I don’t often watch movies in a theater, let alone horror films. But a few weeks ago, I found myself watching “Heretic,” which intrigued me for personal and professional reasons.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s I watched many romantic comedies featuring Hugh Grant. Today, I am a scholar of gender, culture and religion, including Mormonism. And in “Heretic,” two Latter-day Saint missionaries knock on a door only to find it opened by a character called Mr. Reed, played by Grant himself.

As I sat in the theater, my mind wandered to a short time ago, when I watched the entirety of the reality show “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.”

Although the show is quite different from the movie, both focus on the lives of women affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, often known as the Mormon church. The TV show is less horror and more hot mess, manufacturing conflict between a group of mom friends who break a lot of their church’s rules.

Yet both sets of characters echo long-standing tropes about women in art: shown as virgins, mothers or sinners in need of salvation. When characters come from a religious background, their misdeeds tend to be portrayed as rebellion against the strictures of their faith – evident in a “Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” episode called “The Book of Sinners and Saints.”

In film, religion is often a way for audiences to wrestle with ideas about gender and social change. That’s all the more true if the religion is considered conservative, or prone to stereotyping, both of which apply to Latter-day Saints. Female characters’ dilemmas are often depicted as the result of their faith – but their characterization may say more about the rest of America than the church itself.

“The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” which was renewed for a second season on Hulu in October 2024, is a reality show about a group of friends in Salt Lake City, where the Latter-day Saints church is headquartered.

Though many Americans know little about the church, strong stereotypes persist: that members are wholesome, for example, and embrace a family structure with a provider dad and perfectly coiffed, stay-at-home mom. The show purports to demonstrate just how different the “secret lives” of Latter-day Saints can be, even as certain people on the show play up stereotypes about the church’s expectations for women.

The church teaches that members should eschew extramarital sex, alcohol and caffeine. Yet many cast members repeatedly test those sorts of boundaries, or break them altogether. Before the program launched, for example, its stars gained a following via the #MomTok hashtag on TikTok – which then boomed during a “soft swinging” scandal involving their social circle. During the filming, one of the women is pregnant and not married to her child’s father.

These conflicts seem to fuel viewers’ fascination, regardless of the fact that few people of any religious tradition perfectly follow its teachings. Questions about church rules and rule-breaking come up repeatedly in the subreddits dedicated to the show.

Perhaps viewers pretend that only in Utah do women feel particular patriarchal pressures regarding money and appearance – including plastic surgery. They may conveniently forget that two of the largest Christian denominations in the U.S., the Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention, also prohibit women from holding top leadership roles.

At one point early in the series, Whitney is trying to decide whether to accept an offer from a sex toy company to promote their products, and if it aligns with her values. She and the other women all reluctantly admit that they outearn their husbands, largely through these kinds of brand deals.

Those tensions are hardly unique to religious communities. Plenty of people outside conservative faiths wrestle with the idea of a woman being the primary earner in her family. Studies suggest that there may be a higher likelihood of divorce when wives outearn husbands, and that women who earn more than their male partners are more likely to fake orgasms.

“Heretic” is also, in its own way, about power and control, and women’s subjugation with or without religion. But whereas faith itself is rarely addressed in “Secret Lives,” here it is the focus.

The film starts with two young women dressed in the modest clothing of Latter-day Saints missionaries – a rite of passage for many young people in the church – complete with name tags pinned to their coats. They’ve ridden their bikes to visit Mr. Reed, a man who expressed interest in their faith. He invites them into his perfectly decorated home, saying his wife will join them, though the only hint of her are mugs that say “husband” and “hubby.”

Mr. Reed is indeed interested in religion, but not in the way the missionaries had hoped. He begins to lecture them about the supposed false promises of religion, pressuring them to abandon the idea that their church has a monopoly on the truth. In particular, he insists the Latter-day Saints tradition is bad for women, harping on its former practice of polygamy – even as he himself begins terrorizing the young women, who realize they must find a way to escape.

Their plight, I’d argue, is tied to broader ideas about gender – in particular, discomfort about U.S. culture moving away from patriarchal gender roles.

Christine Blythe, a folklore scholar and the executive director of the Mormon Historical Association, argues that sister missionaries make the “ideal victims” for a horror film: figures the audience associates with innocence, who are worthy of men’s protection.

But when they leave the safety of their homes, they are persecuted rather than protected. Only some time after they have entered Reed’s house does Elder Kennedy, a man from their church, come looking for them. Reed’s search for the “one true religion,” and his efforts to make the girls abandon their own, boils down to his need for sheer control over women – as evidenced not only by his violence, but the way he moves figures of the two missionaries through a dollhouse-sized version of his house.

The audience may see the missionaries as a scapegoat, as if these sorts of dangers only happen when women serve their church – instead of considering that misogyny is a danger women face regardless of religious affiliation.

Both “Heretic” and “Secret Lives” reflect ideas about Latter-day Saints to a U.S. audience. The audience, in turn, uses them to work out anxieties over women’s place in society. While both might be entertaining in their own ways, the challenge is to consider why they resonate – and bring that reflection to bear on our own communities.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Rebecca Janzen, University of South Carolina

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Rebecca Janzen received funding from the Kilian McDonnell Fellowship at the Collegeville Institute while writing this piece.