In a soothing, gentle voice, she informs us that a relative is in town and has been craving bubble gum.

Rather than doing what nine out of 10 people would do, which is to fish out an ossified stick of gum from the bottom of a bag and hope there's no such thing as a purse-borne disease, Nara Smith begins making bubble gum from scratch.

She starts with some "gum base" she just happens to have on hand in her gleaming, spacious kitchen. In the space of a 70-second TikTok video, two innovative bubble gum flavors are ready to try.

I suspect most of Smith's 9.4 million TikTok followers realize that her videos are staged and that she's a professional model.

What purport to be spur-of-the-moment decisions to satisfy the cravings of her gorgeous husband or their three young children have all the spontaneity of a military operation.

And yet we keep watching, fascinated by this woman who also makes her toddlers' morning cereal from scratch and softly gushes that cooking natural foods is her "love language".

Religion and the online persona

Religion isn't discussed, but it informs Smith's online persona as surely as the cucumber and watermelon she uses to infuse her midday mocktail. Smith and her husband are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons.

This identity isn't obvious from her videos — she more often than not sports sleeveless and backless clothing that LDS leaders long designated as off-limits for young women of the faith — but the religion subtly undergirds the lifestyle she is selling.

As a scholar who studies Mormonism in the United States, and a Latter-day Saint myself, I know why I watch Smith's videos:

She is part of my tribe and I'm proud of her success, even as I roll my eyes at the idea that we Mormons routinely make our own ketchup instead of fetching it from Costco.

Why do we watch?

My question is why so many other people keep tuning in to watch Smith and a host of other LDS influencers whose religion flies equally under the radar.

For example, Shea McGee, the interior designer behind Studio McGee, deployed her Instagram and YouTube popularity to help launch the Netflix series "Dream Home Makeover."

McGee and her husband met while she was studying at Brigham Young University, where 99 percent of students are Mormon, so it's a safe bet she is or was a church member.

Other clues: They live in Utah, have a growing young family and seem to share the Mormon obsession with cookies and sweets.

But I haven't seen any overt confirmation of a religious identity in their social media or on Netflix's show.

That omission is a smart decision, because Americans like Latter-day Saints' lifestyle a good deal more than they like the religion itself.

Despite the astonishing popularity of these LDS personalities, the Pew Research Center finds that Mormons rank dead last among religious groups in popular approval.

Just 15 percent of Americans hold a "very" or "somewhat" favourable view of us. Our negative-10 favourability rating places us below atheists and Muslims, the only other groups to achieve negative territory.

So if non-Mormons aren't keen on Latter-day Saints' religion, what are they looking for when they follow LDS influencers?

I think they're craving a blend of the traditional and the modern. Mormon women influencers, for example, are supposed to have it all: fam and glam, trad wife and boss-woman.

Social media backlash

But bend too far in either direction and the social media backlash can be intense. Consider the hostility directed at "Ballerina Farm" personality Hannah Neeleman (pictured).

She's a Juilliard-trained dancer who runs a Utah farm with her affluent husband and their eight children.

The rail-thin and conspicuously blond Neeleman embodies the Barbie beauty stereotype.

Fans love the scrubbed pine tables where she dishes up homemade pies, and the prairie dresses she and her daughters wear, skirts swaying gently in the mountain breeze.

Many of those same fans balked, however, when, less than two weeks after giving birth to her eighth child in January, a svelte Neeleman represented the United States in the Mrs. World pageant.

How was she able to lose her baby weight so quickly and parade in a swimsuit and evening gown? What's more, why did she?

Glamour magazine said many people felt that "by posting videos of her home births, skinny waist, obvious bliss and serene nature, she is actively harming other women.

She's making postpartum look like a breeze … and is giving an unrealistic ideal for what motherhood is actually like."

The criticisms intensified last month after The Times of London did an in-depth profile of Neeleman.

