Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) - why are there so many mormon influencers? pt. 1

Episode Date: September 10, 2024

This week, Jamie takes a treacherous voyage into a complicated question -- why on Earth are there so many successful Mormon influencers? In this two-part series, she looks at how the origins and the values of the Mormon church deceptively align with the conservative "tradwife" influencing space of today... and yes, she will get into the tradwives. Contained herein: Joseph Smith shoving his face into a hat, a new Hulu reality series that is deceptively boring, Ballerina Farm, and the Mormons' early success in the conservative mommy blogging space. Tune in for part 2, where ex-Mormon Alyssa Grenfell poses a theory at how the Church of Latter Day Saints stays two steps ahead of it all.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports Network. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebeney, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebeney, and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. CoolZone Media. I'm not so bad when you turn up the lights, but I'll be perfect all of the time. To make me a start, let's take it too far, then give me one moment.

Six-two-minute a face Six-two-minute to fame Six-two-minute to face One more minute to me I'm not so bad when you're thinking of my mind Another character to say you're super-bye Welcome back to 16th Minute, the podcast where we talk to the internet's characters of the day and see how their 15 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 Mormon women at the top of the social media influence? piling pile. After a recent episode, I saw this question in the comments everywhere. I saw it on the 16th 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 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 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 will release on Thursday. Because to understand the root of why Mormonism and present-day Mormon mommy influencers are so successful, you've got to understand where the overlaps and 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, Alyssa Grenfell will unpack how Mormon mobs have stayed on top of internet influencing for the last 20 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. Mormonism is a 19th century religion formerly founded by Joseph Smith in 1833. He was born squarely in the middle of the Second Great Religious Awakening in the U.S., 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 try things. The Mormon faith, often called the LDS or Latter-day Saints, came up shortly after the Shakers movement. The LDS came to prominence around the same time as a number of black church movements, like that. like the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The LDS shares a little bit of DNA with spiritualism, and you can listen to my limited series Ghost Church for more about the history of that.

The mid-19th century was a big time of religious change and upheaval in the U.S. And after Mormonism took off, new religions continued to pop up. For example, Jehovah's 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 1830, but the religion's origin story connects to two incidents from the previous 10 years. One was from 1820 when Joseph was 14 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 1823, when a 17th, year old Smith, is said to have been visited by the Angel Moronai to repeat this calling and was also told 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 Moronai'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 Ozzy quality to the way that this translation is dictated. There's a bit of a wizard. There's magic stones, 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 in said hat.

But if you're a prophet, he explained, the stone lights up within the hat, and then you just dictate from there. This whole mystical plates thing also comes up in modern Scientology, where members in Florida are engraving the words of Elron Hubbard onto titanium plates as we speak. It also harkens back to Helena Blavatsky's note,

of the Akashic records of the late 19th century, which were said to be indestructible tablets of the astralight. So there's that. 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 Book of Mormon details the plight of a group of Jewish people in Jerusalem who escape the city before it's destroyed in 600 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 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. Okay, Jesus is a huge part of Mormonism and the book of Mormon details that after Jesus is resurrected in 33 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 white. His wife. His wife. He 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, and suffering. There are rigid gender roles. There's canonical homophobia. absurd racism that was later scaled back in order to accommodate growth and 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 about queerness, and that's an improvement from the mid-2010s,

when the children of queer parents were still not allowed to be baptized in the LDS. Anyways, in his time, Joseph Smith was, per 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 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 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 1831, just a year after the Indian Removal Act was passed and brought about 20 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 they're permitted to set up a city of their own called Navu basically Zion 2.0 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 LDS's most controversial policies, polygamy. And polygamy wasn't something that was allowed to everyone in the 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 40 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. The end of the line came for Joseph Smith in Illinois in 1844, 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 movies about it on YouTube that are really well-acted. And actual being from the unseen world. Exerting all my strength to call upon God.

I saw a pillar of light. All right, save it for the pulpit. After Smith's death, a guy named Brigham Young takes over, and the Mormons leave Navu in 1846, hiking pioneer style to what is now, present-day Utah, where in the next 10-odd years, they ignored the American government and practiced polygamy openly. That is, until this was going to prevent Utah getting statehood. Polygamy would be in LDS-sanctioned practice until 1890, but it was technically discontinued at that point to avoid clashing with existing laws around bigamy

passed in the 1860s and 70s. 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, 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 schools that separated native families and erased their culture, often killing children all the way into the 1990s. Today, there is still a very high number of Mormons in Utah, hovering somewhere around 40% in 2023. It's where Brigham Young University is and where some of the religion's most prominent influencers live today.

