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New York Magazine’s The Cut published a long reported feature yesterday on Latter-day Saints, Utah, influencer culture, and the national appetite for “Mormon aesthetics.” Buried inside it is a serious thesis: Latter-day Saints helped shape key parts of modern online life—tech, genealogy, affiliate marketing, brand deals—and now a particular Utah-flavored influencer ecosystem has gone mainstream.

That subject deserves real cultural journalism. But the feature doesn’t treat Latter-day Saints seriously. It treats a living religious community as a cultural prop: a reliable source of weirdness, a costume rack of eccentric doctrines, and an acceptable target for winking contempt—then layers that tone over doctrinal errors and an over-reliance on critics with little balancing context.

Latter-day Saints do not need the approval of a lifestyle magazine to live out our faith, but there is something wrong when editorial culture still thinks it is acceptable, or even smart, to understand a religion through nothing but memes.

Criticism isn’t the Problem. Contempt Is.

The Church is not above scrutiny. If you want to examine PR strategy, media posture, investments, or Utah’s insular status dynamics, fine—do the work: show receipts and speak with informed believers, scholars, and, where relevant, critics. Latter-day Saints are so accustomed to sneers from legacy outlets that even serious critical coverage can feel like a relief. But this feature does not read like an investigation guided by intellectual curiosity. It reads like something else: a story that wants to be both reported analysis and group roast.

A Publication That Wants Credibility Can’t Cover Faith Like It’s a Freak Show

The clearest tell is the piece’s reliance on outsidery shorthand: familiar “Mormon jokes,” recycled late-night tropes, and online folklore presented as representative. That method is at best lazy, at worst socially corrosive. When a major publication treats the sacred life of its neighbors as a punchline, it is not merely “edgy.” It’s the normalization of contempt for a minority faith.

And to be blunt: there is a reason this kind of tone still shows up with Latter-day Saints more easily than it would with many other religious groups. The feature claims Latter-day Saints now carry real cultural cachet, yet writes as if anti-Mormon mockery is still culturally acceptable. That’s a sign that anti-Mormon mockery is still socially permitted in a way it wouldn’t be for many other minority faiths.

What the Piece Does Well

To be fair, the feature does some real reporting: It paints a vivid picture of a Utah influencer ecosystem; it traces how early Mormon mommy bloggers helped professionalize affiliate marketing and online commerce; it captures how “noncontroversial” family content became brand gold during the pandemic; it correctly notices that Utah’s particular blend of community networks, aspirational domesticity, and entrepreneurial hustle can be an accelerant for online business.

If you want to analyze a community that you believe has exported a powerful cultural product—“Mormon mom” influencer culture—then you also owe that community the baseline respect of accuracy and the basic fairness of being represented by more than its loudest detractors and its most sensational reality TV exports. 

Three Failures that Warrant Post-Publication Changes

The problems in the feature fall into three categories:

1. Factual inaccuracies
2. Statements included for the purpose of mocking Latter-day Saint belief
3. Unchallenged criticisms presented as if they are settled truth

These are not nitpicks. They go to the heart of whether the piece is journalism or polemic.

1) Factual inaccuracies: the kind that shouldn’t survive a competent edit

Some errors are interpretive. These are not. These are statements about what Latter-day Saints believe, teach, or do—asserted in the narrator’s voice—that are wrong, distorted, or presented with such sloppiness that readers are misled.

Here is a catalogue of the most obvious problems:

Doctrinal claims that are misstated or sensationalized

• The piece claims there is a doctrine of spending 1,000 years in “spirit prison.”
• It claims spirit prison is for the “least worthy,” implying a ranked afterlife prison system.
• It calls spirit prison a “temporary hell,” borrowing a loaded popular image that distorts how Latter-day Saints understand the spirit world.
• It states inaccurately that women cannot prophesy in the Church—erasing a long Latter-day Saint teaching about women’s spiritual authority and gifts.

