Don’t believe Hulu. These are the really-real house lives of Latter-day Saint wives

Hulu recently announced a controversial docuseries titled “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.” The sensational title refers to a group of women who purport to maintain their identity as married Latter-day Saints while engaging in illicit liaisons.

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have already taken to social media to collectively roll their eyes at yet another series presenting church members in outlandish ways. The new series takes its place in a genre that includes portrayals of Latter-day Saints as sinister malefactors (“Murder Among the Mormons” and “Under the Banner of Heaven”), victims of crimes (“Tabloid” and “A Friend of the Family”) and religiously hypocritical (“The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City”).

In each case, the unspoken takeaway seems to be fervent faith somehow predisposes all these behavioral extremes. But research tells a different, more positive story about the real lives of Latter-day Saint married women who are more likely to enjoy stable marriages and higher levels of happiness.

“I think it’s just a fundamental misunderstanding of highly religious people,” Dean Busby, family studies professor at BYU, said in a recent interview. “People pursue alternative lifestyles and such, usually after disaffiliation from their religion. ... (It tends not) to be religion that drives them there.”

What do the numbers say?

Relying on data from a total of 16,474 global respondents and an analysis of 9,566 married men and women, researchers from seven different universities found actively religious couples report higher levels of relationship quality and sexual satisfaction than their secular or less religious counterparts, according to a 2019 Wheatley Institute and Institute for Family Studies report.

In a separate study, looking at Latter-day Saints specifically and drawing on data from the RELATE questionnaire of more than 20,000 couples, highly religious Latter-day Saint couples report greater relationship stability and lower levels of divorce. A more recent survey found the divorce rate for temple marriages to be significantly lower than the national average. And in 2012, Pew conducted 1,109 interviews with Latter-day Saints and found 73% of respondents reporting that a successful marriage was a high priority for them.

Busby says the rate of infidelity among married church members who are strongly affiliated with the faith “is so low, you can barely see it.” Other faith groups with strongly affiliated members also have low rates, he says: “It all comes down to basic beliefs — those strongly held beliefs — that sexuality is something that’s for bonding, for procreation and that is only supposed to happen in relationships where you have a permanent commitment.”

Demographically, the average Latter-day Saint woman is married with a couple of children, and the marriage rate among church members outpaces the national average as does the birthrate. These factors correlate with higher levels of reported happiness.

“The data support that strongly affiliated or regularly connected members of the faith are much more likely to have a traditional approach to sexuality and abstain before marriage,” Busby said.

Faith in family matters

“Fundamentally, we’re a family-oriented church,” Daniel Frost, a professor in BYU’s School of Family Life, said, pointing out that a church member engaging in an extramarital affair, including “swinging,” the premise of the Hulu series, would lead to their standing in the church to be jeopardized.

In the faith, he continued, “true happiness comes from faithful, loving, committed marriage.” Pointing to the teachings of President Jeffrey R. Holland, acting president of the church’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, Frost said “marriage is a kind of total union; a person with whom you share your life, your hopes, your dreams and your future.”

Religious marriages have specific upsides for women, too. “All the evidence we have about highly religious women in marriages suggest they are the most likely to be in happy marriages,” Jenet Erickson, a fellow of the Wheatley Institute, said. “Their life satisfaction is higher, their marital satisfaction is higher and their sexual satisfaction is around 50% higher.”

Research also confirms that in highly religious marriages, men are more likely to pitch in on sharing housework. The secret of Latter-day Saint married women is in many instances stable family life, Erickson said.

“When we look at the broad measures, it’s a really advantageous place for the happiness, flourishing and well-being of women,” Erickson said. This is especially true in what is called a “neo-traditional structure,” which she describes as “where the husband takes the primary breadwinning role and she takes the primary caregiving role. He’s more involved with children than men were in the past, and she is more involved in professional work than women were in the past.”

Representation in Hollywood

For some, like journalism professor Joel Campbell, who has long observed the way media treats Latter-day Saints, this Hulu series “is a whole new level.”

“As a Latter-day Saint, as a journalist and as an ethicist, I find it all offensive,” he said, explaining that he thought the series went to “the level of looking at the salacious and the sordid.”

Latter-day Saint women deserve representation that’s anchored in reality, he continued.

Nearly 7 million Latter-day Saint women are part of the Relief Society, a women’s organization dedicated to humanitarian efforts and creating Christian sisterly bonds between participants. Relief Society members perform acts of service, like bringing meals to families in need and helping communities rebuild after disaster strikes. Their work is driven by their faith in Jesus Christ and their membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

A Colorado woman by the name of Emily Walker opened up to the Church News recently about how the Relief Society benefited her life.

“They have randomly taken me mini golfing on my birthday, brought me meals when I was sick, attended my performances, watched my dog, given me rides when my car was in the shop. ... They have spent time with me as friends, grieved with me when I was heartbroken, held my hand in my darkest hours,” Walker said.

Campbell and others contend that there are plenty of exemplary Latter-day Saints women who ought to receive more attention from the broader culture. As the Deseret News has reported, Latter-day Saint Katrina Lantos Swett is an advocate for people who are marginalized across the world, Debra Bonner seeks to heal kids struggling with depression through gospel music choirs and Dawn Hawkins works to combat sexual exploitation and abuse.

Yet a survey from Pew Research Center found a quarter of Americans have a negative view of Latter-day Saints (the second most disliked group listed in the survey) and 59% of respondents did not know enough about church members to opine.

“I think these kinds of shows certainly hurt the ability for people to really see Latter-day Saints, Muslims and Jews as they are,” Campbell said.

A recent survey of nearly 10,000 people conducted by HarrisX in partnership with the nonprofit Faith and Media Initiative found that 80% of respondents wanted to see better entertainment involving people of faith.

While these shows don’t model who Latter-day Saint women are for the world, Erickson believes church members can become a focus for good in the broader culture.

“The reality is that it’s countercultural to have marriage and family, so that means the broader culture will be looking to you.”