When I heard that Elle magazine had done a piece that touched on religion, specifically a woman in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I rushed to read it.
Mainstream women’s magazines just aren’t known for doing good God beat pieces although for a few years, the late More magazine was running some pieces (by me) on would-be female Catholic priests along with a profile on Lutheran minister/superstar Nadia Bolz-Weber.
But that was then. This latest Elle creation is about a married female blogger whose marriage went sour; a woman who’s “a stylish momfluencer who is sponsored by Pantene and regrammed by Martha Stewart, who has a cute husband and a cute son and, soon, another cute country house.”
Now I think Natalie Lovin’s upbringing as a Mormon might have brought some context to the story of her split with her husband, but Elle didn’t have much to say about that subject. Some samples:
Two days earlier, on April Fool’s Day, she’d moved to the new house by herself, in the rain, with a hastily rented U-Haul. She had just been dumped — her words — by her husband of more than a dozen years, the second man she’d ever kissed. They would later have vastly different ideas about how much alimony she needed, Natalie recalls. She had a college degree and experience working with household name brands. Couldn’t she just get a job?
She couldn’t. For the past ten years, Natalie’s job was being a lovably quirky wife and mother who documented her idyllic life online.
Back in 2011, Natalie was 29 and lived:
… on New York City’s Upper West Side in a tiny but well appointed apartment with her breadwinner husband, known as “the Holbs,” and her pudgy baby, Huck. Her blog, Nat the Fat Rat, allowed her to make money off of housewifely bliss — a Phyllis Schlafly-esque hypocrisy that might have seemed unbearably retrograde, were it not for her love of Hillary Clinton’s pro-choice politics and Rachel Comey’s chic clogs.
That’s a cheap shot. Schlafly may not have liked the Equal Rights Amendment, but she was not a hypocrite who said every woman must stay at home. After all, Schlafly, who died in 2016, worked as a ballistics gunner and technician during World War II. In later years, she became a working lawyer and political activist.
Then:
The family was proudly Mormon, though she didn’t often blog about it.
What does “proudly” mean? Had either the wife or husband gone on missions trips, as is common among college-aged Mormon youth? That’s essential basic information.
We do learn later in the piece they met while students at Brigham Young University. And here is one place she did blog about it.
A rift developed between her and another Mormon style blogger at her church, and the fallout felt like middle-school cafeteria politics all over again. She had never felt a deep connection to Mormonism, and she was increasingly appalled by its anti-LGBTQ doctrine. After she and the Holbs stopped going to church in the spring of 2014, she started wearing tank tops and getting tattoos and drinking.
If you want to read an article that did the work that Elle should have done, head over to this piece in The Cut, which fills in all the blanks. The latter also explains exactly what a “Mormon housewife blog” is, to wit: “young white women who were chronicling dreamy, picture-perfect lives with beautiful young children, good outfits, tidy homes, and handsome husbands.”
Maybe I’m on an island somewhere, but I never realized Mormon housewives were a type. Sure enough,
… some of the bloggers were so smarmy, the writing so breathless, the lives so artificial. Moreover, Mormons have long been an object of suspicion and curiosity in non-Mormon America, and the women’s religious devotion added another level of voyeuristic appeal. The disparity between my assumptions about their real lives and the lacquered image they presented — even the chaos of childrearing somehow picturesque. …
Why do some Mormon women feel compelled to publish this stuff? There’s actually some theology behind it all, The Cut explained.
“It seems that a lot of popular culture wants to portray marriage and motherhood as demeaning, restrictive or simple,” she told [the online magazine Salon for a ]piece. “But in the LDS church, motherhood is a very important job, and it’s treated with a lot of respect.”
The aforementioned Salon piece, published back in 2011, is here and explains even more about Mormon mommy blogs. It too gives even more helpful insights on why such blogs really caught on among the maternal set in LDS land.
Eventually, Natalie — but not her husband — leaves the church. The Cut adds,
… she wrote (gently) that “I’m going to let go of a few things that I’ve been told are Right and Wrong that i honestly, prayerfully, just don’t believe,” and was “disgusted” with the LDS leadership’s threat to excommunicate members who advocated for gay marriage. She tells me part of what drove her to write this post was a message she received from a young woman who was self-harming and couldn’t see a place for herself in the church until she found Lovin’s blog.
So there is/was lots of stuff out there about Mormons and their blogs that Elle could have -– but did not -– draw on. The subject of their story now lives in the dull-ish Portland, Ore., suburb of Wilsonville, just down the highway from a huge Mormon temple that overlooks Interstate 5.
What does she think when she sees it? Her child is at the age of baptism for Mormons. What has she decided to do about that? Is her husband, who has moved closer to her, taking the kid to church?
There’s a lot fresh material that Elle could have tackled in this piece. Instead, we get a lot of self-reveries from the reporter about her back-and-forth with the blogger. And Natalie has moved on to working full-time for Nike (in the nearby suburb of Beaverton), blogging on Instagram and writing a piece for Vogue on how having a pre-menstrual depression nearly killed her.
Does she ever think about her Mormon past? If so, we won’t learn about that from Elle.