This article was first published in the State of Faith newsletter. Sign up to receive the newsletter in your inbox each Monday night.
Nearly 15 years ago, the buzz about Latter-day Saints in the media revolved around Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign and the Broadway musical “The Book of Mormon.”
This time, the spotlight has turned to a constellation of mostly Utah-based social media influencers who claim ties to Utah’s predominant religion and who have been featured on screens and feeds with their clothing and lifestyle brands, rambunctious broods and makeup routines.
They’ve also been starring in Hulu’s TV series “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” and on ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars.” One has been performing in the musical “Chicago,” while another will soon be on “The Bachelorette.”
A recent season promo shows “Secret Wives” influencer Taylor Frankie Paul, who is slated to appear on “The Bachelorette,” in a satin-red gown clutching a mock scripture titled “The Book of More Men.” Some, including a recent cover story in New York magazine by Bridget Read, have called what’s happening a second “Mormon Moment.”
“The representatives of Mormonism are no longer geeks in white shirts with name tags. Nor are they men at all,” wrote Bridget Read in a recent cover story in New York magazine. “America is in the middle of a second Mormon Moment, and its representatives are women with flowing hair and flawless skin in outfits that certainly don’t accommodate official undergarments, if any.”
And yet, for all the branding around the faith’s nickname, this so-called “moment” has little to do with the faith itself. Some of the influencers are observant; others are not. But regardless of their involvement with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, what unites them is not so much belief and doctrine, but a culture partly shaped by the faith headquartered in Utah, and then refracted through commerce, aesthetics and the algorithm.
Peter Conti-Brown, a Wharton School professor of finance and a Latter-day Saint, made this point in his recent Substack, reflecting on the New York magazine article.
“Read’s verisimilitude, which she credits to Mormonism, is actually a story about Utah,” he wrote. The portrayal of Mormonism in the story, he continued, is “exaggerated, generalized, a funhouse mirror used to dismiss an entire group of people based on the barely cognizable attributes of a few.”
Still, the appeal of these influencers appears to be irresistible to the wider audience. “America was finally ready to accept Mormon women,” Read writes. So why are these women striking a chord with so many followers, many of whom have no interest in religion? (Taylor Frankie Paul has 2.3 million followers on Instagram.)
Recent surveys from Pew Research Center show that roughly 1 in 5 to 1 in 4 women say they are unsure about having children or do not plan to have them at all. Perhaps lurking from the distance to imagine what their lives could look like — or would never look like — can feel like a safe and satisfying experiment. For secular women on the coasts, who are on the fence about marriage or motherhood or who are exhausted by modern dating, these influencers may offer a window into the possible visions of contemporary motherhood and womanhood.
Many of the Utah influencers are mothers, wives and homemakers of various degrees and aesthetics. At the same time, they’re business-minded and digitally savvy, trying to reconcile traditional family life with modern ideas about independence and ambition. From afar, these Instagram glimpses of life can seem either claustrophobic or enchanting.
Either way, it is hard to look away.
But there is also emerging a new kind of “Mormon influencer” in response to these often sloppy and inaccurate representations of the Latter-day Saint faith in the media, and there are actually many men among them. For example, Caden Alvey and Baylor Johnsen of the “All Those in Favor” podcast have leaned into more explicitly Latter-day Saint-focused content, and have tried to relate theological insights in a language that the Gen Z audience can understand.
“We’re academically minded, but Gen Z spoken,” Alvey told me recently. They described their goal as “making more available the best reasons for faith,” and that extends to a broader Christian faith as well.
Although the current cultural moment around the Latter-day Saint identity may be leaving many believers unsettled, it’s also sparking a new generation of faith-focused influencers, who are eager to engage with the wider world while putting their beliefs front and center.
Fresh off the press
- Is there room at America’s dinner table for all faiths? A profile of Adam Phillips, CEO of Interfaith America.
- Religious parents in LGBTQ storybook case to be paid $1.5 million in damages.
Faith in the courts
On Friday, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Louisiana can move forward with the law requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms.
The case Roake v. Brumley was brought by the ACLU after Louisiana passed a 2024 law mandating small posters of the Ten Commandments with a statement explaining their historical influence on American law and education.
A federal district court had blocked the law, and a three-judge panel initially upheld that decision. But last fall, the full Fifth Circuit reheard the case “en banc.” The court reversed course with a 12-6 ruling, allowing the displays before any had actually been installed.
Louisiana is represented by Becket, Attorney General Liz Murrill and Solicitor General Ben Aguiñaga.
“In the opinion released Friday, the court said it was too early to make a judgment call on the constitutionality of the law,” AP reported. “That’s partly because it’s not yet clear how prominently schools may display the religious text, if teachers will refer to the Ten Commandments during classes, or if other things like the Mayflower Compact or Declaration of Independence will also be displayed, the majority opinion said.”
The ACLU can appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court within 90 days.
What I’m reading — and listening to:
- Along with the rest of the world, I’ve been mesmerized by Alysa Liu’s breathtaking performance that won her gold at the Olympics. There was something awe-inspiring and spiritual about it — a sense of surrender to the movement, to something bigger, that in turn filled her with utter delight. In a recent edition of New York Times’ “Believing,” Lauren Jackson compared the movement on ice to the sacred dance of whirling dervishes, a mystical Sufi brotherhood founded in the 13th century in Turkey and inspired by the teachings of the Persian poet and mystic Rumi.
- The bones of St. Francis of Assisi were publicly displayed for the first time on Sunday, attracting nearly 400,000 registrants to the Basilica in Assisi as part of events marking the 800th anniversary of the saint’s 1226 death. Near the end of his life, St. Francis was the first saint believed to have acquired the stigmata, wounds resembling those of Christ’s crucifixion.
- The Atlantic recently faced pushback after publishing a story titled “This Is How a Child Dies of Measles,” recounting a moving and hypothetical account of a family with an unvaccinated child contracting measles and suffering from the damage of the brain tissue. Despite the note that the story relied on extensive reporting, many journalists, including myself, read it as a tragic first-person account and were confused to learn that it was constructed from reported material.
- Jesse Jackson, a civil rights leader and the man behind slogans like “I am somebody!” died on Feb. 17 at 84 years old.
- Ross Douthat had a fascinating conversation with Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei. Amodei expressed uncertainty about the models’ consciousness: “We’ve taken a generally precautionary approach here. We don’t know if the models are conscious. We are not even sure that we know what it would mean for a model to be conscious or whether a model can be conscious. But we’re open to the idea that it could be,” he said. He also said he was open to slowing down AI development if both the U.S. and China agreed to do so: “If we really had a story of, like: We can enforcibly slow down, the Chinese can enforcibly slow down. We have verification. We’re really doing it — if such a thing were really possible, if we could really get both sides to do it, then I would be all for it.”
End notes
This Tuesday marks the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This war is personal to me, because my family is living the war’s everyday realities as I write these words. My parents have electricity for only a few hours a day. Because their heating system depends on power, their home is cold, too.
I was reminded of the sustaining power of faith and houses of worship in this war when I watched a video CNN’s Clarissa Ward recently recorded inside St. Michael’s Cathedral in Kyiv, the city I explored on foot for hours as a teenager, often slipping into that very cathedral to listen to the Orthodox polyphonic singing.
“Even if you’re not religious, it’s just a space of hush,” Ward said. “Where you can drop into the presence or the possibility of something much bigger than us.” She went on, whispering into the camera: “For a lot of people who are at a breaking point right now, this kind of a sacred space is pretty much the only respite that they have.”