Layla Taylor wasn’t born into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she chose it – secretly.
When she was in high school, she would sneak out of her house with a backpack in hand, carrying a dress that she would change into before going to church. Layla, like all teenagers, was looking for something — in her case, a traditional family structure — and she thought the LDS church held the key. Looking back, she’s not sure it worked.
“Since I’m divorced at 24 with two kids, probably not,” she says with a laugh.
Layla is one of the stars of Hulu’s Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, a reality show centered around the dramas of a group of Mormon moms who are TikTok stars. Secret Lives, the first season of which covered the aftermath of a swinging scandal among married members of #MomTok, platforms a new kind of Mormonism: one in which the patriarchy is challenged, norms are confronted or shattered completely, and women take the helm of the family as breadwinners. In the first season, we see Layla getting her footing, freshly divorced and figuring out her life as a single mom of two. In season two, which premieres on May 15, Layla is coming back more confident, ready to bare it all for the audience. At 24, she’s already lived a whole life, and now she’s welcoming audiences into her second act.
When Layla was growing up, she had what she calls a “messy home life,” her parents divorcing when she was 7 years old. In the aftermath of their split, Layla says she craved the kind of white-picket-fence family she saw friends in her hometown of Gilbert, Arizona, have. It also happens that Gilbert houses a large Mormon population, members of a church that stresses the importance of family. Layla learned about these values as a teen while at a friend’s house, staying into the evening for Bible study. The more she learned, the more Layla started to look to the church as a path toward the life she envisioned for herself — one that centered around the warmth of a nuclear family.
“As a little 16-year-old girl, I wanted that so bad for future me,” she remembers. “So I thought, if I converted to the church, then hopefully in the future I would have that happy family dynamic.”
Soon, she started sneaking away from home on Sundays for church services, attending with her friend and their family. After a while, Layla got baptized and officially became a Mormon convert. Still, she kept her new religion to herself. “I just knew [my family] would have their feelings about it,” she says. “At that point in my life, I just wanted to do it for myself and not have to hear what they were going to say.”
Layla made other plans in secret, too. While her dad encouraged her to apply to the University of California - Irvine (which she did, and was accepted), she wasn’t sold on attending college. “That was my dad’s original plan for me,” she says. “I was all set to go. Then my dad went on a business trip and while he was gone, I packed up my whole entire room.”
Just months after her high school graduation, and shortly before she was supposed to start college, Layla left her childhood home to move to Utah. She calls the decision “a whim. I felt a calling to come here,” she says, speaking via Zoom from her Utah home.
Once she got to Utah, she moved into an apartment on the campus of Brigham Young University, though she didn’t attend the school. She started a nannying job and enrolled in dental assisting school – and she downloaded Mutual, a dating app for LDS members.
That was how, just a week after moving to Utah, she met her future ex-husband. It felt almost divinely mandated: she had joined the church and moved to Utah and immediately met her person. “I was like, this is my little dream come true,” she remembers. The two dated on and off for a year, a relationship that Layla now describes as “toxic.” Then, she got pregnant. She was 19 years old.
The pregnancy fast-tracked the relationship. In her memory, her ex reacted well to the news, suggesting they get married. Two weeks after that, Layla says, they were engaged and moved into a basement apartment together. A month later, they were married. Everything Layla had hoped for when she joined the church seemed to be coming to fruition. She was forging her own path, creating her own idyllic family life, and all in quick time. So, why did she feel so scared?
The mood of Layla’s wedding day was foreboding, a red flag. “I was sick to my stomach the whole entire day, besides being pregnant,” she says. “It was eerie, almost. Deep down, I just knew that it wasn’t a good decision. But at that moment, I just felt like it was the only decision.”
In the Mormon faith, sex before marriage is considered a “serious sin.” So, when her unexpected pregnancy occurred, Layla says marriage felt like the only way to fix what she considered at the time a mistake. “I felt like that would undo the oopsie in my mind,” Layla says. “I purposefully got a super puffy wedding dress so it would hide the little bump that I did have. I was really, really scared.”
That fear was caused, in part, by the threat of judgment from her religious community. So, the couple got married and then had their first son, a boy named Oliver. When she was three months postpartum, her world slid sideways when she found out she was pregnant again. (She had thought, as many people do, that she couldn’t get pregnant while breastfeeding.) Thirteen months after her first son was born, Layla gave birth to a second child, a boy named Max. Throughout those years, Layla says the relationship between her and her husband was fraught but she was committed to making it work.
“It was killing me slowly, just begging someone to be with me and choose me,” she says. “Eventually, I just had to put myself first and choose myself.” Two happy households, she reasoned, would be better for her sons than one unhappy one. By the age of 21, she was separated from her husband, a single mother of two toddlers. And, she was embarrassed.
“I felt like I failed my family,” she says. “You're supposed to fight for your family regardless if you're happy or not. You're supposed to keep your family together forever.”
