"Tradwives" offer an alluring vision of right-wing Christianity — online warriors are fighting back

As social media stunts go, it's hard to top this one: Give birth to your eighth child at age 33. Then, just two weeks later, compete in a beauty pageant, complete with a swimsuit competition. Hannah Neeleman, a "momfluencer" who has nearly 9 million followers for her Instagram account "Ballerina Farm," did just that in January, strutting in the Mrs. World pageant after winning the Mrs. America pageant last year. "I don’t think there’s any shame in showing I just had a baby," Neeleman told the New York Times. "Like, I’m not going to have a perfectly flat stomach."

Her videos and photos of the event suggest that whatever tummy imperfections she was confessing to were not visible to the naked eye.

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What an incredible experience it was to compete on the Mrs World Pagent stage. There were so many emotions last week, the biggest one being gratitude. Grateful to feel it all. Grateful to be a mother, woman, daughter, sister. Honored to have made top 17, and congratulations to our new Mrs World, Mrs Germany!

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This combination of faux humility and orchestrated perfection is intoxicating to some, infuriating to others and confusing to many. But what's indisputable is that it's hard to look away. It's how this Utah resident built an online following of millions for a social media account that purports to portray the humble life of a former ballerina turned farm wife. (It's fair to note that her family's financial security has other sources: Her father-in-law founded JetBlue.)

Neeleman, with her bucolic images of grazing cattle and her sourdough recipes, is an especially successful example of the growing industry of social media influencers often described as "trad" (for "traditional"), or as "momfluencers" and "beige moms," for the minimalist aesthetic that dominates this online universe. Some of these influencers are married couples and some are just women, but they all sell variations of the same fantasy: a simple-but-luxurious life with a loving husband and charming children, all for the low, low price of abandoning one's ambitions of a career outside the home.

Feminist critics like Sara Petersen, Anne Helen Petersen (no relation) and Anna North have built an impressive body of social criticism unveiling the cynical blend of capitalism, gender politics and plain old dishonesty of the "momfluencer" enterprise. (Neeleman's feed, for example, never shows us her farm workers, her kids' full-time teacher, her babysitters or her personal assistant.) What is less often discussed in these critiques is the ways many of these online influencers also function as propaganda outlets for the Christian right.

There's another group of whistleblowers, however, who are working to confront what they see as a deeply misleading portrayal of life inside right-wing religion. It's an amorphous but devoted collection of former evangelicals, former members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (aka the Mormons) and other critics of the Christian right. What unites them is the desire to call B.S. on the idyllic self-portrayal of conservative Christian influencers. And they're fighting on the same turf as their adversaries: TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Spotify.

"You could have this too, if you just submit to your husband"

It's hard to keep track of the metastasizing numbers of Christian influencers peddling beatific images of their family lives online: Estee Williams, Nara Smith, Cynthia Loewen, Natalie Bennett and Mrs. Midwest, just to name a few. These women (and occasionally couples) often rack up followers in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, despite (or because of) a depressing sameness in their presentation: Magazine-perfect kitchens and gardens. Rows of mostly-blond children. Long, layered haircuts, ranging from cornsilk blond to light brown with blond highlights.

"They lead with the beautiful babies and the pretty families and the obedient children," explained Tia Levings, a former fundamentalist who now releases TikTok and Instagram videos exposing what's known as "Christian patriarchy." It's "a very wholesome image of function and beauty and order."

She continued, "In chaotic times, people crave order, they crave fundamentalism. They want formulas."

"It's seductive," said Matthias Roberts, a therapist who helps people recover from religious trauma. "It offers certainty and belonging, which are core to what we need as humans."

Dr. Laura Anderson, a therapist who herself left a fundamentalist sect and now helps others who are leaving, said she had longed for that "sense of stability" and argued that "fundamentalism is a coping mechanism for a deregulated nervous system." But what's "underneath the photos," she said, is not "reality."

In one sense, there's nothing new about Christian influencers, explained Blake Chastain, who hosts the Exvangelical podcast. Christian right YouTubers and TikTokers, he said, are continuing a century-old "alternative media ecosystem."

Evangelicals have always "seized whatever the media was at the time," Jennifer Bryant of the YouTube channel Fundie Fridays said. "Before you had radio, they were doing tent revivals. Then they started to get on TV. Now it's on TikTok."

