Mediated Mormons: Shifting Religious Identities in the Digital Age

“don't google ‘joseph smith’” (141). So was Rosemary Avance cautioned by a Mormon missionary when she began studying Mormonism in 2009. The warning was apt for more reasons than one: At the cresting wave of Web 2.0, as bottom-up, content-rich social media became part of the scaffolding of everyday life, and before Google's search algorithm had been rendered practically useless by ads and corporate search engine optimization, googling “Joseph Smith” would unearth a vibrant array of results. These results ranged from sanitized official sources produced by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to ex-Mormon blogs describing how the more salacious aspects of the founder's personal history led them to leave the faith. What's more, Avance, as a budding chronicler of the intersection of digital media and Mormon identity, was uniquely well positioned to document the content she found there—preserving what might otherwise have faded away as digital ephemera and plumbing its depths for insight into the way the “new” internet shaped Mormon faith and belonging in the twenty-first century. Such is the promise of Avance's debut monograph. As a “citizen sampler” (ix) of online internecine conflict during the “Mormon moment” of 2012–2013, Avance offers readers a front row seat to a selection of lightning rod episodes in which competing narratives about what it means to be Mormon were negotiated and contested on digital turf.Avance frames her analysis of the “Mormon moment” around its mediated nature—a fitting choice for a media and strategic communications scholar. Indeed, many of the most pressing debates about Mormon identity that took place during the early 2010s—over apologetics, feminism, presidential politics, and more—were largely conducted through online news media, corporate and personal websites, and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. In her introduction, Avance identifies how new opportunities provided by digital spaces—opportunities to engage in debate “anonymously,” to connect with others over shared beliefs across geographical barriers, and even to surveil church members more effectively—challenged existing power dynamics within the LDS Church. In some ways, the heterodox had more ways to broadcast their views and find like-minded coreligionists than ever before. On the other hand, the “LDS bureaucracy” had new tools to spread official church doctrine and monitor members’ rhetoric (15). Although the nomination of Mitt Romney as the 2012 Republican presidential candidate and Mormon feminist movements like Ordain Women thrust the church into the national spotlight during the Mormon moment, Avance primarily focuses on how these and other conflicts were litigated by competing interest groups within the faith. Ultimately, Avance argues, the Mormon moment—unfolding as it did in a new digital landscape requiring new tactics of boundary maintenance and narrative spread—shifted “the Mormon Overton window” toward a more inclusive and heterodox community of Saints, even as the LDS Church introduced new methods of institutional control (154).In some ways, Avance's work might best be framed as the spiritual successor to Jan Shipps's 2000 book Sojourner in the Promised Land, in which Shipps reflects on four decades of life spent as a non-Mormon among Mormons. On the precipice of the twenty-first century, Shipps looks back to the shifting Mormon media image from 1960, during which time the Priesthood Correlation Program was greatly expanded under President David O. McKay, through the scandal that exposed underhanded tactics by the Salt Lake Organizing Committee to secure Salt Lake City as the site of the 2002 Winter Olympics. Shipps leaves the question of what is to come in the new millennium to future scholars, but not before making an educated (prophetic?) guess of her own: “Things are changing so rapidly that I suspect soon it will not be legitimate (or even possible) to delineate the Mormon image. Despite the ‘cookie-cutter effect’ of a carefully elaborated program the church has instituted in recent years to set standards for LDS belief and behavior, never again is there likely to be a single Mormon image. It is much more probable that, along with nuance, will come multiple images of the Latter-day Saints.”1 In tracking the conflict between groups of Saints asserting their right to define the boundaries of acceptable Mormon belief and practice during a period of heightened external scrutiny, Avance (as a non-Mormon participant-observer, no less) takes up a mantle Shipps feared might not be passed on.2 But Avance is far from alone—she joins a new generation of scholars, journalists, and bloggers intent on unpacking how the Mormon moment elucidates the state of the faith in the twenty-first century. Among this group is Jana Riess, whose 2019 book The Next Mormons: How Millennials are Changing the LDS Church documents many of the same identitarian fault lines—namely, theologies of gender, sexuality, and race, and who has the right to interpret them—that Avance highlights in Mediated Mormons.3 Avance's focus on these fault lines as mediated phenomena finds company with a small cadre of fellow Mormon studies scholars interested in media infrastructure as an instrument of power whose role in shaping individuals and institutions often goes unexamined.4It is this latter intervention—perhaps the most interesting one promised by Mediated Mormons—that Avance underdelivers. In her introduction, Avance notes the power of digital media to