Today, Explained - The book of Mormon influence

Episode Date: March 22, 2026

From TikTok to reality TV, Mormons are having a big moment in pop culture. This episode was produced by Dustin DeSoto and Avishay Artsy, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Jonquilyn Hill. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The worst advice I have ever gotten is stay in your lane. I am Rabin-Ur-Soon, athlete, executive, founder, and staying in my lane would have kept me small. Don't protect other people's comfort at the cost of your growth. This week on Project Swagger, my strategies for embracing your multi-hyphenate existence. Tune in now at Project Swagger, wherever you get your podcasts. This week on Net Worth and Chill, we're live from South by Southwest with California Governor Gavin Newsome. behind viral TikToks and one of the most talked about figures in American politics. After years of leading the country's most populous state, Governor Newsom is getting candid about why rent is too

high, why groceries cost too much, and how the government is and isn't showing up for everyday Americans. Get ready for an unfiltered conversation about the wealth gap, housing, AI's impact on the economy, and what it'll actually take to build a better financial future. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com slash your rich BFF. Why are there so many Mormon influencers? Mom Talk blew up overnight. I gained like 60,000 followers in a week. Like, whoa, whoa, whoa, like this is crazy.

One of the biggest stories in pop culture this week is that Taylor Frankie Paul is out as The Bachelorette. If you don't know who that is, 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 Talks. It's 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 surface. 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. 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. A quick lesson on 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. Here you go. Cheers, America.

Let's see. Let's try dirty soda. 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 futures writer at New York Magazine.

They cover all kinds of oddities and... phenomena. Okay, so in your latest piece, you write about the rise of Mormon influencers and TV 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 named Rachel Parcell, and she had a blog in the mid-2010s called Pink Piannees. And today I'm going to 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, how she was decorating her home, what she

was buying her kids, and then linking that stuff, actually making money off the links, 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 boy. You can shop everything in the carousel below. Ida, can you say bye? Bye, Mom. 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 Utah. And it really became a job for her because it was something she could do while being at home when she eventually had children. So she's kind of a pioneer. as the Mormons were in the state of Utah 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 quite a gendered religion in that women really do have a very specific role, which is as caretakers in the home.

You could think of it as a quite traditional sort of domestic division, right, where women take care of the kids, take care of the home. And that's really what they're supposed to be striving for. We're going to church every Sunday with our girls. And we really do plan to kind of just carry on what we both were raised in. Spend them morning with me as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ, Salvation Saints, or a Mormon mom. We have to be to church in 20 minutes and neither of my girls are even awake yet. Mormon women have long been acceptable. homemakers, 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 years and years. And, you know, when you think about social media and kind of performing who you are online, that behavior is learned behavior that Mormons are already so good at. And that combined with a sort of unique history in Utah where a lot of people are really honest. Utah has a very specific role in the tech industry that's maybe lesser known than someplace like California. But Mormons embrace technology really quickly. And then the third thing is that they share. Mormonism is a very close-knit religion.

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

So all of that, if you think about that, that's also a really good way to describe following somebody online. You know, what is this person up to? 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 think it comes in waves, you know, and that's something that 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, you know, whether young people are reacting.

to uncertainty in the job market, uncertainty 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 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.

Today I'm going to make this sort of potato, broccoli, egg thing. So it kind of onboarded the rest of the world to Mormon-style content making. and now we're just living in that world. So, 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 fully, we're swimming in, you know, their waters,

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 SponCon. And they're beautiful and they're, they have seemingly very glamorous lives and they're sort of doing it all, right? Because 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 would try that. So Mormons have hit the mainstream. And it's been nearly 200 years in the making. That's next.

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Upwork.com. With Upwork Business Plus, you can access the top 1% of talent on Upwork and with AI-powered shortlisting. Think about it. I'm JQ, back with Explaigne 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, who is this kind of young charismatic guy in upstate New York who claimed to have a vision from God and Jesus Christ. An angel visited Joseph and 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 religious movement that became known as the Mormons was subjected to a constant barrage of state sanctioned persecution. You know, the early Mormons actually were constantly fleeing from one state to another, trying to find a place where they could kind of set up shop and worship, and they were always driven out of wherever they had landed.

Over the course of several years in the early 19th century, they were driven from Ohio to Missouri, to Illinois. And Missouri actually, the governor issued what was called an extermination order that, yeah, it demanded that Mormons be removed from the state or killed. And actually, a militia ended up descending on a Mormon settlement and attacking them. And so, you know, really the early decades of Mormonism was forged in kind of opposition to the American government, which saw them as a threat. And eventually Mormons were actually driven out of the country entirely into the desert where they settled in what is now Utah, but was at the time a Mexican territory. And so that is part of the DNA of Mormonism that this, church that saw itself as kind of a beacon of the best of what America had to offer was roundly and often violently rejected by America itself.