“Worthiness” and church practice presented as caricature

• The piece asserts that for Latter-day Saint women, “worthiness” depends first and foremost on marriage and motherhood. That is an editorial line that reads powerful and condemnatory—and it is misleading. Latter-day Saint worthiness has formal, published standards and interviews; you can critique those standards without inventing new ones.
• It describes bishops’ interviews for youth and lists topics that are not included in the youth interview questions.

Internet folklore treated like representative practice

• The piece presents “soaking” as a way young Mormons can have sex without breaking chastity covenants, treating it like a real, meaningful “loophole” in lived religion. At best, it’s gossip; at worst, it’s a joke inserted because it’s humiliating.

Errors of basic terminology

• The feature confuses temple clothing worn in the temple with temple garments that are first received in the temple and then worn as an everyday religious commitment. That confusion is exactly the kind of thing that happens when a writer is covering a community from the outside and does not slow down to learn the vocabulary.

Sloppy claims about history and demographics

• The piece asserts that Black men could not hold leadership positions before 1978, when what it appears to mean (and should have precisely stated) is that Black men could not be ordained to the priesthood prior to 1978.
• It gives a Utah Latter-day Saint self-identification figure with no clear sourcing, and different from the most widely reported Pew Research figure.
• It reports an incorrect count of temples announced in 2025—again, a checkable detail that signals a lack of verification.
  

[Editor’s Note: New York Magazine has since corrected the final two errors, but declined to fix the other factual mistakes in the piece.]

These are not obscure theological disputes. An understanding reader might handwave these away as honest mistakes or minor points. But these are precisely the kinds of facts that journalists care about (or at least should). The errors suggest an editorial posture of stereotype-driven credulity: if a claim sounds weird enough, it is assumed true, and therefore not worth checking.

Religious reporting is challenging and detail-heavy, which is exactly why careful outlets verify doctrine and terminology with knowledgeable members of the faith and scholars—so the people being described can recognize themselves in the description.

In response to a request for comment about the article’s editorial process, Lauren Starke, head of communications for New York Magazine, replied, “Our writer consulted a wide range of sources with varying perspectives, and the story was carefully reported, edited, and fact-checked.” If so, these varying perspectives and careful reporting did not appear in the final draft of the article. It does not even appear that an in-house religion reporter was consulted. 

2) Mocking statements: the paper trail of contempt

Even if every factual claim were perfect, the piece would still have a problem: it repeatedly deploys editorial asides and framing choices that read as intended to belittle.

A story can have a voice without being cruel. This one is cruel in small, deliberate ways—the kind that accumulates until the reader understands the assignment: these people are weird; feel free to laugh.

Here is a catalogue of the clearest tone cues:

• Opening with a sexual pun as the entry point into “Mormon” Utah: a signal that this community will be handled with a wink, not with care.
• Describing Latter-day Saint beliefs as “zany” in the narrator’s voice—an adjective that invites ridicule rather than understanding.
• Referring to Mormons as “freaks” (even as part of a broader cultural arc). If you want to understand how a community went mainstream, you do not need to label them freakish. That’s not analysis; it’s sneering.
• Casually conflating Latter-day Saints with polygamous shows like “Big Love” or “Sister Wives.”
• Throwing out tangential doctrinal ideas with no purpose beyond making it appear silly, and in a way an average member would not recognize as “what we believe.”
• Bringing up “soaking” as a narrative beat—not because it’s crucial to the thesis, but because it’s humiliating and clickable.
• Referring to church reserves/investments as a “war chest” rather than using neutral language like “savings” or language Latter-day Saints would use themselves such as “rainy day fund.”
• Referring to the most serious source on the church as “a Happy Valley mom who posts educational content about the faith.” While Latter-day Saint women often view their roles as mothers as the most significant, the phrasing here is clearly meant to downplay her professional accomplishments and portray her as a frivolous home vlogger. 

None of this advances the core journalistic purpose. All of it advances a social purpose: to reassure the reader that they are part of the in-group that knows how to roll their eyes at the out-group.