Or an attempted profile: According to interviewer Megan Agnew, Neeleman's husband often spoke for his wife, and he left Agnew alone with her interview subject for only a few minutes.

I can't, it seems, get an answer out of Neeleman without her being corrected, interrupted or answered for by either her husband or a child.

Usually I am doing battle with steely Hollywood publicists; today I am up against an army of toddlers who all want their mum and a husband who thinks he knows better.

Her husband also revealed the alarming tidbit that sometimes Neeleman is so exhausted from her farm and child-care duties that she has to take to bed for an entire week.

This revelation generated a firestorm on social media, with critique far outweighing compassion.

For a 35-year-old woman to require that much bed rest isn't normal, the internet said.

And since Neeleman hinted (when her husband briefly left the room) that she once had an epidural during a childbirth when he was out of town, the internet assumed he had otherwise prevented her from accessing pain relief for all of her other births.

What viewers want

The backlash shows that viewers want the Neelemans to be a traditional family, but not too traditional. Neeleman should be beautiful, but not impossibly so.

They want to believe the fantasy that she runs her family by herself and feel betrayed to learn that the "homeschooled" children are actually tutored by a paid employee.

They also want religion to be muted and the Neelemans mostly succeed at this, keeping their faith out of the foreground.

That approach also characterises the Bucket List Family, who spent years as global wanderers, exploring the planet with three kids in tow, including a baby. (They've since bought a home in Nevada and settled in, at least for the time being.)

Their travels, chronicled in the lovely book "National Geographic Bucket List Family Travel," are filled with gorgeous water adventures, culinary delights and beautiful photos of them in swimsuits, as befits any travel fantasy worth its salt.

Though they don't discuss religion openly, they do talk about "values" and "living authentically," 21st-century buzzwords that, from their mouths, feel fresh and moving.

Those values are ones that many Americans fear we are losing.

Once a month, for instance, the family paused their travels for a service project, in part to teach their kids how privileged they are.

(And they are privileged. In the NatGeo book, Jessica Gee matter-of-factly explains they can afford their life because her husband, Garrett, co-developed a barcode-scanning app as an undergraduate, before selling it to Snapchat in 2014 for $54 million. Oh.)

These families are traditional, with a heterosexual married couple at their core who seem to love and enjoy each other.

Importantly, though, they're not winding the clock back too far. It's Nara Smith, not her husband, who is the bigger star, and Shea McGee, not Syd, who heads the family's design firm.

Both husbands are clearly supportive and proud of their wives, which only adds to the fantasy. So, too, is Garrett Gee, who pens the foreword to Jessica's travel book and credits her with being "the one who makes it all happen."

These egalitarian-seeming gender dynamics appeal more to contemporary Americans than the actual patriarchy that the LDS church has long upheld as divinely ordained.

LDS women cannot hold the priesthood or any of the positions of authority for which the priesthood is the essential calling card.

Women cannot run a congregation or preside over men in church organisations, but in influencer-land they can run a company, rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year (or more) and still have the bandwidth to make breakfast cereal from scratch.

I don't envy these women.

It must be exhausting to curate their lives and children for public consumption — to say nothing of preserving those beautiful bodies that society reviles and reveres in equal measure.

It's not a sustainable lifestyle. But oh, how America loves to keep watching.

• First published by Religion News Service
• Jana Riess is a senior columnist for Religion News Service

These dense subjects arose for me after this New York Times op-ed about how influencers have kind of become secular morality preachers was published last week, just as religion came up in a discussion group I'm a part of.

The Times essay by Leigh Stein is great.

She threads invisible strings between women who've become mega-famous for self-help and wellness Instagram accounts, like Glennon Doyle, and the rise of millennials who identify as nonreligious.

One of her theses is that although influencers like Doyle and others aren't like the typical evangelists we see in churches or on TV at all, they've assumed a similar role for a left-leaning, nonreligious population who are seeking salvation and answers to big life questions.