complicate existing scholarship about identity, enactments of the self, and community. Believers’ performances of Mormonism—and even their self-conception of the role and importance of their faith in their daily life—might look different online than they do in the analog world. So, too, do digital platforms create and restrict possibilities for Mormon identity formation, boundary policing, and community building. Even as Mormons on the fringes of institutional acceptability find new avenues for legitimizing their vision of the faith on the internet, the institution of the LDS Church continues to flex its media-savvy muscles, using new digital tools to advertise, poll, message frame, and monitor members (23–24). Employing structure and agency as heuristic categories that co-constitute Mormon identity in their ongoing tussle, Avance offers five case studies from the Mormon moment that showcase how such battles are fought through media narratives. And yet, throughout these studies, it is largely the content of mediated narratives that takes center stage; the way new forms of media constrain, augment, and alter what types of narratives are even possible remains (as it so often does) hanging unobtrusively in the background.Two of Avance's case studies feature moments when Mormonism broke into secular news cycles, leaving Mormons to navigate not only how to portray their beliefs to a broader public but also illuminating the institutional church's slipping control over that message framing in light of technologies that help circulate heterodox voices. Both Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential run and 2012’s grassroots Mormon feminist “Wear Pants to Church Day” put Mormon belief and practice in the national spotlight, leaving the Latter-day Saint establishment to shore up its corporate messaging with an eye toward secular scrutiny and dissenters within the faith. In the case of Romney's bid for president, the diverging narratives of the institutional church and its progressive outliers played out like a study in situational irony. While the LDS Church downplayed its influence on Romney's political agenda and its theological and cultural differences from other forms of American Christianity, progressive Mormons found the field wide open to detail how (in their view) Romney's politics betrayed the deepest values of the Mormon faith. Thus did progressive Mormons find themselves in the unlikely position of having “almost unchecked freedom to dictate the public conversation about the meaning of Romney's faith”—a freedom they exercised primarily through democratizing digital platforms like blogs and social media sites (80). Digital spaces like Facebook community groups were similarly instrumental to Mormon feminist activism during the Mormon moment. Not only did 2012’s “Wear Pants to Church Day” and 2013’s Ordain Women action on Temple Square offer mainstream observers evidence of cracks in the Correlated Latter-day Saint armor, but they grew new connective tissue between previously siloed progressive Mormons, amplifying their voices in ways that challenged their fellow believers to reckon with their presence.Avance's three other case studies explore internecine conflict within the faith. A chapter on internal debates around caffeine use by LDS Church members raises the question of where theology ends and culture begins—and who gets to decide in a media landscape filled with opportunities for the heterodox to spread their opinions to insiders and outsiders alike. Another case study follows the mutually assured destruction wrought by a 116-page take-down article of Mormon Stories podcaster John Dehlin, penned by Gregory L. Smith, a then-associate editor of Brigham Young University–affiliated academic journal FARMS Review.5 Although the article never made it to publication, the controversy it engendered led to both the restaffing and rebranding of the journal and Dehlin's eventual excommunication. Characterizing both Smith and Dehlin as “mapping the borders of acceptability” of Latter-day Saint belief and behavior, Avance argues that the church's emphasis on institutional authority requires them to police vocal outliers of all kinds, even those that step out of the fold to ardently defend the status quo (85). Avance's final case study highlights how the LDS Church uses new digital tools to protect that status quo. Through changes to the Gospel Topics section of the official church website in the wake of negative publicity about the institution's history of banning Black men from the priesthood and Black women from the temple, the Latter-day Saint establishment employed a “digital prophetic voice” to quietly set the record straight on an issue that threatened to undermine perceptions of church doctrine as univocal and eternal (148).Avance's chapters on the FARMS-Dehlin disaster and the church's quiet publication of new Gospel Topics essays bear further consideration here, not least of which because the former led to the creation of the very journal in which this review is published. These two chapters encapsulate what goes right with Avance's book—and what begs for deeper engagement. Avance's analysis of the Latter-day Saint establishment's censure of both FARMS apologists and Dehlin complicates facile constructions of turf battles within the faith. Compellingly describing Mormon identity as encompassing “a range of possibilities tethered to a structural ideal,” Avance writes that FARMS apologists, despite their “right” beliefs and interest in maintaining the status quo, ultimately committed the same