The glossy Mormon wives and a swinging scandal convulsing the church that says even kissing outside marriage is morally wrong

From their bizarre belief that Jesus Christ visited the Native Americans to their well-known fondness for polygamy, Mormons haven’t always made it easy for others to warm to them.

Women like Taylor Frankie Paul, therefore, must have seemed like a godsend to the eccentric American sect. Young, perky and wholesome, she lived in a mansion in Utah’s Salt Lake City with her equally photogenic husband Tate and their three adorable children.

The videos Taylor relentlessly posted online – showing the family getting dressed for church, washing up dozens of baby-feeding bottles or dancing around her spacious home –– made the life of a conventional young Mormon woman (who generally marry young and rear large families) fascinating to millions.

But then such ‘content’ is the lifeblood of Generation Z social media platform TikTok, where she attracted more than four million followers.

In the process she spawned an entire online movement, known as MomTok, of young, glamorous Mormon mothers – all with the Rapunzel-like tresses de rigueur in their church – sharing their perfect lives in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with vast social media audiences.

Conservative women consider them inspiring, while feminists often find their lives appalling – but everyone seems intrigued.

But, for Taylor, as a new TV series will re-explore, the perfection suddenly ended in June 2020 when she posted an announcement that sent online interest in her soaring even as it horrified fellow Mormons.

She and husband Tate were getting divorced. Worse still, for a church that demands chastity outside marriage, the ‘momfluencer’ sensationally admitted that the couple had been ‘soft swingers’.

This practice, she explained, was a kind of wife-swapping in which young Mormons were allowed to take other sexual partners within their group of married friends – on ­certain conditions.

These included refraining from ‘going all the way’ and indulging in penetrative sex – unless their spouse was in the same room when it was going on.

Taylor admitted that she ‘did step out of that agreement’ and – though she insisted it hadn’t been the only factor – her husband was divorcing her.

Soft swinging, she went on, was rife among her extended group of good-looking, well-heeled Mormon friends who – following church tradition – generally marry in their teens or early 20s and so usually never have more than one sexual partner.

‘The whole group was intimate with each other,’ she said.

Taylor faced an intense backlash from within her church. Many of her girlfriends – themselves also prominent on social media – ran for cover, publicly insisting that they had never ‘swung’, softly or otherwise.

Her claims sparked an intense debate, with some church members insisting Taylor was just a mendacious attention-seeker who was a Mormon in name only.

Others claimed that any religion that pressures young members to remain chaste until they’re married and then never so much as look at a member of the opposite sex again shouldn’t be surprised if they end up experimenting sexually as they get older.

If that wasn’t scandal enough for her famously austere church, Taylor, now 30, last year made headlines again when she was arrested after drunkenly going ‘ballistic’ (her word) on Dakota Mortensen, the boyfriend with whom she’d cheated on her husband.

Taylor admitted aggravated assault after prosecutors say she hurled a phone, a wooden play set and several ‘heavy metal chairs’ at Dakota.

One of the chairs hit his five-year-old daughter who’d been sitting next to him on a sofa.

The Taylor scandal captivated social media. A search for ‘Mormon Swinging Moms Scandal’ on TikTok now elicits more than 100 million videos.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, now the church has to contend with The Secret Lives Of Mormon Wives, the resulting eight-part reality TV series that will focus on Taylor and seven other young and glossy Mormon women with multi-million social media followings.

The group, all in their 20s or early 30s, includes Jennifer Affleck, whose husband Zac is a cousin of Hollywood star Ben.

Commissioned because of the notoriety of Taylor, the series is technically ‘unscripted’. But producers will expect sex, catfights and late nights up with the Chardonnay rather than discussions of babysitting arrangements and the Book of Mormon.

A publicity photo for the series showed Taylor and her seven co-stars each with a conspiratorial shushing finger to their lips.

For a church which believes that, outside marriage, even kissing, dancing and touching are morally wrong, none of this is good news.

‘The scandalous world of a group of Mormon mom influencers implodes when they get caught in the midst of a swinging sex scandal that makes international headlines,’ the streaming giant Hulu, which commissioned the series, breathlessly claims.

‘Now, their sisterhood is shook to its core. Faith, friendship and reputations are all on the line. Will #MomTok be able to survive and continue to give the rulebook a run for its money, or will this group fall from grace?’

Taylor was sentenced to a day behind bars and ordered to undergo substance-abuse and domestic-violence evaluations after agreeing a plea deal in her assault case.

Although a shocking video allegedly had shown her kicking her boyfriend Dakota, hitting him several times with a metal barstool and putting him in a choke lock, they’re actually still together and had a child – her third – in March.

Dakota, an estate agent, also ­continues to appear in her social media posts.

However, as the series begins, she’s worried about his fidelity. (The producers must be secretly overjoyed).

