"Always An Angel, Never A God"

Ex-Mormon Alyssa Grenfell on what she learned about marriage and motherhood from her LDS upbringing

Many of the most successful and famous momfluencers are Mormon. This makes intuitive sense to lots of folks since Mormonism is a patriarchal religion which places high value on a woman’s ability to excel as a mother, wife, and domestic goddess. The influencer economy places high value on these qualities too. Or, more accurately, the influencer economy places high value on the ability to perform these roles in an aesthetically compelling way for an audience.

Because I’m eternally interested in performances of femininity, and the various power structures that uphold domestic, heteronormative, and maternal examples of womanhood as being the pinnacle to which we should all aspire, I am also interested in Mormonism.

Understanding the role of women in the LDS (the Church of Latter Day Saints) is important for interrogating the influence of hugely popular Mormon influencers. And it’s also important to consider how any patriarchal religion continues to impact the political landscape. Evangelicals and Mormons comprise some of the most influential, wealthy, well-organized Christian groups in the US, and as we teeter closer and closer into Christofascism, and further into a future in which women’s lives are controlled by the state, I don’t see how feminist issues can be decoupled from conservative Christianity.

I have no lived experience with Mormonism, so today, I’m centering someone who does. Alyssa Grenfell is an ex-Mormon content creator and author of How To Leave The Mormon Church: An Ex-Mormon’s Guide To Rebuilding After Religion. Through her work, Alyssa explores the power and roots of trad culture, gender roles within the Mormon church, and peels back the opaque layers of Mormon power. And it’s not nearly as simple as soda shops and getting high on laughing gas during cute Botox sessions.

Sara

Could you start by just telling me who you are, what you do, and a little about your history with the Mormon church?

Alyssa

Before I started making videos, I was in education, both as a teacher and as an assistant principal. After my second son was born, I decided to write a book, which is about leaving the Mormon church. And then as part of writing the book, I started posting online videos in order to create an audience to share the book with. The videos were much more successful than I expected, and kinda took on a life of their own. So now I refer to myself as an ex-Mormon author and content creator. I talk primarily about my experience in the Mormon church and provide commentary on Mormon pop culture (which includes trad wives obviously).

Sara

What led you to write the book?

Alyssa

I went into education because of a blessing my dad gave me. And it never felt like something I had really chosen for myself. So after the birth of my son, I decided to take a leap and do something more aligned with my longtime dream of writing. I had recently gone through the huge experience of leaving the Mormon church, and so many people were reaching out asking for help or advice on leaving. Interestingly, most of the time, it was people I wasn't even friends with. It was sometimes very distant acquaintances who were basically looking for an anonymous space to get advice. And this made me realize there was a real need for a resource for people who wanted to figure out what they wanted but weren’t ready or able to talk to their families or husbands about it.

Some of the questions I got were: How do I tell my parents? How do I move on? How do I address the guilt of trying coffee for the first time? I began to realize that there was kind of a basic structure of leaving. I not only wanted to write a book that people would read, I also wanted to write a book that would help people and didn’t exist yet. The book was initially written with ex-Mormons in mind, or people in the process of leaving, but it includes many of my personal experiences, and a lot of people have read it almost as a memoir.

Sara

I don't think people would necessarily need a guide book to leave all religions. Like if you're just going to like, a run-of-the-mill Protestant church that you were raised to be lukewarmly faithful in, I don't think you're necessarily going to need a book. The other thing that's interesting is how you're reaching non-Mormon readers. And I think that speaks to a widespread cultural fascination with the Mormon church. So why do Mormons need a book to leave the church? And why do you think people are so fascinated?

Alyssa

The Mormon church is a high demand religion. There are some aspects of it that feel cultish, or cult adjacent. I've come to think of it as the carcass of a cult because it had so many cultish qualities in the beginning, and as the church modernized, they gradually gutted the most cultish parts. Whether it's Black people finally being able to get the priesthood, or taking out the most explicitly sexist portions of the Mormon temple ceremonies, or modernizing garments.

