September 12, 2024 • 47 mins
In part two of this definitely minisode series, Jamie talks with ex-Mormon YouTuber and author of How to Leave the Mormon Church: An Ex-Mormons Guide to Rebuilding After Religion Alyssa Grenfell about how the LDS may have found a back channel to bankroll its most powerful influencers, without leaving a paper trail.
Alyssa walks Jamie through how she thinks it's done, and how the LDS has succeeded and fumbled its relationships with influencers in the past.
Buy Alyssa's book!: https://www.howtoleavethemormonchurch.com/about
Watch Alyssa's full theory here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGXggLIafrc
Subscribe to Alyssa's channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@alyssadgrenfell
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Start up nights Joy.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
Time, So.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Stay Exclaim.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Sixteen sixteen sixteen, Welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the podcast
(00:59):
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's
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
(01:20):
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. It stands on race, gender,
and sexuality cliff notes not great, and it's history of
intersecting with conservative leaning social media trends among women. So
(01:44):
think mommy blogs of the two thousands. 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. When
I'd like to dedicate more time in the future Mormon
women's intersection with major multi level marketing schemes, schemes that
(02:07):
rely on salespeople 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,
(02:31):
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 Lularo, the
ugly leggings company that was busted in a massive legal
scandal in the twenty tens. You tell the people you
love they're an a Peermid scheme, and they go, no,
I'm not, You're just a hater. I own my own business.
(02:53):
I'm very successful.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
My orders would smell disgusted.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
It was just insane, the amount of hoops at jump
Through to get them to ever admit that their product
was faulty.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
I would sometimes open bags and they'd be wet.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
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 Lulu ro 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
(03:32):
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
mom Talk, the stars of the new show The Secret
(03:53):
Lives of Mormon Wives, and Ballerina farm, a ten million
follower influencer who presents 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 these similarly flawed girl boss archetypes the way
(04:16):
that they think they are, but that's for another day,
because now we're going to 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
(04:40):
bringing them to the top of your feed ex Mormon
influencer Alyssa Grenfell has been asking this question too. She
was raised and 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 twenties with her husband, and after they
(05:00):
both found themselves questioning the values they'd grown up with.
For Alissa's husband, the radicalizing issue was the church's stance
on gay marriage, and for Alissa, 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 two
(05:20):
thousand 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
(05:41):
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 esthetics, but it's very possible at the Church of
Latter day Saints itself is bankrolling these Mormon mommy influencers
(06:05):
without the influencers being able to say for sure that
it's them. Here's a clip from that video.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
So different niches, different types of content on the Internet
make different amounts of money. You can see you're off
to the side that depending on the type of content
you make, you're gonna 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
(06:33):
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 twelve dollars and twenty five cents for each one
(06:57):
thousand views on that video. When Google or an other
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
(07:19):
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
(07:42):
are looking for.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
Alissa 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 into
the amount that she was making on YouTube and the
amount of algorithmic preference she was getting less than a
(08:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
You can see here that the keyword new bank costs
twenty five dollars and thirty cents. 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
(08:38):
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
(08:58):
already looked at the term Catholic. The cost per click.
The ad revenue behind Catholic is three dollars and fifty
eight cents. If you look at the term Baptist, the
cost per click is a dollar twenty six cents. 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 four dollars and sixty four cents. The cost
(09:21):
per click for the term Mormon is twenty four dollars
and seventy one cents. 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
(09:41):
money into ad spend around the term Mormon.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
So this theory isn't and can't be proven without the
LDS being straightforward about their finances, which will never happen.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
So I'll let Alyssa take it.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
From here without any further ado. Here is my interview
with the fantastic Alyssa Grenfell.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Hi. My name is Elsa Grenfell and I am an
ex Mormon content creator and author. I was very Mormon
growing up. I grew up in a varianted about home,
and then I left the church when I was about
twenty three, 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
(10:25):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
I grew up in Massachusetts. I grew up like 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?
