Flunking Sainthood

'Yesteryear,' a tradwife satire, understands Christianity better than most Americans

(RNS) — The new bestseller has been criticized for having a shallow understanding of religion. I disagree. 'Yesteryear' depicts how shallow American religion has actually become.

"Yesteryear" and author Caro Claire Burke. (Photo by Aistė Saulytė)

Jana Riess

June 29, 2026 

RNS

“Yesteryear,” one of the bestselling novels in America right now, combines caustic humor with cultural commentary to ruminate on religion and the tradwife movement. It’s a gripping read, which is particularly impressive since author Caro Claire Burke is a first-time novelist.

In what follows, I’m not going to give you any plot points that aren’t in the jacket copy or the opening pages of the novel. No spoilers here.

As the story opens, Natalie is on top of the world. Her rural Idaho farm, “Yesteryear,” is booming, and her family is about to grow from five children to six. The kids, clad in prairie garb in “a rainbow of neutrals,” help out on the farm, their efforts chronicled endlessly for Natalie’s millions of social media followers. Her husband, Caleb, the son of an ultra-wealthy U.S. Senator who has bankrolled their farm, has embraced the cowboy dream.

So far, the novel’s stage set sounds like a riff on Ballerina Farm, the famous Utah ranch where a former Juilliard-trained ballerina now lives with her husband, who is a son of Jet Blue’s billionaire founder, and their eight kids. (Wait, make that nine: We blinked and the Neelemans welcomed their ninth child a few months ago.) The family’s Mormon faith is a largely unspoken but persistent undercurrent of their social media empire.

I started reading “Yesteryear” while I was in Utah a few weeks ago, visiting both the Ballerina Farm in Kamas and the store/café in Midway. It was hard not to see similarities between the Neelemans’ farm and the novel’s, including outrageous prices for their farm products. (Bone Broth Hot Cocoa mix: $46. A tiny pack of “Willa Sourdough Starter”: $18.)

(RNS photo/Jana Riess)

(RNS photo/Jana Riess)

(RNS photo/Jana Riess)

But if the novel begins with similar threads — a large religious family, bolstered by inherited wealth, becomes internet-famous — Natalie and Caleb’s lives take a darker turn.

What their Instagram followers don’t see is the army of low-paid laborers who keep both farm and family going. Fertilizers and pesticides are sprayed at night all over their “organic” fields of harvest. Natalie is distant from her children, who are being raised by nannies, and she despises Caleb.

Caleb is aimless; Natalie is nothing if not focused. So she focuses on fixing him, steering him away from his natural inclinations (nurturing children, having fun) toward an acceptably rugged form of Christian masculinity: farming. The central tragedy of the novel is how unsuited they both are to their assigned gender roles, and their utter inability to imagine a different, happier life. Natalie is a terrible wife and mother, but she’d be excellent at roles that are closed to her, like dictator of a small country. Caleb has zero leadership ability, but he’d be a stellar kindergarten teacher, a job considered beneath a righteous Christian man.

That’s where things stand when suddenly, the novel morphs into a horror story. Natalie wakes up in the year 1855, having apparently traveled back in time to Yesteryear farm. Unlike the nostalgically “authentic” farm she has curated for online consumption, this one is fully beaten down and ramshackle. Her 21st-century tradwife life, made possible by immigrant labor and high-tech machines, has devolved into a continuous round of washing mud-encrusted laundry until her knuckles bleed.

The people are different, too. Her 1855 husband, also named Caleb, is a hardened, abusive and weirdly capable version. Her children are not her real children though they keep calling her “Mama.” Natalie comes to believe she’s been cast in a hard-core frontier reality show. If she can play her role correctly until she figures out a way to escape, she may survive.

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Religion is the backdrop threading through both timelines. Twenty-first-century Natalie thanks God for all His blessings (and it’s always “His” with a capital H) and apologizes to Him for her many curse-laden inner monologues, rendered in italics in the novel. 1855 Natalie, by contrast, prays for rescue and tries to view the unforgiving landscape as a test of her faith. All the while, she’s realizing that life for women under full-fledged patriarchy is far more terrifying than the version she has cosplayed online.

Various reviewers have commented that the characters don’t seem to truly embody one recognizable strand or denomination. This is evangelical Christianity, but a watered-down hodgepodge. It even has vestiges of Mormonism — for example, one evangelical character quotes Dieter Uchtdorf’s “doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith,” which Natalie recognizes as “an old Sunday School line.” There’s no defining characteristic to this brand of fundamentalist Christianity, other than conservative gender roles and MAGA politics.

