plates as we speak. It
also harkens back to Helena Blovotsky's notion of the Acaciic
records of the late nineteenth century, which were said to
be indestructible tablets of the astral light. So there's that

(06:11):
a lot of this reminds me of spiritualism, which in
its early days was composed of a lot of practical magic.
Great movie and if you're not familiar with the origins
of the Book of Mormon. To be fair, most religious
origin stories are not significantly wilder than this. Spiritualism has
a similarly mystical origin story as for its contents. The

(06:31):
Book of Mormon details the plight of a group of
Jewish people in Jerusalem who escaped the city before it's
destroyed in six hundred BC. They built a boat, sail
it to the Americas, and soon become embroiled in a
conflict within the group between two groups called the Neophytes
and the Lamanites. One of the big changes made to
the Book of Mormon later on is that the Lamanites
were ancestors of all indigenous Americans. This language would later

(06:55):
be softened to say that they were among the ancestors
of some indigenous people. So a group of Jewish people
migrate to the Americas and become indigenous Americans.

Speaker 3 (07:07):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (07:08):
Jesus is a huge part of Mormonism, and the Book
of Mormon details that after Jesus is resurrected in thirty
three AD, he goes to visit the Americas, where he
is hailed as the pale Prophet. Because yes, Mormon, Jesus
is white, some of their Other beliefs, as expressed through
Joseph Smith, are that God is a flesh and blood
being who has a flesh and blood wife, his wife

(07:32):
who lives far away near a distant star. And God
tells Joseph Smith that we earthlings were brought into being
to create these nuclear families, to be closer to God,
so that one day we can live with God out
of town on the star where he lives. And to
create these families. You hear a lot of the classic
signifiers of fundamentalist religions. There is an emphasis on sacrifice, discipline,

(07:55):
and suffering. There are rigid gender roles. There's canonical homophobia,
a third racism that was later scaled back in order
to accommodate growth in membership. Until a few decades ago,
the Book of Mormon described members as quote a white
and delightsome people unquote. To this day, there is still
a tacit, don't ask, don't tell policy within the church

(08:15):
about queerness, and that's an improvement from the mid twenty tens,
when the children of queer parents were still not allowed
to be baptized in the LDS. Anyways, in his time,
Joseph Smith was for his account declared a prophet by
Jesus and genuinely did face a great deal of persecution
in the early days where he was gathering followers in
New York, he was arrested and ejected from the state

(08:38):
and took his believers to Ohio to prepare for the
Second Coming of Jesus in Zion, a location TBD paradise
where Smith envisioned communities that would be governed by celestial
laws as determined by him. As it progresses, Mormonism grows
further away from traditional Christianity, and before you know it,
the Mormons are ousted from Ohio. Smith is tar and feathered.

(09:00):
Before this, the group then moves to Missouri, which is
great because the Lord just so happens to have told
Joseph Smith that that's actually where Zion is, but also
where the Garden of Eden was. So the Mormons start
buying up land in Missouri. And to remind you of
the era of history we're in, this happened in eighteen
thirty one, just a year after the Indian Removal Act

(09:21):
was passed and brought about twenty years of brutal genocide
of the indigenous people. But once in Missouri, the Mormons
are driven out again, this time with increasing violence, and
over the next few years they head with Smith all
over the Midwest, where they're treated with similar hostility most
places they go. At one point, the governor of Missouri
passed an extermination act. Eventually they moved to Illinois, where

(09:43):
they're permitted to set up a city of their own
called Novou basically Zion two point zero, and it's here
where Smith lightly militarizes the group and increasingly sends out
missionaries to continue to grow the faith, and at the
same time, Smith is told by an angel to introduce
one of the lda Yes's most controversial policies, polygamy. And
polygamy wasn't something that was allowed to everyone in the

(10:06):
faith at first, just the powerful in the church, and
during Smith's lifetime the practice was kept fairly quiet. He
married as many as forty women, some of whom were underage.
Women were expected to remain in the home, have many children,
and to this day there is an early and intense
emphasis on being a wife and mother before all else.

(10:27):
The end of the line came for Joseph Smith in
Illinois in eighteen forty four, where non Mormon locals imprisoned
and then killed he and his brother. He's been hailed
as an eternal prophet in the Mormon Church ever since,
and is still an extremely prominent figure in the culture
to this day. And if you want this story told
from the Mormon perspective, there's a lot of LDS produced

(10:48):
movies about it on YouTube that are really well acted
and actual.

Speaker 4 (10:53):
Being from the unseen world, exerting all my strength to
call upon God, I saw.

Speaker 3 (11:08):
A pillar of life, all right, save it for the pulpit.

Speaker 2 (11:13):
After Smith's death, a guy named Brigham Young takes over
and the Mormons leave Navoo in eighteen forty six, hiking
pioneer style to what is now present day Utah, where
in the next ten odd years they ignored the American
government and practice polygamy openly. That is, until this was
going to prevent Utah getting statehood. Polygamy would be in
LDS sanctioned practice until eighteen ninety, but it was technically

(11:35):
discontinued at that point to avoid clashing with existing laws
around bigamy passed in the eighteen sixties and seventies. However,
a lot of Mormons continued to practice polygamy quietly. In
today's Mormon marriages, more traditional fundamentalist monogamy is certainly the norm,
and there's a long complicated history with the Mormons, Utah

(11:56):
and indigenous people because, unlike most accounts of a new
American colony being founded, there were Native Americans in Utah
when they arrived, and under Brigham Young, LDS members are
encouraged to purchase Native children as slaves and raise them
in their homes with the hopes of assimilating them to
the Mormon faith. It's not too dissimilar from the residential

(12:16):
schools that separated Native families and erase their culture, often
killing children, all the way into the nineteen nineties. Today,
there is still a very high number of Mormons in Utah,
hovering somewhere around forty percent in twenty twenty three. It's
where Brigham Young University is and where are some of
the religion's most prominent influencers live today. Ever heard of

(12:37):
the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.

Speaker 5 (12:40):
Salt Lake City, Utah, is known for its magnificent mountains
and world class.

Speaker 6 (12:46):
Case STOs, But what Salt Lake City is most known
for is the Mormon Church.

Speaker 7 (12:54):
A quick lesson on how to be a good Mormon.

Speaker 8 (12:56):
Don't drink don't swear to treat your body like a
Temples Mormon.

Speaker 9 (13:00):
We are taught honesty and integrity, and most importantly, to
watch for sue. You're gonna go with Mary your grandfather.

Speaker 3 (13:09):
Well, there you go.

Speaker 2 (13:11):
On the other end of that, about a third of
people raised in the LDS today end up leaving the religion,
as opposed to the ninety five percent retention rate of
the late nineteen eighties. So it's important to note the
Internet age has made a difference in how Mormonism is
perceived by its own members. And if you're Mormon or
ex Mormon, you know that I am barely scratching the

(13:33):
surface here. It's an extremely complicated religion that's been around
for nearly two hundred years. Things I didn't mention include rituals, observances,
restrictive religious underwear, and for the very devout missions, which
are eighteen to twenty four month assignments where LDS officials
determine a location for a young person to go and
their job is to recruit people into the church. As

(13:55):
it pertains to today's episode, it's important to note that
Mormonism is a fundamental religion that has been historically hostile
to women to queer people into anyone who isn't white.

Speaker 3 (14:06):
What is also.

Speaker 2 (14:06):
Important is that the Mormon Church has a shitload of money,
A shitload I had no idea. At present, the Mormon
churches net worth is estimated to be two hundred and
sixty five billion dollars. For context, Disney is valued at
one hundred and sixty.

Speaker 3 (14:24):
One billion dollars.

Speaker 2 (14:25):
Much of this has to do with mandatory tithing, where
church members are required to give ten percent of their income.

Speaker 3 (14:32):
Back to the LDS.

Speaker 2 (14:34):
As for pop culture, Mormonism has been portrayed negatively a lot.
Think HBO show Big Love and still running Broadway musical
The Book of Mormon, which of course the LDS condemned.

Speaker 5 (14:48):
Hello, my name is Elder Price, and I would like
to share with you the most amazing book.

Speaker 3 (14:57):
Hello, my name is Elder.

Speaker 2 (15:00):
It's a book cub out America a long long time ago.

Speaker 9 (15:04):
It has well.

Speaker 3 (15:05):
I wonder why they didn't like that.

Speaker 2 (15:07):
But the LDS has also produced its fair share of
successful entertainment acts. There no Scientology, but Mitt Romney, David Archiletta,
Donnie and Marie Osmond and Gladys Knight is still a
pretty impressive roster. The aquabats are Mormon? Really think about that?
And of course a ton of currently successful influencers more

(15:32):
when we come back. The prevalence of Mormon influencers has
been an increasing point of speculation in the last few months,
mostly in connection to two stories that have broken through

(15:54):
to the mainstream. The first story, as I write this,
a new Hulu reality show that is about to debut
about Mormon wife influenzas.

Speaker 9 (16:05):
I love the Mormon Church, but there are a lot
of rules that we have to follow.

Speaker 10 (16:08):
We were raised to be these housewives for the men,
serving their every desires.