Christian social media differs from those previous efforts in two principal ways. The omnipresent nature of the internet means that online personalities can have wider reach and more influence than even the biggest televangelists of the past. Bradley Onishi, a former evangelical minister who now hosts the "Straight White American Jesus" podcast, described how the "rabbit hole" effect of social media leads people to consume exponentially more of this content than they ever could in the past.

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Even in his hardcore Christian youth, Onishi said, he might "go to church three times a week and, in between, visit a Christian bookstore and listen to Christian radio." Now, he argued, by the time a believer gets to church on Sunday morning, they've "digested a hundred hours of influencers, podcast, pundits, talking heads, Fox News and YouTube." Online Christianity has, for many, totally overwhelmed what's on offer from a pastor "you see once or twice a week." More than 40% of self-described evangelicals rarely or never attend church. As Ruth Graham and Charles Homans reported for the New York Times, these unchurched Christians build their spiritual lives around "podcasts and YouTube channels that discuss politics ... from a right-wing, and sometimes Christian, worldview."

Secondly, social media influencers who present themselves as lifestyle gurus aimed largely at women don't necessarily foreground religion. Their primary focus is guidance on parenting, housekeeping, sexuality and being more attractive to men. "They're the marketing department," Bryant said. Their "job is to look pretty" and advertise "how amazing my life is," with the underlying pitch: "You could have this too, if you just submit to your husband."

"They will do all this normal influencer stuff," McKay Forsyth, who hosts a popular ex-Mormon YouTube channel, said. "Then they'll just slip in a Sunday photo of them going to church."

"Fundamentalism is really good at taking what we love in our hearts and using it to exploit us," Levings said.

"I know your Bible way better than you"

This veneer of polished perfection is increasingly under attack, however, by social media competitors who want to tell a different story about what's going on behind all those family photos and lovely landscapes. "The only way to debunk something that is so pretty and so attractive and so comforting," Levings said, "is for people who've actually lived it to share" their stories. 

The people doing this work often call themselves "exvangelicals," or "ex-mos" for former members of the Latter-day Saints. Some call their campaign "#fundiesnark," a phrase that apparently launched on Reddit, and is now a common hashtag on Instagram or TikTok. A more serious term is "deconstructor," derived from the "deconstruction" concept pioneered by philosopher Jacques Derrida. Originally that meant exploring the dynamic relationship between a "text" — which could be writing, visual art, film or something else — and its social context. For the anti-fundamentalist movement, it's become a favored term to describe the process of unlearning what they see as the toxic and unhealthy views enforced by conservative religion.

Maybe it's a big leap to link 20th-century European philosophy to people who make YouTube videos mocking "tradwives." Spend enough time with the fundie-snarkers, though, and it starts to make sense. Authoritarian religious leaders push the notion, for instance, that the Bible is literal truth — and there's only one correct reading. Through music, storytelling and, of course, humor, the snarkers undercut that certainty, arguing that such texts are being selectively interpreted to suit the political and social goals of fundamentalists.

Anti-fundamentalist influencers who spoke to Salon almost universally described their community as one grappling with massive trauma inflicted by conservative religion. At the same time, an irresistibly infectious sense of fun informs their debunking of conservative Christian ideas.

"It's so liberating, not only to question but to laugh," said journalist Sarah Stankorb, the author of "Disobedient Women."

"Why Don't Mormon Influencers Wear Their Garments?" asks one popular video by McKay Forsyth and his wife, Jordan. The video is an amusing explanation of what the "magical underwear" worn by Latter-day Saints actually is, and why so many popular Mormon influencers clearly are not wearing it. Garments that cover the body from shoulder to mid-thigh, the Forsyths explain, are mandatory for all adult members of the church — which probably turns a blind eye to influencers who show up online in miniskirts and tank tops, serving as attractive, relatable symbols of their faith.

But if people actually join the church, McKay Forsyth said, they will find the garments are not optional. It's just an effort to sell "a more palatable version of Mormonism" and get people "started down their high-demand religion path."