So I think of the Mormon church kind of as a cult that's been gutted, which is why there's still these cultish vestiges that make people curious. If you look at the history and if you look at continuing practices today, there are still whispers or echoes of the violent, sometimes murderous Mormon history.

Sara

What do you mean?

Alyssa

So, The Last Podcast On The Left did a six-part series on Mormonism, which provides a really detailed account of the Danites and blood atonement. Both Brigham Young and Joseph Smith advocated religious killings for people who were not acting correctly. There’s a religious murder depicted in Under The Banner of Heaven, and there continue to be suicides committed by queer people alienated by the LDS.

The Danites were a military group set up by Joseph Smith to initially protect the Saints from being persecuted in their early history. But they more or less turned into a paramilitary group committing violence towards both fellow Mormons and outsiders.

So the history of Mormonism is very violent, both because there was violence perpetrated against them and because they were perpetuating violence. And you still see that violence echoed in current church doctrine. I recently did a TikTok video about death pacts, which were a part of temple ceremonies up until the 1990s. Essentially, when baptized, you had to promise if you ever gave away Mormon secrets or shared details from inside the Mormon church, you’d promise to kill yourself.

Sara

That’s not a great look!

Alyssa

Look, the endowment ceremony used to have all this language (that I can’t quote directly off the top of my head) about cutting one’s throat and submitting to one’s tongue being torn out. There were references to bowels falling out of bodies, birds eating innards. It was a whole thing. And that was as recent as the 90s!

Every church leader made those promises. My parents made those promises. And yes, they’ve started to systematically remove some of the creepier ceremonies and language, but it’s not completely gone. I did the washing and endowment, I experienced marriage as a “saving ordinance,” I did the secret handshakes, I did the curtain.

For people my parents’ age, when they did the washing and anointing ceremony, picture wearing 2 flaps - one over the front of your body, one over the back of your body. And when they would bless your body, they would reach under the flap and touch your breast, touch you basically right next to your pubic bone. And you’re totally blindsided by this. You're going into the temple and these men are just, like, touching your naked body, right? And that was practiced until the 90s, which isn’t a long time ago.

There are lots of people who lived through the Black priesthood ban and experienced these strange, arguably intrusive ceremonies. So it's weird, I think, to see Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which really wants you to think of Mormonism as mainstream (there’s laughing gas over Botox, they’re all drinking soda and having parties). But so much of Mormon history (and current practices) wouldn’t seem very mainstream to non-Mormon audiences.

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The other reason I call the Mormon church cultish is because they tend to have a mental chokehold on people. Whether it's culturally facing a lot of blowback from leaving the church, or being forced to do identity gymnastics to still remain part of your cultural group. Or whether it’s the backlash and alienation that comes from leaving. And then you see the glam ladies of Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, and it’s hard to hold both truths at once. It’s somehow very pop-culture and still very regressive at once, which I think contributes to so many people having so many questions.

I mean, to illustrate that point, I’ve seen some non-Mormons confuse Mormons with the Amish, mistakenly thinking Mormons can’t use electricity or technology. But a bunch of non-Mormons also know about Mitt Romney and the Osmonds as rich celebrities who seem relatively normal. I mean, the Marriott chain of hotels is owned by Mormons! And yet, the church still maintains so many archaic practices and holds so many regressive beliefs about women, family structure, queer people, and trans people.

And I think the other reason non-Mormons are fascinated is because it’s this distinctly American phenomenon. It can come as a shock that this type of super patriarchal, high demand religion exists in a place like the US.

Sara

Polygamy was an original part of Mormonism, right?

Alyssa

Kind of. The position most ex-Mormons take is that Joseph Smith had extramarital affairs and he was caught, so he used the doctrine of polygamy to justify and enshrine polygamy as holy. But when he sat down to write The Book of Mormon, polygamy wasn’t a factor. It was after the fact.