This has led some readers to fault the author as not knowing much about religion, saying she doesn’t go deep enough into any one Christian tradition to make the story believable. I disagree. The novel accurately depicts how shallow American religion has actually become. From a sociology of religion standpoint, she has hit the nail exactly on the head. And that makes for an unflinching portrait.

In an interview with Lauren Jackson of The New York Times, the author says she grew up Catholic, but she made Natalie an unspecified fundamentalist Protestant. Natalie is attracted to the trappings of religion, but not wedded to theological belief per se:

. . . her relationship to her religion kind of moves in and out. She is not someone who is attached to the doctrine. She doesn’t understand scripture. Her relationship is very transactional.

I feel like I’ve spent the last decade watching people in power try on and then take off elements of religious strategy to see what works best.

Giving Natalie a specific denomination, Burke noted, would distract readers from seeing the commonality between religious fundamentalisms, like that they all limit women and are concerned about power. It would also “imply more of an intelligence than Natalie has about her own religion.”  

Bingo. Natalie is a stand-in for millions of other Americans who like the idea of religion but don’t actually know much about it. They may own several Bibles and remember a few verses, but the “biblical Christianity” they’ve imbibed is about an inch deep.

Sociologists of religion and political scientists have been tracking this shift for decades. In the 1980s, Princeton University’s Robert Wuthnow wrote of the “restructuring of American religion,” in which Americans stopped caring about the theological differences between Christian denominations and started caring about the political ones.

What mattered a hundred years ago was where your church stood on issues like infant baptism or eternal punishment. What matters now is where your church stands on Donald Trump.

Politics leads religion now, not the other way around. Political identities have become oddly fixed, while religious ones are only sparsely grounded in actual religion.

This is a transformation that “Yesteryear” understands intuitively. Natalie and the family she marries into are defined not by Christian faith but by the politics of Christian nationalism. It’s only when she’s abruptly torn from that world that she begins to glimpse something deeper.

If the novel came with a black box warning, it would be: Be careful what you wish for, America. You just might get it.

 What the Pentagon’s Snub of Mormons Was Really All About

by Sarah Posner

06.09.26 | TPM

President Trump and Defense Sec Pete Hegseth. TPM illustration/Getty Images.

In Church, Merch, and State, Sarah Posner writes about the intersection of religion and politics in the United States. This column is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), an ardent Trump loyalist, recently got a taste of what it’s like to be a disfavored religion in the Christian nationalist world of MAGA. He was triggered by the news, broken by the defense news site Military.com, that the Pentagon had eliminated 180 recognized religious faiths in order to “streamline the DoW [sic] collection of religious preferences collection [sic] for service members to enhance the delivery of targeted religious support from the Chaplaincy.” The Pentagon’s new list of what it calls Religious Affiliation Codes classified a number of religions, like Methodists and Baptists, as Christian. But Lee’s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was not listed among the “Christian” faiths. He demanded — on X, of course, because United States Senators have no other means of either commanding attention or acquiring information — “why The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was left out of the list of Christian churches.”

Lee and other LDS lawmakers spent several days futilely seeking answers to that question. By midday Monday, Lee had lodged his complaint with management — that is, he called President Donald Trump, who “loves Latter-day Saints,” Lee assured his followers on X. The Pentagon then released a new list, which did not classify any religion as Christian. Was it a win? A win would have been for the LDS Church to have been included among the Christian faiths. Convincing the public that, yes, a religion that has the words Church of Jesus Christ in its name was actually Christian had been at the top of the senator’s to-do list this weekend. That the Pentagon chose to excise the Christian label entirely rather than apply it to Lee’s church was quite telling. But Lee declared victory anyway, writing on X that he was “grateful” to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth for “correcting the error.” 

It’s hard to imagine why such a new classification system was even necessary, other than being another step in Hegseth’s march to his personal brand of Christian supremacy. Hegseth reportedly insisted on whittling the list down because the number of religions practiced by members of the military had “ballooned” to over 200 religions and needed to be reduced to an apparently very arbitrary 31. The new list omits, among others, atheists and Unitarian Universalists. In announcing the revised, Lee-approved list, the Pentagon wrote on X that “the Pentagon’s job is not to adjudicate theological debates, but instead to ensure sincerely-held faith is respected and encouraged in our ranks.” 

