Jana Riess: How authentically LDS are Hulu’s ‘Mormon Wives’?

Season 3 of Hulu’s hit series “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” dropped Thursday. Ten new episodes promise to update us on the latest scandals, catfights and shifting alliances among Utah’s MomTok frenemies.

Let me say up front that I’m not a fan of “reality” TV, or what one of my friends aptly calls “fake-ality” TV. There’s a tedious and engineered sameness to these shows. “Secret Lives,” like similar shows, revolves around some type of manufactured conflict, usually low stakes played as high stakes — for example, adults saying “OMG, she said that?! I am so not inviting her to my birthday party.” Then the cast members rehash the low-stakes conflict endlessly, in cloistered small-group gossip and in solo interviews in front of the camera, telling us again and again how they feel about it.

And yet, I can’t dismiss the show as entirely vacuous, and I can’t dismiss these women as not being real Latter-day Saints.

Yes, there’s a lot that is fake about the show and about them. For women who seem bent on asserting their individual uniqueness, they sure went all-in on identical “Utah hair” styles. There’s surgical augmentation of certain body parts and the synthetic “sisterhood” they keep claiming to enjoy. They constantly speak about friendship even as they only appear to hug so they can stab one another in the back from closer proximity. Their relationships through MomTok, the nickname for their TikTok community, seem almost wholly transactional. The women use one another for clout, although they also worry aloud that other people are interested in befriending or dating them only to get more clout.

But that doesn’t mean these characters aren’t raising vital questions about what constitutes a Latter-day Saint identity.

Their ties to the church

The first two seasons of “Secret Lives” showed some of the women working out their relationship to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in real time. The main characters fall on a spectrum where some are “all-out” of the church and are very critical of it, a few are at the other extreme and still regularly attending church, and most are somewhere in the middle.

An important aspect of this identity negotiation has to do with sex. Beyond all the revealing clothing and made-for-media drama about who cheated on whom, there’s a good deal of hurt around sexuality.

I acknowledge that the first time Mayci used the word “trauma” to refer to her picture-perfect life, I rolled my eyes. But I gave her the benefit of the doubt by reading some of her new memoir, “Told You So.” It details a painful history of adolescent grooming and sexual assault, and the humiliation of having to confess what was mostly nonconsensual sexual activity to her bishop. It’s an important story.

Then, there’s Mikayla, who says in Season 2 that she survived childhood sexual abuse that was dismissed or downplayed by her Latter-day Saint mother. Mikayla, now in her mid-20s, left home at 15, became a teenage mom at 17 and now has four kids.

And let’s not forget Layla, who says she has never had an orgasm. Or at least, not until MomTok hired a sex educator to teach them all more about the female body and how it’s not designed to give only men pleasure.

Layla didn’t grow up a member; she converted as a teenager, attracted to the religion’s seeming ability to deliver a happy nuclear family. She got married super young since early marriage seemed to be emphasized in her new Latter-day Saint world. But the church’s ideal of the happy family didn’t work out, and, by her early 20s, she was a divorced and destitute single mom.

Church and its culture share some blame

Some orthodox Latter-day Saints will doubtless respond that these women made their own choices, citing agency and accountability and all that. But the common theme running through these stories is a feeling of powerlessness around their sexuality, and some of that can be blamed on the church.

The church taught women their sexual “purity” was the most important thing about them, the single-most prized virtue they possessed. The church also taught them that sex outside of marriage was a sin second only to murder (cue former church President Spencer W. Kimball here). And the church wasn’t always careful to distinguish between consensual, chosen sex and being the victim of rape or abuse. If virginity was the commodity that gave a young woman value, then she was damaged goods when it was gone, even if it was forcibly taken from her.

For the past five years, I’ve been part of a research project about who leaves Mormonism and why. In my interviews with women who have left — particularly younger women in their 20s, 30s and 40s — it has become clear to me that the damage inflicted by purity culture is real.

In a wider way, the church taught women that their primary role in life was to be a wife and mother. This creates conflict for some of the women in the show. Their generation of Latter-day Saint women was told to get an education, but also that any career they might prepare for was strictly a “plan B” in case they couldn’t fulfill the ideal of being a stay-at-home mother.

In the series, we see this tension play out in the story of Jen, who begins as the token, quiet young Latter-day Saint wife. Jen married young, and her husband is portrayed as controlling. The show depicts him as attempting to isolate her from her female friends when they exert damaging peer pressure on Jen by frog-marching her against her will to the den of iniquity that is Chippendales. (Did I mention these women are not real friends to one another?)

Jen’s fellow MomTokers don’t think much of her husband. Jen, meanwhile, begins to assert her own opinions and make demands of him, something she feels empowered to do, in part because she has become the unexpected breadwinner in their marriage.

Jen could well be church leaders’ worst nightmare. She’s the cautionary tale of what can happen when women don’t completely buy into the church’s preferred stay-at-home-mom identity and the chronic financial dependence that goes with it. Lured by the validation and the paycheck they can receive in the working world, they stop playing the role of the deferential wife who just feels lucky to have a husband — any husband, even a crappy one. (And I’m not saying Jen’s man-child of a husband is crappy. Who really knows with fake-ality TV?)

But Jen is living a deeply familiar Latter-day Saint story. I know many women like her who postponed or derailed their careers in order to follow the church’s one true approved path for them. Some are happy they did, and others are not. All of them are wrestling with the messages about work and motherhood they absorbed growing up in the church.

Some parts ring true

Yet, the church asserts it can’t see itself in any way in this series. A couple of weeks before the first episode of “Secret Lives” debuted in September 2024, the church published a news release that didn’t name the show but decried “stereotypes or gross misrepresentations that are in poor taste.” The statement further noted the church’s “regret that portrayals often rely on sensationalism and inaccuracies that do not fairly and fully reflect the lives of church members or the sacred beliefs that they hold dear.”

I agree with some of that: “Secret Lives” offers an absurdly one-sided picture of Mormonism. These women are so materialistic and obsessed with parties and clothes that they don’t resemble any of the Latter-day Saint women I know. If the MomTok divas care about the wider world beyond their influencer bubble, we don’t see it on screen. They mine human relationships for dramatic effect and size up other people based on what those people can do for them.

That self-centered worldview is very much not Latter-day Saint. The church has consistently preached a gospel of helping others and serving God.

But in terms of sexuality and gender roles, there’s a clear connective thread to what the church taught these women about their life purpose and their bodies. And it impacts what they are grappling with today.

Their struggles are often painful to watch. But I hold a grudging respect for several of these women, and I wish them the best. Mostly, I think they would be better off if they stayed away from one another and found at least one actual, tried-and-true friend. Failing that, each could use a loyal golden retriever.

Note to readers • The views expressed in this opinion piece do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.