The book of Mormon influence

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Why are there so many Mormon influencers? Mom taught blew up overnight. I gained like 60,000 followers in a week. Like whoa whoa, like this is crazy. One of the biggest pop culture this week is that Taylor Frankie Paul is out as the bachelor. Here's the quick and dirty. She got the gig as lead in ABC's dating show after starring in a Hulu reality series. I created Mom Talk.

A group of Mormon moms making TikToks. The upcoming season of The Bachelorette was canceled after she got into a fight with the father of her youngest child. The police were called and an old video of her putting him in a headlock surfaced. Now, this may sound like typical reality TV fodder, but given the fact that Taylor Frankie Paul is Mormon. Headlining the Bachelorette was big news in and of itself.

But there are actually a ton of Mormons in the pop culture spotlight these days. Just turn on your TV. Dancing with the stars, getting a double dose of Mormon wives as a quick How to be a good Mormon. Don't drink, don't swear, treat your body like a temple. Or check out some of the latest lifestyle trends. We are making sourdough bread. We're gonna do a tutorial video of step-by-step how to make your first sourdough loaf. Have you heard about

Dirty sodas. Well I'm excited. Cheers. Cheers. Say, let's try dirty sodas. It's very interesting. And there's a pretty good likelihood you'll run across a woman affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I'm John Glenn Hill, and this week on Explain It to Me from Vox, what's behind the Mormon momentum and what happens when pop culture and religion collide? I'm Bridget Reed. I'm a features writer at New York magazine. I cover all all kinds of um

oddities and uh phenomena. Okay, so in your latest piece you write about the rise of Mormon influencers and T V stars, and you talk about a woman who really helped Pioneer influencing as we kind of know it today, who is she?

Yeah, that woman is um named Rachel Parcell, and she had a blog in the mid-2010s called Pink Peonies. And today I'm gonna show you guys my favorite accessories that I'm loving for spring. She was one of the first. True influencers on the internet, where instead of just having a blog, sharing her life, She was actually linking to the products she was buying, the clothes, um, how she was decorating her home, what she was buying her kids.

And then linking that stuff, actually making money off the links and and having followers kind of mimic her lifestyle. And there you have it, a fun idea to coordinate with your little girl or your little You can shop everything in the carousel below. Ayla, can you say bye? Bye. Explaining that now feels almost silly because it's endemic to how people live and make money online. But this was long before that was actually an income.

And you know, Rachel was a stay-at-home mom. She's practicing Mormon in in Utah and it really became a job for her because it was something she could do. um while being at home, uh, when she eventually had children. So she's kind of a um a pioneer, uh as the m the Mormons were in the state of Utah, um, of the influencing industry as we know it.

Yeah, it's interesting that Mormon women have been pioneering these trends and kind of the way social media works. Why are they so good at doing that? Mormonism as a religion, first of all, is is quite a gendered religion in that um women really do have a very specific role, which is as caretakers in the home. You could think of it as a quite traditional

um sort of domestic division, right? Where women take care of the kids, take care of the home, um and and that's really what they're supposed to be striving for. What we both were raised in is Spend the morning with me as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Livorday Saints or a Mormon mom. We have to be to church in twenty minutes and neither of my girls are even awake yet.

um, you know, who's baking the best thing to bring to the temple? Who is making their kids homemade Halloween costumes? This is something that's been going on for for years and years. And, you know, when you think about social media and kind of performing um who you are online, th that behavior is is learned behavior that Mormons are already so good at.

Um and that combined with a sort of unique history in Utah where a lot of people are really online. Utah has a very um specific uh role in the in the tech industry. Um that's maybe lesser known than someplace like California, but Um, Mormons embrace technology really quickly. And then the third thing is that they share. Mormonism is a very close knit

Um, religion. Many Mormons live in Utah, so they're they're also really closely kind of concentrated. Um, everybody knows everybody's um, you know, fellow members in their ward, their cousins, their grandparents. And so there's a lot of um talking to each other and following each other. You know, Mormons um have pretty strict codes of conduct. So they're also like always watching each other and looking what they're what each other um is up to.

uh following each other when, you know, someone's emulating good behavior. Women especially. So all of that, if you think about that, it that's also a really good way to describe following somebody online. You know, what what is this person up to? How's she spending her day? What's her nighttime routine? And how can I buy these products to do the same?