Speaker 9 (16:15):
Have kids by the time you're twenty one or in
my case, at sixteen, Well, I'm like this.

Speaker 2 (16:21):
We are trying to change the stigma of gender roles
on the Mormon culture. The central characters of this show
are existing successful Mormon mommy TikTokers, and if the comments
on virtually every video of these women is to be believed,
they are very controversial within the Latter Day Saint community,
and most would say they do not represent Mormonism in

(16:43):
spite of the fact that they live in Salt Lake City,
where the LDS is headquartered. Most of them grew up
Mormon and part of why they became so popular on
TikTok was because they were referencing the tenets and values
of the church.

Speaker 11 (16:55):
Have you talked to your bishop or the church about anything?

Speaker 9 (17:00):
No?

Speaker 11 (17:02):
No, how come I don't know, because like what if
they're going to like excommunicate me.

Speaker 2 (17:05):
This content got really popular under the hashtag mom talk
on TikTok in the early twenty twenties. And while this
content promotes fundamentalist values around gender rules, due to their popularity,
the mom talkers were also becoming primary breadwinners for their family.
The women of mom talk look very modern. They're usually
wearing Kardashian adjacent athleeture. But the reason they have a

(17:28):
TV show, in my opinion, is not because they blew
up on TikTok or even really because they're Mormon. It's
because they were perceived as being bad at being Mormon.
In twenty twenty two, mom talk influencer Taylor Frankie Paul
announced that she and her husband would be getting a
divorce because of her violation of the terms of their

(17:49):
soft swinging within their Mormon friend group. And soft swinging
is not sanctioned by the LDS in no small part
because that might actually be fun for women.

Speaker 9 (18:00):
Soft swinging, again, is when you like just hug up,
but you don't go all the way.

Speaker 2 (18:05):
It's a huge source of controversy among very online Mormons,
if the comment section is to be believed, and it's
not hard to understand why. Add this to the fact
that mom Talkers were regularly breaking core tenants of the faith.
They did things like drink caffeine, They didn't wear their
religious garments beneath their clothes all the time. This soft
swinging incident might cause a scandal in your average suburban community,

(18:29):
but Paul's disclosure that there were multiple Mormon couples involved
caused a stir within the community. So, presented with this
public scandal and subsequent high profile influencer's decision to remain
within the church, is this bad for the Mormon pr
team or is all press good press? They haven't been
excommunicated or anything like that, But the Mormon Church has

(18:51):
issued the rare condemnation of this upcoming Hulu show. And
this is rare because the LDS hasn't commented on how
Mormons are portrayed in pop culture in a while. But
when the secret lives of Mormon wives trailer dropped, the
LDS released the following statement.

Speaker 5 (19:07):
The portrayal is a gross misrepresentation that could have real
life consequences for people of faith. A statement by the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints reads it
depicts lifestyles and practices blatantly inconsistent with the teachings of
the Church and irresponsibly mischaracterizes the safety and conduct of

(19:30):
our volunteer missionaries. We understand the fascinations some in the
media have with the church, but regret that portrayals often
rely on sensationalism and inaccuracies that do not fairly and
fully reflect the lives of our church members or these
sacred beliefs that they hold.

Speaker 2 (19:50):
Dear, there are a lot of Mormon rituals that aren't
often referenced in this kind of content, but is addressed
a lot in ex Mormon content. There is rituals like
the washing and anointing. There's endowment, ceremonies and aesthetics that
are all but directly pulled from Joseph Smith's interactions with
the American Freemasons. But whether the LDS likes it or not,

(20:13):
this is the latest step that actively Mormon influencers have
made into mainstream culture.

Speaker 3 (20:18):
Again.

Speaker 2 (20:19):
I haven't seen an episode of this show yet, but
it looks like the wives are going to be centered
in the story here, which would have been unheard of
in Mormonism at one time. But what I've learned is
that part of why Mormon influencers are more successful than
other trad wife Okay, let's define tradwife.

Speaker 5 (20:37):
A trad wife is a woman who believes in and
practices traditional gender roles and marriages. Some may choose to
take a homemaking role within their marriage, and others leave
their careers to focus on meeting their famili's needs in
the home.

Speaker 2 (20:53):
Part of why Mormon influencers are more successful than other
tradwife influencers of other religions is because the Mormon Church
has been unusually good at adapting to the Internet and
always has been. That's not the only reason, but we'll
get there. If you've managed to make it to Fall
twenty twenty four without having the word tradwife shoved in

(21:16):
your face, congratulations and sorry, because I am going to
tell you what it is. Tradwife content is a social
media trend from about the last half decade where women
create lifestyle content and make lifestyle changes to more closely
aligned with traditional gender roles, with an emphasis on the
beauty of a return to old time values. So TikTok's

(21:36):
about making meals from scratch for five hours, defining oneself
primarily as a wife and a mother, rejecting or abandoning
a career outside the home, and being generally deferential to
the patriarch, whether that's a husband or father or priest.
Not all tradwives are Mormons hashtag. Not all tradwives, not

(21:58):
even close, And I'm not going to tackle the topic
of tradwive content wholesale in this episode. What you need
to know is the term tradwife shouldn't be conflated with
staying at home moms, because while tradwife creators are moms
and at home with the children, making tradwife content is,
for my money, a separate job from the actual parenting,

(22:21):
because being a stay at home parent is a job,
although most cultures are not conditioned to view that labor
as valid. Tradwife content looks beautiful, high on aesthetic and
low on practicality, showing only the esthetically pleasing parts of
the nuclear family, and rarely any of the struggle or mess.

(22:41):
There's a sense of self surveillance to this content, an
appearance of perfection in the home and family that's projected
to the public, and often visual signifiers that harken back
to mid twentieth century America. So, if this makes sense,
tradwives don't look like stay at home moms. They look
like the advertisements of stay at home moms, and so

(23:03):
much of what makes their content appealing is that an
incredibly difficult lifestyle to achieve is.

Speaker 3 (23:09):
Made to seem easy.

Speaker 2 (23:11):
Attractive, and morally correct. Because if you're making lifestyle content
of any kind, whether you personally or morally endorse the lifestyle,
you're working in sales. I hate to break it to you,
how many hot dogs have I sold by accident? Incalculable?

Speaker 12 (23:30):
Just not.

Speaker 3 (23:32):
The trad life space.

Speaker 2 (23:33):
Is predominantly white, but possibly more diverse than you might expect.
There is an active black track life community who, according
to a Refinery twenty nine piece by Nyla Burton in
late twenty twenty two, believe that quote traditional marriage is
the key to black women's liberation from being overworked, economic insecurity,
and the stress of trying to survive in a world

(23:54):
hostile to our survival and existence. Tradwife content is popular
across a lot of religions, but what's consistent across these
communities is a feeling of performance and this aesthetic of
either mid century housewives or cottage core. In my opinion,
there's very little intimacy to these posts, in spite of

(24:19):
the fact that we're seeing inside of a family's home
and usually seeing their children, who are, make no mistake,
a part of the business model. While I totally get
why the content is so appealing, it does feel like
a performance, and a very effective one. I mean, I'm
like a militant feminist and I would be lying if
I said I hadn't seen a few tild wife posts

(24:41):
that made me feel like I was living my life
the wrong way. But neutral statement, these posts are a performance.
Think of it like this. The Donna Reed show very
effectively sold the idea of Donna Red as a nuclear
housewife and mother that lived in this effortless way, and
in reality, he was a television show that was produced

(25:02):
by its star, and that the real Donna Read was
a multi hyphenic creative and a TV pioneer who was
selling the idea of this housewife rather than actually living
that life herself.

Speaker 6 (25:13):
Well, would you say, missus Johnson, that Donna worked hard
in college?

Speaker 12 (25:19):
She worked hard up at seven in the morning, all
day in school and jobs between classes to earn a
little extra money, and then home to earn a roman
board to help me move, cooking and dishes and a
little ironing and men study until midnight. I don't think

(25:42):
she ever had more in six hours sleep.

Speaker 2 (25:44):
From a social media perspective, the track life phenomenon has
a lot in common with a pattern that we talk
about on this show all the time. A lot of
the reason we're still talking about this content is because
there's been so much backlash and outrage toward it since
it became popular in the early twenty twenties left leaning
feminists who believe that the tradwife trend hearkens a dangerous

(26:05):
period of regression as the American people's right to bodily autonomy.

Speaker 3 (26:09):
Slowly and surely slips.

Speaker 2 (26:11):
Into the very mid century timeframe that tradwives so often
portray in. This outrage does help to fuel the success
of the influencers, because yes, they have millions of followers,
but the snark reddit boards and hate comments saying that
tradwives are self hating and glamorizing oppression have engagement in
the hundreds of thousands as well, and as far as

(26:34):
the algorithm is concerned, engagement is engagement, whether it's positive
or negative. It reminds me a lot of Friend of
the Pod Max Fisher's book The Chaos Machine, in which
he fully illustrates the ways in which modern algorithms are
designed to enrage. That's why we have so many social
media stories that are rooted in backlash and then backlash

(26:54):
to the backlash. Tradwife narratives fall neatly into this pattern
because for every every bit of phrase, there's an essay
that's written in stark disagreement. So why is this content
so popular in the last few years. Friend of the
Pod Brigid Todd of there are no girls on the
internet sets.

