I love Mormons. That is to say, more accurately, I am obsessed with Mormons. Their presence in the American landscape of religion, their cultural impact, their proclivity for becoming mainstream influencers and TikTok stars in a way that’s never quite caught on with other American Christian sects. I like to see what they’re up to; I like to read about their culture and distinct religious practices. I love the HBO show Big Love and the Jon Krakauer book Under the Banner of Heaven. When I was shopping for a wedding dress, I kept accidentally following Mormon-based wedding influencers because it turns out I like Mormon wedding dresses, all long sleeves and full lace. My partner sends me photos of Mormon missionaries in their white shirts and black ties knocking door-to-door in our upstate New York town captioned simply: “mormons!” I feel seen, I feel loved. He knows me.
So, I love Mormons and that means I love, more than almost anything, Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. I love their excessive hair extensions, their drastic plastic surgery, their earnest commitment to saying “gosh” and “oh freak,” their outsized SUVs, and their discussions of Mormon garments and the taboo of sex in the LDS church. As a Midwesterner, they remind me of girls I grew up with; there’s a comforting familiarity with the type of girl who was most certainly not my friend in high school. But like me, these are women that have eaten a pulled pork sandwich in a church basement. There’s something deeply Middle America about these wives: all married young, birthed children young, drinking immense amounts of Poppi sodas in their nondescript model homes. Their taste is tacky, but it’s home.
What sticks with me most in the afterglow of my dazed, ecstatic binges of the show is not a TikTok dance or staged confrontation over dirty sodas in an outsized Styrofoam cup. It is the arrest footage from season 1 of MomTok influencer cum reality star Taylor Frankie Paul, absolutely plastered despite the show’s ongoing assertion that “Mormons don’t drink,” shouting at her boyfriend/baby-daddy-to-be: “You don’t own me.” What I find most haunting in this exclamation—recorded via police body cam—is how quickly she comes to this conclusion, summarizing what I think is the accidental thesis of the show.
Taylor Frankie Paul, arguably the most successful of the group, is the only girl to show reluctance about marriage.” Given the opportunity to remarry, she instead chooses to face the social shame of pregnancy outside of marriage. This leads to a painful scene in which Paul’s entire family, excluding her sister, chastises her for having sex before marriage, and blaming her for her boyfriend’s infidelity. It is Paul’s fault, they assert, that he strayed. She gave it up too soon, she should be ashamed.
I text my partner: “I think I don’t want to be Mormon.”
There’s a comforting familiarity with the type of girl who was most certainly not my friend in high school.
He responds immediately. “I really never thought I’d hear you say that.”
I can’t tell if I’m joking anymore, about wanting to be Mormon or not wanting to be Mormon. I’m too committed to the bit, my hyperbole telling on me.
None of the women who lead the show seem happy. Season 1 villain Whitney returns after having fled to Utah following the discovery of her husband’s Tinder account. The pressure to conceive leaves season 2 villain Demi sobbing alone on a girls’ trip. Everyone remains married, trying for more babies, driving their SUVs around the stark Utah landscape, telling everyone that everything is fine. What the show presents is a simple aesthetic mired in the complexity of a life defined by subjugation.
Twenty-five-year-old mother of two Jen Affleck’s unexpected pregnancy is one of the bleakest things I’ve ever seen on television, not least of all because her super blonde husband is the most Mormon looking man I can imagine. And, no shade to Jen, but this is coming from someone who’s biggest high school crush grew up to be a Midwestern Lutheran minister. Jen and the blonde Affleck’s marriage is an absolute bummer. The discovery of her pregnancy leaves Jen so depressed and physically debilitated that the show chooses to stop filming her. Pre-pregnancy Jen and her husband are briefly separated due to a very funny saga involving a Chippendales show in Vegas. During their many on screen arguments, Jen begs her husband to see her as “still the mother of your children.” This is a clear microcosm of the white Christian woman begging any man in white America to remember and acknowledge her personhood. And if not her personhood, then at the very least, her motherhood. Jen does not want to be pregnant again, despite not using birth control in any form. There is, of course, no discussion of other options she might consider.
In the brief separation, Jen achieves a degree of agency. For the first time ever, she becomes the primary—perhaps only—breadwinner financing her family’s life through her TikTok success. The most pressing struggle of the TikTokMormon wives seems to be the expectation that they must be a religious “trad wife” in contrast to a life of financial independence. It’s the potential for the riches of brand deals and major TV shows that tempt these women to step, however microscopically, out of line. That is, like Jen, until they get pregnant. Which begs the question: is there an actual exit ramp for these women from the control of religious faith, and the ownership of men?
