Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)

Hey kids, it's me, Kevin Smith.

And it's me, Harley Quinn Smith.

That's my daughter, man, who my wife has always said

is just a beardless, dickless version of me.

And that's the name of our podcast, Beardless, Dickless Me.

I'm the old one.

I'm the young one.

And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard.

Sounds innocent, doesn't it?

A lot of cussing, a lot of bad language.

It's for adults only.

Or listen to it with your kid.

Could be a family show.

We're not quite sure.

We're still figuring it out.

It's a work in progress.

Listen to Beardless, Dickless Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your kid. Could be a family show.
We're not quite sure. We're still figuring it out.
It's a work in progress. Listen to Beardless S**t with me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Peace to the planet. I go by the name of Charlemagne the God.
And guess what? I can't wait to see y'all at the third annual Black Effect Podcast Festival. That's right.
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Dressing. Dressing.
Oh, French dressing. Exactly.
Oh, that's good. I'm AJ Jacobs, and my current obsession is puzzles.
And that has given birth to my podcast, The Puzzler. Something about Mary Poppins? Exactly.
This is fun. You can get your daily puzzle nuggets delivered straight to your ears.
Listen to The Puzzler every day on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My name is Brendan Patrick Hughes, host of Divine Intervention.

This is a story about radical nuns in combat boots and wild-haired priests trading blows with J. Edgar Hoover in a hell-bent effort to sabotage a war.

J. Edgar Hoover was furious.
He was out of his mind, and he wanted to bring the Catholic left to its knees. Listen to Divine Intervention on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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To learn more, visit ItTakesEnergy.com. Robert Evans here.
And for the holiday season, the end of the year, all that good stuff. We are continuing our normally scheduled behind the bastards episodes.
Don't you worry. But we also are running some special episodes, compilations from new shows we launched this year and the very best episodes they did.
We've stitched a couple together. So you've got less ads.
You can listen to something that maybe you haven't had a chance to check out yet. And today you're going to hear 16th Minute, as in 16th Minute of Fame, Jamie Loftus' excellent new podcast about the main characters of the internet and what happens to them after internet stardom.
And here's her wonderful two-parter on Mormon influencers. Do you say data or data? Well, at my house, we say data.
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Fairfield Subaru, where love meets the road. Hey, kids, it's me, Kevin Smith.
And it's me, Harley Quinn Smith. That's my daughter, man, who my wife has always said is just a beardless, dickless version of me.
And that's the name of our podcast, Beardless, Dickless Me. I'm the old one.
I'm the young one. And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard.
Sounds innocent, doesn't it? A lot of cussing, a lot of bad language. It's for adults only.
Or listen to it with your kid. Could be a family show.
We're not quite sure. We're still figuring it out.
It's a work in progress. Listen to Beardless, Dickless Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Welcome. Sixteenth Minute Phase Sixteenth Minute Phase

One more minute, babe

I'm not so bad when you take me off my mind

I'm not a character too

Goodbye 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 influencing 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 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 we'll 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 in 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 1830.
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 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 17-year-old smith is said to have been visited by the angel Moroni 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 Moroni'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 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 L.
Ron Hubbard onto titanium plates as we speak. It also harkens back to Helena Blavatsky's notion of the Akashic records of the late 19th century, which were said to be indestructible tablets of the astral light.
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 escaped 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 wife, his wife, who 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.
There's 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 Nauvoo, 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. An 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 Nauvoo 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 an 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's 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 ski 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 swear, treat your body like a temple. To be Mormon, we are taught honesty and integrity.
And most importantly, to watch for sin. You're going to go with Mary, who f***ed 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. 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 Archuleta, Donnie and Marie Osmond,

and Gladys Knight is still a pretty impressive roster. The Aquabats are Mormon.
Really think

about that. And of course, a ton of currently successful influencers.
More when we come back. 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. Have kids by the time you're 21, or in my case, at 16.
Well, I'm like, f*** 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 like, what if they're going to like 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 momtalkers were also becoming primary breadwinners for their family.
The women of momtalk look very modern. They're usually wearing Kardashian-adjacent athleisure.
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, MomTalk 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 LDS released the following statement.
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 fascination 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 wife. Okay, let's define trad wife.
A trad wife 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 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 align with

traditional gender roles with an emphasis on the beauty of a return to old time values. So TikTok

Thank you. and make lifestyle changes to more closely align 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 tradwife creators are moms and at home with the children, making Tradwife 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.
Tradwife 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 harkenarken back to mid 20th century America.
So if this makes sense, grad wives 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 accident? Incalculable. The track life space is predominantly white, but possibly more diverse than you might expect.
There is an active Black Tradwife community who, according to a Refinery29 piece by Nyla 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 cottagecore.
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 trad wife 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 effectively 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 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 Trap Life 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.
Proud Wife 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 are 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.
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.

