During 2024 — at time when members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were featured in numerous media accounts — a respected national study found that twice as many Latter-day Saints feel misrepresented in American media, compared with Catholics, Jews, Muslims and religious “nones.”

Tiffany, a 41-year-old Latter-day Saint woman in Idaho, told the researchers how often she sees her faith being “made fun of” — admitting, “that’s a little unsettling because you feel like we’re being mocked.”

“Many Latter-day Saints feel that their faith is often ridiculed by Hollywood, the media and popular culture, which perpetuate inaccurate stereotypes about their communities,” the researchers summarize. In addition to the 60% of Latter-day Saints who say that they are portrayed unfavorably by TV shows and movies, an even higher number, 67%, feel misrepresented by political and media elites.

More in Common survey analyzing a representative national sample of more than 6,000 Americans, from Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim and Latter-day Saint communities, as well as Americans of no faith.

Promoting distortion

It’s not hard to see where these perceptions are coming from. Try to come up with a single mainstream media production in the last few years that portrays Latter-day Saints in a way that active members themselves would relate to.

Depending on what viewers are in the mood for, they can find persuasive portrayals of Latter-day Saints as either hypocritical and superficially compliant to their faith (”The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City”), or pathologically committed to their religion (”Sins of Our Mother”, “Murder Among the Mormons,” “Under the Banner of Heaven”) — in a way that implies, in the words of writer McKay Coppins, that normal members are “ever perched on the brink of radicalization.”

Many journalistic portrayals of the faith fare little better. For instance, a prominent Washington Post story earlier this month labeled 2024 as “the year” of Latter-day Saint women, citing as primary exhibits the same productions about “secret wives” and “real housewives,” without comment from a single active member.

Instead, the author purports to illustrate a member’s perspective by quoting a scholar who calls it “the Latter-day Saints church” and a woman who claims incredibly that most Latter-day Saints “don’t care if I believe in God or Joseph Smith. They don’t care about my relationship to Jesus Christ. They care if I am saying nice things about them publicly.”

That’s not a church I’ve ever encountered, since Jesus Christ is central to everything we do — in homes, and chapels, and temples, during Christmas and during the rest of the year too. How nice it would be if reporters at respected institutions like the Washington Post helped people understand basic facts like that, rather than breeding more cynicism at the motives of all believers. Deseret News editor Sarah Jane Weaver drew attention to this same inconsistency earlier in the year when writing about the “Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.“

“The ‘Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’ is not a representation of me or my friends or my daughters or their friends or of the women I have met across the globe....,” she wrote. “My invitation and plea to any media writing about these women is simple. There are millions of Latter-day Saint women who live their faith differently than these outliers being promoted online. They are smart, educated, funny and content. Find them, talk to them and tell their stories. You will be amazed. Like me and my daughters, they have been empowered by their faith.”

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There’s also evidence that social media is influencing the distortions about faith. The lead researcher for the More in Common study, Coco Xu, told Deseret News they found evidence that social media use often “drives misperceptions” — with the more time people consume social media, the bigger your misperceptions are about devoted people of faith. This is “totally against the idea that social media brings us closer or allows us to get to know people who are different from us,” she acknowledged, while highlighting concerns about the “information silo that social media has created” and demonstrating how that has “exacerbated stereotypes.”

Audience members sing a rest hymn during the Sunday morning session of the 194th Semiannual General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at the Conference Center in Salt Lake City on Sunday, Oct. 6, 2024. | Scott G Winterton, Deseret News

Journalism that ‘gets religion’

This helps explain why Deseret News Executive Editor Doug Wilks acknowledged in a recent podcast how easy it is in journalism to “get frustrated with ‘why are people focusing on the wrong things?’”

Wilks goes on to highlight how many peaceful solutions and “nuance” are getting missed. It’s really the “sharp edges” that tend to get people’s attention, he said, before emphasizing how the publication he leads is trying to “focus on the nuance and the true storytelling to get further at the truth.”

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Coverage of religion in America today is where this may be needed the most. The prolific religion journalist Terry Mattingly recalls his mentor David McHam telling him, “I consider religion to be the worst covered subject in the entire American press.”

In a recent interview with Deseret News, Mattingly describes weeping while writing a retrospective on the state of journalism, which concluded that “it no longer makes economic sense, in our splintered digital age, for journalists to report and produce news that will upset their paying customers.”