Ever heard of the real housewives of Salt Lake City? Salt Lake City, Utah is known for its magnificent mountains and world-class skis slopes. But what Salt Lake City is most known for is the Mormon Church. A quick lesson on how to be a good Mormon. Don't drink, don't drink. swear, treat your body like a temple. To be Mormon, we are taught

honesty and integrity. And most importantly, to watch for soon. You're going to go with Mary who's her grandfather. Well, there you go. 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 95% retention rate of the late 1980s. 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 surface here. It's an extremely complicated religion that's been around for nearly 200 years. Things I didn't mention include rituals, observances, restrictive religious underwear,

and for the very devout missions, which are 18 to 24-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 it pertains to today's episode, it's important to note that Mormonism is a fundamentalist religion that has been historically hostile to women, to queer people, and to anyone who isn't white. What is also important is that the Mormon Church has a shitload of money. A shitload. I had no idea. At present, the Mormon Church's net worth is estimated to be $265 billion.

For context, Disney is valued at 161 billion. million dollars. Much of this has to do with mandatory tithing, where church members are required to give 10% of their income back to the LDS. 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. Hello, my name is Elder Price, and I would like to share with you the most amazing book. Hello, my name is Elder Grant. It's a book about America a long, long time ago.

It has... Wow, I wonder why they didn't like that. But the LDS has also produced its fair share of successful entertainment acts. There are no Scientology, but Mitt Romney, David Archeletta, Donnie and Marie Osmond, and Gladys Knight is still a pretty impressive roster. The Aquabats are Mormon. and really think about that. And of course, a ton of currently successful influencers.

More when we come back. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebeney, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebeney, and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. On Pretty Private, we'll explore the untold experiences of women of color who faced it all. Childhood trauma, addiction, abuse, incarceration, grief, mental health struggles, and more. And found the shrimp to make it to the other side.

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Tune in on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth. Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you. Shock incarceration, also known as boot camps, are short-term, highly regimented correctional programs that mimic military basic training. These programs aim to provide a shock of prison life, emphasizing strict discipline,

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My name is Ed. Everyone say hello, Ed. from a very rural background myself my dad is a farmer and my mom is a cousin so like it's not like what do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club

I know it sounds like the start of a bad joke but that really was my reality nine years ago I just normally do straight stand-up but this is a bit different on stage stood a comedian with a story that no one expected to hear 22nd of July 2015 a 23 year old man

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 to the mainstream. The first story, as I write this, a new Hulu reality show that is about to debut about Mormon wife influencers. I love the Mormon church, but there are a lot of rules that we have to follow. We were raised to be these housewives for the men, serving their every desire. I have kids by the time you're 21. Or in my case, at 16.

Well, I'm like, this. We are trying to change the stigma of gender roles in 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 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. Have you talked to your bishop or the church about anything? No. No? How come? I don't know, because what if they're going to excommunicate me? This content got really popular under the hashtag, mom talk on TikTok in the early 2020s. And while this content promotes fundamentalist values around

gender roles, 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 athleteure. But the reason they have a 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 2022, 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 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. Soft swinging again is when you like just hug up but you don't go all the way.

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 tenets 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, 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 influencers 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 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 L.S. 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 our volunteer missionaries.

We understand the fascinating. 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 the sacred beliefs that they hold 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's 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, this is the latest step that actively Mormon influencers have made into mainstream culture. Again, 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 white... Okay, let's define tradwife. A tradwife 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 family's needs in the home. 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 2024 without having the word tradwife shoved in 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 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 even close. And I'm not going to tackle the topic of tradwife content wholesale in this episode. What you need to know is the term tradwife shouldn't be conflated with stay-at-home moms. Because while trad-wife creators are moms and at home with the children, making trad-wife content is, for my money, a separate job from the actual parenting. Because being a stay-at-home parent is a job, although most cultures are not conditioned to view that labor as valid.

Bradwife content looks beautiful, high on aesthetic, and low on practicality, showing only the aesthetically pleasing parts of the nuclear family and rarely any of the struggle or mess. 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-20th 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 much of what makes their content appealing is that an incredibly difficult lifestyle to achieve is made to seem easy, 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 action? accident, incalculable. Yeah, we just not.

