- - In 'Surviving Mormonism,' Heather Gay Takes on the Church

Judy BermanNovember 13, 2025 at 1:23 AM

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Heather Gay Credit - Natalie Cass—Bravo

The age of the Mormon wife is upon us. In 2025, it can seem as though Utah’s chief export is traditional womanhood, as manifested in the meticulously groomed, carefully stage-managed yet strategically intimate realms of social media and reality TV. While Mormons have been overrepresented in this sector since the dawn of “mommy blogs” in the early 2000s, the trend accelerated with the explosion of visually oriented platforms like Instagram and then TikTok. Now, Utah homesteader and mother of eight Hannah Neeleman, whose social media handle Ballerina Farm is a household name, has a lifestyle brand, a staff of 60, and over 20 million followers. Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, a reality show that chronicles the fallout of a “soft swinging” scandal involving a clique of attractive, young LDS moms on TikTok, became an instant hit when it premiered last year. Its cast has published memoirs and competed in Dancing With the Stars; breakout Taylor Frankie Paul will be the next Bachelorette.

But before the series returns, on Thursday, for its third season in just 14 months, Heather Gay has something to add to the discourse. As anyone who has watched her on Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City or read her memoirs Bad Mormon and Good Time Girl knows, Gay left the LDS Church after the dissolution of her traditional Mormon marriage and has since become one of its most vocal critics. Her shrewdly timed three-part documentary series Surviving Mormonism With Heather Gay, now streaming in full on Peacock, is not a direct attack on the tradwife influencers who appear in a montage introducing the first episode. What Gay objects to is the way their fluffy content, which she describes as “intoxicating,” serves as propaganda for a church whose hierarchy, according to Gay, has many dark secrets to conceal. Only slightly undermined by RHOSLC’s silliness and her reality-star persona, the series’ emotional interviews with alleged victims of homophobia and child sexual abuse effectively expose what Mormon-wife mania leaves unsaid.

The core of each Surviving Mormonism episode is an in-depth conversation with a person who feels—and can cite plenty of evidence—that the LDS Church failed them. The first is David Matheson, once a leading proponent and practitioner of gay conversion therapy, who, after decades of fighting homosexuality in alignment with religious authorities, ended his marriage to a woman, rejected Mormonism, and came out of the closet. “I’m overwhelmed by the arrogance” it takes to insist that sexual orientation is an affliction that can be healed, Matheson says, watching himself in an old recruitment video. He and Gay unpack the pseudo-psychology underlying conversion programs promoted by the Church. “The belief was that men who are gay didn’t have a sense of their own power,” he explains. Matheson also gives voice to a perspective that pervades the series, illuminating why so many Mormons choose to remain in a community where they’re marginalized or worse, rather than start fresh in the secular world: “When you’re raised Mormon, there is not a future outside of Mormonism. It is everything.”

Matheson’s uneasy mix of resentment towards the Mormon establishment and guilt about how many men he subjected to spurious therapies makes him a fascinating subject. Gay’s other interviews are more straightforwardly heartbreaking. Ben, the husband of her friend Shane, tells a harrowing story of alleged sexual abuse at the hands of a male member of his ward that began when he was just four years old. A pair of sisters, Jennie and Lizzy, can’t even recall a time before their now-incarcerated father’s abuse. In both cases, the survivors say they dutifully reported these horrors to Mormon leaders, but the leaders allegedly not only failed to notify authorities, but also appeared to close ranks to protect the Church’s interests and the men being accused. (The sisters sued the Church over its handling of their allegations and ultimately settled the case.) Ben’s alleged abuser was not excommunicated until 2019, following a lawsuit from another alleged victim that was settled.

Surviving Mormonism struggles a bit to expand its indictment beyond these infuriating case studies, which were surely chosen in part because they come with extensive paper trails (Gay has run afoul of the Church’s lawyers before). Video chats and letters from Mormons and ex-Mormons who’ve reached out to Gay suggest that stories like Matheson’s, Ben’s, and Jennie and Lizzy’s may be extreme but aren’t anomalies. Yet each is so quick as to feel more like a box-checking citation than a humanizing profile. Segments on the Church’s history, its beliefs, and the system of tithing that has put hundreds of billions of dollars in the hands of LDS leaders are also brief, as though to avoid boring viewers who’ve stuck around after watching the SLC Housewives scream at each other on a yacht in the preceding Below Deck crossover episode.

It is Gay’s presence that does the most to integrate the subjects’ accounts into a larger picture of a stifling religious culture. We see her identify with their fears, stoked by Mormon doctrine as well as community pressure, about leaving the Church. She reflects on her teen years, recalling how she convinced herself that unwanted sexual attention from a bishop and family friend was not, in fact, creepy. RHOSLC’s most frequent voice of reason (though, considering who her castmates are, that’s not saying much), Gay radiates the kind of warmth, empathy, and self-deprecating humor on which daytime chat-show careers are made. The otherwise puzzling choice to film her monologuing about Mormonism while driving feels like a contrivance to extract her from the luxurious interiors that are Bravolebrities’ natural habitat. Yet the sincerity of her crusade comes through, too. Surviving Mormonism is not just an exercise in brand expansion.

Is there still some cognitive dissonance inherent in the series? Sure. RHOSLC is not exactly Mormon Wives, with the latter’s cheerfully soapy depiction of 20-something moms sipping dirty sodas, sending up their own tradwife images, sorting themselves into devout “saints” and irreverent “sinners,” and confronting sexism in their romantic relationships with all the pluck of indomitable momtrepreneurs. For its part, Housewives has sugarcoated neither Gay’s clashes with the Mormon Church and subsequent estrangement from some friends and family members, nor the painful excommunication of her castmate and cousin Whitney Rose. But it has also perpetuated a more permissive image of Mormonism, from “Mormon 2.0” Lisa Barlow—who sees no conflict between owning a tequila brand and sending her son on a mission—to Britani Bateman, a twice-divorced mom in an on-and-off relationship with an Osmond and an attitude towards drinking alcohol that seems to change depending on who’s around to see her.

All of this Mormon pop culture has helped to create an impression of a religion comparable to, say, Catholicism, with adherents ranging from orthodox to casual and a history of covering up abuse that has stained its establishment without fundamentally discrediting its belief system. Gay would like to go further; the stated inspiration for her series is Leah Remini’s Scientology and the Aftermath. Surviving Mormonism may fall short of exposing its target as a cult, but it certainly works as a counterbalance to the camera-ready momfluencers giving the Church free publicity. “What’s weird about Mormonism,” Matheson says, in an observation that effectively sums up the case that the show succeeds in making, “is: It’s the kindest cruel culture.”

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