Momtalkers 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 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 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 ten. They got engaged after only three weeks.
And while Hannah was still in college, she also started competing in beauty pageants. 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's 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 Train 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 media platforms pretty easily. I'd recommend Sarah Peterson's book Momfluenced for more on this topic because mommy blogging was popular from the very dawn of social media.
But it was very different than the trad wife 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 Jeezer 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 blogs, Mormon mothers' 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 Fillerup-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 Fillerup-Davis, and Love Taza, and Love Taza, aka Naomi Davis. Around this same time, successful family vloggers like Shea Carl and his family become really popular on YouTube in the late aughts 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-nackle community, with personalities like Stephanie Nielsen of the NeNe Dialogues and See Jane Kendrick of See 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-nackle 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, etc. 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 too many 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 they're 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 danced 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 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 grappling 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 trad wife 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 cottagecore 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 Hannahannah 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

Thank you. 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 add 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 meet-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 in voluntary 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-Mormon 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-Mormon 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 10 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-Mormon 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 iHeartRadio. It is written, hosted, and produced by me, Jamie Loftus.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.

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Our theme song is by Sad13.

And pet shoutouts to our dog producer, Anderson, my cat's flea and Casper, and my pet rock

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Sixteen minute affair

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One more minute, please. I'm not so bad when you're thinking of my mind.
I'm not a character, too. So goodbye.
Goodbye. Welcome back to 16th Minute, the podcast where we take a look at the Internet's characters of the day to see how their moment affected them and what it says about the internet and us.
My name is Jamie Loftus, and this is part two of a series trying to answer a question that I honestly thought would be easier to answer. Why is the internet so dominated by Mormon mommy influencers? So if you haven't listened to part one yet, I recommend you do, because this is a frustratingly complicated question.
Last time we talked about the origins of the Mormon church, its stance on race, gender, and sexuality. Cliff Notes, not great.
And its history of intersecting with conservative-leaning social media trends among women. So think mommy blogs of the 2000s.
Mormon women were at the top of that boom and were more open about their religion than many influencers are today. Think about another ongoing trend that's a whole subject unto itself, one I'd like to dedicate more time to in the future.
Mormon women's intersection with major multi-level marketing schemes. Schemes that rely on sales people spending a lot of their own money with usually diminishing returns if you don't get in on the ground floor.
Utah has the highest concentration of MLMs in the country, and the door-to-door element isn't that unlike

the missionary spirit that the devout embark on on behalf of the Church of Latter-day Saints, or the LDS, when they're young adults. Sales as a mission.
Actually, if you're into obscure documentaries as much as I am, one of the most famous contemporary failed MLM schemes was actually founded by a Mormon couple.

That being LuLaRoe, the ugly leggings company that was busted in a massive legal scandal in the 2010s. You tell the people you love they're in a pyramid scheme and they go, no, I'm not.
You're just a hater. I own my own business.
I'm very successful. My orders would smell disgusting.
It was just insane the amount of hoops I had to jump through to get them to ever admit

that their product was faulty. I would sometimes open bags and they'd be wet.
And when it comes to recruiting for MLMs, Mormon women tend to be excellent marks. Because of the rigid gender roles of the religion that encourage many women to stay at home, things like LuLaRoe might be the only opportunity for them to make a living on their own,

not to mention the close-knit Mormon communities offering a ton of customers.

It's not quite that simple, but you see where I'm going with this.

And of course, there is significant crossover with Mormon women and the current,

if somewhat dwindling, TradWive content that's become extremely popular on Instagram and TikTok. We talk about this quite a bit in the first part of the series, specifically about users from MomTalk, the stars of the new show The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, and Ballerina Farm, a 10 million follower influencer who presents stay-at-homestead lifestyle while,

say it with me, selling that idea to her followers as a part of what is very much a job unto itself.

The more I think about it, Tradwives are actually not straying from the similarly flawed girl boss

archetypes the way that they think they are, but that's for another day.

Because now, we're gonna forge into part two. Shall we? Even with the context I've given you, I was still confused.
Because, yes, white heteroconservatism sells online. We know that.
But why this religion specifically? What about Mormon content is bringing them to the top of your feed? Ex-Mormon influencer Alyssa Grenfell has been asking this question too. She was raised an extremely devout Utah Mormon, went on a mission, got married at an LDS temple the whole nine yards.
Eventually, like one in three young Mormons today, she left the church in her 20s with her husband after they both found themselves questioning the values they'd grown up with. For Alyssa's husband, the radicalizing issue was the church's stance on gay marriage.
And for Alyssa, it was a series of crises of faith. Over and over, what Alyssa felt God wanted for her was directly contradicted by priests and her father.
She was called to do a mission 2,000 miles away from where she expected. She was told by her father that God needed her to be a teacher when she had no interest in teaching and didn't feel she had the natural skill set to do it.
So eventually, the two leave the Mormon church. They start drinking coffee and cocktails.
And Alyssa was motivated to join YouTube after self-publishing her first book.