The Tradwife space is predominantly white, but possibly more diverse than you might expect. There is an active Black Trat Life community who, according to a Refinery 29 piece by Nila Burton in late 2022, 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 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 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

Tadwife posts 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 effective. sold the idea of Donna Reed as a nuclear housewife and mother that lived in this effortless way, and in reality was a television show that was produced by its star, and that the real Donna Reed was a multi-hyphenate creative and a TV pioneer who was selling the idea of this housewife rather than actually living that life herself. Well, would you say, Mrs. Johnson,

that Donna worked hard in college? She worked hard. Up at seven and in the morning, all day in school, and jobs between classes to earn a little extra money, and then home to earn a room and board to help me with cooking and dishes and a little ironing, and then study until midnight. I don't think she ever had more than six hours sleep. From a social media perspective, the TradLife 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 2020s, left-leaning feminists who believe that the tradwife

trend harkens a dangerous period of regression as the American people's right to bodily autonomy slowly and surely slips into the very mid-century time frame that tradwives so often portray. And 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 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 to the backlash. Tadwife narratives fall neatly into this pattern, because for every bit of praise, 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, Bridget Todd, of There Are No Girls on the Internet, says, 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. If you're only looking within your own family, you're not looking hard enough at the larger issues at play. 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?

Projecting a message without explicitly stating it. Maybe the 50s 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 before a lot of necessary. civil rights were fought for, but online now. Ooh, tradwives, man, but let's bring it back to the Mormon 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 talkers are far from the only prominent Mormon content creators dominating social media today. The most popular, and so by extension, the most embroiled in controversy, is the second major Mormon influencer story of the summer, Ballerina Farm. More when we come back. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebeney, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebeney, and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around. around you. On Pretty Private, we'll explore the untold experiences of women of color who faced it

all. Childhood trauma, addiction, abuse, incarceration, grief, mental health struggles, and more, and found the shrimp to make it to the other side. My dad was shot and killed in his house. Yes, he was a drug dealer. Yes, he was a confidential informant, but he wasn't shot on a street corner. He wasn't shot in the middle of a drug deal. He was shot in his house, unarmed. Pretty Private isn't just a podcast, it's your personal guide for turning storylines into lifelines. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it.

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The offspring. Tim McRaw. Tickets are on sale now at AXS.com. Get your tickets today. AXS.com. Welcome back to 16th minute. 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-2010s.

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 when we left off, we were talking about the most famous Mormon-in-encompassing. influencer on the scene today. Ballerina Farm, where do we begin? All my male listeners are getting like a nosebleed.

Ballerina Farm is the username for a Mormon woman named Hannah Nealman, whose follower count on Instagram currently sits at 10 million. She was raised in the LDS and was a tremendously talented ballerina who got into and graduated from Juilliard. And she's cited over and over that she was the first undergrad in modern history to be pregnant while still at Juilliard because while there, she got married to fellow Mormon Daniel Nealman in 2011, the year before she graduated. So both the Nealmans grew up in big, devout Utah Mormon families. Hannah was one of nine, Daniel was one of 10. They got engaged after

only three weeks. And while Hannah was still in college, she also started competing in beauty passions. 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 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. Because it must be said, financially, these are incredibly privileged people. Daniel's father founded JetBlue, dude. They've got money. And he's so Mormon that he worked on Mitt Romney, failed presidential campaign in 2012.

But Daniel's dream is to move back to Utah and live on a farm, and they finally do so in 2017, buying the eponymous ballerina farm in 2018. By the time they moved on to the 328-acre farm, they had four kids. And when they moved on to the farm, Hannah Nealman'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 Tree. in early 2013, shortly after the birth of her first child Henry and her college graduation. And it's interesting that she intersects with a completely different era of successful

Mormon online influencers, because in the 2000s into the early 2010s, 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 usually adapt to new social. 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 be more

confessional. Writer Catherine Gizer 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 2020, where she mentions how Mormon women entering the mommy blog space changed it. To overlook the influence of Mormon and other Christian mommy bloggers on this shift would be a huge oversight. Mormon mommy bloggers in particular were enormously influential in establishing the aesthetic 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 adopters. Unlike the confessional early mommy blog, Mormon mother's blogs broadcast a clean and chipper vision of motherhood, replete with DIY crafting projects and coordinated family photo shoots. Many of the most successful Mormon bloggers from the mid-aughts, like Amber Fillarup Clark and Naomi Davis, went on to become mainstream lifestyle bloggers, and although their Mormon faith is no secret, its prominence receded as the years passed.

