the church of jesus christ and latter day health influencers
or why Mormons make good fitness and lifestyle influencers
I started following mega-influencer Amber Fillerup-Clark when I was 23 years old, pregnant, finishing my Master’s degree, and working as a host at a vegan restaurant. I was broke, young, and terrified of my ever-growing pregnant body. It constantly reminded me of the great motherhood unknown I was waddling towards. I had no idea what sort of mother I wanted to be, or what type of mother I could be at my age. My understandings of motherhood were rooted in blend of thirty-something suburban stay-at-home mothers of the 1990s and the “You have to see the baaaaybyyyy” mother on Seinfeld. So, a lot of curled micro-bangs, scrunchies, and tapered jeans.
Then, the Instagram algorithms gods introduced me to the Barefoot Blonde: Amber Fillerup Clark. She was the mother to a sweet little boy named Atticus, and pregnant with her second child. She was under the age of 25, and her pregnancy glow was enhanced by a consistent tan and the mermaid hair of your childhood dreams. She was what I thought the “perfect” mother looked like in the 21st century: very fit, wildly successful in her self-made business, well-travelled, and heartfelt in her child-rearing. I soaked in the warm rusts, gentle lavenders, and mustard yellows of her online documentation of motherhood, trying to vicariously manifest myself into some form of a real, actual mother. These images brought me ease, knowing it was possible to become a parent and still have a very full and rich social life, devoid of any suburbia Mommy + Me groups.
After a few months of getting my daily fix of Intro to Motherhood via The Barefoot Blonde, I started to realize she was actually quite religious. And Mormon. I didn’t know much about Mormonism, or The Church of Jesus Day Christ and Latter-Day Saints (LDS). I was intrigued, so I started to take a closer look at many of the major health, beauty, and fitness influencers with large followings.
By the time Instagram Stories launched in 2016, it became much easier to see the Mormonism sneak into the documentation of influencers lives. They’re not overt about their faiths, especially as influencers with infinite advertising potential. But occasionally, in between the workout videos and hairstyling tips, you’d see an Instagram Story of an Isiah quote with a cute millennial pink background, or a Boomerang of a woman starting her day with a hot lemon water and an Etsy journal edition of The Book of Mormon. It’s a blink and you’ll miss it type of story, but tucked away under the heightened performance of the feminine lifestyle and health ideals on those pages is the undercurrent of Mormonism.
When I moved back to my hometown of Peterborough this past summer, I began to contextualize the way that this particular religion has shaped my understanding of lifestyle and fitness influencers. My algorithm has noticeably changed living here – gone are any Toronto friends posting about their new plant businesses or curbside pop-up dining ventures. I’m suddenly drenched in multi-level marketing pages from stay-at-home mothers selling essential oils and tooth whitening pens. You have to see the oiiiils.
It became easier to notice the Mormon women in my area with modest-yet-chic linen outfits, adorable homeschooled babies, breezy beige households adorned with pampas grass and wicker baskets for their fig trees. These women weren’t even necessarily Amber-level famous, but they had significant enough followings and often used these to spin a quick profit on their self-made businesses. And many of these businesses were founded on their disciplined attitudes towards their presentation: being physically fit, eating only the best foods, having perfect hair, bright white smiles, and happy children.
I started questioning why there were so many Mormon women that were that good at being lifestyle and fitness influencers. What about their church has helped them become the ideal influencers? And can this influence their how followers come to understand health and lifestyle?
Mormon teachings on health and gender
I was raised in an Irish Catholic household. If you’re wondering what that’s like, Jack Donaghy of 30 Rock explains it best. I am not religious anymore, but I am curious about the role that religion plays in the lives of so many. As a millennial, I’ve spent the better part of the last two decades being told that we live in a secular society. Yet there are so many who maintain some connection to a faith.
Perhaps the more important distinction here is that even when people do not practice the religion they were raised or brought into, the foundations of these religious beliefs still play a cultural role in their lives, whether they like to admit it or not. I made several friends in my early twenties just by virtue (or vice in this case) of sharing that ever-haunting Catholic Guilt™ that pervades any amount of time away from the Church.
While Catholicism has certainly impacted the sexual health of many, most of the gendered components of Catholicism privilege modesty and fidelity above other values. Mormonism, however, has more explicit guidelines on the role of physical health, conveniently available on their LDS websites:
“Good health is also stressed in the Book of Mormon, where God’s chosen leaders are often portrayed as men of great physical strength… There is a fundamental law that the tissue of the human body will waste away through idleness and disuse. Conversely, muscles and vessels that are stressed grow and increase in capacity. This same basic law also applies to man’s spiritual growth and his mental capacity … Not only are all three areas—physical, spiritual, intellectual—governed by these same laws, but they also seem to be inseparable in that one cannot reach his loftiest potential without the support and strength of the others. Many members of the Church have developed themselves spiritually and intellectually, but they are being held back because of physical unfitness.”
When the relationship between physical and spiritual health is unpacked, you begin to see a strict binary of gender ideals in Mormonism. Many blogs and articles by Mormon writers point to the relationship between fitness and spirituality. The discipline of exercise is directly connected with a self-mastery that is deemed virtuous. One article from LDS Living provides this example:
“Take, for example, a young mother who sets a goal to go on a 20-minute run before the rise of her twin toddlers. The first two weeks are definitely a wilderness experience for her. Her body protests every pavement-pounding step. However, each morning she overcomes her physical desire to sleep. Each day she exercises more dominion and self-control until eventually, rather than protesting, her body feels renewed and ready to face the day. The same self-discipline she practices each morning increases her spiritual capacity.”
