Newsletter

Mormon MomTok swingers are talk of the net

Also, do not summon the devil on the campus of Adelaide University

Rohan Salmond

Jun 3, 2022 • 5 min read

You begin the ritual and you are asked for the secret word. Once correctly supplied, an array of symbols are displayed to you. You reach out, selecting a sigil of power. Something calls into the void, and the void answers back. You’re on the internet, babbyyy.

Sorry this edition is a few days late — I have had an extremely long and busy week. Subscribe below so you’ll never miss an edition, no matter how chaotic my posting schedule gets.

Subscribe now

“Mormon Momtok” swingers are talk of the net

@taylorfrankiepaul this trend has impeccable timing

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

I’m unsure if I should even be writing about this because it’s:

Very gossipy
Not really my business
Potentially completely made up

But it’s been the biggest religion thing online in the past week and even bled out into mainstream social media and that’s what this newsletter covers.

So here it is in a nutshell: “Mormon MomTok” is a group of popular self-described Mormon women on TikTok. They make videos dancing in skimpy midriff tops and yoga pants, which is surprising because members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints normally wear temple garments under their clothes that cover everything from the neck to just above the knee.

One of these influencers, Taylor Frankie Paul, recently announced she is getting divorced and claims that several members of the group and their husbands would drink and ‘soft swing’ (be sexual with each other but stop short of penetration). She’s made several vidoes about it over the last week, fuelling the controversy. Newsweek has the details of the drama if you are curious.

Some TikTokers are claiming that Taylor just had a regular affair and the whole swingers story is a cover (thanks to Cam for sending me the linked screenshot). But Taylor Frankie Paul has a history of making wild statements as a way to increase engagement, like when she joked she was really 50 years old and the mother of two of her friends. It’s entirely possible that she and her husband are just moving house and the divorce and swingers story is purely so people like me will talk about her and funnel more eyeballs to her TikTok account (although to be clear, other members of the MomTok group are telling the same story and it would be socially devastating in mainstream Latter-day Saint circles).

Scandal aside, the existence of this group is interesting to me in and of itself. Drinking alcohol and sex outside of heterosexual marriage is forbidden in mainstream Latter-day Saint theology. It’s absolutely not my place to comment on the legitimacy of other people’s religious identity — people do things that are contrary to the orthodox teachings of their faith all the time, but that doesn’t mean they’re not what they say they are (for example, I am a Christian in a same-sex relationship!)

Still, I can’t help but wonder if other Latter-day Saints would recognise these influencers as being one of their own, or if the Church counts them as members. So I wonder what is distinctively “Mormon” about them? What does it mean to claim a Mormon identity if the Church doesn’t recognise you and you don’t follow its rules? What does it say about the marketability of the “Mormon brand” that these influencers claim that identity even though they don’t have to?

In the YouTube video below, Ex-Mormons Jordan and McKay talk about what the consequences would be if the Mormon MomTok members were active members of their temple and known to their bishop, although they doubt this is the case.

Tyler Huckabee’s Youth Group Dropout playlist

Much of this edition was written to Tyler Huckabee’s Spotify playlist of “2000s indie and emo jams by Christian/formerly Christian/Not Christian but not NOT Christian bands that forged the millennial deconstructing/exvangelical set.”

Do not summon the devil on the campus of Adelaide University

via Adelaide University Occult Club Facebook page

I posted this story to my Twitter already but I’m completely obsessed with it. Basically, a catch-all club for pagans, witches and Satanists has been in a years-long process to receive recognition from the Adelaide University Union, but a few weeks ago their application was denied on the basis of a single complaint alleging “its members may summon the devil onto campus.”

Club president Ashley Towner says, “Even if we did want to summon Satan, it's not against university or union policy to do so, so it's still not really grounds to reject us.”

Read the whole article.

Nightcrawler fucks

The X-Men character Nightcrawler is famously Catholic, and even studied to become a priest despite overwhelming prejudice concerning his devilish features.

Despite that, this week Relevant Magazine Senior Editor Tyler Huckabee posted these panels from the latest X-Men series Legion of X, where it is revealed that Nightcrawler fucks. “my brave boy is deconstructing,” Tyler says.

Yahweh property care

My fiancé saw this cleaner’s van while he was out for a walk and posted it in the Modern Relics Discord. How a green United Methodist logo (do you think they know?) wound up on a van all the way in Australia is a mystery.

Do not shout to the Lord in Castlevania II

This screenshot is from the game Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, where you play Simon Belmont, a vampire hunter. One of the gameplay mechanics involves speaking to the villagers, who will either give you clues or tell you lies.

According to the Castlevania wiki, this villager is lying: “you must enter a church and talk to the priest to have your life restored.” If you say so.