Sara

There’s a history of the subjugation of women and violence towards women and young girls in the Mormon church, which feels very much at odds with recent positive PR about women and the church. In a recent NYT profile of Hannah Neeleman, they asked a Mormon scholar about gender roles and this is what she said:

“Dr. Klein said that in recent years, women have put pressure on the church to expand their roles, making room for equality within marriage. ‘Being a trad wife is about submission,’ she said. ‘This looks more like the church's ideal idea of partnership.’” This was in response to the Neeleman’s marital example. It just seems so disingenuous to me when women still can't hold the priesthood. Can you speak to the reality of gender roles within the church?

Alyssa

When I was 22, I literally wrote a list of attributes my dream husband would have. Like a bulleted list. “He will be the head but we will be equals.” I recently reread this journal and just can't believe that as an adult woman, I was writing these words. Like, I was explicitly thinking about the day when my husband would be the head and I would be beneath him. It just felt so scary to reread.

I would say that for many Mormon women, there’s the illusion of consent. It's the illusion of power. The church is very interested, I think, in putting women on a pedestal. There’s a song by Boygenius called “Always an Angel, Never a God.” And I feel like that's the perfect synopsis of what it is to be a woman in the Mormon church. You're always a beautiful angel. You have the beautiful hair, the makeup, the lovely children, you’re a mother goddess. But never a god, never the head, you know? And so I think the LDS church is good at performatively making women feel special.

There's a meme about women being given the most comfortable chairs in Mormonism, as a way to show how well women are treated in the Mormon church. Like, we care about women because we give them comfortable chairs. You can tell women matter because we treat them well. As long as they're in their place, they're never asking for power, and they're always beautiful. And you have Hannah Neeleman or any of the smiling women on Mormon pamphlets looking so pleased and happy to be there. But when you've never been presented with any other option and you've been indoctrinated since birth to believe that you should have a subservient role within a marriage, it's hard to believe women have a true choice. If you’re presented with only one way to be a good woman.

Sara

Right, you're only protected and cherished if you adhere to a list of demands.

Alyssa

A friend of mine calls herself a feminist Mormon. She voted for Kamala Harris. She would be offended by me questioning her feminism. She read Cheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, and she felt really seen by it in that she also works and is also a mother. But her version of feminism doesn’t feel like an activist-minded feminism. It’s very much like, my life is good, so what’s the problem?

And this type of feminism might see other women living harder lives, but they see this as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like, if unhoused people wanted houses, why don't they do what it takes to buy houses? Or, you chose to marry that person or you chose to have sex and get pregnant. So you have to live with your choices.

It's almost like when you overemphasize choice as the defining factor of your feminism and you already have, like, a kept lifestyle, it doesn't spur you to have any real empathy or to seek understanding of someone's life because they “chose” it. But you can’t choose to be born in poverty, or choose to be born to an unsupported single mom. I think this idea of choice protects them mentally from having to change. It gives you permission to turn a blind eye to suffering.

And I also think this is why so many nice white lady Mormon feminists invest a lot of time in their appearance (the Botox for example). Even that’s framed as a choice. I choose to be beautiful and that's empowerment. Spending thousands of dollars on clothes and extensions and calling it empowerment is interesting to me. It doesn’t seem so empowered to have to spend so much capital on maintaining your appearance or to submit yourselves to knives and needles in order to feel beautiful. When feminism is all about choice, I think it distorts the truth of the human experience, which is that we were all born into circumstances that we didn't choose.

Sara

In that same New York Times piece, the framing of Mormon women as being homesteading pioneers, hardworking, and self reliant really struck me. It was certainly glorified in that piece and it seems like a big part of Mormon mythology. It’s very much in line with the American dream and, you know, rugged individualism. But it’s not considering that Mormons were also part of the white colonial project, and that these women lived incredibly difficult, often brutal lives. It was all just beauty and nostalgia. Like, I'm just following in my mother's and grandmother's footsteps, canning my vegetables or whatever. And it seemed really lovely. I just wondered if you had any thoughts about that?

Alyssa

I recently spoke to a woman whose mother was one of Warren Jeffs’ wives. And this woman had an incredibly high number of children - somewhere between 11-14. I can’t recall the exact number. We can describe her as strong but also ask whether or not she should’ve had to be so strong. Yes, the pioneer women were strong, but they were also trapped in polygamist marriages. If they weren’t strong, their children wouldn’t survive. Is this really the type of strength we should valorize? Should we be thinking about a woman’s strength rather than the fact that she didn’t have access to birth control, suffered severe mental health issues, and was borderline abusive to those 14 kids?