Another blog-based website by a group of Mormons, By Common Consent, spoke in 2005 to the religious experience felt in hot yoga:
Exercise makes me happy, and as we all know from Joseph, happiness is the object and design of our existence. Perhaps the finest feeling known to man is the one you get when stepping out of a hot shower after having done some form of strenuous exercise. It’s a good feeling, a happy, "lovely" feeling, both "praiseworthy" and of "good report". You feel clean, refreshed and so alive!”
Maybe it’s the former Catholic in me, but it’s hard not to see the baptism allusions being made about the isolation of exercise and post-workout shower: cleansing and being born anew after a workout, taking satisfaction out of physical exercise as a form of virtuous faith-keeping. And all before your twin toddlers wake up!
Research on the connections between Mormon religiosity and health
Mormonism shares that their laws were revealed in 1833 by the Lord in order to enhance physical and spiritual health, including laws on which foods are good to eat, and which substances are good to use. The “Word of Wisdom” also includes details about getting the right amount of sleep, regular exercise, and a monthly fast; this includes restrictions around consuming coffee, tea, or alcohol.
There really aren’t a lot of overt academic pieces that link Mormonism to fitness, but there has been some research over the years that explores the gendered nature of it a bit more. In 1997, a research team from Birmingham found that there were strong relationships between the level of religiosity in Mormon women and their level of physical fitness, as measured by their body composition, waist circumference, and waist-to-hip ratio (Blakemore, 1997).
Following that, a 1999 masters thesis from Jannette Olsen (from the same research team) measured the relationship between the level of religiosity and amount of physical fitness amongst middle-aged Mormon men. Religiosity was measured by a questionnaire that measured of being “highly religious” or “less religious,” and fitness was assessed using grip strength, waist-to-hip ratio, BMI, and oxygen uptake (a reminder that this was the 1990s, so BMI as a fitness indicator wasn’t critically assessed as it would be today). Olsen found that unlike the statistically significant relationship between the level of religiosity and fitness for Mormon women, there was no statistically significant relationship found between how religious Mormon men were and how physically fit they were.
In a more recent qualitative study about the connection between religious beliefs and health in Mormons, Badanta and colleagues (2019) noted that the theme of “Body as a Temple” was significant:
“The healthy lifestyle proclaimed by the Mormons answers the question: “How can we become like our Heavenly Father if we consume harmful things?” Even the commandment “Thou shall not kill” is referred not only to killing another person but also to kill oneself. In addition to the religious explanation, they consider that these behaviours are also “protected by science”. Mormons consider that many of the recommendations of the LDS Church coincide with those coming from the field of public health.”
There is a clear relationship between health, physical fitness, and the religiosity of many Mormons. These religious values tend to get inserted into practices that benefit individual health, and potentially have a protective impact on their families. This sounds beneficial, but there is a heightened gendered component, with more pressure potentially being put on women to maintain their fitness as an embodiment of their faith.
So, why are so many fitness and lifestyle influencers Mormon?
In addition to sweatiness being perceived as being close to godliness, Mormon women are strongly encouraged to keep journals and scrapbooks. Hyper-traditional gender roles in Mormon communities position men and boys as leaders of their church and families, and women and girls are positioned in subordination to that (Kline 2014). At a young age, girls are introduced to makeup and beauty, with appearance again being virtuously perceived.
In 2017, Alice Gregory wrote a piece for Allure, arguing that Mormon influencers are so effective because they present this idealized version of Mormonism to the general public. Even if they don’t necessarily imbue the perfect picture of Mormonism, they manage to maintain their strict binary gender roles, with women being able to simultaneously stay home to care for their many children while also working within a flexible job that promotes their religion, albeit discreetly.
Fitness and food and health influencers of the LDS Church include Amber Fillerup Clark (1.3m followers), The Food Nanny (Lizi Heaps, 138k followers), dancer Witney Carson (1.3m followers), The Tattooed Mormon (Al Carraway, 234k followers), “exercise maniac” Kristin Andrus (86.9k followers), and Clean Simple Eats (JJ and Erika Peterson, 247k followers). All of these influencers are young, blonde-haired white women with perfect teeth, and ample highlight reels of their free, simple meals and workouts. They offer perfectly filtered, happy versions of their Mormonism for your consumption, all while eating clean and sweating out their vices to get one step closer to God. Conspicuously hidden are the boob jobs and other cosmetic surgery interventions that help maintain their body as temples.
When you have followers in the thousands, what you say, how you dress, how you live, and the health beliefs you espouse play a significant role in subtly reinforcing values outside of your community and unto your social media followers. The very notion of having followers feels inherently religious.
For Mormon women, looking good and being physically healthy is an important piece of being spiritually healthy. I suppose, in theory, there is nothing wrong in abiding by these principles to live a healthy life. Yet when these are all behaviours that are practiced to eventually achieve eternal salvation, you start to wonder about when morality and salvation will start to creep into the minds of even the most atheistic followers.