Karen Alea, who hosts the podcast "Deconversion Therapy," told Salon that she and her co-host, known only as Bonnie, wanted to share the "funny and odd experiences" they and others like them had "growing up as Christians." One listener described how, as a child, he was finally given the stuffed Smurf he'd longed for, only to see it burned in a church bonfire targeting "demonic influences." He saw "Papa Smurf flying over his head into the fire," Alea said, followed by a cloud of "blue toxic smoke."

Levings makes videos recounting the horrors of the "Quiverfull" life. But watching them is hardly a death march — they're often sarcastic and focused on the weirder details of her former life, such as being told that girls and women never need haircuts:

Fundie Fridays started off as a channel where Jen Bryant did her makeup on camera while telling the back story of some famous or influential fundamentalist. If that sounds like a bizarre juxtaposition, it worked brilliantly on YouTube, creating an atmosphere of intimacy. She no longer does her makeup in public view, although she still shows up with enviably colorful looks. Now she and her husband, James Bryant, bring a mix of research, clever editing and their personal charm to bear in a series of videos meant to capture what James calls "the best and the worst of Christianity."

That, of course, entails a lot of dunking on Christian influencers and revealing the less-than-godly motivations that drive lucrative online ministries. In one recent video, "Kat Von D is Christian Now," Jen Bryant recounted how the famous tattoo artist and makeup peddler "rebranded" herself as a Christian after losing fans and sponsorship deals amid allegations of racism and anti-vaccine views. Jen Bryant points out that this Christian "rebrand" brought Von D to an audience with different standards than the secular world, where marrying a guy with a swastika tattoo is frowned upon.

There's "a low, low point of entry" to the Christian-influencer world, James Bryant said. "As long as you're like, 'I'm saved, I found Jesus,' you're going to get people who mindlessly agree with that to follow." But to keep that audience, an influencer must keep dishing out more red meat, which usually means increasingly right-wing politics. "You see this pattern of them doubling down more over time" in pursuit of that audience, he said. "You're making yourself, ironically, more niche," since most people outside the world of conservative Christianity reject those far-right views.

This new crop of anti-fundamentalists is dramatically different from the militant and male-dominated "New Atheist" movement that emerged early in this century. These newer and younger opponents of the religious right are more focused on social justice issues than on whether or not there's a God. Many still identify as Christians or hold other spiritual beliefs. Their focus is on fighting what they see as the widespread damage done by right-wing religion. Many will point out that evangelical intolerance and Christian nationalism "cause problems for the rest of" believing Christians, by giving them a bad name.

While many of this movement's prominent figures are women and LGBTQ folks, the #fundiesnark and deconstruction world is predominantly white. In that sense, of course, they resemble their conservative Christian rivals and peers. As Bradley Onishi points out, this sometimes means unintentionally minimizing the role that racism and white identity play in the Christian cultures they critique.

But this cultural mirroring also lends the #fundiesnark community a major strength: They come from the world they're now attacking, and bring a level of knowledge that makes their criticisms harder to ignore. "You'll never out-evangelical me," Onishi said. "I know your Bible way better than you. I can speak your language with no accent.” This cultural fluency makes it easier, he said, to reach people who are still inside right-wing religion but are "trying to find a window to the outside."

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"On the sly," Onishi said, someone like that can "listen to the podcast, watch the YouTube channel" and come to understand "the other ways people think" and "why they left." 

The journey Onishi describes, from conservative Christianity to more skeptical circles, was dramatically illustrated this week. Dav Beal — the husband of popular Christian influencer Bethany Beal, of "Girl Defined" — revealed that he is "circling deconstruction," meaning that he's considering leaving his faith. "When I try to find my identity in Christ, it just doesn't seem to work," he said in a video the couple posted. The announcement spurred a frenzy of excitement in the #fundiesnark community.

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There are dozens of Reddit threads about this, largely expressing a desire to welcome Beal to their side, and glee that their message seems to be breaking through.

Sex sells ... Jesus?

Hannah Neeleman, she of Ballerina Farm and the beauty pageants, is no outlier with her swimsuit photos and her unfathomably toned post-partum body. It swiftly becomes apparent, when one delves into the world of tradwives and Christian-influencer content, how downright sexy a lot of it is. It's not just the Latter-day Saints forgoing otherwise mandatory garments in order to pose in spandex and low-cut blouses. As I noted in a November column on tradwife content, it's hard not to get a cheesecake vibe off the chest-first photography or the TikTok videos that pretend it's normal to bake bread while dressed like a pin-up.

