Are conservative men of faith sometimes overbearing ... without realizing it?
British reporter Megan Agnew wasn't fair with Hannah and Daniel Neeleman. But her skewed observations still raised some questions that got me thinking about ways to improve as a husband and father.
Lots of people were bugged by an article this summer in a UK newspaper about Latter-day Saint influencer Hannah Neeleman. And I understand why.
The journalist brought into her reporting such a strongly-held prejudiced view of this family’s faith and values that was not about to be undermined by further curiosity - resulting in a profile that turned out to be so far from the Neeleman family’s own self-understanding that Hannah spoke out after about being “shocked” by an article that felt like “an attack on (her) family and (her) marriage” and which “couldn’t be further from the truth.”
In that article, this wildly-successful social media influencer, who also won the Mrs. America Pageant in 2023, “came out looking like a victim to a fundamentalist religion, a despotic husband, and eccentric children,” Meagan Koehler writes - rightly arguing that if this woman’s “identity was being taken from her,” it was happening thanks to distorted media portrayals like this, rather than from a husband and children Hannah had been actively choosing to love for many years.
I agree with these critiques, even while finding myself thinking a lot about some questions Agnew’s report raised for me. In America these days, of course, our tendency is to stop thinking and reject entirely anything that feels like it’s associated with the “wrong team.”
I feel that same pull. Yet when Joseph Smith was unfairly attacked during his life, it was reported that he would often look at himself - asking what can I learn from this and how can I do better? In my better moments, I also try to listen and learn from the perspectives of those very different than my own - even those that feel critical of me or my community.
In this case, I believe that notwithstanding her serious blindspots, reporter Megan Agnew raises some questions worth considering by anyone committed to covenant marriage and the soul-stretching experience of family life. As the husband to a remarkable woman who exceeds my own faith and strength in many of the most important ways, I’m acutely aware of many ways I need to keep improving personally.
Three sensitive questions for our families:
1. Hearing. Are the women in our families and communities able to speak what’s truly on their hearts and minds?
For onlookers who are glimpsing the Neeleman home for the first time, Agnew makes sure they feel awkward throughout the profile - largely from how she characterizes the forceful presence of Hannah’s husband Daniel. Although this British journalist had arrived in Utah specifically to find out about Hannah, multiple times Daniel chimes in to answer questions the reporter specifically asks to his wife (which the journalist clearly wants the reader to know: “How does she feel about it?” [she asks Hannah] “We were already together, doing what we were doing,” Daniel replies instead.)
At one point, the journalist’s exasperation comes out in the open, complaining about struggling to get an answer from Hannah “without her being corrected, interrupted or answered for by either her husband or a child” - a husband, she adds, who “thinks he knows better.”
Okay, men. Isn’t that how we can sometimes act? The first to answer and interject. The ‘one who knows best’?
Obviously, that’s not true of all men - with some seeming to possess angelic gifts to be able to rise above any controlling, bossy impulse. Of those men who struggle, it’s also fair to say that many probably only get over-bearing on occasion. And, of course, some women seem plenty able to boss and push and press.
But there’s a reason that Joseph Smith wrote (while in Liberty Jail himself), “We have learned by sad experience that it is the nature and disposition of almost all men, as soon as they get a little authority, as they suppose, they will immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion.”
If that was true in 1839, and human nature hasn’t changed, why would we think that’s any less true today?
We’re all painfully aware of the degree to which heartbreaking abuse worldwide (and throughout history) disproportionately impacts women and children - by a long-shot. I’m highlighting here something else here - the way natural differences in physical size and strength between men and women can lead to subtle imbalances in our family and community conversations - where perhaps men can speak more (and more forcefully) in a way that can inadvertently diminish women’s opportunity to share openly what’s on their hearts too.
2. Dreaming. Are we overlooking pursuable dreams of women in our families and communities - hopes that could spark new joys and growth with a little more investment?
At one point in the profile, Daniel takes the reporter and their family out for a property tour - Hannah in the back seat with the toddlers (in what the reporter not-so-subtly hints as metaphoric), especially by her telling of the story that follows.