Speaker 2 (10:53):
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
(11:14):
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 lays
(11:36):
his hands on hit 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
(11:57):
most important things about your future and it's all encompassed
around motherhood and wivehood. 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 true children. And so if you can compare the
what women are taught, if you compare that with what
men are taught, it's also very different. So you could
(12:21):
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,
hot water rafting, or doing boy scouts, learning to tie
not you know, just more traditional boyhood kind of things.
(12:45):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
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 does it like to
process that doubt?
Speaker 2 (13:19):
I think it's 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 a broiled 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
(13:42):
the real quote real meed 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
(14:04):
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 how I'm
moving the opposite way instead of kind of somewhere in
the middle of this like what I really want kind
of idea that people have.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
How do you move forward with so much of what
your life has been structured around being removed?
Speaker 2 (14:31):
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,
(14:52):
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
(15:14):
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
(15:36):
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.
(15:59):
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
(16:20):
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 twenty four at that point. Didn't grow horns,
(16:41):
didn't fall beneath the floor, everything proceeded as normal. It
was very underwhelming. Most sins after you leave the church,
most sins of the 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 like, why did you come to New York?
And I start talking about Utah, Mormonism and leaving the
(17:04):
church and garments, the religious underwear, the temple endowment, the
prayer circle of the ceremony, the oaths, and the handshakes,
and I just remember it was probably a group of
fifteen 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 a cult right now? And
like I could. It was kind of affirming to me
(17:25):
to have And you know, I always have those experiences
talking to people they don't know much about Mormons, because
you can tell from the look on their face that
you're not the crazy one for thinking you were raised
in a very crazy religion. Whereas you know, 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 were garments, but to someone who's never
(17:47):
interfaced with the religion, it is probably ten to twenty
times stranger and odder than people who are familiar with it.
So that kind of surprise on people's faces has been
healing from me in some way 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
(18:07):
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.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
Oh, I think that one of my first Mormon memories
is that there is there's a YouTuber who would go
around and film the temple ceremonies. I remember, probably when
I was like late middle school, early high school, coming
across the thumbnail of you know, secrets inside a Mormon Temple,
and okay, I remember thinking to myself, you know, I
(18:54):
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 learned the term anti Mormon literature, that that's a
whole thing you're warned against that you should you shouldn't
(19:15):
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, they and
(19:36):
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.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
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 that you know, however, hashtag not all tradwives are Mormons,
but many of them are. Many of the most successful
influencers are either Utah Mormon based or create content that
(20:08):
really appeals. So when did you start noticing this content?
And yeah, what did you make of it?
Speaker 2 (20:16):
That's a good question. And I mean, I feel like
my whole childhood was kind of tradwife content. 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 a
(20:39):
lot of trad wife content kind of came up in
the Instagram age, which is beautiful children, beautiful dresses, lovely
sour dough, 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 pause the
(21:00):
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 the tradwife movement in specificity, I guess
because prior to that, I just see, you know, beautiful
kind of like a lot of people say that the
(21:22):
Mormon tradwife movement came from Mormon mommy bloggers, which were
super prevalent in the early two thousands, which is a
lot of recipe making and diy stuff, and so it's
kind of like this movement kind of re materialized onto
Instagram after they already had their original audience on the
blogging side of things. I think where it kind of
(21:44):
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 post their posts just feel like a
Pinterest board. I think Mormon is in very interesty. Mormon's
love findrist to in my in my experience, So I
(22:04):
think that that is what has kind of kicked back
against tradwives is that for a long time, I think
people just unquestioningly consumed the beautiful content. And when there's
a voice over 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 for my husband or I
(22:25):
made this for my family, and then you know, and
there's more of a narrative, Like the new video form
of the tradwife content is narrative, and so it is
developing much more of an ideology, in my opinion, behind
the curated video the pictures that we once had, and
I think two Mormons are taught to be so missionary
minded that if someone is Mormon, they've probably talked about
(22:49):
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
(23:09):
loudly and speak often about their religion.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
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 traadwave accounts that have ended up
(23:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
Yeah, in my opinion, the prevalence of people who are
influence is mentioning Mormonism 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.