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Even when Christian influencers aren't using age-old tricks to capture eyeballs by appealing to the lizard brain, it's astonishing how much of their content is about sex and romantic relationships. Indeed, that's primarily what the term "trad" reflects. Sure, influencers go on about all manner of "traditional" lifestyle choices, but "trad" largely refers to the fundamentalist conception of what a healthy sex life should look life: Heterosexual and married, with overtly regressive gender roles.

Deconstructors call this "purity culture," and it runs much deeper than the well-documented fundamentalist obsession with controlling people's sex lives. Purity culture is also a promise that conservative Christians make to young people: If you follow the strict life path we're showing you, you'll be rewarded with true love, a beautiful family and lots of scorching hot sex — within the bounds of marriage, of course.

This sales pitch goes back decades, Chastain explained, citing Elisabeth Elliot's 1984 book "Passion and Purity," a romantic account of her brief marriage to a Christian missionary who was killed in Ecuador in 1956 by members of an indigenous group he tried to convert. As Liz Charlotte Grant at the Revealer recently wrote, the book appeals to those "hungry for romance," turning that longing into an argument for self-denial. As a young woman, Grant wrote, "I loved her example of courtship, of 'saving yourself' for ecstatic marital sex, of the hand of God directing a humble woman’s love life." But, she added, "it never worked for me."

Other bestsellers have made similar pitches: "Every Man's Battle" portrays giving up masturbation as the path to a satisfying sex life; the self-explanatory "I Kissed Dating Goodbye," which has since been rejected by its author; "Love & Respect" by Emerson Eggerichs argues for rigid gender roles and chastity before marriage.

The rulebook of purity culture often goes beyond a ban on premarital sex to proscribing kissing and holding hands. Some go further and seek to forbid all forms of dating, embracing a "courtship" model almost indistinguishable from arranged marriage. (The infamous Duggar family of reality TV believes in "courtship.") Of course abortion is forbidden, but in many cases so are all forms of birth control.

Therapist Laura Anderson said that when she was still a believer, "the tenets of purity culture provided a sense of stability." She didn't like the restrictions, but amid the "chaos of having to choose a career and life path," it felt like a "life raft": "If I did things this way, then I would get this reward."

In the world of Christian influencers, with intense competition for audience share, things can get weird fast. Influencers use sex to get attention, while also proving their purity bona fides through performative adherence to ever-stricter rules. The result can be uncanny, as in videos of conventionally attractive young couples discussing whether it's OK to kiss before marriage. Or when the aforementioned Bethany Beal, who built an empire by pushing abstinence before marriage, now hawks "The Ultimate Sex Course for Christian Women" for $169 a pop.

Jeremiah Gibson, a couples therapist who hosts the Sexvangelicals podcast with his wife and fellow therapist Julia Postema, told Salon that the sex-and-relationships material that dominates the Christian influencer world is a form of bait-and-switch. "Conservative folks are less concerned about sex and more concerned about the performance of gender," he said. "Sex just happens to be the vehicle" they use to promote rigid gender roles. 

Content that promises to be about sex is really "talking about a gender dynamic," Gibson said. In this worldview, being a man means "you lift weights. You eat certain foods. You stuff your emotions down." Being a woman means "you bake bread. You pay attention to the needs of your husband." For many people, it can be comforting to "sit with" these kinds of stereotypes, hoping they'll solve all your problems. But what Gibson and Postema find in their practice, they say, is that these "gender scripts stop working for people."

Multiple sources said this dynamic is especially pronounced among LGBTQ people, whose bodies, desires and identities simply can't adhere to the idealized vision of purity culture. A 2023 study by the Williams Institute at UCLA found that "two-thirds of LGBTQ people who were raised Christian no longer identify as Christian." Levings argues, however, that "everybody who grew up in those kinds of environments" experiences this pain to some degree. 

