A recent article in the Washington Post has dubbed 2024 “The Year of The Mormon Woman.” Indeed, it has been a great year for us. President Camille Johnson, for example, addressed the European Union Parliament in March. In May, Sarah Jane Weaver became the Editor of the Deseret News, and the first woman to do so. And in September, Bonnie H. Cordon was inaugurated as 10th President of Southern Virginia University.
I am grateful for more opportunities to discuss women in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Although there’s some broader anxiety about the role of women in our faith, there’s also increased curiosity. Unfortunately, much of the media’s recent curiosity centers on the Hulu series “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.” As a result, one persistent idea is that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints encourages superficiality in women and that womanhood in the church is about outward perfection.
When the focus of media coverage is on a handful of influencers and a reality TV series, this is an understandable conclusion. After wading through half a dozen recent articles about Latter-day Saint women in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Atlantic, I found quotes from only two practicing members of the church, and one was a man.
No matter how you feel about the Hulu series, such a small sample size will naturally produce a narrow idea of women in the church. For example, the Washington Post describes ‘the modern Mormon woman’ as “signaling holiness” through “shiplap walls” and “big-barrel curls.” Others have similarly burdened the church and its female members with superficiality.
The problem here is focusing on MomTokkers to the exclusion of more representative members and then arguing that their cosmetic obsessions stem from the church’s values. The Post even goes so far as to argue that the “performance of purity — or Godliness — is a fundamental part of the [LDS] religion.”
This doesn’t mean there aren’t church members — even entire subcultures of the church — who aren’t obsessed with aesthetic perfection. I see the billboards on I-15, too, and have lived among fellow female parishioners who left me feeling like I didn’t measure up. My lank brown hair is unhighlighted and I drive a dirty, 8 year-old Odyssey. But living among members across the country and abroad — not just the ones represented by Provo influencers — has shown me what the media’s laser focus on the “Mormon Wives” misses: that an excessive beauty culture is at odds with discipleship in the church, not a result of it.
In my own experience, the church is the one place where my desires for superficial perfection are consistently challenged. When I am serving others whole-heartedly in my church callings, or when I am sincerely invested in scripture study and temple attendance, what I look like matters much less to me. We are taught in the church that “the worth of souls is great in the sight of God,” and one reason I believe in the church is that the more I strive to live its teachings, the more I am able to see beyond appearances and understand what a soul really means to God.
By contrast, when I’m overconsuming social media and popular entertainment, I start wondering whether I need a nicer house or fuller lips. My church experience begins to feel restrictive precisely because it asks me to focus on others rather than myself: to give and not just consume, to serve and not just self-indulge. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that women are endowed with unique power and influence for good in the world, and that it proceeds from keeping covenants rather than from what they look like.
That’s why it’s grating when journalists celebrate women in the church identifying less with their religion and in the next breath, blame that religion for the ensuing embrace of the superficial.
“The modern Mormon woman is more palatable, defined less by her garments” writes Anne Branigin for the Washington Post “than her dirty soda and clean-girl makeup.” Branigin then attributes these Instagramable performances to their religious background: “Holiness and prosperity are signaled through shiplap walls, chevron rugs and choreographed dances on social media.”
So which is it? Does MomTok represent a departure from the church or a peek into it? If you are celebrating behavior that contradicts church teachings while at the same time laying the insanity of that behavior at the church’s feet, perhaps something important is missing in your analysis.
Fortunately, there’s research that can help fill in that gap. For example, religious women are less likely than average to pathologize their physical imperfections. A 2015 review across twenty-two studies found that “strong and internalized religious beliefs coupled with having a secure and satisfying relationship with God were associated with lower levels of disordered eating, psychopathology, and body image concern.” On the flipside, a “superficial faith” was associated with “greater levels of disordered eating, psychopathology, and body image concern.” This suggests that being part of a religious community, but not personally religious, can lead to focusing on the kind of “performative perfection” that a strong relationship with God renders less important.
And the truth is that women in the church are less likely than the average woman to signal their holiness through cosmetic procedures. I’ve written before about the claim that women in the church obtain an outsized share of plastic surgery. It’s a criticism that receives a lot of air time even among members, but the data paints a different picture. In 2017, Jana Riess conducted a nationally representative survey of current members. Drawing upon her own sample of 1,115 Latter-day Saint adults and a Pew Research study of nearly 5,000 U.S. adults, Riess found that Latter-day Saint women in Utah report lower than average rates of plastic surgery: 5.6% compared with a national average of 7%.
The church does ask us to seek perfection, but not in our appearance. The goal is to love God and one another perfectly, and unsurprisingly, this has given me less time for perfect hair or a perfect house (or even a clean one). That doesn’t mean I don’t still want everyone to think I’m beautiful, clever, and exceptionally tasteful in my home decor, because I do (like everyone else I know). But my membership in the church gives me concrete ways of living for the things that matter far more.