The real secret about Latter-day Saint women won’t show up on Hulu anytime soon

Marketers of Hulu are well-versed in the art of tabloid — draw viewers in with a juicy headline that tells them they’re going to get the real truth about the “darker secrets” people have been covering up. Brain science indicates that such gossip even lights up the reward center of the brain, giving a bizarre sense of pleasure in seeing people “exposed,” appealing to the ego’s sense of being “in the know.”
But tabloids aren’t taken seriously in journalism, or anywhere else, because as most people know, it’s not reliable information — somewhere between complete distortion and all-out-falsehood. But hey, it sells.
We shouldn’t be surprised, then, by the latest Hulu reality show, “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” with the TikTok trailer caption, “Secrets, scandals, and viral handles.” The titillating title appears to promise the inside view on what really is going on in the lives of Mormon wives, something New York Times writer Jessica Grose suggests, even as she simultaneously calls it “garbage” out of the regular “reality TV dreck.”
So, how do the eight influencers followed in this show represent the lives, beliefs and experiences of Latter-day Saint women? What are the real lives of religious women like — members of the Church of Jesus Christ, as well as other religious women, for that matter?
Unsurprisingly, as it turns out, research into the lives of religious women tells a very different story than the one told in reality TV. For starters, the Harvard’s Human Flourishing project concluded after a careful look into religion’s influence on well-being: “Participation in religious services is associated with numerous aspects of human flourishing including happiness and life satisfaction, mental and physical health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, and close social relationships.”
This evidence, they note, “now comes from rigorous longitudinal study designs, with extensive confounding control.” In other words, this research tracking people over time shows that religious belief and participation has a profound effect on human flourishing among both men and women that is causal, not just correlational.
Despite these clear findings, the prevailing assumption in some elite circles evokes an image of an unhappy, depressed woman in an oppressive, emotionally distant marriage who has little sense of meaning, purpose or decision making in her life.
The fact that this dismal image has become so prevalent might explain why some were startled by our findings from a large, international study of over 8,000 religious and nonreligious women from 11 countries, including the United States. Among other things, we found that highly religious couples across faith traditions (defined by weekly attendance at church) enjoyed significantly higher quality relationships than their less religious or secular peers.
Women in highly religious marriages reported the highest relationship quality of any women, including when compared with women in relationships that were secular, progressive, nonreligious or somewhat religious. These same highly religious women were also 50% more likely to report being strongly satisfied in their sexual relationship.
But a closer look at these women revealed even stronger links between religiousness and relationship quality. Women in every country who didn’t just attend church but also lived out their religion in daily life, including praying daily, regularly reading scripture, and having religious conversations at home showed markedly higher positive outcomes in terms of relationship quality, emotional closeness between spouses, and higher sexual satisfaction — compared to those who just attended church.
In the United States, women who combined weekly church attendance with active participation in religious practices at home were twice as likely as less-religious women and five times as likely as secular women to report frequently feeling that their lives have meaning and purpose. These women were also significantly more likely to report that they have a high level of life happiness than less or nonreligious women. In fact, women who prioritized worship at home were twice as likely as those who just attended, and four times more likely than secular women to report a high level of life happiness.
The same patterns showed up in relationship quality. In every country, women who participated in worship practices at home were twice as likely to report a high level of relationship quality in their marriage compared to less-religious women. In fact, highly religious men and women reported the highest levels of relationship quality, emotional closeness and sexual satisfaction in their relationships compared to any other groups. This was especially true in the United States, where these highly religious women were 3 times more likely than their secular peers, and 2 times as likely as those who just attend church to report high relationship quality.
We should not be surprised then that these couples prioritizing worship at home also reported significantly higher levels of shared decision making between partners, fewer money problems, and more frequent patterns of loving behavior such as forgiveness, commitment and kindness than their less-religious peers. Such behaviors are strongly predictive of marital quality, emotional closeness and sexual satisfaction.
Painfully, there are some highly religious couples where shared decision making and patterns of loving behavior are not the norm. In some cases, spouses may misuse religious belief to justify abusive and controlling behaviors, in spite of repeated statements such as that from President Russell M. Nelson condemning “any kind of abuse of women, children or anyone,” while urging each of us to “be alert to anyone who might be in danger of being abused and to act promptly to protect them.”
“The Savior will not tolerate abuse, and as His disciples, neither can we,” he said. Despite long-standing teaching like this, some cultural traditions may be used to perpetuate patterns of inequality and oppression of women even among highly religious families.
However, it is a false stereotype to infer that patterns of interpersonal violence are more common among highly religious couples than they are among less religious or nonreligious couples. Even though media discourse often pushes the narrative that world faiths justify violence or encourage women to stay in abusive relationships, research using nationally-representative samples of U.S. adults generally finds that — within married couples — religious men are less likely to be perpetrators of intimate partner violence, and religious women are slightly less likely to be victims of such violence.
The reality is that, on average, highly religious Latter-day Saint and other religiously conservative women who live out their beliefs in daily worship report the greatest sense of meaning and purpose, highest levels of happiness, and when married to highly religious men, the highest levels of relationship quality, emotional closeness, and sexual satisfaction of all.
This is not the only story about Latter-day Saint women, however. Religious worship clearly blesses their lives, but they also bless many others through their religious participation. When researchers at the University of Pennsylvania studied the amount of volunteering done across religions, they found that the average American Latter-day Saint contributed as much as seven times more than that of the average American.
These scholars concluded that active members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints are the most “prosocial” members of American society. As members of the church know, Latter-day Saint women are at the core of that reality — both in and out of their homes — as they bear and nurture their own children while leading, comforting, lifting, healing, and sharing their essential gifts and capacities with countless others. One can’t help but hear echoes of Wallace Stegner’s statement about Latter-day Saints: “Especially their women. Their women were incredible.”
Latter-day Saint women are doing much; some might argue, too much. And in some cases, that is true. But the evidence is clear — this devoted religious path brings profound gifts, some of which may not be found in any other way: meaning, purpose, happiness, relationship quality, emotional closeness, and deep experiences of sexual connection.
If we really wanted to find out about the lives of Latter-day Saint women and how their religion influences them, wouldn’t we look at those who are actually living it out in their daily lives and marriages?
Don’t expect to find that on Hulu. But you can find it today and every day in the ordinary, yet remarkable women of faith in your own neighborhood and all around us. Ironically, perhaps, this is the real secret about Latter-day Saint women, a secret truly worth knowing and sharing.
Jenet Jacob Erickson is a fellow of the Wheatley Institute and a professor in Religious Education at Brigham Young University. Jason S. Carroll is the family initiative director at BYU’s Wheatley Institute and a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies.