The Ethics of Contempt

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.

The tone signals—early and often—that the reader is supposed to feel superior to the subjects. The “color” isn’t neutral; it’s cudgel-like. And once a story trains readers to laugh first, accuracy and fairness become optional. Contempt isn’t criticism: criticism evaluates claims and practices, contempt is the refusal to grant moral seriousness to the subject—signaled by ridicule-as-default, caricatured summaries, and the selection of sources that make sincere belief unintelligible.

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.

This is what makes the article so frustrating: it’s close to being thoughtful journalism. The reporting is substantial enough that the failures aren’t simply mistakes; they are choices. The inaccuracies aren’t the price of speed; they are the price of not caring enough to get it right. 

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. 

Contempt has consequences. When you normalize casual mockery of a faith, you teach readers what kind of people deserve respect and what kind don’t. You teach them whose sacred things are “real” and whose are a joke. You teach them which communities are safe to stereotype.

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.