Speaker 7 (27:14):
During uncertain times, people sell easy solutions because our brains
in times of precarity crave simple solutions. But often those comforting,
simple solutions are just placeholders for the reality, which is
that the problem is actually systemic and institutional. You're not
going to dismantle it in your specific nuclear household and family.

(27:34):
If you're only looking within your own family you're not
looking hard enough at the larger issues at play.

Speaker 2 (27:39):
While these accounts have millions upon millions of followers who
view the content as soothing or aspirational, there are plenty
of modern moms who were completely fucking baffled by it.
Because I've engaged with so much of this content that
my algorithm will never bounce back, I feel comfortable saying
that tradwife content is often a lot about subtext, right

(28:01):
projecting a message without explicitly stating it. Maybe the fifties
were a great time for women, Maybe we need to
bring it back, but there's a sense of encouraging to
submit to the status quo, a status quo that existed.

Speaker 3 (28:15):
Before a lot of necessary civil rights.

Speaker 2 (28:17):
Were fought for, but online now tradwives man. But let's
bring it back to the Mormon's side of this content,
specifically because as we're trying to get to the bottom
of Mormons have found a lot of success in this space.
Mom sockers are far from the only prominent Mormon content
creators dominating social media today. The most popular, and so

(28:40):
by extension, the most embroiled in controversy, is the second
major Mormon influencer story of the summer Ballerina Farm more
when we come back, maybe welcome back to sixteenth minute.

(29:09):
The more I learned about tradwives, the more it became
obvious that they developed in response to the capitalism is
for girls to actually slay rhetoric of the mid twenty tens.
But like, is it that different when you're a tradwife entrepreneur.
It kind of seems like you're doing the same thing,
but the thing that you're selling is that you're not
actually doing the thing that I'm watching you doing. And

(29:33):
when we left off, we were talking about the most
famous Mormon influencer on the scene today, Ballerina Farm. Where
do we begin? All my male listeners are getting like
a nosebleed. Ballerina Farm is the user name for a
Mormon woman named Hannah Nielman, whose follower count on Instagram
currently sits at ten million. She was raised in the

(29:53):
LDS and was a tremendously talented ballerina who got into
and graduated from Juilliard. She cited over and over that
she was the first undergrad in modern history to be
pregnant while still at Julliard because while there she got
married to fellow Mormon Daniel Nielman in twenty eleven.

Speaker 3 (30:12):
The year before she graduated.

Speaker 2 (30:14):
So both the Neielmans grew up in big, devout Utah
Mormon families. Hannah was one of nine, Daniel was one
of ten. They got engaged after only three weeks, and
while Hannah was still in college, she also started competing
in beauty pageants. She started with Miss New York and
then re entered the space after getting married and having kids,
because Hannah does not stay a ballerina. After graduation, Hannah

(30:38):
and Daniel moved to England for a semester at Cambridge,
then Utah so Daniel could finish his degree at Brigham
Young University, and then to Brazil, where Daniel worked as
the director of his father's security company for a few years.

Speaker 3 (30:50):
Because it must be said.

Speaker 2 (30:52):
Financially, these are incredibly privileged people. Daniel's father founded Jet Blue. Dude,
they've got money, and he's so Mormon that he worked
on Mitt Romney's failed presidential campaign in twenty twelve. But
Daniel's dream is to move back to Utah and live
on a farm, and they finally do so in twenty seventeen,
buying the eponymous Ballerina farm. In twenty eighteen. By the

(31:15):
time they moved on to the three hundred and twenty
eight acre farm, they had four kids, and when they
moved onto the farm, Hannah Nielman's online brand as a
Mormon wife was well established, but significantly less successful. Hannah
started her social media journey as a mom influencer on
a blog called We Took the Train in early twenty thirteen,
shortly after the birth of her first child, Henry, and

(31:37):
her college graduation. And it's interesting that she intersects with
a completely different era of successful Mormon online influencers because
in the two thousands into the early twenty tens, Mormon
mommy blogs were a thing. The Mormon mommy blogger pipeline
was popular for as long as blogs were popular, and
mommy bloggers in general have always enjoyed massive success and

(32:01):
usually adapt to new social media platforms pretty easily. I'd
recommend Sarah Peterson's book mom Fluenced for more on this topic,
because mommy blogging was popular from the very dawn of
social media, but it was very different than the tradwife
content that we see today. There was a lot more
emphasis on writing over visuals, and the writing tended to

(32:22):
be more confessional writer Catherine Jeezer Morton has been covering
this space for a long time. I'm quoting here from
a New York Times column called Did Moms Exist Before
Social Media? From twenty twenty, where she mentions how Mormon
women entering the mommy blog space changed it.

Speaker 7 (32:39):
To overlook the influence of Mormon and other Christian mommy
bloggers on this ship would be a huge oversight. Mormon
mommy bloggers, in particular, were enormously influential in establishing the
esthetic and tone that came to characterize influencer era online motherhood.
Mormonism encourages the careful documentation of family life, and Mormon
mothers were among blogging's earliest and most enthusiastic adopt Unlike

(33:01):
the confessional early mommy blogs, Mormon mother's blogs broadcast a
clean and chipper vision of motherhood, replete with diy crafting
projects and coordinated family photoshoots. Many of the most successful
Mormon bloggers from the mid aughts, like Amber phillerup Clark,
and Naomi Davis, went on to become mainstream lifestyle bloggers,
and although their Mormon faith is no secret, its prominence

(33:21):
were seated as the years passed.

Speaker 2 (33:24):
Early successful Mormon or ex Mormon mommy bloggers included how
Their Armstrong of Deocey, Amber, Phillerup Davis, and Love Taza
aka Naomi Davis. Around this same time, successful family bloggers
like Day Carl and his Family become really popular on
YouTube and the late aughts into the early twenty tens.

(33:45):
In fact, Carl's child, Brock, was considered to be the
first Truman baby, as in The Truman Show, as in
a child whose life was documented from moment one to
a massive social media audience.

Speaker 3 (33:58):
Scary.

Speaker 2 (34:00):
This hyper vulnerable mommy blog stuff is considered pretty old
school now. At the time, Mormon mommy bloggers were a
part of the coined blogger nacle community, with personalities like
Stephanie Nielsen of The Nine Dialogues and C. Jane Kendrick
of C Jane enjoy It serving as early examples for
their crossover appeal outside of the religion. There was even

(34:23):
an award system developed for successful blogger nacle publications called
the Nibblets. This went from twenty five to twenty seventeen,
and bloggers who were particularly good at spreading Mormon values
online got a trophy. And I don't know if you
feel the same way. But I was really surprised because
I thought of Mormon culture as so conservative in its

(34:44):
gender roles that actively encouraging women to speak at all
would be a non starter. But that's not true at all,
If talks given by Mormon leaders during the early blogging
era are to be believed.

Speaker 3 (34:57):
These blogs, blogs.

Speaker 2 (34:59):
Et cetera were viewed to be an extension of the
Mormon mission and a way to get the word out.
I'm pulling this from an LDS news post from two
thousand and seven.

Speaker 5 (35:09):
Apostle urges students to use new media. Two hundred graduating
students at Brigham Young University Hawaii were urged today to
use the Internet, including blogs and other forms of new media,
to contribute to a national conversation about the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints. Elder M Russell Ballard,
an apostle in the church, told the mostly Mormon student

(35:32):
body that conversations about the church would take place whether
or not church members decided to participate in them. We
cannot stand on the sidelines while others, including our critics,
attempt to define what the church teaches, he said. While
some conversations have audiences in the thousands or even millions.
Most are much much smaller, but all conversations have an

(35:57):
impact on those who participate in them. Perceptions of the
Church are established one conversation at a time. Church leaders
have publicly expressed concern that while much of the recent
extensive news reporting on the church has been balanced and accurate,
some has been trivial, distorted, or without context. Elder Ballard

(36:19):
said there were too many conversations going on about the
church for church representatives to respond to each individually, and
that church leaders can't answer every question, satisfy every inquiry,
and respond to every inaccuracy that exists. He said students
should consider sharing their views on blogs, responding to online

(36:40):
news reports, and using the new media in other ways,
but he cautioned against arguing with others about their beliefs.
There is no need to become defensive or belligerent.

Speaker 3 (36:53):
He said.

Speaker 2 (36:55):
This feels like a skeleton key to a lot of
Mormon content. 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 all.

Speaker 9 (37:14):
Right, we're all proselyting through it in the heat. We
just had our very.

Speaker 1 (37:19):
First contact really of the day in person.

Speaker 4 (37:22):
What happened not interesting.

Speaker 2 (37:26):
Posting is all but baked into the religion in the
modern day, probably in a sour dough 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.

Speaker 3 (37:41):
It's more of a soft pitch.

