With viral attention on Mormon influencers, Ella Jones provides an analysis of the specific critiques aimed at religious women on social media. (Can MomTok survive this?)

Blonde, beautiful, and clad in full-skirted peasant dresses, Hannah Neeleman delicately picks vegetables in front of the camera while her smiling children run around her ankles. Scroll through her Instagram or TikTok page, and you will find similar vignettes of perfect, traditional life in rural America. Neeleman is what Erin Clark has referred to as a ‘Latter Day Influencer’ (LDI), a member of the Church of Latter Day Saints who is also an active participant in the influencer economy, with varying levels of evangelism exhibited in their content. Under the handle @ballerinafarm, Neeleman has achieved superstar levels of internet fame, having amassed, at the time of writing, 10 million followers on Instagram, 9.7 million on TikTok, and 1.7 million on YouTube.

As well as being an example of an LDI, Neeleman is also part of a wider internet phenomenon commonly referred to as ‘trad wives’, where women in marriages, usually with an explicit religious dimension, and who conform to traditional gender roles, document their lives for an internet audience that is equal parts adoring and perturbed.

It seems that interest in women in nonliberal religions has never been higher in the public arena, and has compounded with the release of reality television shows concerned with their private lives. Examples include My Unorthodox Life, Dubai Bling, and most recently, the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which deals with the dramatic lives of Mormon women in narratives migrated from Mormon TikTok, or ‘MomTok’. Reality TV and wider digital culture shifts have brought to the fore discussions about gendered faith and acceptable levels of public religiosity, and I will explore some conversations about the agency of women of faith through the case study of Ballerina Farm.

On the 20th July 2024, The Times’s Megan Agnew published an explosive and viral article entitled “Meet the queen of the ‘trad wives’ (and her eight children)”. Agnew interviewed Neeleman, who is an influencer, mother, and Julliard-trained ballerina, who documents her idyllic life as a homemaker on a 328-acre Utah Farm. She lives there with her 8 children and her husband Daniel Neeleman, heir to a JetBlue airline fortune worth over US $400 million.

The article is poignant, and leaves the reader with little to conclude but that Neeleman’s illustrious career as a ballerina has been replaced unceremoniously with a life of domestic labour, a tragedy at the hands of a conservative patriarchal religious ideology. Indeed, Agnew brings up several concerning points. The couple do not have nannies (a preference of Daniel’s) despite the workload of eight young children, and he himself admitted she is sometimes in bed sick for a week with exhaustion. Agnew was also unable to talk to her alone. Despite saying she is accustomed to dealing with steely-eyed publicists and interviewing high-profile celebrities, she said she was unprepared for the challenges of interviewing Neeleman, writing “I am up against an army of toddlers who all want their mum and a husband who thinks he knows better.” Other causes for concern include the now-infamous ‘egg apron’ video, where she unwraps, on camera, a present from her husband, hoping for tickets to Greece. Instead, in an eye-watering display, he gives her an apron for collecting eggs on the farm, wrapped in the postal packaging it came in.

Egg apron aside, speculation on the details of Neeleman’s marriage, or debates about whether the LDS Church facilitates opportunities for men to exert control in a damaging way, are not the focal point of this article. Instead, viral cultural phenomena like Ballerina Farm point towards questions of how the motivations and desires of religious women are considered and discussed.

The life that Neeleman leads is one undeniably of significant personal sacrifice, prioritising the needs of her family over her own in a manner that runs contrary to what Saba Mahmood calls “normative liberal assumptions about human nature.” These assumptions include the idea that every person innately desires freedom, and that being able to do as one wishes, including subverting and challenging power structures, is an ultimate priority for everyone. In the imagination of the secular-liberal public, Neeleman cannot be seen as a free agent in her own life, because agency in this imagination is thought of as synonymous with resistance to social norms.

Again, this is not to defend Neeleman’s specific situation or posit that ‘feminism is all about choice.’ What is interesting to note is that it seems to be out of the question to believe her when she transmits a religious worldview that causes her priorities to be different than those of secular-liberal women.

Neeleman says herself:

“We were taken aback however when we saw the printed article, which shocked us and shocked the world by being an attack on our family and my marriage, portraying me as oppressed with my husband being the culprit. This couldn’t be further from the truth. […] For Daniel and I, our priority in life is God, and family, everything else comes second. The greatest day of my life was when Daniel and I were married 13 years ago. Together we have built a business from scratch, we have brought 8 children into this world, and have prioritised our marriage all along the way.”

Her audience was not convinced by this statement, and the comments were predominantly accusations of coercion by her husband. Because of the assumption that the desire for freedom from social convention (in this case, gender roles) is innate, the only conclusion left to make is that Neeleman is the subject of oppression. When she denies this is the case, she is attributed a feminist interpretation of Marxist ‘false consciousness’, where it is assumed that, even if she does think she believes this, it is a false consciousness induced by the conditions of her life as a subject of patriarchal LDS society.

Paradoxically, by refusing to entertain religious conviction as a genuine motivator in Neeleman’s choices, and insisting that God and family could not possibly be a true priority for any woman without coercion, she is denied status as an agent in herself.

Conjecture about the marriages of influencers and concerns with reality television are not the most likely places to look, but these ideas in popular discourse mirror, unfiltered, tendencies that are present in academic writing. The motivations of women in nonliberal religions are often opaque to scholars, and desires outside of a universal, freedom-oriented norm are written off as examples of the oppressive power of religion to induce false consciousness in its adherents. Observing the representations of religious women in popular media and digital culture, and keeping a reflexive attitude to how we are led to perceive them, is key to avoiding the pitfalls of denying agency and subjectivity when it appears in unfamiliar forms.

* I use ‘nonliberal’ to indicate “religiosity incommensurable with […] those forms of public sociability that a secular-liberal polity seeks to make normative.” Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011. 75. Also see: Fader, (2009).

Image from the Ladies’ Home Journal