“Is this what she always wanted?” the reporter describes asking Hannah on the outing “when we get a moment alone.”
“No,” Hannah responds. “I mean, I was, like —” She pauses. “My goal was New York City. I left home at 17 and I was so excited to get there, I just loved that energy. And I was going to be a ballerina. I was a good ballerina.”
“She pauses again,” the reporter points out knowingly - in a hesitation that the journalist and all her readers (everyone but Hannah) knows is imbued with immense significance. “But I knew that when I started to have kids my life would start to look different,” Hannah continues.
This is the precise moment at which secular and sacred narratives divide (or collide). Is the turn of events readers are about to hear recounted by this Latter-day Saint mother represent an act of laudable faith and Christian sacrifice? Or the tragic derailment of a follow-your-truth/be-yourself/live-your-dream authenticity revered in America today? Or something even worse?
“Back then I thought we should date for a year [before marriage],” Hannah continues, “So I could finish school and whatever.”
These were Hannah’s dreams and hopes and plans - at least until someone else steps in: the villain in Megan Agnew’s telling of Hannah’s story: Dominator Daniel…who interrupts readers’ musing on Hannah’s hopes by abruptly saying: “It’s not going to work, we’ve got to get married now.”
“After a month they were engaged,” Agnew informs the audience - followed by a retelling of family formation that will give modern readers whiplash:“Two months after that they were married, moving into an apartment Daniel rented on the Upper West Side. And three months after that she was pregnant, the first Juilliard undergraduate to be expecting “in modern history.”
A few years later, they had three kids under four; even so, Hannah was still dancing professionally at first. She admits, “our first few years of marriage were really hard, we sacrificed a lot. But we did have this vision, this dream and —”
“Daniel interrupts,” Agnew reports, to tell her: “We still do.” What kind of sacrifices, I ask her. “Well, I gave up dance, which was hard. You give up a piece of yourself.”
The reporter later asks Daniel as well whether this farm-and-family-and-fame life was always what he wanted. “Yes,” he says. “I expected Hannah to be more at home with the kids, but she said, ‘I watched my parents working together and so whatever we do, we got to do it together.’”
This is all the reader hears about Hannah’s dreams, except one more glimpse that punctuates and closes out the story. “The only space earmarked to be Neeleman’s own — a small barn she wanted to convert into a ballet studio — ended up becoming the kids’ schoolroom.”
Agnew closes her story by asking the reader where all the “sequined gowns” are from Hannah’s Mrs. Universe competition. “Well, they used to be in her bedroom cupboard, but with all of her stuff — and Daniel’s and Henry’s and Charles’s and George’s and Frances’s and Lois’s and Martha’s and Mabel’s and Flora’s — the cupboard got so full that there wasn’t any more room. So Daniel put them in the garage.”
In the garage. That’s where readers are informed Hannah’s real dreams are going, in Agnew’s angsty telling. Next to the boxes of children’s clothing they’ve grown out of - and alongside the college textbooks no one cares about anymore.
3. Deciding. Are the women in our families and communities being respected in their input on crucial life questions - especially those decisions that affect them most?
In addition to this seeming heavy-handedness in terms of talking and dreaming, the bigger takeaway from the article is how Daniel is portrayed when it comes to major decisions facing the family. This is first evident when the journalist pokes holes in their family story about both of them giving up “career ambitions” - saying “I look out at the vastness and don’t totally agree. Daniel wanted to live in the great western wilds, so they did; he wanted to farm, so they do; he likes date nights once a week, so they go (they have a babysitter on those evenings); he didn’t want nannies in the house, so there aren’t any.”
But it’s the biggest decision of all where Agnew makes the case for a pattern of not-so-subtle husband-over-wife domination. When the family tour with reporter-in-tow passes the 15-passenger family minibus, Agnew asks whether the family aims is to “fill it”?
“Some day, yeah,” Daniel says (answering first, again). Hannah sounds “less sure” to the reporter when she says with baby Flora strapped to her chest “We are getting old and worn out. So we’ll see.”
