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“They Get Zero Say in How We View It”: Ex-Mormon TikTok as Spectacle

2025; Volume: 12; Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/21568030.12.06

2156-8030

Caroline Matas,

Gender, Feminism, and Media

In late 2022, a trend took over TikTok wherein users repeatedly made the Italian che vuoi or "pinched fingers" hand gesture while offering a tour of their homes to the soundtrack of Louis Prima's "Che La Luna." Often, these videos showed off niche elements of the user's culture, such as "things in my Deaf household that just make sense," "things in my lesbian moms' household that just make sense," or "things in my Pentecostal grandmother's house that just make sense." For many ex-Mormon users, this trend presented an opportunity to showcase the physical relics of their transition out of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.Several popular ex-Mormon TikTok creators offered tours of "Things in My Ex-Mormon Household that Just Make Sense." Wandering through the house, they panned the camera to their dusty scriptures, desk drawers full of Moroni sculptures, and framed devotional artwork that they could neither bear to display nor throw away. Commenters on the videos shared their own fraught relationship with physical reminders of their former faith: bags to transport temple clothing that have been repurposed as sleepover packs for their children, scriptures that have been moved to the fiction sections of their bookshelves, and religious artwork that has been installed ironically over their newly established kitchen coffee stations.Other ex-Mormons provide viewers shock value by displaying and making strange material relics of their former lives. Users often juxtapose their intimate knowledge of an item's "official" use—for example, dressing in temple garments or leafing through the Book of Mormon to find a specific passage—with verbal or visual cues signaling their rejection of those beliefs. Some pin their missionary name tags to clothing that does not conform to the LDS Church's modesty standards, or don their full missionary outfit while drinking coffee or alcohol. In each of these examples, TikTok users' videos blur the line between the digital and the material in the same way they unsettle prevailing assumptions about the authority and meaning of religious objects. In other words, they use the tools of spectacle to alter real-world conditions.Using theoretical critiques of screen culture as a one-way relationship that always separates and disempowers spectators, this essay examines how ex-Mormons use TikTok as a tool to reckon with their relationship to Mormon faith and culture. A debate between Mormon and ex-Mormon TikTok content creators about the appropriate way for de-converts to interact with and share information about sacred objects serves as my case study. I argue that technological advances allowing users to "speak back" to and through the screen require us to reconsider existing theories of spectacle as a one-way source of power and control.Guy Debord and other theorists have posited the spectacle of the screen as a scourge on the modern world, describing spectacle as "antidialectical" and as a "social hallucination."1 I propose that studying ex-Mormons' use of TikTok to define, share, and hone their (and others') changing beliefs and practices complicates existing theory on spectacle and adds new insights to theories on the dynamic between religious practitioner and authority. Far from being antidialectical, one might picture the relationship between ex-Mormons and the objects and discourses of their faith as a scramble crosswalk, involving ties and detachments of meaning between religious authorities, the past devotional self, the current self, and the future or ideal self. I also hope to spark further academic conversation about how contemporary social media platforms' audiovisual capacities and limitations might redefine the bounds of a contemporary American society of spectacle, especially as it relates to religious authority and meaning-making.In many ways, Guy Debord's foundational 1967 work on the theory of spectators and the spectacular, The Society of the Spectacle, anticipated many of the twenty-first-century critiques leveled at social media use and smartphone culture. Debord describes spectacle—loosely defined as the bombardment of one-way visual stimuli that has come to characterize twentieth- and twenty-first-century entertainment and social life—as not just a "distortion of the visual world," but "a weltanshauung that has been actualized, translated into the material realm—a world view transformed into an objective force."2 What is the aim of that objective force? For Debord, the spectacle is a vampire, feeding on the real and replacing it with a series of prefigured representations. It is not "something added to the real world. . . . It is the very heart of society's unreal reality."3 In other words, to think about Mormonism as a "spectacle" is not simply to examine how the faith is characterized through exaggeration or distortion. Instead, one might consider spectacle as a foundational force in modern life—one that sensationalizes and makes "unreal" any subject in its grasp.As a tool that "atomizes and manipulates" individuals, supplanting real social relations while pretending to facilitate them, the spectacle can be a tool of immense hegemonic power.4 It provides the illusion of leisure time while stymying opportunities for activities outside the matrix of labor production. It promotes isolation that further fuels the necessity of goods that reinforce that isolation. It naturalizes capitalist ideologies to the point that those ideologies take on the form of unquestioned reality. The situation, Debord warned in 1967, is dire: "Imprisoned in a flattened universe bounded by the screen of the spectacle, behind which his own life has been exiled, the spectator's consciousness no longer knows anyone but the fictitious interlocutors who subject him to a one-way monologue about their commodities and the politics of their commodities."5 Debord's proposed solution to the social ruin wrought by the society of the spectacle lay in the long game. Social theorists must continue to hone their critiques of authoritarian systems and hope that doing so ultimately reveals to the masses the hegemonic forces depriving them of true community and true leisure. "A critique seeking to go beyond the spectacle," Debord concluded, "must know how to wait."6The intervening years since