(RNS) — An alluring young woman sporting a 1950s-style polka-dot halter dress leans toward the camera across the kitchen counter, the epitome of retro chic. In a soothing, gentle voice, she informs us that a relative is in town and has been craving bubble gum.
Rather than doing what nine out of 10 people would do, which is to fish out an ossified stick of gum from the bottom of a bag and hope there’s no such thing as a purse-borne disease, Nara Smith begins making bubble gum from scratch, starting with some “gum base” she just happens to have on hand in her gleaming, spacious kitchen. In the space of a 70-second TikTok video, two innovative bubble gum flavors are ready to try.
I suspect most of Smith’s 9.4 million TikTok followers realize that her videos are staged and that she’s a professional model. What purport to be spur-of-the-moment decisions to satisfy the cravings of her gorgeous husband or their three young children have all the spontaneity of a military operation.
And yet we keep watching, fascinated by this woman who also makes her toddlers’ morning cereal from scratch and softly gushes that cooking natural foods is her “love language.”
Religion isn’t discussed, but it informs Smith’s online persona as surely as the cucumber and watermelon she uses to infuse her midday mocktail. Smith and her husband are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons. This identity isn’t obvious from her videos — she more often than not sports sleeveless and backless clothing that LDS leaders long designated as off-limits for young women of the faith — but the religion subtly undergirds the lifestyle she is selling.
As a scholar who studies Mormonism in the United States, and a Latter-day Saint myself, I know why I watch Smith’s videos: She is part of my tribe and I’m proud of her success, even as I roll my eyes at the idea that we Mormons routinely make our own ketchup instead of fetching it from Costco.
Instagram posts by Studio McGee. (Screen grab)
My question is why so many other people keep tuning in to watch Smith and a host of other LDS influencers whose religion flies equally under the radar.
For example, Shea McGee, the interior designer behind Studio McGee, deployed her Instagram and YouTube popularity to help launch the Netflix series “Dream Home Makeover.”
McGee and her husband met while she was studying at Brigham Young University, where 99% of students are Mormon, so it’s a safe bet she is or was a church member. Other clues: They live in Utah, have a growing young family and seem to share the Mormon obsession with cookies and sweets. But I haven’t seen any overt confirmation of a religious identity in their social media or on Netflix’s show.
That omission is a smart decision, because Americans like Latter-day Saints’ lifestyle a good deal more than they like the religion itself. Despite the astonishing popularity of these LDS personalities, the Pew Research Center finds that Mormons rank dead last among religious groups in popular approval. Just 15% of Americans hold a “very” or “somewhat” favorable view of us. Our negative-10 favorability rating places us below atheists and Muslims, the only other groups to achieve negative territory.
So if non-Mormons aren’t keen on Latter-day Saints’ religion, what are they looking for when they follow LDS influencers? I think they’re craving a blend of the traditional and the modern. Mormon women influencers, for example, are supposed to have it all: fam and glam, trad wife and bosswoman.
But bend too far in either direction and the social media backlash can be intense. Consider the hostility directed at “Ballerina Farm” personality Hannah Neeleman, a Juilliard-trained dancer who runs a Utah farm with her affluent husband and their eight children.
The rail-thin and conspicuously blond Neeleman embodies the Barbie beauty stereotype. Fans love the scrubbed pine tables where she dishes up homemade pies, and the prairie dresses she and her daughters wear, skirts swaying gently in the mountain breeze.
Recent Instagram posts by Ballerina Farm. (Screen grab)
Many of those same fans balked, however, when, less than two weeks after giving birth to her eighth child in January, a svelte Neeleman represented the United States in the Mrs. World pageant.
How was she able to lose her baby weight so quickly and parade in a swimsuit and evening gown? What’s more, why did she? Glamour magazine said many people felt that “by posting videos of her home births, skinny waist, obvious bliss, and serene nature, she is actively harming other women. She’s making postpartum look like a breeze … and is giving an unrealistic ideal for what motherhood is actually like.”
The criticisms intensified last month after The Times of London did an in-depth profile of Neeleman. Or an attempted profile: According to interviewer Megan Agnew, Neeleman’s husband often spoke for his wife, and he left Agnew alone with her interview subject for only a few minutes:
I can’t, it seems, get an answer out of Neeleman without her being corrected, interrupted or answered for by either her husband or a child. Usually I am doing battle with steely Hollywood publicists; today I am up against an army of toddlers who all want their mum and a husband who thinks he knows better.
Her husband also revealed the alarming tidbit that sometimes Neeleman is so exhausted from her farm and child-care duties that she has to take to bed for an entire week. This revelation generated a firestorm on social media, with critique far outweighing compassion. For a 35-year-old woman to require that much bed rest isn’t normal, the internet said. And since Neeleman hinted (when her husband briefly left the room) that she once had an epidural during a childbirth when he was out of town, the internet assumed he had otherwise prevented her from accessing pain relief for all of her other births.
The backlash shows that viewers want the Neelemans to be a traditional family, but not too traditional. Neeleman should be beautiful, but not impossibly so. They want to believe the fantasy that she runs her family by herself, and feel betrayed to learn that the “homeschooled” children are actually tutored by a paid employee.
They also want religion to be muted, and the Neelemans mostly succeed at this, keeping their faith out of the foreground.
That approach also characterizes the Bucket List Family, who spent years as global wanderers, exploring the planet with three kids in tow, including a baby. (They’ve since bought a home in Nevada and settled in, at least for the time being.) Their travels, chronicled in the lovely book “National Geographic Bucket List Family Travel,” are filled with gorgeous water adventures, culinary delights and beautiful photos of them in swimsuits, as befits any travel fantasy worth its salt.
Though they don’t discuss religion openly, they do talk about “values” and “living authentically,” 21st-century buzzwords that, from their mouths, feel fresh and moving. Those values are ones that many Americans fear we are losing. Once a month, for instance, the family paused their travels for a service project, in part to teach their kids how privileged they are. (And they are privileged. In the NatGeo book, Jessica Gee matter-of-factly explains they can afford their life because her husband, Garrett, co-developed a barcode-scanning app as an undergraduate, before selling it to Snapchat in 2014 for $54 million. Oh.)
These families are traditional, with a heterosexual married couple at their core who seem to love and enjoy each other. Importantly, though, they’re not winding the clock back too far. It’s Nara Smith, not her husband, who is the bigger star, and Shea McGee, not Syd, who heads the family’s design firm. Both husbands are clearly supportive and proud of their wives, which only adds to the fantasy. So, too, is Garrett Gee, who pens the foreword to Jessica’s travel book and credits her with being “the one who makes it all happen.”
These egalitarian-seeming gender dynamics appeal more to contemporary Americans than the actual patriarchy that the LDS church has long upheld as divinely ordained. LDS women cannot hold the priesthood or any of the positions of authority for which the priesthood is the essential calling card. Women cannot run a congregation or preside over men in church organizations, but in influencer-land they can run a company, rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year (or more) and still have the bandwidth to make breakfast cereal from scratch.
I don’t envy these women. It must be exhausting to curate their lives and children for public consumption — to say nothing of preserving those beautiful bodies that society reviles and reveres in equal measure. It’s not a sustainable lifestyle. But oh, how America loves to keep watching.
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