But “adjudicating theological debates” is precisely what the Pentagon has done. Hegseth has made no secret of his religious agenda, as evidenced by his monthly prayer meetings on government property, at which his religious mentor, the Christian nationalist Doug Wilson, has preached. Wilson is not shy about his antipathy to the LDS Church. He has written that “Mormonism is not Christian” and is “a false gospel.” In April, responding to reader mail on his blog, Wilson thanked a correspondent, an Army chaplain, for the “heads up” about the “disturbing trend” of Mormon chaplains in the Corps. The reader prayed that Wilson could wield his “significant influence in certain spheres” to do something about this “heresy.”

The entire “reclassification” effort was sure to trigger complaints of both a constitutional and personal nature. But Lee, who has long shaped his political identity around his supposed expertise in the Constitution, had a deeply personal, not constitutional beef. Resolving it was also a personal matter: he expressed no concern that the list, or Hegseth’s hyper-sectarian prayer meetings, may run afoul of the First Amendment’s Establishment and Free Exercise clauses. Instead, his campaign to have his own faith properly categorized as Christian was a cry for inclusion (oh, no! not that!) in the MAGA circle. As much as Lee prides himself on his MAGA bonafides, at its religious heart MAGA is an evangelical movement, and evangelicals have long considered Mormons weird outsiders, non-Christians, and even members of a cult. In the 1990s, former President Jimmy Carter, a Southern Baptist, received blowback for questioning his brethren’s insistence that Mormons are not Christians.

Years later, Republicans contentiously chose a Mormon as their nominee for president. That nominee, Mitt Romney, had to try for the nomination twice — first in 2008, when his rival, the former Arkansas governor and Southern Baptist pastor Mike Huckabee, was forced to apologize for wondering aloud in an interview with the New York Times whether Mormons believe Jesus and Satan were brothers. (They don’t, but it’s quite a common distortion promoted by those hostile to the LDS Church.) When Romney ran again in 2012, this time successfully securing the nomination, he had to endure attacks from another Southern Baptist minister, Robert Jeffress, who later went on to be one of Trump’s first evangelical endorsers and most loyal supporters. Jeffress called Mormonism a “cult,” with anti-LDS sentiment taking center stage at the 2011 Values Voter Summit, which at the time was otherwise a typically cohesive affair of religious conservatives with shared opposition to abortion and LGBTQ people and other demonized outsiders. Later, Trump would do something Romney couldn’t pull off — win over evangelicals.

AN AMERIKAN KULT

For 2 centuries, Latter-day Saints have revered religious freedom – but their definition is evolving

(The Conversation) — Latter-day Saints have long valued the US Constitution’s promise of religious freedom – but the church has also tested its boundaries.

Leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have called for a fast on July 5, 2026, to give thanks for religious liberty. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

Nicholas Shrum and Benjamin Park
June 2, 2026 at 1:48 p.m. ET


(The Conversation) — On July 5, 2026, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is encouraging its American members to participate in a special fast: a day to “express gratitude for religious liberty and to pray that it be strengthened throughout the world,” in the words of its top three leaders.

The fast will coincide with the United States’ semiquincentennial celebrations. For Latter-day Saints, the 250th anniversary commemorations are not merely a historic milestone for the country, but an opportunity to reflect on their faith’s relationship to the American experiment. In the church’s early decades, that relationship often tested the boundaries of religious liberty – and the church’s own understanding of that principle has been evolving ever since.
Divine plan

From the faith’s beginnings in the 1830s, founder Joseph Smith frequently emphasized the significance of religious liberty. In one 1843 sermon, for example, Smith explained that “civil and religious liberty … were diffused into my soul by my grandfathers,” both of whom had fought in the war of independence.




Joseph Smith published the Book of Mormon in 1830.
Wikimedia Commons

Smith’s personal connection to the Revolution and the nation’s founding documents were central to the faith’s developing theology. Latter-day Saints believe that their church is a restoration of Jesus’ “only true and living church,” and that America’s founding helped make that possible. In other words, Mormonism exists because of the United States, specifically its tradition of religious freedom enshrined in the Constitution’s First Amendment.

According to this logic, America’s founding was a crucial part of God’s divine plan, accomplished by chosen servants. Its founding documents are treated with reverence, especially the Constitution.

One of Smith’s own revelations declared that God “established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose,” suggesting divine intervention.