The answer seems to be no.
There is an interesting divide in my life: those intrigued by the show, and those who want nothing to do with it. Of my close friends, the handful that watch come from a similar background to me, also from the rural Midwest. I wonder if they too are reminded of their high school’s cheerleaders. Though I was raised by largely non-religious parents, American Christianity was inescapable in my childhood in smalltown rural Iowa. My dad is firmly anti religion, my mom less so, both aging hippies who sought to correct their own Catholic upbringing. I went to church with my babysitter’s family regularly, notably without my parents, and I liked the church plays and memorizing bible verses. My first Christmas, I played baby Jesus in the nativity.
Our extended family, with which we are close, is partially Catholic and partially the distinct American sect of Apostolic Pentecostal. The women wear long skirts, long braids, no makeup, no jewelry of any kind or other forms of bodily adornment. Like the Mormons they don’t drink, don’t smoke, and don’t have sex before marriage. In my own family, my closest cousins love the show as much as me, similarly raised on the secular spectrum, but close enough to the Apostolic Pentecostal branch of our family to be interested. Perhaps they see the same mixture of comfort and intrigue, which is ironic since my religious cousins would never watch this—their branch of Christianity does not allow them to watch TV at all.
Despite the supposed separation of church and state, religion ruled my public-school education. We weren’t allowed to celebrate Halloween at school because parents complained on religious grounds. Christian teens regularly gathered and held hands praying around the flagpole at the high school in the mornings before class. To what end? I don’t know. One of my friends dated a guy who casually invited her to “see you at the pole” for a morning prayer. I think she said yes, more for the excuse to publicly hold hands than anything else. I’ve since baffled my East Coast college friends when explaining we never had afterschool activities on Wednesday night because of church. Turns out, Wednesday night church—church twice weekly,or more—is not the American cultural staple I thought it was.
American Christianity was inescapable in my childhood in smalltown rural Iowa.
My partner and I have argued about whether we would send our future children to vacation bible school. Like my parents, I am not personally religious, but it feels like a part of my cultural heritage. One of my best friends from my small hometown agreed, saying that for some reason she wanted her daughter to experience our cultural identity via eating pulled pork in a Midwestern church basement. It feels confusingly right. My partner, in contrast, is firmly against vacation bible school. He was raised religious, attending Catholic school from K through 12. He tells me the reason I’m so obsessed with religion is because I was raised only adjacent to it. He’s right. I have never been bored by religion, only held at an arm’s length, curious to know if people actually believe all this stuff. Or are they just in it for the pulled pork and the church basements?
I recommend the show to a Canadian friend of mine and she says she tried it but found it vaguely revolting. “I just hated all of them right away,” she says. This confirms my suspicion that the enjoyment of this show might be a distinctly American pastime. Because Mormonism is the most American of religions, a bizarre outgrowth of the American pioneer history, native slaughter and racism baked into their very existence. With its mixture of frontier values, Puritan ideals, and worship of super-store capitalist culture, Mormonism is a microcosm of America itself. Of the non-indigenous religions founded in the United States, none is more famous, more iconic, more widespread than Mormonism. No one else has a globally successful Broadway musical from the creators of South Park. And nothing is more iconically American than being parodied by South Park. No other American religious sect has had a major presidential candidate with as much mainstream appeal as Mitt Romney. There is no Mormonism without America, and I’d say there is no modern America without Mormonism. Plus, they wear funny underwear, and they don’t drink coffee.
I recently took a copy of The Book of Mormon from a motel room in Tennessee, the way I think most people should find and receive copies of The Book of Mormon, a certain charm of the rural American motel room. I lay across the plastic motel comforter and tried reading it. I found it incomprehensible. In contrast, I read the opening of the King James Bible in that same motel room, and the writing is slick, polished, and clear. A thousand years of edits has done wonders for the line-by-line writing. The Book of Mormon from page one is baffling. I, of course, took the book with me, and the rabbit hole of my Mormon obsession deepens.
To justify my love of the show, I talk around my fixation with Mormons as a whole and, on a more micro level, my obsession with the marriage and gender relations of these somewhat “progressive” Mormons. They preach that they are working together to fight the patriarchy of the LDS church, despite the fact that they never intend to fight the patriarchy or the control of men in their lives. But who am I kidding? Those are the boring parts of the show. I’m not here for these women to overthrow the patriarchy that dominates their everyday lives. I’m here for this lifestyle. I would enjoy the show less if they were less Mormon. In fact, I wouldn’t watch it at all.