Does this influence really feel new? Yeah, I I think it comes in waves, you know, and and that's something that a there has been a lot of conversation about whether Mormon women in particular are in right now because we are riding kind of a conservative cultural turn. Um, you know, whether young people are reacting to

Uncertainty in the job market, uncertainty in in the economy and saying, you know, feminism that I was raised on isn't working for me. Am I turning towards something more traditional? In my reporting, I actually found that the pandemic played a really key role. in kind of breaking open something that was a bit of a niche. Um market. What the pandemic did was turn that territory that Mormon women are at home in, which is the home, right? The domestic sphere. And we were all suddenly.

stuck there and making content and that's whether you're a Mormon stay-at-home mom or whether you're like Gwyneth Paltrow. This sort of potato. So it kind of onboarded the rest of the world. to um Mormon style content making and now we're just living in that world. So I you know, the fact that now we have multiple TV shows about Mormon women I think is a product of

really normalizing this idea that homemaking is something worth watching and interesting, you know, not something retrograde or sort of old fashioned, right? You can be a modern woman and we can watch you like Wipe your countertop. You know, it feels a little strange, but that's it's that's fully we're swimming in, you know, their waters now.

You know, I think this is a savvy church and they realize that you know, a portrayal of modern women calling themselves Mormon, making a ton of money on SpawnCon, and they're beautiful and they're They have seemingly very glamorous lives and they're sort of doing it all, right? Cause they also are all moms. They're very enviable. These are lives that I think a lot of women might look at and say, Oh, I I would try that.

So, Mormons have hit the mainstream, and it's been nearly 200 years in the making. That's next. This is advertiser content brought to you by Stonyfield Organic. Our cows, them going out to pasture, they love it. They're so excited to go out. Every day they wait right at the door. In fact, we milk them and we just open up the laneway and let them just go right out to pasture. I'm Rhonda Miller Goodrich and I'm a dairy farmer in Cabot, Vermont.

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I'm JQ, back with Explain It to Me. Mormonism is at the forefront of American culture, but it wasn't always that way. To find out how we got here, I called up McKay Coppins. He's a staff writer at the Atlantic. He's also Mormon. And he says that members of his church weren't always embraced by the mainstream like they are now.

Yeah, the church was founded by Joseph Smith, um, who is this kind of young charismatic uh guy uh in upstate New York who claimed to have a vision from God and Jesus Christ. An angel visited Joseph. Instructed him to unearth an ancient record hidden in a nearby hill, which Joseph translated by the power of God. This ancient record was the Book of Mormon. Almost from the very beginning, the kind of fledgling religion.

religious movement that became known as the Mormons was uh subjected to a constant barrage of state sanctioned persecution. Um you know, the the early Mormons actually were constantly fleeing from one state to another. trying to find a place where they could uh kind of set up shop and worship and they were always driven out of wherever they they had landed. So uh over the course of several years in the early 1990s.

country they were driven from Ohio uh to uh Missouri to Illinois and Missouri actually the governor issued what was called an extermination order that oh wow uh yeah it demanded that more be uh removed from the state or killed and actually a militia ended up descending on a Mormon settlement and attacking them. And so f you know, really the the early decades of Mormonism was for

In kind of opposition to the American government, which saw them as a threat. And uh eventually Mormons were actually driven out of the country entirely into the desert where uh they settled in what is now Utah, but was at the time uh you know, a Mexican territory. And so th that is part of the DNA of of Mormonism that this church uh beacon of the best of what America had to offer was s roundly and often violently rejected by America itself.

Yeah, it's interesting. You know, you write in this piece um back in twenty twenty that

Mormonism is kind of the most American religion. What makes Mormonism uniquely tied to the American story compared to other religious traditions? Well, it it is, I think, one of the largest uh global religions that was founded in America. Most of the uh the large uh churches or even, you know, small religious movements that are growing were founded outside of the United States. But Uh also uh theologically, uh the church has always been kind of wrapped up in the American Project. Um

From early on, church leaders taught that America was a promised land that had been uh prepared to uh be the place where God could restore his his church to the earth. America The land of liberty was to be the Lord's. latter day base of operations For his restored church. And uh many of the kind of ideas uh in Mormon theology Are also drawn from uh, you know, the the sacred American texts, right? Mormons actually are taught that.

the uh founding documents, the the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution are divinely inspired, that America is a a special place that God has set apart. Um, and you know, there are are kind of deeper ideas in the theology, uh, like f agency, uh, free will, that you can without uh too much effort kind of connect to uh foundational American ideas like pluralism and democracy. Life, liberty, property. mankind's three great rights.