And while she's been on YouTube for less than a year, she already has nearly a quarter million subscribers. And my favorite video of hers presents a pretty compelling theory.
Alyssa suggests that, sure, Mormon tradwife content does play into the algorithm as far as aesthetics, but it's very possible that the Church of Latter-day Saints itself is bankrolling these Mormon mommy influencers without the influencers being able to say for sure that it's them. Here's a clip from that video.
So different niches, different types of content on the internet make different amounts of money. You can see here off to the side that depending on the type of content you make, you're going to make different amounts of money.
For example, anything to do with money and finance makes a lot more money than a video about cooking. The reason for this is that the money that you make off your content is driven by how much advertisers are willing to pay for it.
Banks, for example, have a lot of money, and so they can drive a ton of money into advertising. So if you made content, a video about the best bank accounts to open, you could get paid approximately $12.25 for each 1,000 views on that video.
When Google or another ad platform goes to put ads on top of that content, they will recognize it as a piece of content that advertisers are willing to pay a lot of money for. So the length of the video could be the same, the person in the video could be the same, but depending on the content, you're getting paid a wildly different amount of money for the type of content you're posting.
A major way that Google and other advertisers figures out where to put ads is through something called keywords. So these keywords will be something like credit card or open bank account that signal to the algorithm, to the ad algorithm, that you've made content that aligns with what advertisers are looking for.
Alyssa only started investigating this search term question when she was getting repeated feedback that her viewers were getting ads for the Mormon church on her videos, which is weird because Alyssa's content is doing the opposite of encouraging people to join the church. And what's more, when she looked into the amount that she was making on YouTube and the amount of algorithmic preference she was getting less than a year into her time versus other creators, she was getting a lot more engagement and making a lot more money.
Why? She explains more in the video. You can see here that the keyword new bank costs $25.30.
That's how much advertisers are willing to pay for this keyword. So compare that to Catholic, that's a huge difference.
So if I'm making my content about finance, I'm going to see a lot more ad revenue coming my way because there are lots of advertisers who are willing to pay Google to try to capture your eye to open a new bank account with them. The church definitely does advertising online, and if I go to YouTube and type in Mormon missionary, I can see that there's an ad at the top.
This is an ad that the church paid to put there. So Mormon missionary, there's an ad in my YouTube trying to get me to meet with Mormon missionaries.
So we already looked at the term Catholic. The cost per click, the ad revenue behind Catholic is $3.58.
If you look at the term Baptist, the cost per click is $1.26. I tried looking up a religion that's a little closer to Mormonism.
Jehovah's Witness is an American religion. If you want to advertise using the key term Jehovah's Witness, it's going to cost you $4.64.
The cost per click for the term Mormon is $24.71. And if you recall, the Mormon church has more money than Wells Fargo.
And the reason that that number is so high, I believe, is because there is a multi-billion dollar organization that is funneling money into ad spend around the term Mormon. So this theory isn't and can't be proven without the LDS being straightforward about their finances, which will never happen.
So I'll let Alyssa take it from here. Without any further ado, here is my interview with the fantastic Alyssa Grenfell.
Hi, my name is Alyssa Grenfell and I am an ex-Mormon content creator and author. I was very Mormon growing up.
I grew up in a very devout home and then I left the church when I was about 23 after serving a Mormon mission and getting married in a Mormon temple and doing all the Mormon things. And now I make content around what, you know, the history of the churches, current church teachings, the doctrine, personal experiences.
And that is kind of the focus of what I put on the internet. I grew up in Massachusetts.
I grew up like, I didn't know anything about Mormon culture outside of what was in pop culture when I was growing up.

Growing up in the Mormon church, I know that you've made a significant amount of content about this.

How are women specifically treated and sort of how are you conditioned to view yourself? Some of my earliest memories really are just discussing my wedding dress, discussing my husband, writing letters to my future husband, talking about purity, learning homemaking skills, ironing, you know, I'm eight years old, ironing a shirt, talking about, you know, taking care of my future family. And it's, I think, past just the idea that, you know, everyone probably should learn how to take care of a home or cook a meal, but it was very much posed as this is your divine role from God.
And even, you know, there's something called a patriarchal blessing, which is kind of, I would like call it Mormon fortune telling a little bit where a very important man within the church laces hands on your head and basically is supposed to be speaking as if he's speaking from God and kind of telling you what's going to happen in your future. Much of my patriarchal blessing was about how I was going to be a mother in Zion and how I was going to, like, it was all just about my future children, basically, and my role as a wife and mother.
And to think that a man is saying basically the most important things about your future and it's all encompassed around motherhood and wifehood and then to read you know now I read my husband's patriarchal blessing and a lot of male men's patriarchal blessings is not about their children their future children and so if you compare the what women are taught if you compare that with what men are taught it's also very you could, you know, I think I might have been able to like stomach it if the boys were also learning how to take a girl on a date or how to also watch children or change a diaper. But the boys were often doing that, like playing basketball or doing, you know, water rafting or doing Boy Scouts, learning to tie knots, you know, just more traditional boyhood kind of things.
I think there was the actual kind of training around motherhood and family, but then there was the religious element of gender roles as divinely appointed upon you. As I was sort of learning more about you, as you were coming of age, all of these gut feelings, thinking that I'm being guided by God towards this person, towards this mission location, towards this job, receiving different answers that weren't in your gut.
What is it like to process that doubt? I think it's really hard because it's very difficult to kind of see outside of yourself and to question the systems you're raised in and embroiled in, especially systems that you're taught as the most moral way to live. I feel like even after leaving, I've had a lot of moments where I have to kind of question if my desire to pursue a certain path is coming from the real quote real me versus if it's coming from the conditioning I received as a young person.