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With more and more paying news consumers skeptical of faith, maybe it shouldn’t surprise us then to see some outlets singularly focused on promoting stories that consistently confirms any and all reasons for skepticism — while displaying a stunning lack of interest in understanding what that same faith means for those who love it. In a Latter-day Saint context, that includes:

  • Breathless, play-by-play coverage of frivolous lawsuits targeting tithing practices, rather than examining what the funds raised by tithing actually accomplish in lives, homes and chapels.
  • Detailed, blow-by-blow accounts of communities raising complaints about temples, rather than highlighting some of the changes, growth and lived experience of people who serve in those temples.
  • Exclusive features on sexual and gender minorities distancing themselves from their faith, rather than the many who find healthy and happy ways to reconcile religion and sexuality.
  • Highlighting any woman with concerns or grievances about her faith, while bypassing the many others who feel gratitude and rejoice in their membership.

This imbalance could be called by many names — selective reporting, ignoring journalistic standards, activist journalism, or simply “grievance journalism.” Some have justified this imbalance by insisting that true religious journalism is one that shows a brave willingness to criticize one’s faith — representing a noble-sounding rationale for elevating negatives and minimizing positives.

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Conferencegoers exit the Conference Center after the afternoon session of the 194th Semiannual General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints held at the Conference Center in Salt Lake City on Saturday, Oct. 5, 2024. | Brice Tucker, Deseret News

Acknowledging beauty

Genuine attempts to represent the full truth, of course, ought to include an acknowledgement of real positives when they arise. There are, of course, many examples of journalists who have worked hard to examine exactly that — even when those positives go up against their own biases. That includes recent profiles by Nina-Sophia Miralles (Londnr) and Greg Sheridan (The Australian) that reveal aspects of Latter-day Saint faith easily missed otherwise.

Reporters might also try to understand why Latter-day Saints are excited about 200 temples dedicated in the faith, and the significance of strengthening the Salt Lake Temple and purchasing the Kirtland Temple. There might also be more interest on why, contrary to national trends, Latter-day Saint youth seem to be bucking national trends, with record enrollment at BYU-Idaho and the creation of 36 new missions to accommodate what is now 80,000 missionaries serving.

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Predisposed to highlight controversy

Yet national media seem almost predisposed to chase less flattering stories. Mattingly recalls an earlier New York Times Magazine article insisting that “absolutes do not exist” and “people who claim to have found them are crazy” — which reinforced his own conclusion that the mainstream press doesn’t “get” religion.

Since then, he’s suggested that many journalists seem to believe that standards of accuracy, fairness and balance “do not apply to coverage of hot-button subjects linked to religion, morality and culture” — writing, “Why do accurate, fair-minded, balanced coverage of crazy people?”

The “press doesn’t really cover religion as religion” his mentor McHam also told him. Yet maybe it shouldn’t surprise us when secular journalists end up reaching largely secular conclusions after pursuing secular analyses.

A new year’s appeal: Dig deeper to understand believers

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Christians feeling misunderstood can perhaps empathize with skeptics in the same way Joseph Smith once did, when he said: “I don’t blame anyone for not believing my history. If I had not experienced what I have, I could not have believed it myself.”

Yet it’s especially when something is confusing that journalistic curiosity matters most. And this is exactly why it’s so important to cover the full story of faith in America today — because it’s not always so easy for people to grasp. But the fact is that people of faith have something to offer a society beginning to drown in animosity and aggression.

“I wish that people knew we were true Christians, that we’re all just trying to be like Jesus,” 30-year old Latter-day Saint Brittany from Utah told More in Common researchers. “We want to love everybody and serve everybody, and we want everybody to live in heaven together. We all make mistakes. At some point in time, we’ve all done hateful things, but that’s not what we want to be. We don’t want to be hateful. We really are just trying to love and serve.”

This is the kind of personal impact almost entirely overlooked in grievance journalism centered around complaints and lawsuits, spectacle and scandal: the possibility of a mighty change inside us, leaving people no more disposed to anger, agitation or despair — and able to bring grace, hope and light to places that have none.

Audience members stand and sing a rest hymn during the afternoon session of the 194th Semiannual General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Conference Center in Salt Lake City on Saturday Oct. 5, 2024. | Scott G Winterton, Deseret News
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