It it was around the twentieth century that Latter-day Saints started to think more deliberately about how they could be uh kind of initiated into American life. And certainly by the middle of the twentieth century, uh the church was making a pretty concerted effort to uh be accepted as part of mainstream American society. This is the story of a winter. ¡Suscríbete! A people very much like your next door neighbors. A people who number in the million. We'd like you to meet the Mormons.

you saw Latter day Saints joining the military and intelligence agencies in very large numbers. That's partly because a lot of them uh speak foreign languages from their mission service and because they live relatively clean lives that makes them attractive recruits to the uh like the CIA and FBI. But you also saw a lot of the church's messaging, its advertising, Trying to portray it as kind of an all American church, right? Mormons had big families.

were traditionally arranged where uh you know the men worked, the women stayed at home, they had lots of kids, um, they were very active in civic organizations like the Boy Scouts of America, and You know, I'd I don't want to say that this was all PR. I think a lot of it was genuinely rooted in the things that they uh believed were important about American civic life and family life and religious life.

But also th there was a a distinct desire to uh prove to America that they were kind of worthy of being considered American. But you know, a part of this was a a big part of this was in that the very end of the nineteenth century, the church uh disavowed polygamy, discontinued the practice. And uh and and that was kind of the beginning of the mainstreaming of Mormonism. Utah became uh an official state.

Um and from that point on, the church was kind of on this march of assimilation, trying to be uh accepted as a respectable and uh you know positive force in American religious life. Are there any fears that are inside the church that, you know, assimilation may be too much in the current American culture. I mean

I'm a Christian and one of the things I was raised if was with like you're not supposed to be of the world or in the world, like but I know. It's uh no, it's a it's a real it's an ongoing conversation in the church. I mean

I w same we got the same rhetoric, you know, that b we should be in the world but not of the world, right? That Um, I I remember one of the big defining talks given by a Latter-day Satan prophet early in the twenty-first century was by Gordon B. Hinckley, he was the president of the church.

He said that we are a peculiar people and that we should be a peculiar people. We should be apart from from the culture in some ways, even as we try to participate in American life. You are this peculiar people. You cannot with impunity follow practices out of harmony with values you have been taught. I challenge you to rise above the sordid elements of the world about you. I I do think that

There is a question now about, you know, whether that assimilation has gone too far. Right. Um, I remember five years ago when I wrote this story about uh about the church i entering its third century. And uh the thing that I I worried about and and I wrote about this in the piece was that um Not that Mormonism would uh, you know, drift into kind of r radical right-wing politics, w like much of the religious right. I'm actually more concerned about it.

becoming so obsessed with assimilation, so obsessed with uh approval from mainstream American society that it kind of loses sight of what it it it actually is, right? It's just that I I think it's it there is a little bit of discomfort in some quarters of the church that Um, Mormonism will come to be seen as all these sort of pop cultural indicators, the reality shows, the the weird soda cocktails that everybody drinks. A and then not actually be uh identified by their religious beliefs.

I think that uh at least some in the church, I think some church leaders are sort of grappling with what that means for them going forward. So there's this question of how religion and pop culture shape one another. And it's one we've been asking ourselves for a while now. That's coming up. Noelle King. Hey. Do me a favor. Give me like three reasons why you make today explain.

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The world is a very big and confusing place, Sean Rama's firm, and we want to help people understand it. Simple as that. That's a really good reason. Okay, in addition to that one, to make it too, like I wanted a compromise, I like the idea of of there being a new show that Like the experience of going through the news that feels like it's made by your fellow human who wants to understand the news and not like it's made by some.

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I'm JQ and we're back with Explain It to Me.

Mormonism is far from the only version of religious life we've seen on TV. My name is Diane Winston. I'm a professor of journalism, communication, and religion at the University of Southern California. Streaming has really um opened up the market for shows about religion, spirituality, faith, morality.

And that's because you can have niche audiences watch a program as different when you had analog television and you wanted to get the lowest common denominator, so you get more people, but that's not a problem anymore. In those old days, in analogue days, religion was often deemed as too controversial or too marginal.

And so you didn't want to offend anyone and you picked shows with the largest possible audience like Touched by an Angel or Highway to Heaven. You wanted the truth, I'm giving it to you. I'm an angel. Not one of the best, but I try. But now, given the fact that religion is everywhere, whether we're looking at politics, social life, cultural life.

