The Mormon sex scandal hitting the small screen

What happens when a member of a church that bans everything from pornography and caffeine to sex before marriage admits she's involved in swinging?

In 2022, a group of wives and mothers known as Mormon MomTok, who rose to TikTok fame with their "viral dance and lip-sync videos", were left reeling when a founding member admitted on a livestream that she and her husband were involved in swinging with some of the stars of her social media clips, said Fox News.

Now, a new TV series takes viewers behind the scenes as members of the online community struggle to save their friendships and reputations.

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'Soft swinging'

In 2022, a sex scandal "shook the foundation" of a "thriving online subculture" of Mormon moms, said NBC News, when one of its main stars, Taylor Frankie Paul, announced that she and her husband were getting a divorce, and admitted they'd had an open relationship and that she had violated its terms by "swinging" – meaning they swapped partners within their group of friends.

Referring to what she got up to as "soft swinging", she told millions of followers that she and her then-husband, Tate Paul, had agreed that they could be intimate with the other members of their swinger group on two conditions: as long as both were present and neither went "all the way".

So, "as long as we were both there and we saw it and we knew it, it was OK", she said, but "the second it goes behind without each other", then they "stepped out of the agreement. And I did that".

Piling scandal upon scandal for the religious community, she said that other Mormon couples were also involved. She never offered names of any other swingers but as speculation ran riot it was assumed that countless Mormons were involved. Several MomTok members took to social media to insist they were absolutely not swingers, while others preferred to stay silent.

Taylor Frankie Paul has since married Dakota Mortensen but it's not been happily ever after for the couple. She was arrested during an altercation with Mortensen and charged with assault and domestic violence in the presence of a child. She told NBC News that at the time of the arrest she was "going 90 miles per hour" and "wasn't even thinking straight".

The couple have a baby together and since then her social media has "taken a hard turn toward pregnancy and postpartum content", said The Cut. If social media posts are not enough for you, then new Hulu docuseries, "The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives", follows eight of the influencers as they "navigate the resulting chaos and tumult", said NBC News.

Married too soon?

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was founded in 19th-century America and has an estimated 13.5 million members worldwide, including up to 190,000 in the UK. Mormons believe their church is a restoration of the Church as conceived by Jesus and that the other Christian churches have gone astray.

Mormonism is a sexually conservative belief system, where "chastity is a virtue, homosexuality is a sin" and the father is the "presiding authority in his family", wrote Jessica Grose for The New York Times. So it's "notable" that the wives "haven't left the religion outright", added Grose.

A lot of them "love the foundation of our church: love, family, service", said Paul in the series, but they find it "impossible" to be a "modern woman" and "follow all the rules". Commenting on why many Mormons find it hard to keep to their church's beliefs, one participant said that the problem is that Mormons are "getting married before their brains even develop".