Barcelona, the European capital of Mormons: ‘We’re happy because we’ve started holding meetings in Catalan’

Lately, my feed has been filled with U.S. women with perfectly dyed dark-blonde waves, preparing mozzarella and arugula sandwiches from scratch — I mean kneading the bread and making mozzarella from unpasteurized milk. If you keep watching, they put on neo-Victorian dresses and, with their husbands and children, head together to the Mormon chapel.

Scroll a little further, and young people who have left that community appear, sharing the perversions they experienced: the repression, the special underwear, the demanding missionary training, the conservative gender roles. Others, from inside, talk about how they skirt the boundaries of what’s allowed in sex and alcohol consumption. Everything feels foreign, yet I can’t look away.

We know we should distrust the algorithm because it always favors the most regressive and globalized content, but judging by mine, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is hot right now. While statistics keep coming out about young people’s disinterest in faith, the millionaire influencers, hugely successful reality shows, and even a satirical musical that show a newfound curiosity about a community whose customs sound very old-fashioned.

When I visit the official website of this church, a Jesus portrayed by an actor who looks almost AI-generated welcomes me and explains the core values: God’s love, eternal life, and above all, the Book of Mormon. One of the main differences between this denomination and Catholicism is religious authority: founded in 1830 by the American Joseph Smith, known as a seer and polygamist, who was revealed the need to restore the original church lost after the martyrdom of the apostles, it follows a hierarchical system led by the prophet, who resides in Utah.

Nothing could be further from the secular Spanish region of Catalonia, yet, as Ofèlia Carbonell — an internet trends analyst and author of Catalan Women Don’t Wear Makeup — explains, its aesthetic inspires the reactionary wave we’re seeing everywhere: the viral phenomenon of Spanish influencer RoRo — who performs traditional domestic roles — is in fact a copy of Mormon influencer Nara Smith, who films herself cooking whatever pleases her husband, wearing ruffled dresses and speaking in a nearly pornographic voice.

From my Barcelona, full of creative professionals in sweltering hot shared apartments, the vision of Mormon life — the devoted wife, the large family, the house with a garden, the lavish Sunday meals — becomes a terrifyingly comforting place. We’re drawn to what is ordered according to clear rules, and yet we know those rules can be broken.

Carbonell focuses especially on the aesthetics of the documentary series The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, a recent trash-TV hit that has livened up my summer naps. It showcases the abasement of a few women who flaunt the rules while simultaneously suffering under their community’s strictures: from confessing to partner swaps to organizing cake contests for their husbands.

In this world, faith is cosmetic, and the protagonists are far from exemplary role models. What’s addictive is hearing how they navigate the line between repression and transgression, all while framing it in narratives of feminist freedom and love for family. “It’s funny, this obsession with performing the housewife role when everyone knows they are the family’s main breadwinners, signing contracts full of zeroes for campaigns, interviews, books, and shows,” says Carbonell.

“The word ‘Mormon’ is an exonym — it’s what people call us because of our belief in a particular scripture, but those of us who live the religion more than the associated tradition don’t use it,” says Xavier Real, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whom I went to meet to understand how all this imagery that won’t leave my head plays out in real life.

“In any belief system, people like to focus on those who don’t follow it: a case of sexual abuse in the [pro-Catalan independence party] CUP draws everyone’s attention because it’s a feminist party; the extreme always works,” he tells me when I ask about the series. “In the musical The Book of Mormon, they call us naïve — and maybe they’re right.”

From a working-class family, he is already the second generation in the community. His mother, the daughter of Republicans and skeptical of Francoist Catholicism, found unexpected comfort in what the missionaries promised.

Real is part of one of the three stakes (roughly equivalent to dioceses) and among the more than 5,000 members in Catalonia, which in the 1950s was the entry point of the religion into Spain when brothers Joan and Jordi Ventura Subirats brought it to the country. After several beatings from the grises (Francoist police), they ended up fleeing to France, and the Church did not take off until the Religious Freedom Law was signed in 1967. Since then, it has gradually expanded, partly thanks to Latin American immigration: “We’re happy because we’ve recently started holding meetings in Catalan as well.”

Soon Barcelona will become one of the community’s capitals in Europe: a large 2,500-square-meter temple is planned to be built in Sant Cugat del Vallès, on a plot in the Volpelleres neighborhood. It will be a monumental two-story building with landscaped areas, financed with 10% of the tithes that all members donate to the Church. There are few temples in Europe, and this one will serve as the nerve center for Catalonia, Valencia, and southern France. Who knows what events it might host in the future.

“For us, a temple is a special building, a link between heaven and earth; not everyone has access,” Real explains. Regular meetings take place in chapels, while temples are reserved for advanced rites of faith, such as sealings or covenants: “A pact with the Lord in which you commit to doing something so that God will help you with something else.” None of this appears in series, social media, or musicals. There will be a few open days before it becomes a reserved place of worship for the faithful — don’t miss it.

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