She has said of the show: ‘I want people to have a better understanding of who I am. I wanted to be vulnerable and show people that when you hit rock bottom, there is hope.’

How many of the other women were – or perhaps ‘are’ – part of Taylor’s ‘soft swinging’ network remains to be seen but she isn’t the only one among the friends who, by Mormon standards, has had a chequered past.

Some are divorced, one was notable for staying by Taylor’s side during her fall from grace, and another, Demi Engemann, 30, has been singled out as a potential swinger because she often complains about the age gap with her 46-year-old husband.

Meanwhile, Whitney Leavitt, another of the cast, has denied swinging in her own marriage but encouraged others to try it if they were interested.

Whitney, a mother of two who – as Taylor once did – is currently showing off her pregnancy bump online, ­suffered her own social media crisis.

In 2021, she performed a TikTok dance to a Kendrick Lamar rap song in a neonatal intensive care unit – next to her newborn baby who was seriously ill with a respiratory condition and hooked up to breathing tubes.

More recently, Whitney, 31, got in trouble, even with her own followers, for promoting a sex toy on Instagram.

The series, now available online on Disney+ in the UK, comes out amid growing evidence in the Mormon heartland of Utah that polyamory and so-called ‘ethical non-monogamy’ are on the rise.

Earlier this year, it was reported that dating websites had noticed a flurry of activity in Salt Lake City, Utah’s state capital and the home of most affluent Mormons.

The proportion of users seeking open relationships there now exceeds the national average. This shocking development, say some observers, is rooted in Mormonism’s troubled history.

Started by self-proclaimed prophet Joseph Smith in rural New York state in the 1820s, the church allowed its members to practise ‘plural marriage’, a form of religiously sanctioned polygamy that allowed men to have several wives, sometimes underage ones. Under intense pressure from the US government and society in general, the Mormon church officially disavowed the practice in 1904, although some Mormons continued to observe it.

Yet in 2020, the Mormon-dominated Utah government decriminalised polygamy on the grounds that many people were practising it in secret anyway and, to prevent abuses, it was better to be open about it.

Perhaps with her salacious soft-swinging revelations, Taylor was simply exposing another way in which Mormon sex lives differ from the norm. There certainly hasn’t been so much as a sniff of extramarital misbehaviour from other leading lights on Mormon Mum social media.

Some, admittedly, have left the faith, but others continue to tread the difficult path of being look-at-me influencers at the

same time as being part of a church which preaches modesty and is often accused of reducing women to second-class citizens. They include such stars of the so-called ‘Tradwife’ movement as 34-year-old Utah farmer’s wife Hannah Neeleman.

Better known to her ten million social media followers as Hannah@Ballerina Farm, she posts about the joys of homemaking, farming, and – recently – ferociously getting back in shape after having eight children in order to compete as a beauty queen.

The show’s Demi Engemann (centre) stood by Taylor

Why do Mormons account for so many of the most successful ‘momfluencers’ on social media?

One theory is that because Mormon girls are often encouraged to keep diaries when they’re growing up, they take readily to documenting their lives on TikTok and Instagram.

Meanwhile, voices from within the Mormon Church complain bitterly that Taylor Paul and her fellow MomTok celebrities aren’t remotely representative of rank-and-file church members.

Real Mormon wives are nothing like these glorified Barbies with their vacuous dance routines, they say.

‘Here’s the reality that will never feature in a “reality” TV series,’ says Mormon academic Jana Riess.

‘Most Mormons are deeply, predictably, embarrassingly boring when it comes to their sex lives.’

This may be true but, unfortunately for Mormons, they’re hot TV and film property right now. Hulu has had a string of recent hits with other shows that have tackled Mormonism – never flatteringly – including the 2022 true crime drama miniseries Under The Banner Of Heaven, starring Andrew Garfield and Daisy Edgar-Jones.

This concerned the brutal 1984 murder by two fundamentalist Mormon brothers of their 24-year-old sister-in-law and her 15-month-old daughter.

At trial, the pair claimed to have carried out the killings after a divine revelation.

Also released in 2022, the documentary series Mormon No More focused on two lesbian Mormons and their church’s historical hostility to gay people.

And earlier this year, another Hulu documentary series, Daughters Of The Cult, explored the dark life of Ervil LeBaron, the leader of a fundamentalist Mormon sect with 13 wives (some of them children) who had his myriad opponents murdered.

He justified the killings on the grounds of ‘blood atonement’, a discredited Mormon belief that held that in order for sinners (including adulterers) to be redeemed, they should be killed in such a way that their blood is shed on the ground and acts as a sacrificial offering.

It seems unlikely that Taylor Frankie Paul will be made to pay for her ‘soft swinging’ sins with blood atonement – though there may be some traditional members of the Mormon church who almost believe she deserves it.