This woman was objectively a strong person, but I think there’s something wrong with celebrating strength in the face of adversity when that adversity wasn’t necessary. When you’re trapped in a religion and a life that you can’t escape.

And of course, the FLDS is not the same thing as the mainstream Mormon church, but they do share a common history. And as for Ballerina Farm, sure we can talk about how strong and amazing she is. But at what cost? A lot of women don't want to live that way. And that doesn't make them less valuable. And a lot of women aren't, you know, perfectly beautiful and thin. That doesn't make them any less valuable. A lot of women don't want to compete in beauty pageants ten days after birth. That doesn't make them less strong in their childbirth or in their postpartum experience.

So I struggle with the valorization of this type of womanly strength and even women valorizing their own suffering. It’s like praising the workaholic when we should be asking why he feels compelled to work so many hours in the first place?

Sara

I think so often we define womanly and maternal strength as smiling in the face of hardship, of remaining beautiful and taking the time to do the kids’ hair and bake the cookies. Or whatever.

Alyssa

It’s still connected to a performance for men, because so many of these ideals stem from service for men. Home cooked meals, giving a man lots of children. But it’s been repurposed as feminine strength and something to aspire to. How convenient that the things women have historically been forced to do are now the things that (if they choose them) are deemed most valuable and worthwhile?

Sara

So this is a huge unanswerable question. The Mormons are incredible at PR, right? They have a ton of money. And now we're entering a second Trump presidency. J.D. Vance wants all women to be mothers. So what do you see in this soup of money, public relations, politics, and the valorization of traditional gender roles?

Alyssa

It’s interesting because Hannah Neeleman and others try to remain apolitical but are politicized by others. I mean Candace Owens loves Ballerina Farm, but you wouldn't see Hannah Neeleman clap back to her, right? But she's also not renouncing Candace Owens’ beliefs. It’s good PR for Mormonism because it’s rarely overtly political.

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In terms of gender, I feel like we will probably regress a bit further before we have enough people waking up to realize they don’t want this version of America, until enough people’s personal liberties are threatened. I feel like the Harris campaign was very reliant on reminding us that Trump is a monster, but that there was no longer that visceral feeling of living under a Trump presidency.

As far as Mormonism goes, I think they actually are making an attempt to be more mainstream and more like non-denominational Christians. But as they do that, they might risk alienating some of their most ardent, devout members who are truly putting in the work to keep the church alive. I have been a bit surprised by how much they're willing to get rid of, but why are they getting rid of these things? Because the core of Mormonism is really reforming or because of public pressure and the desire to convert more people?

Sara

I mean, the recent news about the Mormon church’s policy on trans people is pretty terrible.

Alyssa

Yes, definitely. It's like one step forward, two steps back. They have gotten rid of their most homophobic rhetoric. And even though their policy on trans people is still regressive and like, 20 years behind mainstream society (40 years behind progressive society?), it’s more compassionate than past policies.

Sara

How did Hannah Neeleman pose on the cover of Evie magazine and call that apolitical?

Alyssa

I mean, both the Neelemans and the Smiths can kind of surreptitiously infuse their politics in a way that doesn't alienate their audience, which is kind of the brilliance of it all (an evil brilliance but brilliance nonetheless). I don’t know what their end goal is - I mean they don't seem to need the money? I don’t know if Daniel is going to try to fucking run for president? I don’t know what the end game is, but it's a long enough game that they're not choosing to engage with Trumpism. Like from their mouths. They'll just engage with it tangentially so that people like Candace Owens can say, I recognize that. That looks familiar. That feels like something I'm interested in.

*********We didn’t have time to get into it here, but if you’d like to learn more about Alyssa’s hypothesis concerning the huge number of highly successful Mormon influencers, I HIGHLY recommend checking out her interview with Jamie Loftus on Jamie’s excellent podcast 16th Minute. It blew my mind.