For deconstructors, Christian influencers' focus on sex and relationships is a kind of Achilles heel, offering a crucial opportunity to tell the world that these promises of sexual bliss are empty. When people buy into purity culture, Anderson said, "we have a lot of sexual dysfunction as a result." She has seen "sexual pain" and a lot of "shame and disgust toward self" in her practice, she said, along with people who define themselves as asexual "because sex feels so uncomfortable."

Chastain agreed that this disconnect between the sexual promises of purity culture and the messy realities of life leads many people to start questioning conservative Christian values. "People get married young and then they realize that there's a whole bunch more to marriage than just sex," he said. "It leads oftentimes to a self-discovery that is a lot more painful."

People struggling with that disconnect have often done so in silence and shame. Now they're a few Google inquiries away from finding videos, podcasts and other media from the deconstruction community that validates what they're feeling. "When we've experienced trauma in community," Roberts said, "the only way to heal that is by being in community."

While online spaces are no substitute for therapy or in-person community, he said, they can offer a "breadth of voices" that open up "more options for people to really find what works for them."

Freeing oneself from conventionally gendered scripts about love and sex isn't easy, Gibson said, but it can allow people to "develop a sustainable happiness" based on "challenging each other and pushing each other."

"They get really defensive"

The conflict between Christian influencers and the anti-fundamentalist community invites an irresistible comparison to the biblical story of David and Goliath. The Christians have more money, sleeker marketing and institutional support from their churches, while the deconstructors are a ragtag bunch of nerds broadcasting from their bedrooms. Many began with nothing more than an iPhone and a ring-light. Yet there are signs the Christian Goliaths are worried about their online hecklers.

For one thing, various churches, faith organizations and Christian influencers appear to have invested in search engine optimization around the term "deconstruction." Typing terms like "Christian deconstruction" into Google's search bar returns pages of results from Christian sites with titles like "The Most Dangerous Form of Deconstruction" or warnings that "you can easily come out the other side a lonely and bitter person with no hope." Some sites that claim to offer "deconstruction" content deliver bland Christian generalities, possibly concealing a more conservative agenda. (A technique seen recently in the "He Gets Us" ads aired during the Super Bowl.)

“People that are still within the evangelical camp," Chastain said, rarely engage with genuine "exvangelicals," only with "straw-man versions." Most anti-fundamentalist influencers that spoke with Salon don't seem worried. Many noted that they had built up audiences with little to no marketing, and saw no need to echo the aggressive proselytizing of their counterparts. Most offered some version of "If we build it, they will come." Faith may require an advertising budget, they argue, but doubt sells itself.

Trolls are more of an annoyance, especially those Christians who genuinely seem hurt or aggrieved by anyone who dares to criticize them. "A lot of them think I am attacking the religion, so they get really defensive," Jen Bryant said. Some of her jokes are "a little mean," she admits, while saying she doesn't intend to attack anyone's faith. The Bryants, who do not come from religious backgrounds, avoid discussing theology on Fundie Fridays, focusing on the real-world harm they see caused by the bigotry or corruption of religious leaders and Christian influencers.

Alea is amused by the trolls, who she says typically can't even land good insults. They'll accuse her of not being married (although she is) or say that "she lives at home with three cats." Apparently the worst thing they can say about a woman, she jokes, is that she's single. "This reveals where modern Christianity is today. I let it display itself," Alea said.

Some Christian influencers escalate past complaints or arguments into attempted censorship, usually through bogus copyright claims. A good deal of #fundiesnark content relies on appropriating clips, images and music from Christian influencers, which generally falls within the bounds of legal "fair use," since it's deployed "to comment upon, criticize, or parody a copyrighted work." But the big corporations behind social media networks are generally unwilling to adjudicate disputes between users, and tend to err on the side of those who claim copyright infringement, often without bothering to investigate.

Fundie Fridays nearly lost its YouTube channel in 2022 when Lawson Bates, a Christian influencer who has spun off his own empire from his relationship to the Duggar family, kept lodging copyright claims against the Bryants. At first the couple appealed to Bates directly, asking him to chill out about obvious parody. When that failed, they had to fight to keep their channel, which provided a full-time living by that point. Eventually, they prevailed and got it reinstated, but the experience left a bad taste in their mouths.