A publication can choose that posture. But it shows they should not be considered a serious, fair-minded journalistic institution.

3) Unchallenged criticisms: letting the loudest critics define the subject

Professional journalists abide by The Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics. Or at least they are supposed to. 

One of these codes is to diligently seek subjects of news coverage to allow them to respond to criticism or allegations of wrongdoing. The article fails on this front. According to internal sources who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak on the subject, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was not brought in on the article until late in the process. New York Magazine did not diligently seek out other Latter-day Saint organizations who could respond to the criticisms in the article either. 

Reality television is not ethnography. It selects for spectacle, conflict, and extremity; it is not designed to be representative. Most readers understand that instinctively. But when the subject is Latter-day Saints, that genre literacy seems to vanish: the most sensational export becomes the interpretive key for the whole community.

The feature repeatedly gives critics a runway and does not bother to add context, corrections, or faithful perspectives—especially when describing sacred worship. In over 6,000 words, the article manages to include only a few active Latter-day Saints. Jasmin Rappleye, an experienced content creator with serious doctrinal literacy, was woefully underused as a source—she is given a brief quote about “publicity,” and responds to one allegation that influencers are paid directly by the Church (they’re not). Meanwhile The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star and frequent church critic Heather Gay is featured in a quarter of the article. 

This is where the piece crosses from “critical” into “polemic”: it grants authority to the sharpest negative descriptions without doing the basic work of hearing from people who actually practice the faith. 

Examples from the article include:

• It repeats “magic underwear” without noting that Latter-day Saints find that label offensive and have asked others to stop using it—something a respectful publication would at least mention if not honor, even if it still determined that underclothing or a religious minority was a proper subject of journalism.
• It presents “community surveillance” as a defining cultural norm without giving ordinary faithful members a chance to explain how they experience community, accountability, and belonging, and push back on the narrative.
• It gives a critic’s description of temple worship designed to make sacred practice sound ridiculous without any counterweight from a believing voice who can explain what temple worship is intended to be and why it matters.
• It allows the Church to be inaccurately labeled “a theocracy”—a term that describes governments, not churches.

The only moment where balance appears is when the writer needed a denial for legal reasons (the clarification about the church paying influencers). Everything else—the theology, the worship, the moral life of millions of people—gets flattened into outsider narration and the commentary of critics.

That isn’t how you cover a religion. It’s how you prosecute one.

The Biggest Omission: Jesus Christ

One might not expect a cultural publication to take our faith in Jesus Christ seriously (though it did identify us correctly as Christians). But if you are writing a cultural article on why Latter-day Saints do what they do, and you do not talk about how we love Jesus Christ and try to follow His example, then you are not telling the full story.

The story turns a Christ-centered faith into an aesthetic, a machine, a brand strategy, and a collection of quirky doctrines for outsiders to gawk at. Readers come away thinking Latter-day Saint life is mainly about branding, surveillance, and monetization. You cannot tell the truth about Latter-day Saints while ignoring its core animating fact. That omission doesn’t just offend believers. It robs readers of the most important explanatory key to the lives of Latter-day Saints.

Why This Matters Beyond “Hurt Feelings”

Some editors respond to criticism like this with a shrug. They determine it is not their job to be the Church’s PR, or they believe that upsetting people means that their hard-hitting coverage landed. 

I am sorry to disappoint you. But it is also not your job to be the PR for Heather Gay, and an article about how a Hulu reality show made people buy sodas with syrup in them is not hard-hitting coverage.

The reason Latter-day Saints don’t like this kind of coverage is because it’s bad. 

And Latter-day Saints have a long history of being treated as something less than fully American—something exotic, suspect, culty, ridiculous, or dangerous. The article tries to say that is over, while making it very clear it is not. 

The story even gestures at historic persecution early on, then proceeds to participate in a softer modern form of the same impulse: they’re weird, so it’s fine to talk about them in a way you would never talk about others.

