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Allie Stuckey Sourdough

Allie Stuckey vs The Trad Wife Trend

Allie Stuckey is a Christian podcaster hosted on the Blaze Media network. Last week a controversy blew up on social media over a viral clip from Founders Ministries where Allie Stuckey criticized the trad wife trend on social media.

The trend of being a tradwife or having a trad life on social media, which is really less about traditional or biblical values and a lot more about aesthetics. And obviously, there’s nothing wrong with living on a farm and making your own sourdough and homesteading and all of those wonderful things. But because this has become a trend on TikTok and a trend on social media, unfortunately some people have made the mistake of conflating that so-called trad life and being a trad wife with being a biblical wife or a biblical mom, or having a biblical life while homesteading. And all of that is wonderful. It’s great. Motherhood for the Christian is obviously much more than a social media trend.

It’s not just something that you cosplay, put a costume on and play and pretend, um, it’s not just an aesthetic, it is a calling by God. And there are biblical standards, of course, that women are called to, but it is. They’re not standards that are set by social media. They’re not standards that are set by a TikTok trend. They’re not standards set by whatever social media influencer you follow that says, in order to be a good mom, you have to make your own sourdough. That’s a wonderful thing, but you can be a great and biblical wife and mom without doing some of those things, which is good news for me because I like to buy my sourdough.

These comments stirred a bit of controversy, mainly by her detractors within orthodox Christianity. Yet these comments were rather banal. It is well known that social media aesthetics create unrealistic expectations, and pointing out how God’s standard is a higher standard that cares less about aesthetics is edifying.

The references to sourdough come from a popular social media brand, Ballerina Farm, a Mormon wife of a billionaire. Megan Basham commented on the controversy and provided context on the exact trend that Stuckey is addressing that men might be unfamiliar with due to social media algorithms.

To the guys dragging Tom Ascol and Allie Beth Stuckey, I think you may not understand what we’re talking about here. I’d like you to watch a video. Now this woman has one of the most popular trad wife accounts on Instagram. Almost 9 million followers. She is willowy and lovely. Every image she posts looks like a spread from Joanna Gaines’s magazine, Magnolia Journal. She (famously) makes her own sourdough. She makes her own popsicles. She makes her own butter. Millions of women absorb this and they want this life. They think they’re failing if they’re grabbing the otter pops out of the freezer case to keep their sticky kids in their mismatched hand-me-downs busy for half an hour. But here’s some other fun facts about the ballerina farm wife. Her father-in-law is the founder of five airlines, including JetBlue. She and her husband are heirs to $1 billion fortune. Their stove costs $20k. And they sell soap for $22 and the starter kits for her famous sourdough for $89 These “trad wife” influencers can set young women up for disappointment and disillusionment because they portray homemaking as a consumer good. “Comment links to buy my $750 William Sonoma bread maker!” I am very pro homemaking. I am very anti selling women of false bill of goods that tells them that their homes will look like magazine spreads; their children will always be fresh faced, tidy, and camera-ready; and their days will be a maternal bliss of non-GMO, organic artisanal Farmers market fare. These accounts often (not always!) also market envy. NOT saying that’s all the trad life accounts. But there’s many of them that do. So I’d like to gently suggest you may not fully understand what Allie Beth is talking about here. And I think you guys would agree with me that this kind of thing *can* sometimes be an idol because it is not fixed on pursuing godliness as a wife and mother but on self glorification and greed.

The grifting nature of Ballerina Farm ripping off her followers with $22 dish soap and $89 kits to make sourdough whilst living in luxury is enough to call out this trend. Yet there are more sinister elements within, such as a Manosphere sexual degeneracy with extramarital sex.

Stuckey’s detractors seem to be focused on the aesthetics being good in that they positively impact women to aim higher than what feminism has sold them, but this is a low bar. Moreover, Stuckey is encouraging women not to judge their godliness based on social media comparisons. This is objectively good.

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