Debord's exhortation have seen an absolute explosion of technological innovation and a massive transformation in how (and how often) people around the world use screens. In 1994—the year of Debord's death—CERN held the first International World Wide Web Conference and the Web had garnered ten million users.7 By 2023, 90 percent of Americans over the age of eighteen owned an Internet-connected smartphone and a third of them had used it to access TikTok.8 In the social media age, many of Debord's worst fears have come to pass: top social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok all incorporate opportunities to shop from within the app, and the normalization of ads and data mining keep the true "costs" of participating in social media largely hidden from consumers. Critical appraisals of spectacle as "the mass management of attentiveness and its commodification" have perhaps found their apotheosis in platforms like TikTok, where billions of available videos facilitate endless scrolling and tracking pixels follow users' off-app web use to maximize the data the company siphons from users.9And yet the widespread availability of smartphones and the accessible video-making features on apps like TikTok also push back against critiques of the spectatorship as a "one-way relationship" that only "simulate[s] the illusion of choices and 'interactivity.'"10 Indeed, for all its pitfalls, social media can allow users to speak back to the powerful, thus refusing the terms of a one-way relationship. Such interaction, far from being illusory, has real-world consequences that might even spur greater consciousness among the masses of the systems of power in which they operate. This potential is especially salient for organizations like the LDS Church, whose strong central authority system has never been more open to public pushback than it has been in the age of social media. Discontented former members need not even have their own large Internet following in order to make their voices heard—they merely need to capitalize on the right social media trend at the right time.TikTok, the China-based social media app that was released worldwide in August 2018, is a free, video-based platform that allows users to develop a following, engage with and remix others' content, and even sell products through an app-based "TikTok shop." While the success or failure of any given social media platform relies on a mix of tangible and intangible forces, what initially set TikTok apart from other video-based platforms like juggernauts YouTube and Snapchat was its sophisticated in-app video editing opportunities and its emphasis on remixing and repurposing others' audio and video. Users can "stitch" their videos with others' content as a way of "talking back," adding on to a point from the original video, or even answering a prompt-style video that was always intended to live on in others' stitched productions. TikTok "duets" allow users to fill their own video with picture-in-a-picture blocks of others', a phenomenon that TikTok creators have used to literally duet, singing in harmony with other creators, to expand the visual scope of another person's video creatively, and even to add extra visual interest to their own audio-heavy content. Any user can make their video's audio "shareable," resulting in the proliferation of certain "viral" sounds that repurpose others' original audio in countless other contexts.On December 12, 2022, Latter-day Saint TikTok creator Spencer Marsh experienced the full force of TikTok's video remixing capacities when he released a video addressed to the ex-Mormon TikTok community. Marsh, responding to the proliferation of ex-Mormon che vuoi videos showcasing sacred garments and other religious objects, made a personal plea to ex-believers to respect his faith by deleting their videos. In his video, Marsh acknowledged that many ex-Mormons shared their stories of leaving the church due to immense hurt and disappointment and added that he knew he and other Latter-day Saint TikTok creators had failed to show ex-Mormons respect. Nevertheless, Marsh declared his goal in making this video was to persuade ex-Mormons to show more respect for their former faith by avoiding the "lampooning of the sacred" and keeping sacred rituals and items off of the app: Argue against the divinity of the temple, share your hard experiences from the temple, share with me some of your hard experiences—I'm willing to be a listening ear. I'm willing to be in your—I'm willing to make friends with you and to be in your circle of support to help you maybe deal with some of the hard things you've gone through as far as the church is concerned. Just keep Temple robes and other sacred content that you guys know about off this app and off of social media in general. And please create a culture within the ex-Mormon community in which this type of thing is not tolerated.11Marsh's appeal quickly dispersed through the ecosystem of ex-Mormon TikTok, with a number of creators stitching the original video with their own commentary. Some kept their refutations of Marsh's request short and simple, including an account that responded with a sign that read "Go fuck yourself."12 Others engaged with Marsh's request sentence by sentence, affirming what they understood to be their right to treat their own experiences and objects with any level of reverence they wanted. "They put [a] price on that info and we paid it for years," one creator responded.13Debates about ownership—of both material temple garments and the experiences they symbolize—are a significant aspect of many ex-Mormon TikTokers' attempts to reject the authority of the church and claim their right to repurpose, reconsider, and share objects and rituals previously understood to be sacred—and, necessarily, secret. As Colleen McDannell has written, for example, temple garments represent a "flexible boundary line."14 On the one hand, garments worn flush against the body at all times serve as a reminder of the strict boundaries that separate members from non-members and of the control and authority the institution of the LDS Church holds over members' very bodies. On the other hand, because of the private nature of the garments—both in terms of how they are worn and how they are talked about (or not talked about) by Latter-day Saint leaders—individual members are largely free to assign their own meanings and significance to the garments, choosing whether and how to wear them is both a deeply personal choice and a symbol of belonging to something