Mormons and the Media

Identifying 2022 as a significant Mormon media moment, this presentation analyzes the streaming TV series The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City and LuLaRich in order to understand the current iteration of what Jodi Melamed calls “formally antiracist, liberal-capitalist modernity.” Looking at this most recent Mormon media moment, the author argues, helps to account for the central role of secularism in contemporary neoliberal multiculturalism and the co-constitutive relationships between discourses of race, gender, sexuality, nation, political-economy, and religion that are used to disseminate and normalize the rationalizations of contemporary racial capitalism.

This paper explores how ex-Mormons use TikTok as a tool to reckon with their relationship to Mormon faith and culture through physical materials. Drawing on Jennifer Sime’s (2023) theorization of YouTube material culture as a “curio cabinet,” I will argue that ex-Mormons’ visual “tours” of the relics of their former faith serve to make those material objects both intimate and strange. By repurposing, trashing, stashing, and mourning devotional objects, ex-Mormons participate in both an individual and collective reflective nostalgia whose shape is formed, in part, by the possibilities and limitations of the audiovisual TikTok platform.

In this paper I examine Mormon feminist podcasters in relation to the ramifications and promises of previous research in Digital Religion. One promising aspect of the former is its recognition of the conditioning effects of social media. How Mormon feminism depends on the medium is something that has only scarcely been assessed in previous research within the field of Mormon studies. However, research in Digital Religion frames women’s leadership online as traditionally feminine, relational, and authentic – positions which are related to Max Weber’s charismatic authority. I argue that while these characteristics may be found, they are not the only positions occupied, and must be critically assessed against a convergence of conditioning forces. I suggest that Mormon feminist podcasters may function as an important case where perspectives on women’s authority online are revaluated and that this may help break new ground in both Mormon Studies and Digital Religion.