This fall, as Whitney Leavitt and Jen Affleck were competing for the mirror ball trophy on ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars,” their other TV show, “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” a Hulu reality series, released its third season.
During commercial breaks for both, ads could be seen for the upcoming season of ABC’s “The Bachelorette,” with Taylor Frankie Paul, another “Mormon Wives” star, as the lead. (The Walt Disney Company owns both the network and the streaming platform.) Another cast member, Mayci Neely, in October released her memoir “Told You So,” which then became a New York Times best seller. This week, the Broadway production of “Chicago” announced that Leavitt would be taking a turn as Roxie Hart.
The women are also members of MomTok, the social media influencer group whose successes and frictions are the central drama of “Mormon Wives,” which premiered in 2024. Bravo has been concurrently airing the sixth season of “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.” The group and the Bravo housewives are all part of a growing wave of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints dotting TV and social media, who, together, have increased the religion’s profile across pop culture.
“The best export of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is our women,” Rebbie Brassfield, the host of the podcast “Mormons in Media,” said. “Even though you see them in ‘Secret Lives’ as being catty and dramatic and things that I think a lot of people in the church don’t want to associate with the church or with L.D.S. women, you also see them as, like, savvy and enterprising.”
The women of “Secret Lives” confront gender roles in their marriages while enjoying dirty sodas, since the church counsels against drinking alcohol (though Lisa Barlow, the only practicing church member on “Real Housewives,” promotes her tequila brand on her show). Church members on TikTok garnered millions of views of posts showing their search for the latest in modest undergarments. And it’s not just social media success — many of them have expanded their fame into companies or branding. The tradwife influencer Nara Smith, known for from-scratch cooking her husband’s cravings, lent her name to a $28 garlic oil while Hannah Neeleman, known across her social handles as Ballerina Farms, sells on her website the sourdough starter she serves to her husband and eight children.
These unscripted portrayals of women on reality TV and social media are a far cry from past pop culture depictions, which were often scripted formats that skewed satirical or investigative, or focused on polygamy, which was disavowed by the church in 1890 (though some fundamentalist sects still practice it).
There was HBO’s “Big Love,” which premiered in 2006 and starred Bill Paxton as a Utah casino owner with three wives and nine children. In 2010, TLC’s “Sister Wives,” a reality show, followed Kody Brown and his four wives. The sweetly sacrilegious “The Book of Mormon,” a musical about a church mission to Uganda, has run on Broadway since 2011. And the FX mini-series “Under the Banner of Heaven” (2022) adapted the investigative book about the murder of an female church member and her daughter by fundamentalist family members.
The current crop of representation focuses on the lifestyles of women — men are peripheral — raised in the church, who strike a delicate balance of adherence to (and rejection of) doctrine while living in a digital age. The church declined to comment for this article but referred to a statement on its website posted in 2024, when the second season of “Mormon Wives” had just been released. “A number of recent productions depict lifestyles and practices blatantly inconsistent with the teachings of the Church,” it read.
Women are unable to hold the top leadership positions within the church, but in these day-to-day depictions they are decision makers in their households and, increasingly, breadwinners.
Brassfield, a practicing member of the faith, credited the church’s youth programs with empowering her and other women. “In Young Women’s, I grew up every week learning that I had inherent worth,” she said, “that I had a divine nature and that nothing could take away my worth.”
Barlow said the church’s traditions teach members to push for excellence.
“There’s such an emphasis on education and talents and self-betterment in Utah,” she said. “You knew that if you were going to hire a Mormon, there’s an elevated standards level.”
Miranda Hope, a “Mormon Wives” cast member, said that church culture can come with “a little bit of an undertone of competition.” To her point, nearly half of this season’s professionals on “Dancing With the Stars” were raised in the church, as were Derek Hough, a judge, and his sister Julianne Hough, who is a co-host.
“There’s also a motivational and discipline side, but it just makes Mormons go-getters,” Hope said.
The general appearance of perfectionism markets itself well, according to Diane Winston, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communications who specializes in media and religion.
“These women have turned lifestyle into a booming brand and they’ve done that by falling back on their traditional roles as Mormon mothers and homemakers,” she said. “So it’s an interesting fusion of both feminism and anti-feminism.”
Representation of women in traditional familial roles has increased as “the Trump era has brought up questions about women’s roles that many of us thought were settled,” she said, creating opportunities for conservative women to be more visible.
“If there is ever a religion that was built for social media or built for Instagram, it’s Mormonism,” said Heather Gay, a cast member on “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” and a former member of the church.
Increasingly, audiences are embracing less “perfect” cast members and those who have left the church all together.
Taylor Frankie Paul’s announcement on TikTok that she would be divorcing her husband amid a “soft swinging” scandal involving other member couples helped start “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” which showed on its first episode police body camera footage of her arrest for assault and domestic violence toward her ex-boyfriend and other charges. She pleaded guilty to aggravated assault; the other charges were dropped. Paul has the biggest social media following of the cast, two million followers on Instagram and nearly six million on TikTok.
In 2023, Gay released “Bad Mormon,” a memoir about her separation from the church, and this year she produced “Surviving Mormonism,” a three-part Bravo documentary series in which she interviewed former members of the church about conversion and allegations of sexual abuse.
“I was an indentured servant to my family and husband and church,” Gay said, “and I think that it’s really hard to say that when we’ve been trained our whole lives to spin it positive, but we’re also trained our whole lives to spin our Instagram post positive, too.”
Shivani Gonzalez is a news assistant at The Times who writes a weekly TV column and contributes to a variety of sections.
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