larger than oneself.In this way, an ex-member's decision to shed their garments is a profoundly personal decision and a symbolic stepping away from their former faith community. TikTok has become a site for ex-Mormons to speak openly about their conflicting emotions regarding their garments, creating a shared narrative not emblematic of ex-Mormons' unanimous views on what the garments mean but emphasizing their collective insistence that they have the right to speak openly about what they once felt obligated to keep private.Several themes emerged in ex-Mormons' responses to Marsh's open message. One was an appeal to ex-Mormons' right to treat their garments with any amount of respect they wanted on the grounds that they physically and legally owned the garments. "If they paid for them, it's their property," rejoined user @blessedapostasy in a point-by-point response to Marsh's video.15 One respondent said, "We paid for those clothes, and for that information."16 By reducing the value of the garments to their cost of purchase, users symbolically rejected the spiritual value of the garments. Similarly, emphasizing their legal ownership of the garments as property suggested that, rather than recognizing the church and its leaders as ultimate authorities, they were now only beholden to the secular laws governing property and financial disputes. If, as McDannell has argued, religious institutions construct and maintain authority through "the micromanagement of power," ex-Mormons' rejection of the LDS Church's ability to define the sacredness of their garments is also a rejection of the church's institutional power more broadly.17Another theme of ex-Mormons' response to Marsh was a reclamation not just of their physical property but of their right to name and define their own spiritual experiences. By describing their status as former true believers, ex-Mormons laid claim to their experiences in the temple and in the church more broadly as their spiritual property. In an impassioned response to Marsh's video, creator @apostate_adah said: I was born into the church, and so I was taught about the Christian Mormon version of God and believed in him my entire life. Then I go to the temple, the most sacred and holy of places, where I'm going to be covenanting with that God—the God who I was told created me, loves me more than anybody in the whole universe, who understands me, who knows my thoughts and my heart and my intent. The god who has seen my future and knows my potential. The God who I have devoted my life to. The God determining my future, my eternal destiny. The God I am supposed to trust more than myself. . . . So, I put aside anything inside of me and trusted this God. Then I go to the temple, and I watch as God tells Eve that because she was the first to take of the fruit, that she needed to covenant to obey her husband. Therefore, because I am a woman, I need to covenant with my God to harken to my husband while veiling my face—and going home to an abusive husband. I had to listen to that message for ten years and feel like that is how my God thinks of me because I am a woman. And you, Mormon man, think that you have the right to tell me how to process that trauma?18Commenters on the post echoed Adah's sentiment, with one writing, "The temple ceremony belongs to us just as much as it belongs to them. They get zero say in how we view it and how we share our experience."19 In her video responding to each aspect of Marsh's message, @blessedapostasy reminded Marsh that garments and temple experiences were also "things we held sacred."20 Ex-Mormons' justifications of their right and authority to "lampoon" the temple and sacred garments based on evidence of their own former sincere belief highlights what McDannell calls the "complicated networks of beliefs, values, myths, and social structures" within which religious objects function.21Even as ex-Mormon TikTokers frame their post-Mormon lives as more authentic and "real" than their lives as believing Mormons, they make frequent appeals to the authenticity of their former belief in and involvement with the church. By "proving" that their experiences in the temple and their acquisition of their sacred garments were in earnest, ex-Mormons lay claim to their continued right to "creatively imagine for themselves what the garments are all about."22 These former "silent theologians," freed of the strictures calling for sacred secrecy around temple garments and rituals, vocalize their theological rejection of the LDS Church out of the authority of their genuine experiences within it.23In his expansion on Guy Debord's theory of the spectacular, Jonathan Crary posits that "spectacular culture is not founded on the necessity of making a subject see, but rather on strategies in which individuals are isolated, separated, and inhabit time as disempowered."24 Screens not only demand users' attention, Crary argues, but require them to block out external stimuli to the point that the material world is rendered secondary to nonstop passive intake of visual stimuli. How does one avoid allowing the spectacle to turn them into a "conscious automaton"?25 Crary suggests spectators must attempt to inhabit what Henri Bergson calls the "zone of indetermination"—the space between "awareness of stimulation and reaction to it" in which one might go beyond reflex or habit and engage in truly creative living.26To creatively inhabit the "real" is easier said than done, partly because the screen and its endlessly refreshable stimuli have nestled so deeply into the heart of twenty-first-century life that what happens on the Internet—politically, economically, socially, spiritually—also happens in real life. While apps like TikTok could be said to epitomize some of critics' worst fears of a society ruled by spectacle—ubiquitous, demanding oblivion to external stimuli, cultivating habitual responses, operating according to hidden levers of power, encouraging deeper investment in consumer culture and material goods that amplify loneliness—they also allow spectators to create a spectacle. Through TikTok, ex-Mormon users find new avenues for speaking back to LDS authorities and contesting their former church's boundaries around the use and meaning of devotional objects. This "talking back" is not simply another vacant source of distraction that isolates and disempowers the masses. Indeed, I argue, it might be just the thing to focus a spectator's attention on the space between stimulation and reaction. It might just be an invitation to more creative living.