It's not so surprising that we see more programs with religious characters and religious themes. Are the shows that we're seeing explicitly religious or shows that just happen to have religious characters or a subplot or themes?

We're seeing both shows that are more explicitly religious and shows that have religious themes. The most exciting example is probably the chosen. God loves the world in this way. That he gave his only son. And whoever believes in him shall not perish. But have eternal life. The Chosen is a show about Jesus and it's sort of how he lived his life. It's not supernatural, it's not flashy, it's just showing Life in Palestine circa zero to thirty-three

common era and Jesus' people is just like his posse. So it's very down to earth. Do you want to be healed? Get up. Pick up your mat. And walk. Now, when Dallas Jenkins first had this idea, there was no way he could fund it, so he decided to crowdsource it. He's raised nearly a hundred million dollars for production. And this covered the initial seasons, but lately

he has studios willing to back him because the show has been such a hit. So obviously big corporations are seeing there's money in religion and more shows like The chosen women of the Bible, House of David, you know, there's a lot in the Bible you can make stories about. What about shows that borrow from religious themes without actually being about religion? Are we seeing a lot of that as well? Yeah.

Representations of religion are hard to do, even though I said they're more in terms of niche audiences. A lot of times you don't wanna go too heavily into a religious character unless they're a biblical character, because it could just turn people off. But it's easier to take the themes that tie religions together. Religions care about good versus evil. They care about redemption. They care about sacrifice. They care about developing personal ethics.

And so we are seeing a lot of shows like that now. Think about the pit. If you ask the pit, Doctor Robbie is sort of a he's Jewish in the show, but he's almost Jesus like. Because he's long suffering, he feels everybody's pain, he wants to do good for everybody. This place will break your heart. But it is also full of miracles, and that is a testament to all of you coming together and doing what we do best. So he's a Jesus y type character. Even if you think about Carmi in the bear.

He's grumpier than Dr. Robbie, but he's also bearing the suffering of everybody. In that last season when he says he's gonna quit so everyone else has better time at the restaurant. I believe in you more than I've ever believed in myself. Why? Because you're the bear. That's sort of a very sacrificial figure. So those ideas of redemption, of suffering, of salvation often play out in popular culture.

Earlier on the show we talked about how Mormons have used social media and you can see that a little bit in the glorification of the trad wife life. I wonder if Pop culture can sanitize religion or sort of whitewash it or sort of make it appear, I don't know, different than it actually is when you're in it. Whether or not pop culture can sanitize or whitewash religion depends a lot on which what kind of pop culture you're talking about and who has control of it.

So influencers on social media, and I'm thinking of Ballerina Farm in particular, is a good example of someone who is great at whitewashing her religion. We all know she's Mormon. There are certain trappings of Mormonism that run through her clips. But we mostly think of her as a beautiful woman with a lovely family who sells wonderful products. That's a very different view of the religion than the recent movie Heretic with Hugh Grant.

where he was out to entrap two young Mormon missionaries. Do you believe in God? Because somebody told you at an impressionable age that God is real, despite having doubts as you got older, despite And the difference there is a studio is making the heretic, and so they can do whatever they want. want to whitewash religion necessarily because that could bring up a lot of of angry protests. Mm but neither do they want to really

crucify it to use another religious term because that would make people pissed off also. So I think people on social media are much more apt to whitewash a religion than people who are y working under a corporate system. Religion is all about what am I doing here? What's the purpose of my life? Who are my people? And these are the questions that make up the best stories in the world.

That's why the Quran and the Bible and the Indian epics have been around for thousands of years because there are stories about people and how they decide to live their lives and how they confront all the things that happen and how they choose. And since that is so fundamental to the human experience, almost every show has some aspect of religion or spirituality in it. I'm trying to convert people. Have I converted you? Yeah. For this week, if you want to support the work we do here at B.

consider becoming a Vox member. Members get a ton of perks. Listening to this podcast ad-free. Head over to Vox.com/slash members to find out more. We're working on an upcoming episode about the word on everyone's lips affordability. Are there day to day items that That feel way more expensive than they used to be? Are there things that cost way more than you ever thought they would? Give us a call at 1-800-618-8545 or send an email to askvox atvox.com.

This episode was produced by Dustin DeSoto and Avashai Artsy. It was edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and engineered by Patrick Boyd. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. I'm your host. Thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you soon. Hej, det är jag från riksbyggen här. fixas i BRF-styrelsen. Som ska planeras, energikostnader som sticker i höjden och allt det här. Hasta is for buff.