Speaker 2 (37:42):
You usually find out their 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 heating to espouse a vision of an ideal Mormon
family without defensiveness belligerence, it kind of makes sense. Okay,

(38:03):
back to Ballerina Farm. Because Hannah Nielman 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 twenty ten's
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

(38:25):
at all confessional and are far more defined by their
esthetic and this sense of faral certainty. 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 twenty thirteen.

Speaker 7 (38:41):
I've been thinking a lot lately about my life and
just how grateful I really am that I am right
here right now. Two people. One was a past pageant coach,
the other a fellow dancer I want to dance with.
Ask me if I was really happy to have given
up those dreams for where I am today.

Speaker 3 (39:00):
I'm so happy.

Speaker 7 (39:01):
I am so at peace. I have a husband who
is mine forever. Together, we have a beautiful baby boy
who is full of purity and joy. I get to
dance and teach as much as possible, and I love that,
of course, But there is nothing more rewarding than seeing
my family here right now. I really feel like the

(39:22):
luckiest girl in the world. So yep, I am happy.
Goal for the week, only eat out once.

Speaker 2 (39:32):
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.

Speaker 3 (39:49):
Am I doing the right thing?

Speaker 2 (39:51):
She also talks about going to McDonald's and loving it,
something that wildly differs from her current stance as a
tradwife 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

(40:13):
what Ballerina Farm content sounds like. Here's a post from
this year.

Speaker 10 (40:17):
Today, we're making some Turkish eggs. So we started off
by straining some of Daniel's homemade yogurt in a cheesecloth
and hung that so it could get a bit thicker.

Speaker 9 (40:28):
Can I wash my butter?

Speaker 10 (40:31):
I also like to run under some cold water to
get it really nice and washed.

Speaker 2 (40:35):
So Hannah starts as 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,

(40:56):
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

(41:17):
meals from scratch, talking about the advantages of her farm
to table and family first lifestyle, and doing it all
in full makeup and these cottage core flowy dresses.

Speaker 3 (41:28):
There's also quiet.

Speaker 2 (41:29):
Advertisements in 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 twenty twenty one, Hannah had two hundred thousand Instagram followers.

Speaker 3 (41:44):
Now she has ten million.

Speaker 2 (41:46):
So the days where Hannah was teaching Dan's 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, surely someone is helping with the
kids and the business, right because the kids are homeschooled

(42:07):
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

(42:28):
compete in the occasional pageant, winning the title of missus
America in twenty twenty one and twenty twenty three.

Speaker 13 (42:35):
What you're all flipping out about is her looking smoking
hot and participating in Miss World right after she gave birth.
I mean, like, I think the placenta probably hadn't even
come out when she was putting on her ball gown.
I mean, she is, That was quick. That was a
quick turnaround. So she's in your head about that. But

(42:56):
why was she not in your head before? I think
you guys just haven't been following her closely enough.

Speaker 2 (43:01):
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,

(43:22):
the emphasis that ball gowns aside my marriage and family
are the most important thing, that's a solid ad 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

(43:45):
their content by chance, there's nothing that screams these are
Mormons unless you know what to look for in terms
of home decorror, and this feels by design. You don't
build an empire with the ninth most popular religion in
the US according to Pew research, behind dominant Protestant and
Catholic practices, behind Judaism, and behind other subcategories like atheist,

(44:08):
agnostic end quote nothing in particular unquote.

Speaker 3 (44:12):
If you're six.

Speaker 2 (44:13):
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 rites and open abortion access. I understand

(44:35):
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

(44:56):
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. It
turns out this was a plane that Daniel's father owned,
and he specifically requested to be set on said plane

(45:19):
beside Hannah, making it the most expensive predatory meetcute I've
ever heard of. Hannah wanted to date for a year
in order to maintain her education at Juilliard, but was
overruled by Daniel. She was engaged a month later and
was married and pregnant soon after that, all before graduation.

Speaker 3 (45:37):
There are, of course.

Speaker 2 (45:38):
People working on Ballerina Farm and for their company, they
were just never acknowledged as existing in the content. However,
Hannah is not allowed to have nanny's to help her
at home, and the article implies that this is Daniel's choice,
and he describes Hannah as becoming so exhausted by caring
for the eight children that she will sometimes collapse for

(46:00):
a week at a time, which plays into the Mormon
and just generally fundamentalist belief that women's suffering is virtuous.
But to a modern audience, hearing this dynamic within such
a wealthy family felt fucked up. Hannah and Daniel did
not believe involuntary abortion, something their content suggested but never stated,

(46:21):
and that Hannah's identity prior to their marriage and especially
her relationship with Dance, had been slowly choked out by
Ballerina Farm and the Mormon lifestyle. And this story had
reach not only because it was upsetting, but because it
seemed to vindicate and sadden a lot of the people
who had been asking how Ballerina Farm quote.

Speaker 3 (46:43):
Unquote did it all.

Speaker 2 (46:45):
The article suggests that the answer is by sacrificing parts
of herself and being exhausted to the point of not
being able to function. Something I thought was interesting while
examining the reaction to this story was that non Mormons
tended to find Daniel Neil as the villain of this
story because it's him who is constantly correct, negging and

(47:06):
suppressing Hannah throughout the profile as written. But ex Mormon
influencers are careful to add a little bit of nuance
to this. Their suggestion is more, does Daniel come off
as an entitled asshole? Yes, but both Daniel and Hannah
are playing their role here. It doesn't excuse the behavior,
but ex Mormon YouTubers like Jordan and Mackay note that
Daniel was playing the part of the devout Mormon husband

(47:28):
to the hilt here. And what I'll say in Ballerina
Farm's defense, While I find the details of this story
really dark, I do believe Hannah Nielman when she says
that she believes this is the correct way to live,
and the rest of us can make of it what
we will. Hannah has, of course condemned this piece in
a recent post.

Speaker 6 (47:47):
A couple of weeks ago, we had a reporter come
into our home to learn more about our family and business.
We thought the interview went really well, very similar to
the dozens of interviews we had done in recent memory.
We were taken back, however, when we saw the printed article,
which shocked us and shocked the world by being an

(48:09):
attack on our family and my marriage.

Speaker 2 (48:12):
And her audience has only continued to grow. Honestly, I
think this article might have helped her in the long run.
But all this, while fascinating, does not answer my question,
why is this a ten million follower account? Hanna Nielman
has not been acknowledged by the LDS as a remarkable asset,
and she doesn't emphasize her religion as she once did.

(48:35):
So is she an asset to the Mormon Church? The
answer becomes clearer if you start to follow the money.
It's impossible to get meaningful insight into this issue without
talking to people who have been Mormons themselves, who intimately
understand the culture. There is a thriving corner of the
Internet that is built around ex Mormon content, primarily on

(48:58):
YouTube and TikTok as an I'm writing this, there are
plenty of creators who have left the church explaining their
personal experience with the various indoctrinations, cultural stigmas, and oppression
experience within the LDS. Often accounts of their childhood and
their mission and why they ultimately left. Like pro Mormon content,
ex Mormon creators appear to be very successful, and I've

(49:20):
watched quite a bit of it in preparation for this episode.
Some resources I've used are the long running Mormon Stories podcast,
which has been going since two thousand and five, and
a number of YouTubers, especially Alyssa Grenfell, who I'll be
talking to in the next part of this episode. Here's
what I'll leave you with. If Mormonism is nowhere near

(49:41):
the country's most popular religion but is disproportionately represented on
our social media, then what is there left to look to? Then?
Money and the algorithm, Alissa Grenfell explains in part two
via then. Sixteenth Minute is a production of Cool Zone

(50:04):
Media and iHeartRadio. It is written, hosted, and produced by me.
Jamie Rostis. Our executive producers are Soghy Lichtterman and Robert Evans.

Speaker 3 (50:13):
Amazing.

Speaker 2 (50:14):
Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our
theme song is.

Speaker 3 (50:19):
By Sad thirteen and Pet.

Speaker 2 (50:21):
Shout outs to our dog producer Anderson my Kat's flea
Casper and by Pet Rockford who will outlive us all
Bye the Welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where

(51:31):
we take a look at the Internet's characters of the
day to see how their moment affected them and what
it says about the Internet and us.

Speaker 3 (51:37):
My name's Jamie Loftus.

Speaker 2 (51:39):
And this is part two of a series trying to
answer a question that I honestly thought would be easier
to answer, Why is the Internet so dominated by Mormon
mommy influencers? So if you haven't listened to part one yet,
I recommend you do because this is a frustratingly complicated question.

(52:02):
Last time we talked about the origins of the Mormon Church.
It stands on race, gender, and sexuality cliff notes not great,
and it's history of intersecting with conservative leaning social media
trends among women. So think mommy blogs of the two thousands.
Mormon women were at the top of that boom and
were more open about their religion than many influencers are today.