(24:16):
It's almost like a graph where the bigger they get,
the less they mentioned Mormonism, because I think they realize
that it's unpopular to a general audience, but it's very
popular with the 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
(24:37):
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 tradwife 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
(24:58):
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,
(25:21):
I think if they see Mormon content and don't know
what's Mormon content, or just like, you know, even tradwife
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
(25:43):
especially they don't like that they're trying to kind of
co opt. 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
(26:07):
too overt about their specific religion, I think, you know,
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 truth, real life or whatever, then
they are recognizing that there's a risk to the brand
in bringing that to the forefront. Now that a brand
is large enough that it's kind of reaching a mass audience.
(26:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
We'll be right back with more with Alissa Grenfell. Maybe
welcome back to sixteenth minute. I sort of had to
wear something like temple garments in my youth, but it
(27:12):
was these shoulder to me 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
(27:35):
more about a recent subject I was covering. I found
that out at 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
(27:55):
what I was encountering a lot, which is 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
(28:17):
for the Mormon Church on your content.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
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 like I have this secret that I'm keeping and
if I could just explain it, like like then that
would explain the phenomenon. And it's I think it's you know,
(28:40):
I 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.
(29:00):
But when I was posting my videos, I you know,
especially initially, I'm still like learning YouTube. I think my
first YouTube video is like ten 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 a 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,
(29:22):
which obviously, if you understand the back end the Mormon
Church purchases ad space through Google Google ad Sense, and
then Google ad Sense looks for content that is relevant
to put the ad on top of. So it's not
like the Mormon Church are 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
(29:46):
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 at the stuff
about YouTube and realizing that my 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,
(30:07):
like my average kind of pay per view or pay
per click or whatever was much higher than just kind
of your average channel. I used to do some SEO
for a previous employer, and I went and looked at
the ads spend estimated behind different keywords, because people don't
realize that the AD spend behind something like crafting is
(30:28):
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 smoothies terms, that the ad spend was
as high as very expensive advertising terms, so like to
(30:51):
open a new credit card was thirty dollars per click,
and something like crafting or maybe like sour dough bread
is like two dollars. It's very low. So when I
looked at Mormon terms like Mormon missionary was thirty dollars
and Utah influencer was nineteen dollars, Mormon was twenty five dollars.
And these are ad spends that are phenomenally high, especially
(31:15):
when compared even with another religion. You know, Catholicism or
catholic is two dollars, Judaism or jew is maybe four dollars.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
As someone raised Catholic, I was like, wow, Catholics found
dead in a ditch, like not a profitable, not a
profitable YouTube grip I was. I was truly blown away
with how many times higher those keywords were scanning.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
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, which I also have no idea 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
(32:01):
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,
(32:22):
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,
you know, before they get the brand sponsorship, before they
get all the clicks for the commissions on Amazon whatever.
Like I think I just basically took what was happening
(32:43):
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 and P and they're making
videos about sourdough. Those people are making the same amount
of money, which is how irregular.
Speaker 3 (33:01):
I had no idea how much money the Mormon Church has.
As you explained 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 like a world
where the Mormon Church is accidentally cutting you checks for
(33:22):
talking about why.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
You let 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 ask for
the Mormon Church. I'm still getting those comments, so I
don't know, Like, I don't think I added them to
the point that they are 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
(33:45):
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. YouTuber can keep
going and keep making the negative videos, And it's a
very funny little cycle, considering I once paid ten percent
of my income to the church and now I'm slowly
making it back.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
Tad 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.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
The most fascinating was that the term the search term
Utah influencer. I think Utah influencer made about nineteen dollars
per click. So if you compare that with New York
City influencer, you know, San Francisco influencer, places where you assume,
you know, that's the influencer capital of the world because
that's especially of the US, those are all under five dollars.
(34:53):
So you know, like I said, it's almost three times
they're making three times as much. So a woman, a
woman with her kids in New York, her kids in
LA 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 the lower cost of
living right, and lower cost of living, and you know,
(35:13):
probably her husband already has a job because he's been
kind of trained to be the bread winner, 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 looking started looking
(35:35):
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 them with church.
But when you see a lifestyle presented that's very alluring
and very beautiful, and you think to yourself, what it
is about this person that made this lifestyle possible, and
(35:58):
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.
