why are there so many mormon influencers? pt. 2

a frustratingly complicated question. 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. Think about

another ongoing trend that's a whole subject unto itself. When I'd like to dedicate more time 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 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 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. You tell the people you love they're an a Peermid scheme, and they go, no, I'm not, You're just a hater. I own my own business. I'm very successful.

ton of customers. It's not quite that simple, but you see 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 Mormon Wives, and Ballerina farm, a ten million follower influencer who presents 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.

The more I think about 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 part two, shall we? 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 was raised and 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, and 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 gay marriage, and for Alissa, 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 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 tradwife content does play into the algorithm as far as esthetics, but it's very possible at 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.

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 thousand views on that video. When Google or an other 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 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 something 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 advertisers are looking for.

to join the church. And what's more, when she into the amount that she was making on YouTube and the amount of algorithmic preference she was getting less than 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.

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. 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 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 money into ad spend around the term Mormon.

And now I make content around what you know, the history of the churches, current church teachings, the doctrine, personal experiences, and that is kind of the focus of what I put on the Internet.

is your divine role from God. And even you know, there's something called a 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 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 most important things about your future and it's all encompassed around motherhood and wivehood. 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 true 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 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 that 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. 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 you.

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 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.

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, 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

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 using to kind of walk through life, only to realize that they were either wrong or that if I had made my own decisions about 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. 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 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, didn't fall beneath the floor, everything proceeded as normal. It was very underwhelming. Most sins after you leave the church, most sins of the 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 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 stop their conversations and just lean in to be like, wait,

are you talking about leaving a cult right now? And like I could. It was kind 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 to someone who's never interfaced with the religion, it is probably ten to twenty times stranger and odder than people who are familiar with it. So that kind of surprise on people's faces has been healing from me in some way 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 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.

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 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, they and so because they told me about this, that's how I know that they are kind of foreseeing or foretelling the future, because they're warning me of this thing that I shouldn't look at.

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 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 tradwife movement in specificity, I guess because prior to that, I just see, you know, 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 thousands, 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 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 interesty. Mormon's love findrist to in my in my experience, So I think that that is what has kind of kicked back against tradwives 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 for my husband or 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 curated 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 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 loudly and speak often about their religion.

that something you've also noticed. 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.

It's almost like a graph where the bigger they get, the less they mentioned 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 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 a lot about Mormonism because Mormons will follow you because they know you're 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, I think if they see Mormon content and don't know what'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 especially they don't like that they're trying to kind of co opt. 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 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 that a brand is large enough that it's kind of reaching a mass audience.

But I don't know, like, 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.

wore a back brace for my entire adolescence. And now we continue our conversation with ex Mormon influencer and great theory Haver Alyssa Grenfell as I was sort of learning more about a recent subject I was covering. I found that out at 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 about like why are there so many successful Mormon women in the influencing space? And

I was like, oh, I have no idea. And you mentioned sort of the most popular answer given, which is what I was encountering a lot, which is that young Mormon women are taught to journal a lot. So that's probably why they're successful at influencing. It doesn't not make sense, but felt just like a very incomplete answer. Could you take me through what made you start asking this question? Because people were telling you that they were getting ads for the Mormon Church on your content.

would explain the phenomenon. And it's I think it's you know, I think something like women 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 like learning YouTube. I think my first YouTube video is 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 a 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 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 Church are 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 their ad spend 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 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 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 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 smoothies terms, that the ad spend was as high as very expensive 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 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.

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, 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 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 how irregular.

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 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.

they're making three times as much. So a woman, a woman with her kids in New York, 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 the lower cost of living right, and lower cost of living, and you know, probably her husband already has a job 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. 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 looking started looking to the church, considering getting a visit from 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 with 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, 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.

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.

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, 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 in the Mormon Chapter Nacle Choir where they did his slow zoom on him. And he was another poster child and another famous person. 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 out as leaving the church and now has written a song about you know, 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 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

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 blog sphere of the early two thousands through the Instagrammers and YouTubers of today by giving them ad revenue.

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 kind of one of the first they've talked about it.

I mean, not that they are literally holding the mouse and clicking the clicks, but in that they are exercising I think a pretty broad ad spend, the way that they are actively petitioning members to go on and share, 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 their free Bible is one of the first organic things you see on Google is for to depress 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, 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 they have whole departments hired for this kind of thing.

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.

feel like tradwives didn't invent motherhood. Tradwives didn't invent being 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 not 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 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's not something that's quite as 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 ro versus Wade, and it's about all of these different cultural forces.

influence 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. 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 why he left the Mormon Church. See you next week.

me this. You're asking me the wrong thing because I don't intend to change, and 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.