(52:25):
Think about another ongoing trend, that's a whole subject unto itself,
one I'd like to dedicate more time to in the future.
Mormon women's intersection with major multi level marketing schemes, schemes
that rely on salespeople spending a lot of their own
money with usually diminishing returns if you don't get in
on the ground floor. Utah has the highest concentration of

(52:48):
MLMs in the country, and the door to door element.
Isn't that unlike the missionary spirit that the devout embark
on on behalf of the Church of Latter day Saints
or the LDS when they're young adults, sales as a mission. Actually,
if you're into obscure documentaries as much as I am,
one of the most famous contemporary failed MLM schemes was

(53:10):
actually founded by a Mormon couple, that being Lularo, the
ugly leggings company that was busted in a massive legal
scandal in the twenty tens.

Speaker 1 (53:19):
You tell the.

Speaker 8 (53:20):
People you love they're in a pyramid scheme, and they go, no,
I'm not, You're just a hater. I own my own business.
I'm very successful.

Speaker 9 (53:26):
My orders would smell disgusting.

Speaker 8 (53:29):
It was just insane. The amount of hoops had to
jump through to get them to ever admit that their
product was faulty.

Speaker 9 (53:37):
I would sometimes open bags and they'd be wet.

Speaker 2 (53:41):
And when it comes to recruiting for MLMs, Mormon women
tend to be excellent marks. Because of the rigid gender
roles of the religion that encourage many women to stay
at home. Things like Luloo might be the only opportunity
for them to make a living on their own, not
to mention the close knit Mormon communities offering a ton
of customers. It's not quite that simple, but you see

(54:03):
where I'm going with this, And of course, there is
significant crossover with Mormon women and the current, if somewhat dwindling,
tradwive content that's become extremely popular on Instagram and TikTok.
We talk about this quite a bit in the first
part of the series, specifically about users from mom Talk,
the stars of the new show The Secret Lives of

(54:25):
Mormon Wives, and Ballerina farm, a ten million follower influencer
who presents stay at homestead lifestyle while say It with Me,
selling that idea to her followers as a part of
what is very much a job unto itself.

Speaker 3 (54:40):
The more I think about.

Speaker 2 (54:41):
It, tradwives are actually not straying from these similarly flawed
girl boss archetypes the way that they think they are.
But that's for another day, because now we're going to
forge into.

Speaker 3 (54:53):
Part two, shall we?

Speaker 2 (54:57):
Even with the context I've given you, I was still
confused because, yes, white heteroconservatism sells online, we know that,
But why this religion, specifically, what about Mormon content is
bringing them to the top of your feed ex Mormon
influencer Alyssa Grenfell has been asking this question too. She

(55:18):
was raised an extremely devout Utah Mormon, went on a mission,
got married at an LDS temple the whole nine yards. Eventually,
like one in three young Mormons today, she left the
church in her twenties with her husband after they both
found themselves questioning the values they'd grown up with. For
Alissa's husband, the radicalizing issue was the church's stance on

(55:38):
gay marriage, and for Alisa, it was a series of
crises of faith over and over. What Alyssa felt God
wanted for her was directly contradicted by priests and her father.
She was called to do a mission two thousand miles
away from where she expected she was told by her
father that God needed her to be a teacher when
she had no interest in teaching and didn't feel she

(56:01):
had the natural skill set to do it. So eventually
the two leave the Mormon Church. They start drinking coffee
and cocktails and Alyssa was motivated to join YouTube after
self publishing her first book, and while she's been on
YouTube for less than a year, she already has nearly
a quarter million subscribers, and my favorite video of hers
presents a pretty compelling theory. Alyssa suggests that sure, Mormon

(56:25):
tradwife content does play into the algorithm as far as esthetics,
but it's very possible that the Church of Latter day
Saints itself is bankrolling these Mormon mommy influencers without the
influencers being able to say for sure that it's them.
Here's a clip from that video.

Speaker 9 (56:44):
So different niches, different types of content on the Internet
make different amounts of money. You can see you're off
to the side that depending on the type of content
you make, you're gonna make different amounts of money. For example,
anything to do with money and fining makes a lot
more money than a video about cooking. The reason for

(57:04):
this is that the money that you make off your
content is driven by how much advertisers are willing to
pay for it. Banks, for example, have a lot of
money and so they can drive a ton of money
into advertising. So if you made content a video about
the best bank accounts to open, you could get paid
approximately twelve dollars and twenty five cents for each one

(57:28):
thousand views on that video. When Google or another ad
platform goes to put ads on top of that content,
they will recognize it as a piece of content that
advertisers are willing to pay a lot of money for.
So the length of the video could be the same,
the person in the video could be the same, but
depending on the content, you're getting paid a wildly different

(57:50):
amount of money for the type of content you're posting.
A major way that Google and other advertisers figures out
where to put ads is through some than called keywords.
So these keywords will be something like credit card or
open bank account. That signal to the algorithm, to the
ad algorithm that you've made content that aligns with what

(58:13):
advertisers are looking for.

Speaker 2 (58:15):
Alyssa only started investigating this search term question when she
was getting repeated feedback that her viewers were getting ads
for the Mormon Church on her videos, which is weird
because Alyssa's content is doing the opposite of encouraging people
to join the church. And what's more, when she looked
into the amount that she was making on YouTube and
the amount of algorithmic preference she was getting less than

(58:37):
a year into her time versus other creators, she was
getting a lot more engagement and making a lot more money.
Why she explains more in the video.

Speaker 9 (58:46):
You can see here that the keyword new bank costs
twenty five dollars and thirty cents. That's how much advertisers
are willing to pay for this keyword. So compare that
to Catholic that's a huge difference. So if I'm making
my content about finance, I'm going to see a law
more ad revenue coming my way because there are lots
of advertisers who are willing to pay Google to try

(59:09):
to capture your eye to open a new bank account
with them. The Church definitely does advertising online, and if
I go to YouTube and type in Mormon missionary, I
can see that there's an ad at the top. This
is an ad that the church paid to put there.
So Mormon missionary. There's an ad in my YouTube trying
to get me to meet with Mormon missionaries. So we
already looked at the term Catholic. The cost per click

(59:32):
the ad revenue behind Catholic is three dollars and fifty
eight cents. If you look at the term Baptist, the
cost per click is a dollar twenty six cents. I
tried looking up a religion that's a little closer to Mormonism.
Jehovah's Witness is an American religion. If you want to
advertise using the key term Jehovah's Witness, it's going to
cost you four dollars and sixty four cents. The cost

(59:52):
per click for the term Mormon is twenty four dollars
and seventy one cents. And if you recall, the Mormon
Church has more money than Wells Fargo. And the reason
that that number is so high, I believe is because
there is a multi billion dollar organization that is funneling

(01:00:13):
money into ad spend around the term Mormon.

Speaker 2 (01:00:17):
So this theory isn't and can't be proven without the
LDS being straightforward about their finances, which will never happen.

Speaker 3 (01:00:24):
So I'll let Alissa take it.

Speaker 2 (01:00:26):
From here without any further ado. Here is my interview
with the fantastic Alissa Grenfell.

Speaker 6 (01:00:33):
Hi.

Speaker 9 (01:00:33):
My name is Elsa Grenfell and I am an ex
Mormon content creator and author. I was very Mormon growing up.
I grew up in a variant about home, and then
I left the church when I was about twenty three,
after serving a Mormon mission and getting married in a
Mormon temple and doing all the Mormon things. And now
I make content around what you know, the history of

(01:00:56):
the church's current church teachings, the doctrine, personal experienceperiances, and
that is kind of the focus of what I put
on the internet.

Speaker 2 (01:01:04):
I grew up in Massachusetts. I grew up like like,
I didn't know anything about Mormon culture outside of what
was in pop culture when I was growing up growing
up in the Mormon Church. I know that you've made
a significant amount of content about this. How are women
specifically treated and sort of how are you conditioned to
view yourself?

Speaker 9 (01:01:24):
Some of my earliest memories really are just discussing my
wedding dress, discussing my husband, writing letters to my future husband,
talking about purity, learning homemaking skills, ironing. You know, I'm
eight years old ironing a shirt talking about, you know,
taking care of my future family. And it's I think

(01:01:45):
past just the idea that you know, everyone probably should
learn how to take care of a home or cook
a meal, but it was very much posed as this
is your divine role from God. And even you know,
there's something called patriarchal blessing which is kind of I
would like call it Mormon fortune telling, a little bit
where a very important man within the church lays his

(01:02:08):
hands on hit your head and basically is supposed to
be speaking as if he's speaking from God and kind
of telling you what's going to happen in your future.
Much of my patriarchal blessing was about how I was
going to be a mother in Zion and how I
was going to like it was all just about my
future children basically and my role as a wife and mother.
And to think that a man is saying basically the

(01:02:29):
most important things about your future and it's all encompassed
around motherhood and wilfhood. And then to read you know,
now I read my husband's patriarchal blessing and a lot
of male men's patriarchal blessings is not about their children,
their future children. And so if you can compare the
what women are taught, if you compare that with what
men are taught, it's also very different. So you could,

(01:02:52):
you know, I think I might have been able to,
like stomach it if the boys were also learning how
to take a girl on a date or how to
also watch children or change a diaper. But the boys
were often doing bad like playing basketball or doing you know,
hot water rafting, or doing boy scouts, learning to tie
not you know, just more traditional boyhood kind of things.