Early successful Mormon or ex-Mormon mommy bloggers included Heather Armstrong of Ducey, Amber Fillarup Davis, and Love Taza, a.k.a. Naomi Davis. Around this same time, successful family vloggers like Shay Carl and his family become really popular on YouTube in the late odds into the early 2010s. 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. Scary! 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 knackle community, with personalities like Stephanie Nielsen of the Nini Dialogs and C. Jane Kendrick of C. Jane Enjoy It, serving as early examples for their crossover appeal outside of the religion. There was even an award system developed for successful blogger knackle publications called The Niblets. This went from 2005 to 2017, 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 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,

these blogs, blogs, 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 2007. Apostle urges students to use new media. 200 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 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 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 said there were two men

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 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, he said. This feels like a skeleton key to a lot of Mormon content,

to 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 right, we're out proselyting. Doing it. In the heat. We just had our very first.

contact really of the day in person. What happened? Not interesting. Not interesting. Posting is all but baked into the religion in the modern day, probably in a sourdough 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. It's more of a soft pitch. 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 heeding to espouse a vision of an ideal Mormon family without

defensiveness or belligerence, it kind of makes sense. Okay, back to Ballerina Farm. Because Hannah Nealman 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 2010s 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 at all confessional and are far more defined by their aesthetic and this sense of sterile 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 2013. 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 once dance with, asked me if I was really happy to have given up those dreams for where I am today. Ha, I am so happy. 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 a beautiful baby boy who is full of purity. But there is a beautiful baby boy who is full of But there is nothing more rewarding than seeing my family. Here, right now, I really feel like the luckiest girl in the world. So, yep, I am happy.

Goal for the week. Only eat out once. 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 graphic. with, I love dance, but I love my husband and motherhood. Am I doing the right thing? 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 what ballerina farm content sounds like. Here's a post from this year. Today we're making some Turkish eggs. So I started off by straining some of Daniel's homemade yogurt in a cheesecloth and hung that so it could get a bit thicker. Then I washed my butter. I also like to run it under some cold water to get it really nice and washed. 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, 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 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. There's also quiet advertisements and 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 2021, Hannah had 200,000 Instagram. followers. Now, she has 10 million. So the days where Hannah was teaching dance 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 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 compete in the occasional pageant, winning the title of Mrs. America in 2021 and 2023. 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 why was she not in your head before? I think you guys just haven't been following her closely enough. 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,

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 their content by chance, there's nothing that screams,

these are Mormons, unless you know what to look for in terms of home decor. And this feels by design. You don't build an empire with the ninth most popular religion in the U.S., according to Pew Research, behind dominant Protestant and Catholic practices, behind Judaism, and behind other subcategories like atheist, agnostic,

and quote, nothing in particular, unquote. If you're six 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 rights and open abortion access, I understand 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 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 sat on said plane beside Hannah, making it the most expensive, predatory meat cute 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.

There are, of course, 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 nannies 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 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. 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 unquote, did it all. 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 Nealman as the villain of this story, because it's him who is constantly correcting, negging, and suppressing Hannah throughout the profile as written.

But ex-Morman 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-Morman YouTubers like Jordan and McKay

note that Daniel was playing the part of the devout Mormon husband 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 Nealman 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.

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 attack on our family and my marriage 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 Hannah Nealman has not been acknowledged by the LDS as a remarkable asset,

and she doesn't emphasize her religion as she once did. 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-Morman content. primarily on YouTube and TikTok as 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 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 2005, 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 the country's most popular religion, but is disproportionately represented on our social media, then what is there left to look to than money and the algorithm? Alyssa Grenfell explains in part two. See you then. 16th Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and IHeart Radio.

It is written, hosted, and produced by me, Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are Sophie Liechtenman and Robert Evans. The Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad 13. And pet shoutouts to our dog producer Anderson, my cats flea and Casper, and my pet rockbird, We will outlive us all. Bye.

Goodbye. Tune in to All the Smoke Podcast, where Matt and Stacks sit down with former first lady, Michelle Obama. Folks find it hard to hate up close. And when you get to know people, you're sitting in their kitchen tables, and they're talking like we're talking. You know, you hear our story, how we grew up, how Barack grew up, and you get a chance for people to unpack and get beyond race. All the Smoke featuring Michelle Obama. To hear this podcast and more, open your free IHeart Radio app,

search all the smoke and listen now. The U.S. Open is here and on my podcast, Good Game with Sarah Spain. I'm breaking down the players, the predictions, the pressure, and of course, the honey deuses, the signature cocktail of the U.S. Open. The U.S. Open has gotten to be

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