And I think that in following some of those paths, I have often found that I'm still kind of living in this reactionary state where instead of looking toward what God wants me to do, I'm often kind of living in a way that is reacting to, I just want to do the opposite of Mormonism. Even though that's still kind of living my life according to Mormonism, it's just now I'm living the opposite way instead of kind of somewhere in the middle of this, like, what I really want kind of idea that people have.
How do you move forward with so much of what your life has been structured around being removed? Yeah, I think initially it was very difficult and even kind of admitting it to myself was really difficult. Like you mentioned earlier, I had all of these experiences kind of culminate where, for example, I had a really strong what I felt like was an answer from God that I was going to go on my Mormon mission to Italy.
And I wrote it in my journal and I wrote, you know, I know I'll go to Italy as sure as I know God lives. And it felt like a little, you know, testimony, my claim to faith on the topic.
And when I opened my mission call, it was to Denver, Colorado, not Italy. And, you know, I still served a full Mormon mission.
I still went to Denver, Colorado. I still was in the church for years after that.
But I think that is kind of the easiest to encapsulate example of these moments that kind of hit me over and over again where I would have these really strong feelings, major revelations that I was using to kind of walk through life only to realize that they were either wrong or that if I had made my own decisions about my own life without consulting God, I probably would have chosen better than, quote, God was choosing for me. So, as I kind of came to that realization over years and years, my first year teaching, my dad had given me a blessing that I was meant to be a teacher and that, of course, I'm going to trust this blessing above all else.
I didn't pursue any other career paths. And then my first year as a teacher, I realized I absolutely hated it and was not cut out for it.
And it was giving me a lot of mental health issues. About halfway through the school year, broke to my husband, hey, I think I might not believe in this anymore.
After a lot of conversations, we both decided that we wanted to leave together after reading a lot of church history for him, after lots of conversations, like I said. So it was really helpful.
One of my favorite pictures of our whole marriage is us holding our coffee cups for the first time. For most people, such a simple, straightforward thing is like drinking your morning cup of coffee.
This is our first ever cup of coffee. I think I was about 24 at that point.
Didn't grow horns, didn't fall beneath the floor. Everything proceeded as normal.
It was very underwhelming. Most sins after you leave the church, most sins as an ex-Mormon, you're like, this is pretty underwhelming.
I also, one of my favorite memories is the first time I went to after work drinks with my coworkers. They're kind of, everybody's getting to know each other and they're like, why did you come to New York? And I start talking about Utah and Mormonism and leaving the church and garments, the religious underwear, the temple endowment, the prayer circle, the ceremony, the oaths and the handshakes.
And I just remember it was probably a group of 15 people. But as I'm just talking, more and more people stop their conversations and just lean in to be like, wait, are you talking about leaving the cult right now? And just like I could, it was kind of affirming to me to have, and I, you know, I always have those experiences talking to people.
They don't know much about Mormons because you, you can tell from the look on their face that you're not the crazy one for thinking you were really like raised in a very crazy religion. Whereas, you know, if, if you, if you're kind of talking to people in Utah, maybe they'll kind of act like oh this is all very normal you know of course mormons wear garments but to someone who's never interfaced with the religion it is probably 10 to 20 times stranger and odder than people who are familiar with it so that that kind of surprise on people's faces has been healing for me in some ways because it helps me feel like I'm not the sinner.
I'm not the crazy one. It was what I was raised in.
And that normalcy is not what I experienced as a kid learning to iron shirts as an eight-year-old and writing letters to my husband about how I was saving myself for him. So yeah.
You're coming of age alongside the internet and you're growing up with these very rigid beliefs. What was your relationship with the internet as you were coming of age into your early adulthood? I think that one of my first Mormon memories is that there's a YouTuber who would go around and film the temple ceremonies.
I probably when i was like late middle school early high school coming across the the thumbnail of you know secrets inside a mormon temple and okay i remember thinking to myself you know i didn't click on it and i remember i had friends at school who would say you know you can see what happens in the temple if you go on YouTube. And I remember like, you know, that's probably what they're talking about.
It's right there. I didn't click on it.
And I, you know, as a Mormon kid, you very much learn the term anti-Mormon literature, that that's a whole thing you're warned against, that you shouldn't look at anti-Mormon literature. They're just trying to destroy your testimony.
And so, I remember just thinking to myself, oh, this is anti-Mormon content and I shouldn't watch it. And so, when I was still in high school, I think if I came across anything disfavorable about the church, I immediately just turned my brain off and thought, you know, this is Satan.
They told me about this. And so, because they told me about this, that's how I know that they are kind of foreseeing or foretelling the future because they're warning me of this thing that I shouldn't look at.
So you grow up alongside the Internet and then you start to see this influx of influencers who I first just saw labeled as trad wives, the like Mormon aspect and not, you know, whatever.