(01:03:16):
I think there was the actual kind of training around
motherhood and family, but then there was the religious element
of gender roles as divinely appointed upon.

Speaker 2 (01:03:28):
You as I was sort of learning more about you
as you were coming of age, all of these gut
feelings thinking that I'm being guided by God towards this person,
towards this mission location, towards this job, receiving different answers
that not that weren't in your gut. What does it
like to process that doubt?

Speaker 9 (01:03:50):
I think it's it's really hard because it's very difficult
to kind of see outside of yourself and to question
the systems you're raised in a bord especially systems that
you're taught as the most moral way to live. I
feel like, even after leaving, I've had a lot of
moments where I have to kind of question if my
desire to pursue a certain path is coming from the

(01:04:14):
real quote, real me versus if it's coming from the
conditioning I received as a young person. And I think
that in following some of those paths, I have often
found that I'm still kind of living in this reactionary
state where instead of looking toward what God wants me

(01:04:35):
to do, I'm often kind of living in a way
that is reacting to I just want to do the
opposite of Mormonism, even though that's still kind of living
my life according to Mormonism, it's just how I'm moving
the opposite way instead of kind of somewhere in the
middle of this like what I really want kind of
idea that people have.

Speaker 2 (01:04:55):
How do you move forward with so much of your
life has been structured around being removed?

Speaker 9 (01:05:02):
Yeah, I think initially it was very difficult, and even
kind of admitting it to myself was really difficult. Like
you mentioned earlier, I had all of these experiences kind
of culminate where, for example, I had a really strong
what I felt like was an answer from God that
I was going to go on my Mormon mission to Italy.

(01:05:23):
And I wrote it in my journal and I wrote,
you know, I know I'll go to Italy as sure
as I know God lives. And it felt like a
little you know, testimony my claim to faith on the topic.
And when I opened my mission call, it was to Denver, Colorado,
not Italy. And you know, I still served a full
Mormon mission. I still went to Denver, Colorado. I still

(01:05:45):
was in the church for years after that. But I
think that is kind of the easiest to encapsulate example
of these moments that kind of hit me over and
over again where I would have these really strong feelings,
major revelations that I was used to kind of walk
through life, only to realize that they were either wrong
or that if I had made my own decisions about

(01:06:08):
my own life without consulting God, I probably would have
chosen better than quote God was choosing for me. So
as I kind of came to that realization over years
and years, my first year teaching, my dad had given
me a blessing that I was meant to be a teacher,
and that of course I'm going to trust this blessing
above all else. I didn't pursue any other career paths.

(01:06:30):
And then my first year as a teacher, I realized
I absolutely hated it and was not cut out for it,
and it was giving me a lot of mental health issues.
About halfway through the school year, broke to my husband, Hey,
I think I might not believe in this anymore. After
a lot of conversations, we both decided that we wanted
to leave together after reading a lot of church history

(01:06:51):
for him, after lots of conversations, Like I said, so,
it was really helpful. One of my favorite pictures of
our whole marriage is us holding our coffee cups for
the first time. For most people, such a simple, straightforward
thing is like drinking your morning cup of coffee. This
is our first ever cup of coffee. I think I
was about twenty four at that point. Didn't grow horns,

(01:07:12):
didn't fall beneath the floor, everything proceeded as normal. It
was very underwhelming. Most sins after you leave the church,
most sins. As an ex Mormon, you're like, this is
pretty underwhelming. I also, one of my favorite memories is
the first time I went to after work drinks with
my coworkers. They're kind of everybody's getting to know each
other and like, why did you come to New York?
And I start talking about Utah Mormonism and leaving the

(01:07:35):
church and garments, the religious underwear, the temple endowment, the
prayer circle of the ceremony, the oaths and the handshakes,
and I just remember it was probably a group of
fifteen people, but as I'm just talking, more and more
people to stop their conversations and just lean in to
be like, wait, are you talking about leaving a cult
right now? And just like I could. It was kind

(01:07:56):
of affirming to me to have And you know, I
always have those experiences talking to people they don't know
much about Mormons, because you can tell from the look
on their face that you're not the crazy one for
thinking you were raised in a very crazy religion. Whereas
you know, if you're kind of talking to people in Utah,
maybe they'll kind of act like, oh, this is all
very normal. You know, of course Mormons were garments, but

(01:08:17):
to someone who's never interfaced with the religion, it is
probably ten to twenty times stranger and odder then people
who are familiar with it, So that kind of surprise
on people's faces has been healing for me in some
ways because it helps me feel like I'm not the sinner,
I'm not the crazy one. It was what I was
raised in, and that normalcy is not what I experienced

(01:08:41):
as a kid, learning to iron shirts as an eight
year old and writing letters to my husband about how
I was saving myself for him.

Speaker 2 (01:08:48):
So, yeah, you're coming of age alongside the Internet and
you're growing up with these very rigid beliefs. What was
your relationship with the Internet as you were coming of
age into your early adulthood.

Speaker 9 (01:09:01):
Oh, I think that one of my first Mormon memories
is that there is there's a YouTuber who would go
around and film the temple ceremonies. I remember, probably when
I was like late middle school, early high school, coming
across the thumbnail of you know, secrets inside a Mormon Temple,
and okay, I remember thinking to myself, you know, I

(01:09:25):
didn't click on it. And I remember I had friends
at school who would say, you know, you can see
what happens in the temple if you go on YouTube,
and I remember, like, you know, that's probably what they're
talking about. It's right there. I didn't click on it,
and I you know, as a Mormon kid, you very
much learned the term anti Mormon literature, that that's a
whole thing you're warned against, that you should you shouldn't

(01:09:47):
look at anti Mormon literature. They're just trying to destroy
your testimony. And so I remember just thinking to myself, Oh,
this is anti Mormon content, and I shouldn't watch it.
And so when I was still in high school, I
think if I came across anything disfavorable about the church,
I immediately just turned my brain off and thought, you know,
this is Satan. They told me about this, and so

(01:10:08):
because they told me about this, that's how I know
that they are kind of foreseeing or foretelling the futures,
because they're warning me of this thing that I shouldn't
look at.

Speaker 2 (01:10:17):
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 tradwives are Mormon,
but many of them are. Many of the most successful
influencers are the Utah Mormon based or create the content

(01:10:39):
that really appeals. So when did you start noticing this
content and yeah, what did you make of it?

Speaker 9 (01:10:48):
That's a good question, And I mean, I feel like
my whole childhood was kind of tradwife content in a way.
I feel like to some extent, I think that it's
also a question of platform, because I feel like Instagram
is meant for curation, and TikTok is kind of meant
to question curation and to criticize curation. So I think

(01:11:09):
that a lot of trad wife content kind of came
up in the Instagram age, which is beautiful children, beautiful dresses,
lovely sour dough, and it's very curated. It's often photos
instead of videos, so it's harder to pick apart a
curated photo instead of a video where there's like a

(01:11:29):
voice in the background, or you know, you can pause
the screenshot and say, what is what's the picture on
their wall? So I think that the kind of transition
away from Instagram into TikTok is also what kind of
opened my mind more to the trad wife movement in specificity,
I guess because prior to that, I just see, you know,

(01:11:50):
beautiful kind of like a lot of people say that
the Mormon tradwife movement came from Mormon mommy bloggers, which
were super prevalent in the early two which is a
lot of recipe making and DIY stuff. And so it's
kind of like this movement kind of re materialized onto
Instagram after they already had their original audience on the

(01:12:12):
blogging side of things. I think where it kind of
hit its head is when we turn more to a
TikTok type of investigation of things, where people are no
longer looking for perfection or they're not looking to follow
people that their post their posts just feel like a
Pinterest board. I think Mormon is in very pinteresty. Mormon's

(01:12:33):
love findst to in my in my experience. So I
think that that is what has kind of kicked back
against tradwifs is that for a long time, I think
people just unquestioningly consumed the beautiful content. And when there's
a voice over to a photo and the photo is
not just it's a pretty photo of kids and some bread,
Now it's I made this this for my husband or

(01:12:56):
I made this for my family, and then you know,
and there's more of a narrative, Like the new video
form of the tradwife content is narrative and so it
is developing much more of an ideology, in my opinion,
behind the curative video the pictures that we once had,
and I think two Mormons are taught to be so
missionary minded that if someone is Mormon, they've probably talked

(01:13:20):
about it at some point. I mean, the Mormon Church
literally expressly says you should be talking about being Mormon online.
You're told that explicitly, and so that also is an
element of I think Mormon influencers are louder about their
religion than a lot of influencers because they are acting
on that kind of command from the prophet to speak

(01:13:41):
loudly and speak often about their religion.

Speaker 2 (01:13:44):
It seems also because of how the algorithm works at
any given point in time, there have been times where
I have gotten content piped 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

(01:14:05):
in my feed it takes me a little while to
catch on that there is a specific religious element.

Speaker 9 (01:14:12):
Is that something you've also noticed?

Speaker 2 (01:14:13):
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.

Speaker 9 (01:14:26):
Yeah, in my opinion, the prevalence of people who are
influencers mentioning Mormonism is greatest in their early stages, when
they're first getting an audience, when they're first kind of
finding their voice. I think once people reach like a
critical mass of no longer just having Mormon followers, they
have a lot of just general interest in their platforms.