It made me notice how often I use religious terminology to describe what influencers are doing, and the effect they have on me and their devout fans.

I've discussed how influencers are skilled and effective preachers — but about lifestyle regimens, parenting, hustle culture, beauty, self-maintenance, and their coupon codes, rather than religious dogma. (I'm being serious! I've been convinced on more than one occasion to buy into something because their pitches are so persuasive.)

Stein's musings were so compelling to me that I decided to reach out to a handful of influencers in the self-growth and wellness space about her theories.

I heard back from five.

Their brands vary, from yoga to body positivity to autoimmune disease awareness, and their follower counts range in size from tens to hundreds of thousands.

They all approach these industries from a place of sharing and moralizing and offer deeply personal stories while giving a lot of advice about how to live one's life well — according to them.

Some influencers rejected the idea that traditional organized religion informs their work today.

Lorraine Carbonell-Ladish, 57, advocates for mental health and talks about eating disorders to her Instagram community of just under 25,000 on her account @lorrainecladish.

She told me she was raised Catholic but is no longer practising.

Now, she abides by "yoga philosophy," which she defined as trying to be a better person every day.

To her, that's what's centring her social media brands.

It has also given her meaning during hard times, like recovering from a severe eating disorder and managing major depressive episodes.

"Back when I was young, there were no social media to turn to for information, so now I share my own journey of wellness and recovery so that younger women can know there is hope," said Carbonell-Ladish.

"I don't need a structured religion to keep me going. Zero aspects of any religion have influenced my work. I am more about ... living by the rule of trying to be a decent person." Continue reading

• Tanya Chen is a BuzzFeed News Reporter

Fans of Ms Doyle's gospel, an accessible combination of self-care, activism and tongue-in-cheek Christianity ("Jesus loves me, this I know, for he gave me Lexapro"), can worship at any time of day or night at the electric church of her Instagram feed.

By replacing the rigid dogma of religion with the confessional lingua franca of social media, Ms Doyle has become a charismatic preacher for women — like me — who aren't even religious.

Twenty-two per cent of millennials are not affiliated with a specific religion. We are known as religious "nones."

The Pew Research Center found that the number of nones in the population as a whole increased nine percentage points from 2009 to 2019.

The main reasons that nones are unaffiliated are that they question religious teachings, or they don't like the church's stance on social issues.

But are we truly nonreligious, or are our belief systems too bespoke to appear on a list of major religions in a Pew phone survey?

Many millennials who have turned their backs on religious tradition because it isn't sufficiently diverse or inclusive have found alternative scripture online.

Our new belief system is a blend of left-wing political orthodoxy, intersectional feminism, self-optimization, therapy, wellness, astrology and Dolly Parton.

And we've found a different kind of clergy: personal growth influencers. Women like Ms Doyle, who offer nones like us permission, validation and community on demand at a time when it's nearly impossible to share communion in person. We don't even have to put down our phones.

In February Ms Doyle posted a virtual sermon to her followers on Instagram, encouraging them to "embrace quitting as a spiritual practice."

More than 100,000 members of her congregation liked it. Followers responded with prayer hands emojis, God bless yous and one "Hallelujah, sister."

I spoke to Kimberly Ciano, a 31-year-old health practitioner on Long Island who found Glennon Doyle via her "discovery" feed. Ms Ciano has followed a spiritual path that may sound familiar to other nones: She grew up Roman Catholic, but she became alienated from her faith by what she saw as the church's hypocrisy.

In her 20s, she studied yoga and Eastern philosophy.

During a year when she lost a job, a 10-year relationship and her grandmother, the message she absorbed from Ms Doyle helped sustain her: "It's OK to not be OK."

Ms Doyle and other quasi-spiritual influencers are the latest iteration of an American institution that has been around since the second half of the 20th century: the televangelist.

These women are Instavangelists. Our screens may have shrunk, but we're still drawn to spiritual counsel, especially when it doubles as entertainment.