Hashtag not all trad wives are Mormon, but many of them are many of the most successful influencers are either Utah Mormon based or create content that really appeals. So when did you start noticing this content? And yeah, what did you make of it? That's a good question.
And I mean, I feel like my whole childhood was kind of trad wife content in a way so like i feel like to some extent i think that it's also a question of platform because i feel like instagram is meant for curation and tiktok is kind of meant to question curation and to criticize curation so i think that the the a lot of trad wife content kind of came up in the Instagram age, which is beautiful children, beautiful dresses, lovely sourdough. And it's very curated.
It's often photos instead of videos. So it's harder to pick apart a curated photo instead of a video where there's like a voice in the background or, you know, you can screenshot and say what is what's the picture on their wall so I think that the kind of transition away from Instagram into TikTok is also what kind of opened my mind more to trad the trad wife movement in specificity I guess because prior to that I just see you know, kind of like a lot of people say that the Mormon trad wife movement came from Mormon mommy bloggers, which were super prevalent in the early 2000s, which a lot of recipe making and DIY stuff.
And so it's kind of like this movement kind of rematerialized onto Instagram after they already had their original audience on the blogging side of things. I think where it kind of hit its head is when we turn more to a TikTok type of investigation of things where people are no longer looking for perfection or they're not looking to follow people that their posts just feel like a Pinterest board.
I think Mormonism is very Pinterest-y. Mormons love Pinterest too, in my experience.
So I think that that is what has kind of kicked back against Trad Wives, is that for a long time, I think people just unquestioningly consumed the beautiful content. And when there's a voiceover to a photo, and the photo is not just, it's a pretty photo of kids and some bread now it's I made this this for my husband or I made this for my family and then you know and there's more of a narrative like the the new video form of the trad wife content is narrative and so it is developing much more of an ideology in my behind the curated video, the pictures that we once had.

And I think, too, Mormons are taught to be so missionary-minded that if someone is Mormon, they've probably talked about it at some point.

I mean, the Mormon church literally expressly says, you should be talking about being Mormon online.

You're told that explicitly.

And so, that also is an element of, I think, Mormon influencers are louder about their religion than a lot of influencers because they are acting on that kind of command from the prophet to speak loudly and speak often about their religion. It seems also because of how the algorithm works at any given point in time, there have been times where I have gotten content pipes to me from a Mormon influencer, but the content that I get, it's not immediately clear.
Where a lot of Tradwave accounts that have ended up in my feed, it takes me a little while to catch on that there is a specific religious element. Is that something you've also noticed? Do you feel that there's sort of any reasoning behind that? Because you're saying, you know, the church wants you to talk about your religion as much as possible, but it feels like with some influencers, to what end was not always clear to me right away.
Yeah. In my opinion, the prevalence of people who are influencers mentioning Mormonism isism is greatest in their early stages when they're first getting an audience when they're first kind of finding their voice i think once people reach like a critical mass of no longer just having mormon followers they have a lot of just general interest in their platforms it's almost like a graph where the bigger they get the less they mention mormon, because I think they realize that it's unpopular to a general audience, but it's very popular with an audience that you're growing early on.
So I think that, you know, for example, I know Ballerina Farm used to have a blog specifically about Mormonism, but if you Google, is so-and-so Mormon, you can always find an answer because they talked about it a lot early on. And there's always like an early interview, same with Brooklyn and Bailey.
They're not really trad wife stuff anymore, but they just have a big YouTube channel. And they talked quite a bit about Mormonism early on, and now it essentially never appears.
I think one of them has left, I'm not sure. Initially, to grow their audience, they're talking a lot about Mormonism because Mormons will follow you because they know you're Mormon.
And then after they get big, they see it as maybe a bit more of a risk or maybe that because they have more money and they're like a little bit less beholden to their community, maybe they're less likely to talk about it because they kind of can take on their own form of what they want to be talking about on the internet. So many Christians, I think if they see Mormon content and don't know it's Mormon content or just like, you know, even trad wife content obviously appeals to kind of a more far right ideology.
And I think all of those people, if they come across, you know, trad wife content in general, they'll upvote it or like it or interact with it. The hard thing for Mormons is that a lot of people just, especially like evangelical Christians, do not really like Mormons.
And especially they don't like that they're trying to kind of co-op, then they would say the Christian movement or whatever and say they're Christians. And there's a lot of tension between, are they Christians? Aren't they Christians? So I think that that's another difficulty that they kind of have to interface with is that their content by its nature of being kind of traditionally minded appeals to this audience of a more like conservative republican audience but if they're too overt about their specific religion i think you know if if you're viewing it which i do a little bit more as kind of like a brand that they're selling versus like their quote true real life or whatever then they are recognizing that there's a risk to the brand in bringing that to the forefront.
Now that the brand is large enough that it's kind of reaching a mass audience. But I don't know, like I don't know if I'm just jaded or something, like if I'm viewing them too much as like business minded versus if they just, you know, if they're just kind of waking up each morning, rolling out of bed, posting their pictures and not really wondering about audience retention or who sees what when and how can I

reach the broadest number of people. So it's hard to get into the mind of these people, really.