A fair feature can be sharp and unsparing and still meet standards of fairness and accuracy. If a publication wants to cover religions—especially minority religions it believes are culturally influential—it should meet the minimum bar:

• Get doctrine right or do not summarize doctrine.
• Avoid lazy stereotypes and derogatory tropes.
• Do not turn sacred practice into spectacle for clicks.
• Include the voices of sincere practitioners, not only critics and reality TV proxies.
• When you make an error, correct it publicly.

We invite New York Magazine, The Cut, and the author and editors of this article to make a public apology to Latter-day Saints, and if they don’t remove the article, to at least correct the inaccurate statements and remove the mockery. 

Moving forward, this can be an opportunity for reflection and improvement. 

One of the most frustrating parts of being part of a community that pop culture periodically discovers is the sense that you are never being spoken to—only spoken about. That your real life is invisible behind the versions of you that sell: the cartoon missionary, the “zany belief,” the “magic underwear,” the reality show scandal, the internet rumor, the aesthetic mood board.

Latter-day Saints are not asking to be shielded from critique. We are asking to be treated as fully human and honestly represented.

New York Magazine can do better. But “better” is not a vague aspiration. It starts with the basics: accuracy, fairness, and the humility to admit when a story uses a minority faith as a punchline.

The post The Ethics of Contempt appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

The reason for this divergence comes in part from systemic pressures. For example, Latter-day Saints value confidentiality and revealing information as appropriate, as modeled by Jesus Christ, whereas journalists value the transparency which feeds their news churn.

Like within any religious body, Latter-day Saints are far from monolithic. So, while some are entirely aligned with the beliefs and practices that define the faith, naturally, others are less so. 

Who are Online Latter-day Saints

Recent research by the BH Roberts Foundation asked a variety of questions about belief and practice to a representative sample of Latter-day Saints. They found two “clusters” of respondents to these questions. The first cluster represented 80% of Latter-day Saints. This group was tightly aligned on questions of belief and practice. The second cluster represented 20% of Latter-day Saints—this group (“second cluster”) was outside of the first group and also much less similar to one another than the first group. 

While BH Roberts’ survey is recent, the underlying breakdown is far from new. Naturally those in the second cluster feel much less unity with their faith. Beginning in the mid-nineties, these Latter-day Saints who felt tension with their faith began to gather online to find religious validation and community. 

In a 2019 essay, I analyzed the role of technology on faith in the previous decade. I wrote, “Social media has provided a venue to channel religious fervor without institutional oversight. The effect has been a kind of democratization of religion. This approach takes the church out of religion, undercutting churches’ authority (and ability) to control a narrative or maintain doctrinal boundaries.” While in that article, I didn’t spend much time examining trends within the Church of Jesus Christ, the reality is that second-cluster Latter-day Saints would have been those naturally attracted to that space. 

Three years later, in a further examination, I explained, “The Church of Jesus Christ is hierarchical, and so the draw to a space with less institutional oversight was strong for those whose beliefs and behaviors put them on the fringes or outside of Latter-day Saint life, while those who felt well integrated felt no similar push to find emotional and religious validation in online communities.”

This was not a controversial realization, and by at least the mid-aughts, this reality was understood by Latter-day Saints who were interested in the space. The More Good Foundation, which I worked for when I first graduated school, was founded in 2005 to counteract this trend. I received permission to share one internal data point that illustrated this trend. In January 2008, as an example of this trend, 85% of YouTube videos about the Church were in tension with church teachings. Other internal data from the group had similar findings.

The second cluster which gathered online went in many directions. Both those who were distinct from the main body of the church in a more fundamentalist direction and those who were distinct from the church in the direction of the broader US culture gathered in these online spaces. However, the group closer aligned to the broader culture tended to be larger.

In other words, because the online space provided a place for them to gather, these “second-cluster” Latter-day Saints adopted online communities earlier and came to dominate the online religious spaces. This effect was well-known early on, and it remains in effect today.