‘Kingdom of God’

However, Latter-day Saints soon came to doubt whether the United States was truly a land of religious freedom.

Early on, the small Mormon church faced persecution – especially in Missouri and Illinois, where state-sanctioned mobs forced members to flee. After Smith was killed by a mob in 1844, his successor, Brigham Young, decided to lead Latter-day Saints outside the country’s borders into present-day Utah, which was then northern Mexico.

Yet on their path to the Great Basin region, the federal government enlisted a group of church members to serve in the Mexican-American War. Known as the Mormon Battalion, they marched into Mexican territory under an American flag with only 13 stars. It was a symbolic protest: the U.S. they hoped to represent was the one that existed during the American Revolution, not the one with 28 states that had chased them out. They saw their own church, not the current government, as the revolutionaries’ true inheritor.




An 1863 depiction of Salt Lake City, which had been founded about 15 years earlier.
Wikimedia Commons

Once the war was over, the U.S. annexed much of Mexico’s land, including the Utah region. For about two decades the church had latitude to establish what it called its “Kingdom of God” in the West, in line with church doctrine. But the federal government soon cracked down, particularly on the church’s commitment at the time to polygamy and theocracy: beliefs that Mormons insisted were protected by the First Amendment.

The ensuing legal and political battles lasted for four decades, testing the boundaries of American religious liberty. Only after the Supreme Court ruled against a church member with two wives in 1879, and Congress passed legislation to further enforce anti-polygamy laws, did the church publicly forfeit the practice in 1890.

Yet even amid these struggles, Latter-day Saint devotion to the founding generation continued. In 1877, for example, Wilford Woodruff, who later became president of the church, declared that he had received a vision of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. The signers “gathered around me, wanting to know why we did not redeem them” by offering them Latter-day Saint ordinances for the deceased.

An American flag draped over the Salt Lake Temple in 1896, the year Utah became a state.
Charles Ellis Johnson/Wikimedia Commons

Though Woodruff’s vision has become the subject of Mormon folklore, it represents how deeply a certain strain of Americanism became woven into church culture in the 19th century. Just as Smith’s revelations had done a generation before, this vision and the sentiments behind it elevated the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution to quasi-scripture.

Shifting focus

During the 20th century the church continued to “Americanize,” such as by embracing U.S. capitalism and participating in the two-party system. Talk about religious freedom shifted away from primarily seeking protection for religious minorities toward protection for their own theological commitments as part of a Christian mainstream.


Ezra Taft Benson, then president of the church, delivered an address in 1987 on the Constitution’s sacred significance.

By the mid-1900s, church leaders had embraced a conservative view of politics and law that championed limited government. Paralleling broader American attitudes during the Cold War, which pitted “godless” Soviet communism against American democracy and freedom of religion, Latter-day Saints used the language of religious freedom to advocate for their own interpretations of religion’s role in the public square.

Latter-day Saint leaders’ list of perceived threats evolved from New Deal legislation and civil rights protections to abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment and, finally, homosexuality – similar to other conservative Christian groups’ concerns. The church got involved in a number of legal cases and campaigns opposing same-sex unions.

Since the 2015 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage across the United States, the church’s public policy stance has focused on compromise, balancing protection of religious liberties with protection against discrimination for LGBTQ+ people in housing and employment.



Dallin Oaks, a former Utah Supreme Court justice who is now president of the church, delivered a landmark speech on religious liberty at the University of Virginia in 2021.




A global church

What becomes clear across the past two centuries is that definitions of religious freedom have substantially changed, including for Latter-day Saints. In the 19th century, church members focused on protecting all minority religious groups like themselves against the Protestant majority. Today, the church’s messaging on religious freedom, at least in the United States, usually concerns protecting beliefs that clash with secular progressivism and LGBTQ+ protections. Overall, its approach has largely aligned with the religious right.

Equally significant, a majority of the church’s members now live outside the United States, and it is eager to present an image that is less American and more universal. Instead of elevating the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as quasi-scripture, leaders tend to highlight principles of religious freedom that are applicable across the globe.

The July fast will highlight “the importance of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and how these documents support religious freedom,” but it will also call for expanding liberty around the world. The day will be an opportunity for Latter-day Saints to reflect on their own place in the American story – a place that is still being defined.

This article has been updated to clarify how Joseph Smith was killed.

(Benjamin Park, Associate Professor of History, Sam Houston State University. Nicholas Shrum, Doctoral Student in Religious Studies, University of Virginia. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)