When a reality show advertises the promise of some “secret lives”, it can hardly refer to one in which one must assemble sandwiches on Sundays or be at a location early in the morning to place the chairs.
However, that is a portion of the silent aggravation taken by certain British affiliates of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints following the release of streaming audiences to The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. The reality show, which takes place in the Utah circles, favors the friendship feud, infidelity and “soft-swinging” scandal. To UK viewers within the faith, it is not so much whether some of it is possible, but what is sacrificed to drama becoming the purpose.
Ben, a podcast producer in and around Burnley, explains the divide in very simple terms: “We are ordinary people”. He admits that there are affairs and break-ups but claims that they are less frequent among the members due to the fact that avoiding them is the daily life. His wife Olivia still sees the release dates as appointment watching, as something on the calendar that serves as an entertainment, and not evidence. That strain, of pondering as one awaits misunderstanding, rings like the congregations that are aware of how easily people are introduced to the faith through the screen.
Latter-day Saint life is more likely to be viewed as normal in the UK where approximately 185,000 members reside: schooling, church callings, pot-luck dinners, and a great deal of focus on family routines. It also is placed in a British backdrop where Latter-day Saints is a visible minority, as opposed to the cultural background. That difference matters. The effect of the bubble can be observed in regions where the density of members is high (Ashlyn, who went to Utah and then back to Lancashire, talks about it as though it was a “bubble” effect) the drive to have a family and create an image of the perfect one can be stronger since it is not only supported religiously but also within a social circle. She back home puts commandments in a kind of framing, but rather than a statement in the form of a number of locks, a guardrail.
The series is not even worth watching, as it is the case with Traci, a psychotherapist in Buckinghamshire who came back to the faith following a personal crisis. It does not call to mind the women I know in the LDS, she says. It is not just personal offence; how entertainment gets shortchanged. That anxiety is embodied in a statement of the Church in Britain which states that such portrayals are usually based on sensationalism and inaccuracies which are not a fair and complete truth of the lives of our Church members.
The scandal that the headline of the show refers to, namely “soft-swinging”, strikes especially delicate soil since the religion preaches the “law of chastity”, and therefore, only a man and a woman must have sexual relations and keep faithfulness. The British members note that the teaching is not merely a collection of taboos, but a moral system, which most people attempt to interpret in a serious and considerate manner. Principled approaches to chastity (which predict consent, mutual respect and sexual health) are the solutions recommended by some therapists and members as a consequence of sensational framing, which can reduce complex discussions to one twist of the plot.
There is another question of who is to represent a whole community. In three years of studies of screen representation, out of 1,676 scripted television series, two included a protagonist character who was a Latter-day Saint, representing approximately 0.1% of the cast, even though the percentage of members is about 1.7 of the US population. Whenever a group is represented infrequently, every description comes with added significance, and stereotypes, naive, rebellious, and threatening, stick more readily.
The matter of race and belonging makes the situation even worse. In the series, one of the Blacks, Layla, recounts experiencing an older scripture of how Black skin was viewed as a curse, which the Church officially denounced in 2013. Naomi, a President of Young Women in London, who deals with girls aged between 12 and 18, reports that she hopes her leadership will demonstrate “what is possible” and that she has never encountered racial prejudice in the Church. The distance between the old writings, institutional deniability, and personal experience does not lend itself to the reality TV desire to find easy villains and heroes.
The most rapid, however, are the clips: a fight, a personal statement, a scandal, made in a few seconds on Tik Tok. To British Latter-day Saints, significant depiction is perhaps not an entire episode but the moment that ends up turning into a meme. It ends with certain members having to repeat quietly once again that their lives are not a genre and that ordinariness, as difficult as it is to shoot, nevertheless is a form of truth.