Journalistic Pressures

As a rule, journalists are underinformed about religion. Each religion includes a massive amount of history and context. Thus, it would be nearly impossible for a journalist to be well-attuned to all the faiths of a pluralistic society. Often, however, they don’t do the work to make up for those gaps.

Journalists have also been in a long trend away from objective reporting and more toward transparent reporting. Many feel their role as journalists is to work toward what they believe are moral ends. This trend was significantly accelerated in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

One other change in the work of journalists has been the advent of social media which has been a gold mine for journalists who are often facing financial pressures that make time-consuming on-the-ground reporting increasingly difficult. Social media allows them to gather quotes without needing to make contacts or gain permission as they would have had to do otherwise. While many have criticized how much journalists have come to rely on social media to report on stories, the financial realities are simply more powerful. And even when news stories don’t cite social media directly, their sources are often found using social media.

For journalists reporting on The Church of Jesus Christ, the Latter-day Saints most accessible to them online are the “second-cluster” Latter-day Saints, most of whom diverge from their faith in the direction of the average journalist—including those advocating for the causes that the journalists feel warrant the suspension of their neutrality.

Trends Collide to Create a Genre

The trend in online-Latter-day Saints and the multiple pressures affecting journalists intersect to create a particular vulnerability in reporting about the Church of Jesus Christ.

Online Latter-day Saints tend to be less aligned with their faith. Journalists who aren’t religiously in tune don’t understand this trend. Then, they use the words of these online Latter-day Saints to create a narrative of internal dissent and advocacy against the Church for change in order to increase the pressure on the Church to become more in line with the worldview of the journalists. 

These claims, founded in the small second cluster of Latter-day Saints who are much more online, tend to underrepresent the large majority of first-cluster Latter-day Saints who support their faith and who aren’t terminally online at the same rates. Simply put, the most dissatisfied with their experience tend to be the most visible online rather than the most accurate general representation.

These trends have created a genre of articles that present Latter-day Saints generally as experiencing tension with the Church, when only a small minority of Latter-day Saints share those feelings.

A notable example of this genre was written by Michelle Boorstein of the Washington Post. She wrote that calls for reform in the Church’s financial reporting were increasing. But she based this on what she saw in blogs and podcasts. Whoops.

The Salt Lake Tribune is perhaps the most notorious purveyor of this genre because of how frequently they report about the Church of Jesus Christ and the degree of financial pressure they are under. Recently for example, they ran a story that promised in its headline to explain “what LDS women want,” but their interviewees were two Instagram influencers. Yikes. 

The New York Times recently added to the genre reporting on, of all things, an Instagram post. They began with the typical religious illiteracy, such as inaccurately stating that within our faith, “The stand is a place of status” to create a narrative of oppression and resistance that is foreign to most Latter-day Saint women. To expand their reporting beyond the Instagram comments, they relied on similarly terminally online Latter-day Saints such as podcasters.

They limited Latter-day Saint women who disagreed to a single example in a single paragraph, despite the fact that the most recent Pew survey shows 90% of Latter-day Saint women oppose ordination. Because Ruth Graham, who wrote the piece, doesn’t understand the underlying dynamics of online Latter-day Saints, her readers leave her article misinformed about how women in The Church of Jesus Christ feel. 

[Editor’s Note: The following example was added on 13 Feb 2026 in response to Newsweek’s article]

Newsweek published a similar article after the call of Elder Clark Gilbert to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Their headline trumpeted that the call “Sparks LDS Church Backlash,” but their evidence for this was complaints on Reddit.

A Better Approach for Journalists

Obviously, Latter-day Saints who don’t align with their church are no more or less worthy of coverage by prominent newsrooms. Their perspectives are just as legitimate as anyone else’s. But when their voices are continually overrepresented while Latter-day Saints in the vast majority are ignored or sidelined, it creates a narrative that further marginalizes those seeking to live a minority faith and misrepresents trends within the Church to outsiders, as Boorstein, Graham, and the Tribune did in these examples.