Speaker 3 (36:11):
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 you know, gender roles and the ideals
of the church and the day to day without having
(36:33):
it be traced back to supposing Ballerina firm, 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.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
The church had a ton of success from Donnie and
Marie Osmond because they're Mormon. They're more you know, the
raised Mormon, still Mormon to this day, and they were,
you know, nominal 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
(37:11):
big Congregation, and she's another example of someone who kind
of became a bit of a brand ambassador. You know,
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,
(37:34):
whereas now they've had it I think in more recent
years backfire more often than they've had it work, like
with David Archiletta. So David Archiletta 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 Chapter Nacle Choir where they
did his slow zoom on him. And he was another
(37:57):
poster child and another famous person. He's the sweetest you know,
if you'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
(38:17):
church and now has written a song about you know,
I'd rather go to health and 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 breathing example of
the church's bigotry towards gay people. Because the church really
(38:40):
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
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 chadwife creators, because they know
(39:03):
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 blog sphere of the early two thousands
through the Instagrammers and YouTubers of today by giving them
(39:25):
ad revenue.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
We'll be right back with more with Alyssa Grenfell. Welcome
back to sixteenth minute, and now we continue our conversation
(39:46):
with Alyssa Grenfell.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
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 cost perview,
and that's it just says advertisers were willing to pay,
and it's like a black box. They're not telling you,
like which this percentage came from this organization, this percentage
came from this organization. So it's like a black box
(40:10):
in that you can't you don't even know. So the
women can just make their content and look up in
the morning and be like, look, babe, like, 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
(40:32):
kind of one of the first they've talked about it.
Speaker 3 (40:34):
There's no one answer that's going to completely unlock why
are there so many successful trad wife 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 it seems like the Mormon Church
(40:57):
has no small part.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
In And it's so funny because when you say it
like that, it sounds so kind of conspiratorial. It sounds,
you know, the Mormons they're controlling the Internet. But it
is funny because it I think to some extent it's true.
I mean, not that they are literally holding the mouse
and clicking the clicks, but in that they are exercising
(41:20):
I think a pretty broad ad spend, the way that
they are actively petitioning members to go on and share,
share the Gospel, share talks, share resources about the church,
and so I think that they do have like a
fairly coordinated pr effort for the Internet specifically. Even one
thing I didn't mention in that video is they have
(41:41):
all these people who are hired to do SEO. And
if you google something like Bible, the Mormon Church has
like their their free Bible is one of the first
organic things you see on Google is for to depress
about today. Say it's 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
(42:01):
has one of the top organic rankings for those searches,
which is very purposeful and specific, you know, and 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
(42:24):
get people on the Internet interested in Mormonism. And it's multifaceted,
and they have whole departments hired for this kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (42:31):
It just seems like the Mormon Church has adapted to
the Internet age unusually well.
Speaker 2 (42:37):
I think they 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 ten articles on a subject, and they'll try
(42:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (43:18):
Is there anything I didn't ask that you feel like
is relevant to this discussion?
Speaker 2 (43:23):
Sometimes I struggle with, you know, when I talk about
tradwife 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 tradwife, but it's maybe the critique because I often
feel like tradwives didn't invent motherhood. Tradwives didn't invent being
(43:47):
a wife, or like being in a loving relationship in partnership,
and so sometimes 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
(44:09):
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 what I is. The final thing I'd want
to leave is just that it's not something that's quite
(44:31):
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 ro versus Wade, and it's about all
of these different cultural forces.
Speaker 3 (44:43):
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 and not you
bully the byproducts of the system.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
That'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 X
(45:24):
y Z, 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.
Speaker 3 (45:35):
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,
(45:56):
why are there so many successful Mormon wives and the
influence 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.
(46:18):
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 Argiletta talking about why he left the Mormon Church.
See you next week.
Speaker 1 (46:32):
One day I was just praying. I got on my
knees and 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, because I don't want
to be a wish and 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
(46:55):
me this. You're asking me the wrong thing because I
don't intend to change, and 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.
Speaker 3 (47:10):
Sixteenth Minute is a production of fool Zone Media and
iHeart Radios. It is written, hosted, and.
Speaker 4 (47:16):
Produced by me Jamie Lostus. Our executive producers are Sophie
Lichtman and Robert Evans The maasi Ian Johnson.