Sometimes efforts by conservative Christians to silence their critics can backfire in a fashion reminiscent of the "Streisand effect." That's what happened in the case of Matthew Blake, aka "Flamy Grant," a drag singer-songwriter. Blake belongs to an LGBTQ-affirming Christian church and wrote a '90s-style country-pop tune called "Good Day" for their congregation to "sing on Sunday mornings." The song is religious in a broadly appealing sense, with lyrics like, "Out of the light, I'm not gonna hide/ I got a heart in the right place."

Flamy tasted the ugly side of online attention when Christian nationalist influencer Sean Feucht attacked her on Twitter, accusing Flamy of trying to force "perversion" on kids and quoting a threatening Bible passage calling for "a large millstone [to be] hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea."

Flamy admitted to Salon that the incident was frightening, since Feucht is a notorious MAGA-world character. Still, "drag queens know how to make lemonade," she said. Instead of pulling back, Flamy went to her followers: "I was like, 'Hey, I've got this album, I've got this song.'" People spread the word and started downloading "Good Day" on Apple Music, driving the song to No. 1 on the iTunes Christian music charts.

"There's no such thing as bad publicity, right?" Flamy said. She recalled being a child in an evangelical family reading criticism about the 1995 drag-centric film "To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar" in Focus on the Family's magazine. "I didn't even realize I was queer — I was like, I need to see this movie."

"They're like sirens"

Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but most #fundiesnark and deconstruction influencers believe they've seen a dramatic surge in interest in their content in recent years. "Once the 2016 election cycle began, we started to see an outflux of people from high-control religion," Anderson said.

"Because of our political realities, people are realizing this world that I once existed in is not good, I want to get out," Roberts agreed. There's some evidence to back that up. Church attendance has gradually declined for decades, but took a precipitous fall after the election of Donald Trump. The COVID pandemic, which forced churches to choose between protecting their congregants by closing down or yielding to MAGA pressure to stay open, creating major rifts that have not healed. Church attendance has not recovered to pre-pandemic levels. For those in the anti-fundamentalist online world, offering a soft landing to people who are bailing out is a major priority.

When you leave a "high-control religion," Cait West, an escapee from Christian patriarchy said, you're often "leaving your friends and your family and your community." To go online and "find people who understand what you're going through, it's like a found family."

“My end goal is making people feel seen and safe," Flamy said. "I realized that my drag had the power to do that for people, because that's what it did for me.”

Even for those who haven't suffered these experiences, this struggle matters. There may be no single greater predictor of support for Trump than white evangelical identity. As Atlantic reporter and lifelong evangelical Tim Alberta makes clear in his new book "The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory," people within that subculture are not allowed to harbor doubts about Trump. Those who do often find they are no longer welcome in their faith communities.

Anti-fundamentalists are keenly aware of how Christian influencers try to normalize far-right politics — and recruit vulnerable young people.

"I am worried about younger men," West said, noting that "trad" content offers them a deceptive promise: "If only the world was like this, then I would get what I deserve."

"It's not an overnight thing," Anderson noted. "You're not anti-MAGA one day and then you wake up the next day" to find yourself "storming the Capitol." She called radicalization a "slow fade" that "slowly chips away at a person's sense of self and autonomy" until they find themselves deeply entrenched in far-right ideology.

Jen Bryant noted that social media has created "the perfect place for pipelines" of radicalization, "because of the never-ending scroll" and the promise of community that conservative influencers offer. "Their job is to entice you in. They're like sirens.”

As extremism researcher Brian Hughes told Salon last year, "individuals pursue radicalization because it meets certain social and psychological needs." There's no easy way to measure how much a counternarrative, delivered within the same social media networks, can help deter people from that path. Anti-fundamentalists believe that encountering progressives, especially those who defy ugly stereotypes and are literate in internet humor, can undercut right-wing messaging and interrupt young people's journey to darker places.

Social media can be a hellscape of bad faith, right-wing propaganda and porn-inflected material. It can also be where people learn how to think, debate and discuss ideas. In that sense, the #fundiesnark and deconstruction world suggests the best possibilities of the internet. "I like to think of the old philosophers' dens, where it was just 20 or 30 students going back and forth," James Bryant said. These kinds of exchanges can get heated, he said, but they have a purpose. "You're figuring out life. You're breaking the world down around you in those conversations.”