Yeah, it's interesting. You know, you write in this piece back in 2020 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 is, I think, one of the largest global religions that was founded in America. Most of the large churches or even, you know, small religious movements that are growing were founded outside of the United States. But also, theologically, the church has always been kind of wrapped up in the American project. From early on, church leaders taught that America was a promised land that had been, prepared to be the place where God could restore 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 many of the kind of ideas in Mormon theology are also driving. from, you know, the sacred American texts, right? Mormons actually are taught that the founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution are divinely inspired, that America is a special place that God has set apart. And, you know, there are kind of deeper ideas in the theology, like agency, free will, that you can, without too much effort, kind of connect to.

foundational American ideas like pluralism and democracy. Life, liberty, property, mankind's three great rights. It was around the 20th century that Latter-day Saints started to think more deliberately about how they could be kind of initiated into American life. And certainly by the middle of the 20th century, the church was making a pretty concerted effort to be accepted as part of mainstream American society. This is the story of a way of life and of a people. A people very much like your next-door neighbors.

A people who number in the media. 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 speak foreign languages from their mission service and because they live relatively clean lives. That makes them attractive recruits to the places 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. They were traditionally arranged where, you know, the men worked, the women's.

stayed at home. They had lots of kids. They were very active in civic organizations like the Boy Scouts of America. And, you know, 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 believed were important about American civic life and family life and religious life. But also, there was a distinct desire to prove to America that they were kind of worthy of being considered American. But, you know, part of this was, a big part of this wasn't at the very end of the 19th century, the church disavowed polygamy, discontinued the practice. And that was kind of the beginning of the mainstreaming of Mormonism.

Utah became an official state. And from that point on, the church was kind of on this march of assimilation, trying to be accepted as a respectable and, you know, positive force in American religious life. Are there any fears 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 a, no, it's a real, it's an ongoing conversation in the church.

I mean, we got the same rhetoric, you know, that we should be in the world but not of the world, right? That I remember one of the big defining talks given by a Latter-day Saint-Prophet early in the 21st century was by Gordon B. Hinkley, 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 the culture in some ways, even as we try to participate in American life. You of 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. And I do think that there is a question now about, you know, whether that assimilation has gone too far, right?

I remember five years ago when I wrote this story about the church entering its third century. And the thing that I worried about, and I wrote about this in the piece, was that not that Mormonism would drift into kind of radical right-wing politics like much of the religious right. I'm actually more concerned about it becoming so obsessed with assimilation, so obsessed with approval from mainstream American society, that it kind of loses sight of what it actually is, right? It's just that I think there is a little bit of discomfort in some quarters of the church that Mormonism will come to be seen as all these sort of pop cultural indicators. the reality shows the weird soda cocktails that everybody drinks, and then not actually be identified by their religious beliefs. I think that 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. In communities across Canada, hourly Amazon employees earn an average of over $24.50 an hour. Employees also have the opportunity to grow their skills and their paycheck by enrolling in free skills training programs for in-demand fields, like software development and information technology. Learn more at aboutamazon.ca. This week on version history, our chat show about the best and worst and most important products in the history of technology.

We're talking about a gadget that was meant to be used on phone lines and was eventually used by the military and then finally changed the music business forever. That's right. Of course, I mean the vocoder. The thing that let us all play our voices like an instrument and change the way that we think about our voices. We have a really fun guest. We have a really fun story to tell. All of that is on version history on YouTube and wherever you get podcasts. 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 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 analog 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, culture 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 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, that 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 33 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 $100 million 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, because 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 want to 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 watch the pit, Dr. 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 Karmie in the bear, he's grumpier than Dr. Robbie, but he's also bar,

the suffering of everybody. In that last season, when he says he's going to quit, so everyone else has better time at the restaurant. I believe in you more than I've ever believed in myself. 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 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 seeing evidence to the contrary your whole lives. And the difference there is a studio is making the heretic, and so they can do whatever they want. And I don't think most studios want to whitewash religion necessarily because that could bring up a lot of angry protests. 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 working under a corporate system. Basically, 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 to be moral or not. 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. That's it for this week. If you want to support the work we do here at Vox, consider becoming a Vox member. Members get a ton of perks like 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 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 1-800-618-8-58-45 or send an email to AskVox at Vox.com. This episode was produced by Dustin De Soto and Avashai Artsy. It was edited by Amina Alsatty, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and engineered by Patrick Boyd. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy.

I'm your host, John Glenn Hill. Thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you soon. Bye!