Speaker 3 (47:23):
It is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme
song is by Sad thirteen and Pet.
Speaker 4 (47:30):
Shout outs to our dog producer Anderson my Kat's Flee
and Casper and by Pet Rothbert who will outlive us
all Bye
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Start up nights Joy.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
Time, So.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Stay Exclaim.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Sixteen sixteen sixteen, Welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the podcast
(00:59):
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's
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
(01:20):
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. It stands on race, gender,
and sexuality cliff notes not great, and it's history of
intersecting with conservative leaning social media trends among women. So
(01:44):
think mommy blogs of the two thousands. 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. When
I'd like to dedicate more time in the future Mormon
women's intersection with major multi level marketing schemes, schemes that
(02:07):
rely on salespeople 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,
(02:31):
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 Lularo, the
ugly leggings company that was busted in a massive legal
scandal in the twenty tens. You tell the people you
love they're an a Peermid scheme, and they go, no,
I'm not, You're just a hater. I own my own business.
(02:53):
I'm very successful.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
My orders would smell disgusted.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
It was just insane, the amount of hoops at jump
Through to get them to ever admit that their product
was faulty.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
I would sometimes open bags and they'd be wet.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
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 Lulu ro 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
(03:32):
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
mom Talk, the stars of the new show The Secret
(03:53):
Lives of Mormon Wives, and Ballerina farm, a ten million
follower influencer who presents 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 these similarly flawed girl boss archetypes the way
(04:16):
that they think they are, but that's for another day,
because now we're going to 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
(04:40):
bringing them to the top of your feed ex Mormon
influencer Alyssa Grenfell has been asking this question too. She
was raised and 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 twenties with her husband, and after they
(05:00):
both found themselves questioning the values they'd grown up with.
For Alissa's husband, the radicalizing issue was the church's stance
on gay marriage, and for Alissa, 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 two
(05:20):
thousand 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
(05:41):
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 esthetics, but it's very possible at the Church of
Latter day Saints itself is bankrolling these Mormon mommy influencers
(06:05):
without the influencers being able to say for sure that
it's them. Here's a clip from that video.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
So different niches, different types of content on the Internet
make different amounts of money. You can see you're off
to the side that depending on the type of content
you make, you're gonna 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
(06:33):
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 twelve dollars and twenty five cents for each one
(06:57):
thousand views on that video. When Google or an other
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
(07:19):
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
(07:42):
are looking for.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
Alissa 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 into
the amount that she was making on YouTube and the
amount of algorithmic preference she was getting less than a
(08:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
You can see here that the keyword new bank costs
twenty five dollars and thirty cents. 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
(08:38):
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
(08:58):
already looked at the term Catholic. The cost per click.
The ad revenue behind Catholic is three dollars and fifty
eight cents. If you look at the term Baptist, the
cost per click is a dollar twenty six cents. 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 four dollars and sixty four cents. The cost
(09:21):
per click for the term Mormon is twenty four dollars
and seventy one cents. 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
(09:41):
money into ad spend around the term Mormon.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
So this theory isn't and can't be proven without the
LDS being straightforward about their finances, which will never happen.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
So I'll let Alyssa take it.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
From here without any further ado. Here is my interview
with the fantastic Alyssa Grenfell.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Hi. My name is Elsa Grenfell and I am an
ex Mormon content creator and author. I was very Mormon
growing up. I grew up in a varianted about home,
and then I left the church when I was about
twenty three, 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
(10:25):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
I grew up in Massachusetts. I grew up like 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?
Speaker 2 (10:53):
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
(11:14):
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 lays
(11:36):
his hands on hit 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
(11:57):
most important things about your future and it's all encompassed
around motherhood and wivehood. 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 true children. And so if you can compare the
what women are taught, if you compare that with what
men are taught, it's also very different. So you could
(12:21):
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,
hot water rafting, or doing boy scouts, learning to tie
not you know, just more traditional boyhood kind of things.
(12:45):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
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 does it like to
process that doubt?
