the mormon church tells its members to become influencers
which I know because a mormon family vlogger told me
why oh why are so many family vloggers and mom influencers mormon? seriously, name someone. ballerina farm? mormon. amber filler-up clark? mormon. bucket list family? mormon. nara smith? mormon. brooklyn & bailey? mormon. the shaytards? mormon.
there have long been rumors that the leadership of the church of jesus christ of the latter-day saints (aka LDS, aka mormons) explicitly encourages the career of influencing and family vlogging because it’s such a useful way to share their testimony. and in my research for my book on family vloggers and child influencers, I got to ask one of *the* pre-eminent family vloggers of our time (name redacted for privacy’s sake) if it’s true.
“yes,” they said. “there is a tremendous push from the church itself and from its general authority leadership to be public with your faith and your lifestyle and share it with the world. there really is encouragement from the upper leadership of the church to use social media.”
and use it they do! why do mormons make such great influencers? why are they so successful? I asked a few experts and these are the reasons we came up with:
first, as ej dickson put it, “there’s really no other way to say this – mormon women tend to be really hot.” it’s funny but it’s also true – mormon women tend to be really beautiful beccause the church places an explicit value on being beautiful and also, the doctrine of mormons has them “not doing stuff that inherently makes you un-hot”, ej said, like smoking and drinking
mormon girls are raised from childhood to keep detailed scrapbooks of their family’s lives – which kind of makes them the perfect influencers. they’re raised to believe their outer beauty is a reflection of their godliness at the same time as they’re encouraged to keep gorgeous, detailed scrapbooks. they were kind of made to be influencers??
a lot of mormon women tend to be blonde-haired and blue-eyed (because they descended from scandinavian immigrants), which is kind of the du jour look for influencers because of the whole european beauty standard thing.
mormons believe in the prosperity gospel – that if you are faithful, god will bless you with wealth and abundance
kathryn jezer-morton of the cut sums it up like this: “you have blonde, rich people who are told from the age of 12 to be a good woman is tot ake a lot of pictures and make cute stories out of it. it’s like the church is teaching them how to be influencers.”
and not only teaching them – but, according to my source, explicitly encouraging them. if we wanted to get really drunk really quickly, we could play a game where we take a shot every time someone thinks of a family vlogger or mom influencer and it turns out that they’re mormon, but I don’t really want to get alcohol poisoning.
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growing up in east san diego county there were tons of mormon kids from alpine/el cajon, ca. this totally tracks as to why there were so many blonde kids everywhere! they're also all very tall. just an entire religion of volleyball players.
Have you noticed how Mormon woman tend to have the most perfect balayage? Loved this post.