There is no Mormonism without America, and I’d say there is no modern America without Mormonism.
As the editor of this essay reminds me, I am allowed to consume media that I don’t agree with or necessarily support, though my days in the Twitter trenches of the 2014-2020 make me feel otherwise. I’m also aware I have a lingering personal preachiness that is tiresome to many around me about media I don’t deem worth engaging with for moral reasons, looking down my nose at anyone who wants to watch an Ansel Elgort movie. Don’t they know and care that he is a bad person? But does my dislike of those movies come down more to the fact that I just…think he’s not a good actor? More than I think he’s a predator? Debating whether or not the women of #MomTok are better or worse than the various male predators of Hollywood I try to avoid is a fool’s errand (spoiler: these women are better). I bring this up because my love is not guilt free. I can justify my viewing as cultural critique, an attempt to understand the other side of American life or even supporting women in conservative settings who come into their own. I could blow hot air all day about how I’m supporting these women finding their own voice, agency, and financial freedom within a system I don’t support. Which is real #feminism, isn’t it!?
But I know, and you know, that’s not what I’m watching. That’s not why anyone is watching. If that were true, we would all be engaging with media that’s far less titillating and far more informative. We would be donating to supportive groups online, instead of sending snapchats about the Mormon Wives reunion and renewing our Hulu subscriptions. We would be better people, probably, but we would be bored. We can enjoy the titillating, take a break from our morality for the sake of entertainment as a treat. But when do we go from watching the lotus eaters to becoming them? When do we go from mocking them to wanting to be them? And is mocking them, which I have in this essay, perhaps to an unfair degree, the cynical, superior, liberal defense to a life that, in many ways, looks appealing?
It is not a noble pursuit, my love of the Mormon Wives. I don’t love them ironically; I love them actually. It is less that I am conflicted about liking something problematic, but that I feel conflicted about why I like it so much. I see the appeal of being controlled, of having my life dictated to me. I fantasize about not working (or, to be more accurate, working in a vague influencer sense) while making homemade graham crackers and having nonsensical arguments with female frenemies. That is my idea of heaven. The burden of the modern-day liberal is that we have to spend so much time caring. We care because we have a human soul and a brain and an idea of what’s going on in the world and an obligation to care for the other souls on our planet, but wouldn’t it be so much easier if we didn’t? Wouldn’t life be easier if I wrote off the troubles of the world and reveled in my own privilege? If I lived in a giant house in Utah and let myself off the hook for the world’s troubles? Which I would be allowed to do only because I am a CIS straight white woman with Christian-passing privilege. And if what I said above was true, that Mormonism is the most American of religions, am I not just now fantasizing about being a white American? Is the fantasy that I am embracing my existing white American identity and privilege now without the burden of liberal guilt? I spend so much time decrying my own American-ness, resenting my monoculture Christian Midwestern roots, that I’ve turned my brain into a pretzel trying to justify my liberal guilt with my love of this show.
My desire and my fantasy is to think my actions and choices do not have consequences, as long as I behave in the strict regulation of my husband’s dictation. Because then they are barely even my actions or choices. What millennial woman wasn’t particularly haunted, and honestly turned on by the scene in season 2 of Fleabag where Phoebe Waller-Bridge explains to the hot priest that she wants someone to tell her what to do all the time. She does not want to make decisions anymore; she wants someone else to do it. Is this not what the Mormon Wives are doing? They are told what to wear, what to do, what to eat, and how to spend their days— by their temples, their bishops, and by social media where they make their fortune. It is no coincidence that the appeal in both Fleabag and The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is religion and the subjugation of women. Waller-Bridge’s monologue is given in an actual confessional. Here I myself confess: give me the freedom from myself, the freedom from choice. I beg in my darkest, most secret thoughts.
I don’t love them ironically; I love them actually.
So, here is the truth: I’m not observing the system from the outside, I am the system. I am comforted by my own nightmares, the things I hated about growing up in the Midwest, the white Christian monoculture that led to small mindedness, fear of the outsider, and oppression of women. My imagined flirtation with the trad wife fantasy is as much a fantasy of giving up my own rights. It’s terrifying to love this show, to see what is so clearly illustrated— that these women’s lives are not their own.
But the glow of the phone screen, the TV screen, still pulls me in, promising sourdough bread and aesthetically pleasing long-sleeved dresses, promising again and again: this would be simpler.