(01:14:47):
It's almost like a graph where the bigger they get,
the less they mention Mormonism because I think they realize
that it's unpopular to a general audience, but it's very
popular with the audience that you're growing early on. So
I think that you know, for example, I know Ballerina
Farm used to have a blog specifically about Mormonism, but
if you google is so and so Mormon, you can

(01:15:09):
always find an answer because they talked about it a
lot early on, and there's always like an early interview.
Same with Brooklyn and Bailey. They're not really tradwife stuff anymore,
but they just have a big YouTube channel and they
talked quite a bit about Mormonism early on, and now
it essentially never appears. I think one of them has left,
I'm not sure. Initially to grow their audience, they're talking

(01:15:30):
a lot about Mormonism because Mormons will follow you because
they know your Mormon. And then after they get big,
they see it as maybe a bit more of a risk,
or maybe that because they have more money and they're
like a little bit less beholden to their community, maybe
they're less likely to talk about it because they kind
of can take on their own form of what they
want to be talking about on the internet. So many Christians,

(01:15:52):
I think if they see Mormon content and don't know
it's Mormon content or just like you know, even tradwife
content obviously appeals to kind of a more far right ideology,
and I think all of those people, if they come
across you know, trad wife content in general, they'll upvote
it or like it or interact with it. The hard
thing for Mormons is that a lot of people, just
especially like evangelical Christians, do not really like Mormons, and

(01:16:15):
especially they don't like that they're trying to kind of
co op. Then they would say the Christian movement or
whatever and say they're Christians, and there's a lot of
tension between are they Christians, aren't they Christians? So I
think that that's another difficulty that they kind of have
to interface with, is that their content, by its nature
of being kind of traditionally minded, appeals to this audience
of a more like conservative Republican audience. But if they're

(01:16:38):
too overt about their specific religion, I think, you know,
if you're viewing it, which I do a little bit
more as kind of like a brand that they're selling
versus like their quote truth, real life or whatever, then
they are recognizing that there's a risk to the brand
in bringing that to the forefront. Now a brand is
large enough that it's kind of reaching a mass audience.

(01:16:58):
But I don't know, I don't know if I'm just
jaded or something like, if I'm viewing them too much
as like business minded versus if they just you know,
if they're just kind of waking up each morning, rolling
out of bed, posting their pictures and not really wondering
about audience retention or who sees what when, and how
can I reach the broadest number of people. So it's
hard to get into the mind of these people really.

Speaker 2 (01:17:21):
We'll be right back with more with Alyssa Grenfell. Welcome
back to sixteenth minute. I sort of had to wear
something like temple garments in my youth, but it was

(01:17:43):
these shoulder to me 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 X more influencer and great theory
havever Alyssa Grenfell. As I was sort of learning more

(01:18:06):
about a recent subject I was covering, I found that
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 of but like why are
there so many successful Mormon women in the influencing space?

Speaker 3 (01:18:20):
And I was like, oh, I have no idea.

Speaker 2 (01:18:23):
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. Doesn't not
make sense, but felt just like a very incomplete answer.
Could you take me through What made you start asking

(01:18:45):
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.

Speaker 9 (01:18:52):
Yeah, every interview I've ever spoken to is like why
are there so many Mormon influencers? And I think they
often ask it almost like in this secret, like can
you tell me the answer? Like like I have this
secret that I'm keeping, and if I could just explain it,
like like then that would explain the phenomenon. And it's
I think it's you know, I think something like women

(01:19:13):
journal and there was the mommy bloggers, and blogging is
like journaling, and then once they're blogging, then they're on
Instagram and it feels easy to understand. But I agree,
like it feels kind of thin because lots of people
journal and it doesn't mean that you're going to be
famous one day just because you were journaling a lot
when you were a little kid. But when I was
posting my videos, I you know, especially initially, I'm still

(01:19:36):
like learning YouTube. I think my first YouTube video was
like ten months ago or something. I'm still under one
year of learning this whole platform and stuff. But I
would have people say so funny, I just got to
ad for the Mormon Church while I was watching this video,
and I, you know, thinking it's so funny that they
are advertising on my content, which, obviously, if you understand

(01:19:56):
the back end, the Mormon Church purchases ad space through
Google Google ad Sense, and then Google ad Sense looks
for content that is relevant to put the ad on
top of. So it's not like the Mormon Sure's saying
we like Alyssa Grenfell definitely not saying that, but the
algorithm is basically looking for people saying Mormon, Mormon, Mormon
or Utah or whatever and then putting their ad space

(01:20:19):
their AdSpend behind that content. And I also, kind of
in tandem with that, was on the YouTube subreddit and
looking at the stuff about YouTube and realizing that my
CPM and my RPM, which is kind of how much
you make off of your videos, was way higher than
basically almost anyone else was quoting that, like my average

(01:20:40):
kind of pay per view or pay per click or
whatever was much higher than just kind of your average channel.
I used to do some SEO for a previous employer,
and I went and looked at the ads spend estimated
behind different keywords. Because people don't realize that the AD
spend behind something like crafting is not the same as

(01:21:01):
the AD spend behind something like open a new credit card,
because it's basically the ad spend is proportionate to how
much the advertiser is willing to spend to get the
eyes of the viewer. So I realized, basically when I
went and looked at the ad spend behind someothies terms,
that the ad spend was as high as very expensive

(01:21:21):
advertising terms. So like to open a new credit card
was thirty dollars per click, and something like crafting or
maybe like sour dough bread is like two dollars. It's
very low. So when I looked at Mormon terms like
Mormon missionary was thirty dollars and Utah influencer was nineteen dollars,
Mormon was twenty five dollars. And these are ad spends

(01:21:44):
that are phenomenally high, especially when compared even with another religion.
You know, Catholicism or Catholic is two dollars. Judaism or
jew is maybe four dollars.

Speaker 2 (01:21:55):
As someone raised Catholic, I was like, wow, Catholics found
dead in a ditch. A profitable not a profitable YouTube
grip I was truly blown away with how many times
higher those keywords were scanning.

Speaker 9 (01:22:10):
Yeah, and it felt like people don't realize that the
Mormon Church is the richest church on the planet. It's
similar to the net worth of Disney, you know, so
I mean, which I also have no idea the value
of Disney. I think it's potentially even worth more than Disney.
So it felt like there has to be some connection
between the high ad spend on these keywords. I'm seeing

(01:22:33):
it literally in my content. I'm seeing that I'm making
more off of my videos than the average YouTuber, and
then extending that to Utah influencers, which is that when
they're making content, they're making more money, and basically realizing
that because there's more money to be had out in Utah,

(01:22:53):
that it can just support a far larger number of creators,
especially in that phase of getting off the ground, right
when they're talking about Mormonism the most, right when they're
kind of like, let me try influencing for a bit, right,
you know, before they get the brand sponsorship, before they
get all the clicks for the commissions on Amazon whatever. Like,
I think I just basically took what was happening to

(01:23:15):
me and thought, what's happening to me is happening to
all these Utah Mormon influencers. They're being paid the same amount.
Like if a guy is making finance content about investing
in the S and P and they're making videos about sourdough,
those people are making the same amount of money, which
is highly irregular.

Speaker 2 (01:23:33):
I had no idea how much money the Mormon Church has.
As you explained 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 like a world
where the Mormon Church is accidentally cutting you checks for

(01:23:54):
talking about why you let.

Speaker 9 (01:23:56):
Anyone else you know? And I think that maybe to
them it's worth it. I mean, I haven't seen those
comments of I just got an ask for the Mormon Church.
I'm still getting those comments, so I don't know, Like,
I don't think I added them to the point that
they're changing their strategy or anything. But it is kind
of funny to realize that they are kind of engineering
their own crisis by making it so that it's profitable

(01:24:18):
enough to be a YouTuber talking about Mormonism that they
are kind of supporting the YouTuber's little you know, rent
payment or whatever. YouTuber can keep going and keep making
the negative videos. And it's a very funny little cycle
considering I once paid ten percent of my income to
the church and now I'm slowly making it back.

Speaker 2 (01:24:38):
Tad 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 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.

Speaker 9 (01:25:01):
The most fascinating was that the term the search term
Utah influencer. I think Utah influencer made about nineteen dollars
per click. So if you compare that with New York
City influencer, you know, San Francisco influencer, places where you assume,
you know, that's the influencer capital of the world because
that's especially of the US. Those are all under five dollars.