Speaker 2 (13:19):
I think it's 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 a broiled 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
(13:42):
the real quote real meed 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
(14:04):
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 how I'm
moving the opposite way instead of kind of somewhere in
the middle of this like what I really want kind
of idea that people have.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
How do you move forward with so much of what
your life has been structured around being removed?
Speaker 2 (14:31):
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,
(14:52):
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
(15:14):
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
(15:36):
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.
(15:59):
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
(16:20):
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 twenty four at that point. Didn't grow horns,
(16:41):
didn't fall beneath the floor, everything proceeded as normal. It
was very underwhelming. Most sins after you leave the church,
most sins of the 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 like, why did you come to New York?
And I start talking about Utah, Mormonism and leaving the
(17:04):
church and garments, the religious underwear, the temple endowment, the
prayer circle of the ceremony, the oaths, and the handshakes,
and I just remember it was probably a group of
fifteen 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 a cult right now? And
like I could. It was kind of affirming to me
(17:25):
to have And you know, I always have those experiences
talking to people they don't know much about Mormons, because
you can tell from the look on their face that
you're not the crazy one for thinking you were raised
in a very crazy religion. Whereas you know, 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 were garments, but to someone who's never
(17:47):
interfaced with the religion, it is probably ten to twenty
times stranger and odder than people who are familiar with it.
So that kind of surprise on people's faces has been
healing from me in some way 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
(18:07):
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.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
Oh, I think that one of my first Mormon memories
is that there is there's a YouTuber who would go
around and film the temple ceremonies. I remember, probably when
I was like late middle school, early high school, coming
across the thumbnail of you know, secrets inside a Mormon Temple,
and okay, I remember thinking to myself, you know, I
(18:54):
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 learned the term anti Mormon literature, that that's a
whole thing you're warned against that you should you shouldn't
(19:15):
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, they and
(19:36):
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.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
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 that you know, however, hashtag not all tradwives are Mormons,
but many of them are. Many of the most successful
influencers are either Utah Mormon based or create content that
(20:08):
really appeals. So when did you start noticing this content?
And yeah, what did you make of it?
Speaker 2 (20:16):
That's a good question. And I mean, I feel like
my whole childhood was kind of tradwife content. 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 a
(20:39):
lot of trad wife content kind of came up in
the Instagram age, which is beautiful children, beautiful dresses, lovely
sour dough, 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 pause the
(21:00):
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 the tradwife movement in specificity, I guess
because prior to that, I just see, you know, beautiful
kind of like a lot of people say that the
(21:22):
Mormon tradwife movement came from Mormon mommy bloggers, which were
super prevalent in the early two thousands, which is a
lot of recipe making and diy stuff, and so it's
kind of like this movement kind of re materialized onto
Instagram after they already had their original audience on the
blogging side of things. I think where it kind of
(21:44):
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 post their posts just feel like a
Pinterest board. I think Mormon is in very interesty. Mormon's
love findrist to in my in my experience, So I
(22:04):
think that that is what has kind of kicked back
against tradwives is that for a long time, I think
people just unquestioningly consumed the beautiful content. And when there's
a voice over 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 for my husband or I
(22:25):
made this for my family, and then you know, and
there's more of a narrative, Like the new video form
of the tradwife content is narrative, and so it is
developing much more of an ideology, in my opinion, behind
the curated video the pictures that we once had, and
I think two Mormons are taught to be so missionary
minded that if someone is Mormon, they've probably talked about
(22:49):
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
(23:09):
loudly and speak often about their religion.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
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 traadwave accounts that have ended up
(23:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
Yeah, in my opinion, the prevalence of people who are
influence is mentioning Mormonism 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.
(24:16):
It's almost like a graph where the bigger they get,
the less they mentioned Mormonism, because I think they realize
that it's unpopular to a general audience, but it's very
popular with the 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
(24:37):
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 tradwife 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
(24:58):
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,
(25:21):
I think if they see Mormon content and don't know
what's Mormon content, or just like, you know, even tradwife
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
(25:43):
especially they don't like that they're trying to kind of
co opt. 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
(26:07):
too overt about their specific religion, I think, you know,
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 truth, real life or whatever, then
they are recognizing that there's a risk to the brand
in bringing that to the forefront. Now that a brand
is large enough that it's kind of reaching a mass audience.
