Tradwife vs. Tradwife: Even Christians Have Had Enough of Ballerina Farm [View all]

[Celerity]

A new wave of online personalities are pushing back against the unrealistic ideals pushed by the likes of Hannah Neeleman: “If you are a stay-at-home mom who makes the sourdough and only homeschools, you feel like you’re better than everybody else.”

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/story/tradwife-vs-tradwife-even-christians-have-had-enough-of-ballerina-farm

https://archive.ph/t2IZD


Hannah Neeleman rolling out dough at Ballerina Farm, in Kamas, Utah, November 7, 2024. Kim Raff/The New York Times/Redux.

For most of this year, Kyrie Luke has been telling her more than 72,000 YouTube subscribers that it’s time for Christian moms to renegotiate their relationship to the internet. She didn’t realize how important that advice would be until this September, when videos of Charlie Kirk’s killing rapidly began circulating online. Last month, Luke told Vanity Fair that while she never sought out footage of Kirk bleeding out, it appeared on her feeds anyway. “I was shocked, and I couldn’t sleep for days,” she says. “I was not meant to see that. I should not have seen that.”

Luke doesn’t post about the topics that would obviously put her in the Turning Point USA orbit, but Kirk and his organization’s characteristic melding of politics and faith have been so influential on the Christian internet that she was hearing commentary from her audience immediately. She films videos for the Transformed Homemakers Society, her channel and blog, from her home in Idaho, where she lives with her husband and three kids. Over the last five years, Luke has built a strong relationship with audience members, who come to her for domestic advice using principles gleaned from the Bible.

Luke is part of a wave of conservative Christian influencers whose content attempts to present a more realistic alternative to the pastoral ideal of TikTok tradwives. They’re building smaller but perhaps more engaged audiences across social media platforms, blogs, and alternative forums like Substack and Patreon. If the first tradwife era was about making the conservative lifestyle seem attractive, this new wave of influencers is trying to make it seem sustainable for women who have already chosen that path—even if retaining that audience means turning away from right-wing rage bait.

Luke started out as a basic domestic content creator, writing a recipe blog and decorating tips. “It was very surface level, talking about aesthetics and things like that,” she says. Eventually she started feeling overwhelmed by the demands of an unsustainable ideal and decided she needed to heal. “And I’m like, Is this our calling? Is this actually what God wants for us? Should women be doing this? Is this even healthy for us? This seems totally unsustainable.”

snip