We'll be right back with more with Alyssa Grenfell. Welcome back to 16th Minute.
I sort of had to wear something like temple garments in my youth, but it was these shoulder-to-knee stinky cotton shirts I wore underneath my back brace. And unfortunately, there's no question about my personality that can't be answered with the sentence, I wore a back brace for my entire adolescence.
And now, we continue our conversation with ex-Mormon influencer and great theory haver, Alyssa Grenfell. As I was sort of learning more about a recent subject I was covering, I found out that the family was Mormon,

but didn't really talk about it.

And a lot of people were saying like,

oh, you should do an episode about like,

why are there so many successful Mormon women in the influencing space?

And I was like, oh, I have no idea.

And you mentioned sort of the most popular answer given,

which is what I was encountering a lot,

which was that young Mormon women

are taught to journal a lot. So that's probably why they're successful at influencing.
It doesn't not make sense, but felt just like a very incomplete answer. Could you take me through what made you start asking this question? Because people were telling you that they were getting ads for the Mormon church on your content.
That was how that started, right? Yeah. Every interview I've ever spoken to is like, why are there so many Mormon influencers? And I think they often ask it almost like in this secret, like, can you tell me the answer? Like, I have this secret that I'm keeping and if I could just explain it, like then that would explain the phenomenon.
And I think it's, you know, I think it think something like women journal and there was the mommy bloggers and blogging is like journaling and then once they're blogging then they're on Instagram and it feels easy to understand but I agree like it feels kind of thin because lots of people journal and it doesn't mean that you're going to be famous one day just because you were journaling a lot when you were a little kid. But when I was posting my videos, I, you know, especially initially, I'm still like learning YouTube.
I think my first YouTube video was like 10 months ago or something. I'm still under one year of learning this whole platform and stuff.
But I would have people say, so funny, I just got an ad for the Mormon church while I was watching this video. And I, you know, thinking it's so funny that they are advertising on my content, which obviously, if you understand the back end, the Mormon church purchases ad space through Google, Google AdSense, and then Google AdSense looks for content that is relevant to put the ad on top of.
So it's not like the Mormon church is saying, we like Alyssa Grenfell. Definitely not saying that.
But the algorithm is basically looking for people saying Mormon, Mormon, Mormon, or Utah or whatever, and then putting their ad space, their ad spend behind that content. And I also kind of in tandem with that was on the YouTube subreddit and looking up stuff about YouTube and realizing that my CPM and my RPM, which is kind of how much you make off of your videos, was way higher than basically almost anyone else was quoting.
That my average pay per view or pay per click or whatever was much higher than just your average channel. I used to do some SEO for a previous employer.
And I went and looked at the ad spend estimated behind different keywords because people don't realize that the ad spend behind something like crafting is not the same as the ad spend behind something like open a new credit card. Because it's basically the ad spend is proportionate to how much the advertiser is willing to spend to get the eyes of the viewer.
So I realized basically when I went and looked at the ad spend behind some of these terms, that the ad spend was as high as very expensive advertising terms. So like to open a new credit card was $30 per click and something like crafting or maybe like sourdough bread is like $2.
It's very low. So when I looked at Mormon terms, like Mormon missionary was $30.
And Utah influencer was $19. Mormon was $25.
And these are ad spends that are phenomenally high, especially when compared even with another religion. You know, Catholicism or Catholic is $2.
Judaism or Jew is maybe $4. As someone raised Catholic, I was like, wow, Catholics found dead in a ditch.
Like not a profitable YouTube group. I was truly blown away with how many times higher those keywords were scanning.
Yeah, and it felt like people don't realize that the Mormon church is the richest church on the planet. It's similar to the net worth of Disney, you know? So, I mean, if you think of the value of Disney, I think it's potentially even worth more than Disney.
So, it felt like there has to be some connection between the high ad spend on these keywords. I'm seeing it literally in my content.
I'm seeing that I'm making more off of my videos than the average YouTuber. And then extending that to Utah influencers, which is that when they're making content, they're making more money.
And basically realizing that because there's more money to be had out in Utah, that it can just support a far larger number of creators, especially in that phase of getting off the ground right when they're talking about Mormonism the most, right when they're kind of like, let me try influencing for a bit, right? Before they get the brand sponsorship, before they get all the clicks for the commissions on Amazon, whatever.