(26:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
We'll be right back with more with Alissa Grenfell. Maybe
welcome back to sixteenth minute. I sort of had to
wear something like temple garments in my youth, but it
(27:12):
was these shoulder to me 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
(27:35):
more about a recent subject I was covering. I found
that out at 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
(27:55):
what I was encountering a lot, which is 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
(28:17):
for the Mormon Church on your content.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
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 like I have this secret that I'm keeping and
if I could just explain it, like like then that
would explain the phenomenon. And it's I think it's you know,
(28:40):
I 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.
(29:00):
But when I was posting my videos, I you know,
especially initially, I'm still like learning YouTube. I think my
first YouTube video is like ten 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 a 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,
(29:22):
which obviously, if you understand the back end the Mormon
Church purchases ad space through Google Google ad Sense, and
then Google ad Sense looks for content that is relevant
to put the ad on top of. So it's not
like the Mormon Church are 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
(29:46):
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 at the stuff
about YouTube and realizing that my 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,
(30:07):
like my average kind of pay per view or pay
per click or whatever was much higher than just kind
of your average channel. I used to do some SEO
for a previous employer, and I went and looked at
the ads spend estimated behind different keywords, because people don't
realize that the AD spend behind something like crafting is
(30:28):
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 smoothies terms, that the ad spend was
as high as very expensive advertising terms, so like to
(30:51):
open a new credit card was thirty dollars per click,
and something like crafting or maybe like sour dough bread
is like two dollars. It's very low. So when I
looked at Mormon terms like Mormon missionary was thirty dollars
and Utah influencer was nineteen dollars, Mormon was twenty five dollars.
And these are ad spends that are phenomenally high, especially
(31:15):
when compared even with another religion. You know, Catholicism or
catholic is two dollars, Judaism or jew is maybe four dollars.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
As someone raised Catholic, I was like, wow, Catholics found
dead in a ditch, like not a profitable, not a
profitable YouTube grip I was. I was truly blown away
with how many times higher those keywords were scanning.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
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, which I also have no idea 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
(32:01):
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,
(32:22):
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,
you know, before they get the brand sponsorship, before they
get all the clicks for the commissions on Amazon whatever.
Like I think I just basically took what was happening
(32:43):
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 and P and they're making
videos about sourdough. Those people are making the same amount
of money, which is how irregular.
Speaker 3 (33:01):
I had no idea how much money the Mormon Church has.
As you explained 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 like a world
where the Mormon Church is accidentally cutting you checks for
(33:22):
talking about why.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
You let 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 ask for
the Mormon Church. I'm still getting those comments, so I
don't know, Like, I don't think I added them to
the point that they are 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
(33:45):
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. YouTuber can keep
going and keep making the negative videos, And it's a
very funny little cycle, considering I once paid ten percent
of my income to the church and now I'm slowly
making it back.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
Tad 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.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
The most fascinating was that the term the search term
Utah influencer. I think Utah influencer made about nineteen dollars
per click. So if you compare that with New York
City influencer, you know, San Francisco influencer, places where you assume,
you know, that's the influencer capital of the world because
that's especially of the US, those are all under five dollars.
(34:53):
So you know, like I said, it's almost three times
they're making three times as much. So a woman, a
woman with her kids in New York, her kids in
LA 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 the lower cost of
living right, and lower cost of living, and you know,
(35:13):
probably her husband already has a job because he's been
kind of trained to be the bread winner, 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 looking started looking
(35:35):
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 them with church.
But when you see a lifestyle presented that's very alluring
and very beautiful, and you think to yourself, what it
is about this person that made this lifestyle possible, and
(35:58):
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.