infractions as the heterodox Dehlin: leapfrogging the church's chain of command and claiming personal authority to make truth claims (85). Indeed, Dehlin's 2015 excommunication letter from his Stake president suggests that “it was his online activism, not the content of his personal beliefs, that crossed the line from tolerable to intolerable dissent” (151). Avance makes a convincing case for the church's prioritization of orthopraxy over orthodoxy in the digital age—and demonstrates how new opportunities for individual voices to rise above the church's institutional voice require Latter-day Saint authorities to police even orthodox members if their online discourse threatens group cohesion and deference to institutional authority.But if new media expands opportunities for believers and doubters alike to spread personal beliefs that challenge the image of a united Mormon church, they also offer novel ways for the Latter-day Saint establishment to shore up authority through online surveillance of members and through websites that make the church's prophetic voice nimbler and subtler. In other words, “The Mormon Church is using the internet to counter the internet” (143). This is especially clear in Avance's chapter on the church's publication of essays confronting historical and theological controversies, including its former ban on the priesthood for Black members of the church. The articles lack a named author, and although they acknowledge the input of “historians and scholars,” they decline to name those, too (148). Not only does a church website (not to mention official church social media accounts) help the Latter-day Saint establishment paint the picture of a disembodied yet authoritative prophetic voice, but it also gives the church new ways to bury information without compromising that authority. As Avance notes, the Gospel Topics essays flew in the face of traditional methods of spreading prophetic announcements—they “were posted quietly on a back page of a dense website . . . and could only be located with a direct link or by searching the page for a specific title or keyword” (149). Avance's book makes one thing clear: It is this type of “experimentation” with new modes of narrative expression (by the Latter-day Saint establishment and its individual members) that will continue to shape the direction of the church in the years to come (149).Perhaps the least interesting way to engage with a book is to describe what it did not do, and indeed, Avance's book does quite a lot. However, I confess that I was surprised to find that this book on Mormon media by a scholar of media focused so much more on the narratives circulated through media than on the way new media itself shapes what narratives (individual and corporate) become both imaginable and taken for granted. Another recent work in the realm of Mormonism and media—Gavin Feller's 2023 Eternity in the Ether—articulates the value of this latter line of inquiry: “Technology is most powerful once it is taken for granted. When all the questions about how a technology should or shouldn't be used, what it can and can't do, and who will and won't benefit are no longer being asked—when the controversies about its role in cultural life cease to grab public attention—the lure of convenience and the merciless force of habit take over. New media love the spotlight, but it is behind the curtains where they exert their greatest influence.”6 What is left on the table in Avance's study of Mormon identity-shaping narratives in the digital age is greater scrutiny of the tools of the digital age as infrastructure that was actively being resisted, negotiated, co-opted, financed, and ultimately naturalized as background noise during the tumultuous mediated events of the Mormon moment. Avance aptly notes that the Latter-day Saint establishment invests heavily in efforts to naturalize “processes around doctrine, authority, and revelation . . . normalizing them and embedding them in everyday life” (58). A worthy follow-up volume to this book might well track just how the church—through its 2010 revamp of the Church Newsroom website, its financing of internet advertisements and search engine optimization, its proliferation of church-affiliated websites and social media accounts, and its policies on deleting, editing, and adding content from official sources engaged with digital tools as infrastructure during a period of heightened scrutiny.7Mormons who find themselves out of lockstep with the beliefs of the Latter-day Saint establishment find themselves with three options, Avance writes in her introduction: “maintain the status quo, vocally dissent, or leave” (7). During the fever pitch of the Mormon moment, as external scrutiny and internal identity negotiation forced experimentation and compromise between Mormon individuals and their church, plenty of Saints chose among these three options. But as social media platforms grew more sophisticated and more ubiquitous during the early 2010s, the boundary lines between these three options were blurred by new choices: block, like, retweet, unfollow, post, join, report, and even—Heavenly Father forbid—poke. From the vantage point of a decade hence, it is obvious how deeply these expressions of the online self became part and parcel of the religious self. What remains to be explored in a future text is how the budding technologies of the digital age not just serve as a platform for new narratives of belief and identity to proliferate, but how they constrict and reshape the very possibilities of narrative expression and identity formation.