I think I just basically took what was happening to me and thought what's happening to me is happening to all these utah mormon influencers they're being paid the same amount like if a guy is making finance content about investing in the s&p and they're making videos about sourdough those people are making the same same amount of money, which is highly irregular. I had no idea how much money the Mormon church has.
As you explained in the video, the church is welcome to pour as much money into these keywords as they like, but they can't control whether the keywords are being talked about favorably. So it seems like there's a world where the Mormon church is accidentally cutting you checks for talking about why you left the church.
And cutting like anyone else, you know, and I think that maybe to them it's worth it. I mean, I haven't seen those comments of, I just got an ad for the Mormon church.
I'm still getting those comments. So I don't know, like, I don't think I outed them to the point that they're changing their strategy or anything.
But it is kind of funny to realize that they are kind of engineering their own crisis by making it so that it's profitable enough to be a YouTuber talking about Mormonism. That they are kind of supporting the YouTuber's little, you know, rent payment or whatever.
Right. So the YouTuber can keep going and keep making the negative videos.
And that's a very funny little cycle considering I once paid 10% of my income to the church and now I'm slowly making it back. Trad wife influencers that started by talking about Mormonism quite a bit and probably don't talk about it as much now.
They are also sort of getting cuts of this, even if they're not explicitly talking about the Mormon church anymore. Do you think even if an influencer who started talking about Mormonism isn't anymore, does this still help the church? The most fascinating was that the term, the search term, Utah Influencer, I think.
Utah Influencer made about $19 per click. So, if you compare that with New York City influencer, San Francisco influencer, places where you assume that's the influencer capital of the world, because that's especially of the US, those are all under $5.
So like I said, it's almost three times, they're making three times as much. So a woman with her kids in New York, a woman with her kids in L.A., and a woman with her kids in Lehigh, Utah.
The woman in Lehigh, Utah will probably make three times as much the ad revenue. With a lower cost of living, right? And lower cost of living.
And probably her husband already has a job because he's been kind of trained to be the breadwinner, just like she's been trained to be the housewife. As far as the church benefiting from it, I think it definitely does.
I've had people tell me through comments, or I've had some emails of people saying that Ballerina Farm, just her content, made them Google, you know, Mormons started looking to the church considering getting a visit from the missionaries, consider getting a Book of Mormon. And it's kind of like a very soft advertisement, in my opinion,

where it's not someone coming on and saying,

I'd like to talk to you about why you should join the church.

But when you see a lifestyle presented that's very alluring and very beautiful,

and you think to yourself,

what is this about this person that made this lifestyle possible?

And you realize they're part of the church.

I think it kind of gives a higher level of influence to potentially someone

I'm not sure. this person that made this lifestyle possible and you realize they're part of the church, I think it kind of gives a higher level of influence to potentially someone who's curious and wondering what they can do to kind of live that life that they're seeing fantasized.
Final thing, I mean, I just wanted to mention and talk a little bit as far as your theory goes, is that this is a way to sort of have these poster board influencers kind of representing, if not the church explicitly, the gender roles and the ideals of the church in the day-to-day without having it be traced back to supposing Ballerina Farm, you know, wakes up tomorrow and is like, I'm done with the Mormon church. It's not like she can say, and the church has been paying me this much for this long to create this content.
It creates this middleman. The church had a ton of success from Donnie and Marie Osmond because they're Mormon.
They're more, you know, they're raised Mormon, still Mormon to this day. And they were, you know, phenomenal brand ambassadors for the church throughout their kind of heyday.
Gladys Knight is also Mormon, and she did a concert at our ward in Kentucky at our big congregation. And she's another example of someone who kind of became a bit of a brand ambassador.
She's doing concerts. And I think pre-internet and before gay issues the awareness around lgbtq issues those people did really well and typically it seems like they mostly stayed in the church and so the church had a lot of success with these famous people being brand ambassadors for them whereas now they've had it i think in more recent years backfire more often than they've had it work, like with David Archuleta.
So David Archuleta was very well known within the church. He also gave concerts for the church.
He served a Mormon mission. You can find a picture of him in the Mormon Child Bernacal Choir where they did a slow zoom on him.
And he was another poster child and another famous person. And he's the sweetest, you know've ever heard him in interviews he's so sweet he's like he just has the kindest presence and so i think he was kind of the perfect example of a great mormon and a great ambassador and then in like a few years ago he came out as gay he also kind of simultaneously came out as leaving the church and now has written a song about you you know, I'd rather go to hell than not love the people who I love.
And in many ways has kind of been a reverse of all of the kind of quote, good he would have done for the image of the Mormon church. Now he's just basically a living, breathing example of the church's bigotry towards gay people because the church really tried to up their proximity to his image from a PR perspective really hurt them now that they are no longer able to you know now they've been damaged by by his coming out against them and saying hey this church is homophobic so I think that that's another reason they don't want to maybe formally approach someone like a ballerina farm or any of these trad wife creators because they've they know it will backfire against them but they also know that these women are making the church look very good and very beautiful and traditional and feminine and so i think this advertising revenue is kind of a way for them to support the blogosphere of the early 2000s through the, you know,

Instagrammers and YouTubers of today by giving them ad revenue.

We'll be right back with more with Alyssa Grenfell.