“Online Latter-day Saints agree with journalists more than church leaders” is not news, or at least it hasn’t been for twenty years, yet it manages to make news time and time again. Journalists who do not wish to mislead their readers would do well to increase their religious literacy so as to avoid continuing to over-represent a small group. While “second cluster” Latter-day Saints are overrepresented online, they are far from the only Latter-day Saints online. Making efforts to connect with more representative members to cite and source, particularly those “first cluster” Latter-day Saints, would go a long way to helping address this problem.

The post Beyond the Veil of Technology: The Dual Realities of Latter-day Saints appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

The result is a disaster of journalistic credibility. This article makes it clear the AP is unfit to publish authoritative news about the Church, at least until it makes significant changes in its processes.

Rod Dreher, the influential writer and editor, quipped in response to the AP’s most recent article, ”I thought this was a Babylon Bee headline.” That reaction has become a bit too common in responses to coverage of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in national media. But it’s usually aimed at publications with established editorial bents, like Rolling Stone Magazine. That the AP has joined its ranks is sad.

The AP article had the headline, “Latter-day Saints leader addresses congregants without a word on racial or LGBTQ+ issues.” Dreher remarked, “I thought this was a Babylon Bee headline, making fun of the media’s obsessions. Nope, it’s real. The failure of the 99-year-old head of a religion to talk about what a journalist thinks he ought to have done is news.” 

That’s right. The Associated Press published a “news” story about what wasn’t discussed in the conference.

Leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ also didn’t speak about the War in Gaza, the population crisis in South Korea, how well the Armenian dram is performing against the dollar, or Javier Bardem’s stunning performance in Dune Part Two.

Perhaps most egregiously, the headline is factually inaccurate! During Nelson’s remarks on Sunday afternoon, he said, “[God] invites all to come unto Him—black and white, bond and free, male and female; … all are alike unto God.” He explicitly mentioned race in his remarks. Not to mention the dozens of remarks that touched on issues of love, charity, and truth, which explains, even if not directly, how the Church approaches LGBT+ issues.

And this is not merely bad coverage by Hannah Schoenbaum who wrote the article. Schoenbaum’s entire beat is covering LGBT+ issues at state houses. The editor who assigned Schoenbaum to the conference did so, knowing precisely what would come out of the narrow point of view of her coverage specialty. 

As the saying goes, If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. Or, in this case, all you can see is there are no nails, ignoring both the beauty and actual news that is there. 

Please, don’t focus your ire on Schoenbaum. What she produced is about what you would expect from a person in her position. The true blame lies at the feet of the journalistic system that put her in the position to fail. Does the AP truly not have a single journalist in Utah who is religiously literate? Until they get one, perhaps they shouldn’t try and cover explicitly religious events. They simply don’t have the right personnel to do it right, as Schoenbaum demonstrates.

Schoenbaum lacks a fair bit of religious literacy in her article. She uses language foreign to the Latter-day Saint tradition, such as  “Church’s leadership panel,” “Nelson’s top adviser,” or “heretics.” She also makes the statement, that the priesthood exclusion was “a policy in the belief that black skin was a curse,” which is at best controversial, without any mention of the fact that neither the Church nor most of its members endorse this version of history. 

However, the article is not only bad in its framing and its lack of religious literacy. It was written to be a straight news story and is peppered with negative editorializing of the faith. She mentions Nelson’s work of reasserting the Church’s full name but describes it as a “sharp shift.” Then adds a frequent line used by critics of President Nelson about the previous ‘I’m a Mormon’ campaign but she states it as a simple fact in her own voice, not attributing it to critics. She doesn’t mention any of the reasons that have been used to support the request.

She describes temples as “lavish,” a description that may feel apt to those who are critical of the temple but not one that would feel appropriate to the Church or its many members. 

She brings in a wild non sequitur about a speech given by a different church leader at BYU and says it’s “known as the ‘musket fire speech’” without clarifying that it is only known this way by those attempting to discredit the remarks.