“Do you plan pregnancies?” Agnew asks Hannah (while intentionally pausing to “look at her fixedly.”
“No,” Daniel responds again. “When he says no,” Neeleman responds gently, “it’s very much a matter of prayer for me. I’m, like, ‘God, is it time to bring another one to the Earth?’ And I’ve never been told no.”
“But for whatever reason it’s exactly nine months [after a baby] that she’s ready for the next one,” Daniel chimes in. “It’s definitely a matter of prayer,” Hannah rebuts.
This happy husband seems oblivious to how awkward this exchange will feel when broadcast to the world, as he adds once more: “It’s a matter of prayer but somehow it’s exactly nine months.”
Other interview conversations touch on epidurals, not typically done in Hannah’s births. While Daniel is out of the room, Agnew claims Hannah “lowers her voice” and says, “So I got an epidural. And it was an amazing experience….It was kinda great.”
But by now, the message is pretty clear. Not only is Hannah struggling to find space to speak freely and directly about her life. And not only are her (true) dreams packed away in the garage. But one of the most life-changing decisions a woman could ever make - should I have a child, and when, and how many - seems (to an objective reader, reading this “objective” reporter) slightly coerced, at best.
Just the reporter’s bending over backwards to highlight the patriarchal stench in the air - I’m trying to show here this jaded journalist’s patriarchy-must-be-in-the-air bias that infuses everything she sees and says.
But not only that … because to the degree there really is some kind of leaning-overruling-overbearing going on here (or anywhere), it’s obviously concerning. Any good husband worth-their-salt should be concerned at the huge physical and emotional impact of birth on the amazing women some of us are lucky enough to call our spouse.
Clearly not understanding what this reporter was ‘up to,’ Daniel confides to the reporter that his wife “sometimes gets so ill from exhaustion that she can’t get out of bed for a week.”
So, there you have it. Hannah Neeleman’s “true story”…as told by a crack international reporter, who can clearly see through all the religious gloss into what’s really going on. Despite what Hannah and other Latter-day Saint women say themselves, Agnew makes clear to all the world that their highest hopes, aspirations and dreams are in the garage, while their own participation in daily life is really just in the backseat.
Is that really what the life of Christian discipleship requires of mothers and wives and women generally? Or is Jesus calling them - and all of us - to something even better than even our original, most natural dreams?
“Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.” (Matthew 10:39)
Not hard to anticipate all the ways this unpopular teaching from the Savior looks and feels to a world obsessed with endless self-fulfillment and incessant elimination of shame or anything too “high pressure” (religion, marriage, family, work).
Even among those willingly committing to follow Jesus, there’s still an important question worth thinking about: how can we be attentive to and supportive of the righteous, inspired pursuit of dreams and hopes and desires of the various members of our families and community - especially those commonly with less power and ability to independently reach for them (women and children). And how can we create atmospheres - at home and in our neighborhoods and congregations - where the range of thoughts exploring this all are welcome and encouraged?
Sister Marjorie Pay Hinckley summed the freedom she felt from her own prophet husband: “From the very start he gave me wings to fly.”
To Daniel’s credit, he does seem to be doing exactly that in so many ways (I mean, she was Mrs. America, for heaven sakes). But like all husbands today, maybe there are some ways he can do that even more - and even better?
To summarize, even in this journalist’s darkly suspicious and culturally Marxist-feminist telling of their family’s stories, I’m saying there are some things we could learn and some ways that people of faith (especially those actively building families - or preparing to do so in the future), could course correct and work towards deeper sensitivity.
Do you agree?
And if so, should we be surprised? After all...the rest of Joseph’s letter below is a pretty high (and incredibly awesome standard). My dear Grandpa Hess memorized this and would recite it over the years to himself:
No power or influence can or ought to be maintained by virtue of the priesthood, only by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned; By kindness, and pure knowledge, which shall greatly enlarge the soul without hypocrisy, and without guile.
Let’s keep trying. I know I will too.