Speaker 3 (36:11):
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 you know, gender roles and the ideals
of the church and the day to day without having
(36:33):
it be traced back to supposing Ballerina firm, 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.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
The church had a ton of success from Donnie and
Marie Osmond because they're Mormon. They're more you know, the
raised Mormon, still Mormon to this day, and they were,
you know, nominal 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
(37:11):
big Congregation, and she's another example of someone who kind
of became a bit of a brand ambassador. You know,
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,
(37:34):
whereas now they've had it I think in more recent
years backfire more often than they've had it work, like
with David Archiletta. So David Archiletta 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 Chapter Nacle Choir where they
did his slow zoom on him. And he was another
(37:57):
poster child and another famous person. He's the sweetest you know,
if you'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
(38:17):
church and now has written a song about you know,
I'd rather go to health and 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 breathing example of
the church's bigotry towards gay people. Because the church really
(38:40):
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
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 chadwife creators, because they know
(39:03):
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 blog sphere of the early two thousands
through the Instagrammers and YouTubers of today by giving them
(39:25):
ad revenue.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
We'll be right back with more with Alyssa Grenfell. Welcome
back to sixteenth minute, and now we continue our conversation
(39:46):
with Alyssa Grenfell.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
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 cost perview,
and that's it just says advertisers were willing to pay,
and it's like a black box. They're not telling you,
like which this percentage came from this organization, this percentage
came from this organization. So it's like a black box
(40:10):
in that you can't you don't even know. So the
women can just make their content and look up in
the morning and be like, look, babe, like, 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
(40:32):
kind of one of the first they've talked about it.
Speaker 3 (40:34):
There's no one answer that's going to completely unlock why
are there so many successful trad wife 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 it seems like the Mormon Church
(40:57):
has no small part.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
In And it's so funny because when you say it
like that, it sounds so kind of conspiratorial. It sounds,
you know, the Mormons they're controlling the Internet. But it
is funny because it I think to some extent it's true.
I mean, not that they are literally holding the mouse
and clicking the clicks, but in that they are exercising
(41:20):
I think a pretty broad ad spend, the way that
they are actively petitioning members to go on and share,
share the Gospel, share talks, share resources about the church,
and so I think that they do have like a
fairly coordinated pr effort for the Internet specifically. Even one
thing I didn't mention in that video is they have
(41:41):
all these people who are hired to do SEO. And
if you google something like Bible, the Mormon Church has
like their their free Bible is one of the first
organic things you see on Google is for to depress
about today. Say it's 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
(42:01):
has one of the top organic rankings for those searches,
which is very purposeful and specific, you know, and 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
(42:24):
get people on the Internet interested in Mormonism. And it's multifaceted,
and they have whole departments hired for this kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (42:31):
It just seems like the Mormon Church has adapted to
the Internet age unusually well.
Speaker 2 (42:37):
I think they 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 ten articles on a subject, and they'll try
(42:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (43:18):
Is there anything I didn't ask that you feel like
is relevant to this discussion?
Speaker 2 (43:23):
Sometimes I struggle with, you know, when I talk about
tradwife 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 tradwife, but it's maybe the critique because I often
feel like tradwives didn't invent motherhood. Tradwives didn't invent being
(43:47):
a wife, or like being in a loving relationship in partnership,
and so sometimes 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
(44:09):
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 what I is. The final thing I'd want
to leave is just that it's not something that's quite
(44:31):
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 ro versus Wade, and it's about all
of these different cultural forces.
Speaker 3 (44:43):
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 and not you
bully the byproducts of the system.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
That'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 X
(45:24):
y Z, 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.
Speaker 3 (45:35):
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,
(45:56):
why are there so many successful Mormon wives and the
influence 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.
(46:18):
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 Argiletta talking about why he left the Mormon Church.
See you next week.
Speaker 1 (46:32):
One day I was just praying. I got on my
knees and 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, because I don't want
to be a wish and 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
(46:55):
me this. You're asking me the wrong thing because I
don't intend to change, and 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.
Speaker 3 (47:10):
Sixteenth Minute is a production of fool Zone Media and
iHeart Radios. It is written, hosted, and.
Speaker 4 (47:16):
Produced by me Jamie Lostus. Our executive producers are Sophie
Lichtman and Robert Evans The maasi Ian Johnson.
Speaker 3 (47:23):
It is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme
song is by Sad thirteen and Pet.
Speaker 4 (47:30):
Shout outs to our dog producer Anderson my Kat's Flee
and Casper and by Pet Rothbert who will outlive us
all Bye
Host
Jamie Loftus
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