Schoenbaum additionally claims there are “ongoing tensions between church leadership and LGBTQ+ members” without mentioning the many LGBT+ members who are at home in the Church and do not feel the “tension” she assumes in her statement.

Schoenbaum frequently covers the Utah legislature, so in case she gets the assignment next October as well, let me pass along some directions from the capital. One block south, one block west. That’s it. That’s the conference center. It’s so easy to find from the capital anyone can do it. And if you can manage the ten-minute walk, there are tens of thousands of sources who would be more than happy to talk to you about what was said at conference, rather than what was not said. 

The problem, of course, is that it wouldn’t fit with the narrative that was predestined for this story from the second it was conceived. 

This kind of deeply flawed coverage is antagonistic to Latter-day Saints. And because it was published by the Associated Press it will be reprinted to media markets across the country. In most of those markets, Latter-day Saints are religious minorities. The narratives imposed on these stories are used by those in these markets trying to stop Latter-day Saints from being able to build places of worship. And this agitation over the different worldview of Latter-day Saints from the broader culture over sexuality inspires vandalism and other hate crimes. 

Come on, AP. Latter-day Saints are actual, real people. And we deserve to be treated like it. This coverage is embarrassing for you. Do better.

Correction: The 16th paragraph has been corrected. It previously said Schoenbaum didn’t interview anyone “celebrating” his birthday, it has been changed to read “speaking in celebration of his birthday.”

The post Associated Press Embarrasses Itself in Conference Coverage appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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Compared to the appropriate sorrow we might feel when another instance of abuse or violence happens, however, the extent of exquisite detail can draw us into the story—not simply to “mourn with those who mourn”—but to do something very different. There’s no question that when crime is committed, journalists have a responsibility to document the wrongdoing and to provide a public notice. But, often stories about crime are written to fascinate and engrosse us in the details. We are shocked, and, sadly, maybe even entertained? 

On August 19, 2019, news broke that Steven Murdock was accused of  filming a woman getting changed in a dressing room. He was arrested and arraigned, and last week Murdock pled guilty to the charges. 

The filming took place in a suburban, Nashville mall. Because the incident involved such a violation of law and human decency, it’s not just understandable that it made the local news, but that’s precisely the role of journalism to shine a negative light on any such reprehensible behavior.

But one detail, it seems, contributed to this story becoming a national phenomenon, carried by some of the largest news outlets in the country and beyond. Steven Murdock was also a local high councilor for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 

To get a better sense of how and why this detail drew such attention, looking at four of the articles detailing the story: 

• “Mormon local leader charged in dressing room camera incident” from the Associated Press
• “A Mormon leader secretly filmed woman getting changed in an H&M fitting room, police say” from Business Insider
• “Police: Man who filmed woman at dressing room identified as high member of LDS church” the highest search engine ranked local news story.
• “Mormon High Priest Put Creepy Cam Over H&M Changing Room Door: Cops” The highest search engine ranked national story from The Daily Beast. 

Murdock’s history of faith undoubtedly makes this story especially sad―here’s a person who should have known better, who publicly espoused high moral standards, but was surreptitiously sought to engage in voyeurism. 

This is a problem that needs to be faced seriously.  Between 2006 and 2016, there was a 7-fold increase in voyeurism convictions in the UK―one of the countries with the most reliable statistics regarding this issue. When nearly identical stories of voyeurism have been reported on in the U.S. in the last two years, very few ever received national attention. And whether locally or nationally covered over the past eighteen months, none appear to include a single mention of the perpetrator’s religious faith. 

In each of the four aforementioned stories, by contrast, Murdock’s membership in the Church is not only mentioned, but mentioned in the headline, the first line of each of the articles, and developed as a significant theme of the story. Titles variously identified the man as a “Mormon leader,” a “Mormon High Priest” or a “high member of LDS church”—with one noting he was a “local Mormon leader.”  