Welcome back to 16th minute and now we continue our conversation with alissa grenfell you know when you're a youtuber or when you get ad revenue from any social media platform it just tells you the amount and it tells you basically your your cost per view and that's it it just says advertisers were willing to willing to pay. And it's like a black box.
They're not telling you like, this percentage came from this organization. This percentage came from this organization.
So it's like a black box in that you don't even know. So the women can just make their content and look up in the morning and be like, look, babe, look at this money I made.
I'll make more content tomorrow. I'm going to tell my friends.
They won't necessarily see through, kind of read the tea leaves of, why am I making this much? I don't know if any of them are doing that, and maybe they are, and I'm just kind of one of the first to have talked about it. There's no one answer that's going to completely unlock why are there so many successful tradwife accounts at this specific moment that answer ranges you know far beyond mormonism but i think your content has just helped me have a better sense of not just you and the culture that you had to leave behind but also who is shaping the internet and seems like the mormon church has no small part in uh in doing that and it's so funny because when you when you say it like that it sounds so kind of conspiratorial it sounds it you know the Mormons they're controlling the internet but it is funny because it I think and to some extent it's true I mean not that they are literally holding the mouse and clicking the clicks but sure in that they they are exercising I, a pretty broad ad spend, the way that they are actively petitioning members to go on and share the gospel, share talks, share resources about the church.
And so I think that they do have a fairly coordinated PR effort for the internet specifically. Even one thing I didn't mention in that video is they have all these people who are hired to do SEO.

And if you Google something like Bible, the Mormon Church has like their free Bible is one of the first organic things you see on Google is Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Same with, I think, Jesus Christ, same with New Testament, you know, all of these terms that are kind of general Christian terms.

The Mormon Church has one of the top organic rankings for those searches, which is very purposeful and specific, you know, in that their attempt to kind of say, hey, if someone wants a Bible, we want to be the ones giving it to them. So I think that they do, you know, it's not just conspiratorial.
They have what I view to be like a very specific targeted plan for how to get people on the internet interested in Mormonism. And it's multifaceted and they have whole departments hired for this kind of thing.
It just seems like the Mormon church has adapted to the internet age unusually well. I think they've definitely viewed it as a great opportunity.
And I think they've also viewed it, you know, people will also talk about how the Mormon church will kind of spam the front page of Google so that ex-Mormon stuff gets further and further down. So they'll, you know, instead of just having one article on a subject, they'll have like 10 articles on a subject and they'll try to get them all to rank so that the whole front page of Google is just faithful responses to questions about the origins of the church.
They even put out all these essays that are about the history of the church so that they can kind of counter the anti-Mormon literature. Is there anything I didn't ask that you feel like is relevant to this discussion? Sometimes I struggle with, you know, when I talk about trad wife things, I feel like people really want kind of a silver bullet answer.
And I also think that I struggle sometimes with, it's not a demonization of something like a trad wife, but it's maybe the critique because I often feel like trad wives didn't invent motherhood trad wives didn't invent being a wife or like being in a loving relationship and partnership and so sometimes I have a I struggle with the nuance of critiquing something that is genuinely human and genuinely not like I think demonizing motherhood is not something we want to do demonizing being a loving partner is not something we want to do but we want to critique the approach that these accounts are kind of sharing and so in the critique sometimes there's a demonization that I think is kind of dangerous and not good for families or children specifically. So I think just a final infusion of nuance is the final thing I'd want to leave.
It's just that it's not something that's quite as straightforward as saying Mormon women like to journal. It's very complicated.
It's about the internet, but it's also about conservatism and it's about Roe versus Wade and it's about all of these different cultural forces. People should be allowed to live their lives comfortably however they choose to.
And so it's just like, let's not go after a specific woman. Let's go after maybe the system that you can trace it back up to, which seems like a lot of what your work is trying to do is interrogate the system that creates and not bully the byproducts of the system.
It's kind of why I always say I'm anti-Mormonism, but I'm not anti-Mormon because I think people can still be criticized, obviously. But I think that in a more broad sense, the systems and the organizations and the dogmas are what are forming human behavior.
and so instead of saying this one person sucks because of this XYZ, it's better and more helpful, I think more informative, more educational to say this is the system that made this phenomenon exist to begin with. Thanks so much again to Alyssa for her time and patience.
I really recommend her YouTube channel if you have any further questions about what it's like to grow up in the Mormon faith, what it's like to decondition oneself from a cult-like upbringing, as well as some interesting interviews with fellow ex-Mormons. You can also check out her book at the link in the description.
So listeners, to conclude, why are there so many successful Mormon wives in the influencing space today? The answer is money. Okay, see you next week.
In all seriousness, thank you so much again for listening. Please remember to subscribe to the show if you like it.
Leave a friendly review. Tell your friends.
It all helps. I had a lot of fun making this episode.
I learned a lot, and it was really hard. So please let me know your thoughts.
And for your moment of fun, or I guess more of a moment of reflection this week, here is former American Idol contestant David Archuleta talking about why he left the Mormon church. See you next week.
One day I was just praying and got on my knees. I said, God, if you're really there and if you really have a purpose for me, just please take this from me.
Please change me because I don't want to be a way I shouldn't. I don't want to be like this and I don't know why I am.
And I just basically heard what I understood is what was always God told me, David, you need to stop asking me this. You're asking me the wrong thing because I don't intend to change you.
You've been spending over half of your life now praying about this, asking me to change something that I don't intend to change. 16th Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It is written, hosted, and produced by me, Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.

The amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor.

Our theme song is by Sad13.

And pet shout outs to our dog producer, Anderson,

my cat's flea and Casper, and my pet rock bird, who will outlive us all.

Bye!