(01:25:24):
So you know, like I said, it's almost three times
they're making three times as much. So a woman, a
woman with her kids in New York, a woman with
her kids in LA and a woman with her kids
in Lehigh, Utah. The woman in Lehigh, Utah will probably
make three times as much the AD revenue with a
lower cost of living right and lower cost of living.
And you know, probably her husband already has a job

(01:25:46):
because he's been kind of trained to be the bread winner,
just like she's been trained to be the housewife. As
far as the church benefiting from it, I think it
definitely does. Think I've had people tell me through comments
or I've had some emails of people saying that Ballerina
Farm just her content made them Google. You know, Mormons
started looking to the church, considering getting a visit from

(01:26:09):
the missionaries, consider getting a Book of Mormon. And it's
kind of like a very soft advertisement in my opinion,
where it's not someone coming on and saying I'd like
to talk to you about why you should join them
at church. But when you see a lifestyle presented that's
very alluring and very beautiful, and you think to yourself,
what it is about this person that made this lifestyle possible,

(01:26:29):
and you realize they're part of the church. I think
it kind of gives a higher level of influence to
potentially someone who's curious and wondering what they can do
to kind of live that life that they're seeing fantasized.

Speaker 2 (01:26:42):
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 posterboard influencers kind of representing, if not the church explicitly,
the you know, gender roles and the ideals of the
church and the day to day without having it be

(01:27:05):
traced back to supposing Ballerina firm 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.

Speaker 9 (01:27:21):
The church had a ton of success from Donnie and
Marie Osmond because they're Mormon. They're more you know, the
raised Mormon, still Mormon to this day, and they were,
you know, phenomenal brand ambassadors for the church throughout their
kind of heyday. Gladys Knight is also Mormon, and she
did a concert at our ward in Kentucky at our

(01:27:42):
big congregation, and she's another example of someone who kind
of became a bit of a brand ambassador. You know,
she's doing concerts, and I think pre internet and before
gay issues, the awareness around LGBTQ issues, those people did
really well. And typically it seems like they mostly stayed
in the church, and so the church had a lot
of success with these famous people being brand ambassadors for them,

(01:28:05):
whereas now they've had it I think in more recent
years backfire more often than they've had it work, like
with David Archiletta. So, David Archiletta was very well known
within the church. He also gave concerts for the church.
He served a Mormon mission. You can find a picture
of him and the Mormon Chapter Nacle choir where they
did his slow zoom on him. And he was another

(01:28:29):
poster child and another famous person. And he's the sweetest
you know, if you've ever heard him in interviews, he's
so sweet. He's like he just has the kindest presence.
And so I think he was kind of the perfect
example of a great Mormon and a great ambassador. And
then in like a few years ago he came out
as gay. He also kind of simultaneously came outs leaving
the church and now has written a song about you know,

(01:28:52):
I'd rather go to health and not love the people
who I love, And in many ways has kind of
been a reverse of all of the kind of quote
good he would have done for the image of the
Mormon Church. Now he's just basically a breathing example of
the church's bigotry towards gay people because the church really
tried to up their proximity to his image from a

(01:29:14):
pr perspective, really hurt them now that they are no
longer able to you know, now they've been damaged by
his coming out against them and saying, hey, this church
is homophobic. So I think that that's another reason they
don't want to maybe formally approach someone like a ballerina
farm or any of these chadwife creators, because they know

(01:29:34):
it will backfire against them. But they also know that
these women are making the church look very good and
very beautiful and traditional and feminine, and so I think
this advertising revenue is kind of a way for them
to support the blogsphere of the early two thousands through
the you know, Instagrammers and YouTubers of today by giving

(01:29:56):
them ad revenue.

Speaker 2 (01:29:57):
We'll be right back with more with Alyssa Grenf. Well,
welcome back to sixteenth minute, and now we continue our
conversation with Alyssa Grenfell.

Speaker 9 (01:30:19):
You know, when you're a YouTuber or when you get
ad revenue from any social media platform, it just tells
you the amount and it tells you basically your cost perview,
and that's it. It just says advertisers were willing to pay,
and it's like a black box. They're not telling you,
like which this percentage came from this organization, This percentage
came from this organization. So it's like a black box

(01:30:42):
in that you can't you don't even know. So the
women can just make their content and look up in
the morning and be like, look, babe, like look at
this money I made. I'll make more content tomorrow. I'm
going to tell my friends. They won't necessarily see through
kind of read the tea leaves of why am I
making this much? I don't know if any of them
are doing that, and maybe they are, and I'm just

(01:31:03):
kind of one of the first they've talked about it.

Speaker 2 (01:31:06):
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 you know, 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 the Internet. And it seems like the Mormon Church

(01:31:29):
has no small part in doing that.

Speaker 9 (01:31:31):
And it's so funny because when you say it like that,
it sounds so kind of conspiratorial. It sounds, you know,
the Mormons, They're controlling the Internet. But it is funny
because it I think to some extent it's true. I mean,
not that they are literally holding the mouse and clicking
the clicks, but sure in that they are exercising I
think a pretty broad ad spend the way that they

(01:31:55):
are actively petitioning members to go on and share the gospel,
share talks, share resources about the church, and so I
think that they do have like a fairly coordinated pr
effort for the Internet specifically. Even one thing I didn't
mention in that video is they have all these people
who are hired to do SEO. And if you google
something like Bible, the Mormon Church has, like their free

(01:32:19):
Bible is one of the first organic things you see
on Google. Is introduced about today, say it's same with
I think Jesus Christ, same with New Testament, you know,
all of these terms that are kind of general Christian terms.
The Mormon Church has one of the top organic rankings
for those searches, which is very purposeful and specific, you know,

(01:32:39):
and that their attempt to kind of say, hey, if
someone wants a Bible, we want to be the ones
giving it to them. So I think that they do.
You know, it's not just conspiratorial. They have what I
view to be like a very specific, targeted plan for
how to get people on the Internet interested in Mormonism,
and it's multifaceted, and have whole departments hired for this

(01:33:02):
kind of thing.

Speaker 2 (01:33:03):
It just seems like the Mormon Church has adapted to
the Internet age unusually well.

Speaker 9 (01:33:09):
I think they definitely viewed it as a great opportunity,
and I think they've also viewed it.

Speaker 4 (01:33:14):
You know.

Speaker 9 (01:33:15):
People will also talk about how the Mormon Church will
kind of spam the front page of Google so that
ex Mormon stuff gets further and further down, so that,
you know, instead of just having one article on a subject,
they'll have like ten articles on a subject, and they'll
try to get them all to rank so that the
whole front page of Google is just faithful responses to

(01:33:38):
questions about the origins of the church. They even put
out all these essays that are about the history of
the church so that they can kind of counter the
anti Mormon literature.

Speaker 2 (01:33:50):
Is there anything I didn't ask that you feel like
is relevant to this discussion?

Speaker 9 (01:33:54):
Sometimes I struggle with, you know, when I talk about
tradwife things, I feel like people really want kind of
a silver bullet answer. And I also think that I
struggle sometimes with it's not a demonization of something like
a tradwife, but it's maybe the critique because I often
feel like tradwives didn't invent motherhood. Tradwives didn't invent being

(01:34:18):
a wife, or like being in a loving relationship in partnership,
And so sometimes have a I struggle with the nuance
of critiquing something that is genuinely human and genuinely like
I think, demonizing motherhood is not something we want to do,
Demonizing being a loving partner is not something we want
to do. But we want to critique the approach that

(01:34:41):
these accounts are kind of sharing. And so in the
critique sometimes there's a demonization that I think is kind
of dangerous and not good for families or children specifically.
So I think just a final infusion of nuance is
what I is. The final thing I'd want to leave
is just that it It's not something that's quite as

(01:35:02):
straightforward as saying Mormon women like to journal. It's very complicated.
It's about the Internet, but it's also about conservatism, and
it's about roversus weighed, and it's about all of these
different cultural forces.

Speaker 2 (01:35:14):
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 bully the byproducts of the system.

Speaker 9 (01:35:35):
That's kind of why I always say I'm anti Mormonism,
but I'm not anti Mormon, because I think people can
still be criticized, obviously, but I think that in a
more broad sense, the systems and the organizations and the
dogmas are what are forming human behavior. And so instead
of saying this one person sucks because of this X

(01:35:55):
y Z, it's better and more helpful. I think more informative,
more educational to say this is the system that made
this phenomenon exist to begin with.

Speaker 2 (01:36:06):
Thanks so much again to Alyssa 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,

(01:36:27):
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.

(01:36:50):
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 Argiletta talking about what he left the Mormon Church.

Speaker 3 (01:37:01):
See you next week.

Speaker 11 (01:37:03):
One day, I was just praying. I got on my
knees and I said, God, if you're really there, and
if you really have a purpose for me, just please
take this from me. Please change because I don't want
to be a wish and I don't want to be
like this, and I don't know.

Speaker 10 (01:37:16):
Why I am.

Speaker 11 (01:37:17):
And I just basically heard what I understood is what
was always God told me, David, you need to stop
asking me this. You're asking me the wrong thing because
I don't intend to change you. You've been spending over
half of your life now praying about this, asking me
to change something that I don't intend to change.

Speaker 2 (01:37:42):
Sixteenth Minute is a production of fool Zone Media and
iHeart Bringim. It is written, posted and produced by me
Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichtman and Robert Evans,
You amazin Ian Johnson. It is our supervising producer and
our editor. Our theme song is by Sad thirty and Pet.
Shout outs to our dog producer Anderson, my cat's fleeing Casper,

(01:38:04):
and my pet rock Bert, who will outlive us all. Bye.