It’s understandable that journalists would struggle to grasp the context of the label “high councilor.” The title, afterall, feels lofty, and in an ecclesistical setting does help convey the importance placed on those who serve and shepherd even at the local level. But, in more secular parlance, a member of the high council is perhaps akin to serving on the advisory board of a local non-profit, with no direct ecclesiastical authority. Indeed, there are more than 40,000 high councilors in the Church. And it would be rare for a Church member to know all the high councilors in their own geographic area, let alone in the next city over. 

Without that context, it’s easy enough to overemphasize the significance of the man’s religious faith—the first local news piece, for instance, describes Murdock as “a prominent leader” with the Church. 

By contrast, Travis Loller’s AP story explains in the first paragraph that Murdock serves as “a local leader.” 

It’s worth asking whether putting someone’s religious tradition in the headline is appropriate when they hold a volunteer position of little prominence. Along the same lines, of the 49 total paragraphs in the four articles mentioned above, remarkably 34.6% of them discuss the Church. And while most outlets used an image of Murdock or the location where the incident happened, the Daily Beast curiously chose to feature the Church’s Conference Center in Salt Lake City, Utah—more than 1600 miles away from the incident, as if the Church was somehow involved in the story. 

What drives the fascination with Murdock’s faith? And what are the consequences of its prominence in the story for readers? 

Illustrations of religious hypocrisy surely make for better copy. It’s hard to not recognize that the Daily Beast’s reporting—which was perhaps the most sensational— was rewarded with the most web traffic. 

It was Elder Neal A. Maxwell who observed in the mid-1970s (reflecting on his early years working in Washington, D.C.) “I see so much of modern journalism searching for sensation—a search which can be addictive to journalists as well as to audiences.” It seems a better path would be to follow The Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics:  “Provide context. Take special care not to misrepresent or oversimplify in promoting, previewing or summarizing a story.”  

Religion media watchdogs such as Get Religion’s Terry Mattingly and Religion News Services’ Aysha Khan both called out the attempts at sensationalistic coverage in this story and suggested reframing it as the local news it is. 

A more egregious example of this quest to insert a Latter-day Saint angle into any story possible was recently on display from the Associated Press. It read, “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is forced to confront its history of polygamy after nine women and children from a Mormon offshoot where some practice plural marriage died in a cartel ambush.”

Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) asked about the coverage: 

What if the victims had been from a woke, hip neighborhood in Manhattan? Would the AP have described the victims by saying that they lived in a place “where some people don’t believe in God”? That would of course be both weird and wildly inappropriate. And it would never happen.

This kind of focus affects people who belong to the groups reported on in this way. The comments and soclial media reactions to this story read like a greatest hits for jokes about Latter-day Saint polygamy and garments. But the most prominent theme across social media comments about the story is that religious people/leaders in general are hypocrites:

• “The most terrible people disguise themselves with religion so they won’t be questioned.”
• “A religious leader being a hypocrite and a charlatan… well, I never!!”

Still, a vocal minority pushed back, as one woman who said, “This makes me sick that anyone would do this. But I also think it doesn’t matter what religion he is, it’s the act that is so awful. I don’t believe the LDS church, Baptist church, Methodist church or any other church would condone this behavior.”

Of course, it wouldn’t—and doesn’t. Nor do we condone voyeurism. Any such act is rightly met with criminal charges. 

The apostle Paul once encouraged the Saints to not “rejoice in iniquity” (1 Cor. 13:6). Rather than gawk at the details, imagine a public conversation centered on compassion for the victim. Instead of reinforcing deep suspicion about people of faith, this could be a conversation that invites reflection and improvement, while absolutely holding perpetrators publicly accountable both in the press and in the legal system. 

But, rather than invoking any of this, our cultural tendencies can too often make “peeping Toms” of all of us—reveling in another person’s sin, crimes, escapades or misery. We can and must do better, and it starts with protecting victims, holding perpetrators accountable, and making the pursuit of solutions the most engrossing aspect of the journalistic enterprise.

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