As a 24-year-old divorceé who, she says, sometimes drinks and has sex outside of marriage, Layla isn’t the platonic ideal of a Mormon churchgoer — certainly not the kind she idolized when she first joined the church. She doesn’t even go to church every week.
“I feel like I just take it day by day,” she says of her faith journey. “I’m not extremely active. Religion is definitely something hard and organized religion, especially. There’s the backbone of the church, the reason why I got baptized – the family aspect – that’s something I love.”
This is something that’s debated on the show, who adheres to the principals of the Mormon church the most, and who has strayed. In season one, this idea essentially divided the cast into two groups, nicknamed ‘the Sinners’ and ‘the Saints’. The faction of the cast known as the saints are made up of the more devout members who attend church regularly and abide by many of the rules of the religion. The sinners stand in opposition: they eschew the doctrines of traditional Mormonism and, sometimes, judge the saints for accepting them.
This divide, though, was over seemingly small quibbles, at least to an outsider. Each of the members of MomTok discussed breaking norms and portraying a new version of Mormonism, but still argued over who adhered to those sometimes outdated ideas the best.
Though she still attends church sometimes and still considers herself a Mormon, Layla was in the sinners group in season 1. Talking about her faith today, Layla’s feelings about religion seem almost contradictory. She takes her faith day by day, but she also feels conflicted logically and morally — even though she joined the church, in part, for its family morals.
As she’s gotten older, Layla has learned things about the church that make her uncomfortable, particularly as a biracial woman. There are aspects of the church that Layla says she finds sexist, and she struggles dealing with race, too. Black members of the church weren’t allowed to hold the priesthood until 1978 and Black members were barred from “sealing”, a ceremony which the religion believes makes family relationships eternal. (Today, the church notes that members of all races are welcome, and racism is not.)
Layla says she’s often the only person of color in church services, and she’s notably the only person of color on the show — something that weighs on her. “There’s definitely a lot of responsibility… because I am representing a whole race,” she says. It’s not the fault of her castmates, Layla adds, but they can’t understand what it’s like to be a person of color. (And that’s not even touching politics. While Layla guesses that her castmates are mostly conservative, she is “definitely liberal. When it comes down to it, I think that human rights is the most important thing.”)
Layla struggles with her faith because of all this. “Sometimes it's very hard for me to have faith in something that, again, just goes against me, morally,” she says. But, it’s all complicated.
“I think that the church is evolving with time, and it’s not perfect because it’s run by man and man is not perfect,” she says. “I just try to look at it with grace. I feel like I have a really good relationship with God and Jesus. But I think, personally, for me, the church on its own is what is hard for me sometimes.”
Moving to Utah, getting pregnant, married, then divorced — it’s all because of her faith, in a way. Seeking that “perfect” family landed Layla in a sometimes pretty tough situation, especially once she divorced her husband.
Life as a single mother was difficult, she says, and rife with financial difficulties. She couldn’t work because she couldn’t afford daycare for her two sons. There were times when she had to borrow money from her family to pay her rent, she says. Other times, she would skip eating so she could afford to feed her kids. Her eyes cloud over as she remembers those days but then she brightens.
“I wouldn’t have survived, honestly, if it wasn’t for MomTok,” she says. “As cheesy as that sounds.”
Layla joined MomTok in 2022, when Taylor Frankie Paul, known as the architect of MomTok, sent Layla a direct message to invite her to come hang and make content.
Before that, Layla was posting motherhood content on TikTok, but only had a few thousand followers. She knew the other MomTok women through the Mormon community and was grateful to be included. “It was just a way for moms to have fun and have an outlet outside of motherhood,” she says. “Because I feel like when you do become a mom, you lose yourself a little bit.”
Layla’s entry into MomTok eventually paved the way for her casting in Secret Lives of Mormon Wives; when the first season aired, Layla’s social media star continued to climb. She landed brand deals and sponsorships. “I literally bawled my eyes out when I saw [that first] paycheck [from a brand deal]. It’s just amazing, the fact that I’m going to be able to give my kids a good life and the life that they deserve.” Now, when she grocery shops, she tells me proudly, she doesn't have to take things out of her cart because of the cost.
Now a bonafide reality television star and social media influencer, Layla can’t believe her own luck. “Every day, I just pinch myself. I don’t think I’m ever going to fully be able to understand, but I’m so grateful.”
In season two, Layla is different. She’s come out of her shell, she says. “I went into season 1 a little timid and scared and didn’t want to say the wrong thing. I didn’t want to open up too much because what if the public hated me?” But after season 1 aired, the response from viewers was overwhelmingly positive.
TikTok content
Case in point: the moment when Layla revealed she’d never had an orgasm. The confession came about accidentally, she says.
“I remember we were at Mayci [Neeley]’s house, and that was when Whitney [Leavitt] told us about the brand deal that she was going to take with the vibrator company. Whitney said something random like, ‘Yeah, I have this friend that's 20 years old, and she's married, and she's never had an orgasm,’” Layla remembers. “I thought she was pranking me for a second. I was like, ‘Oh, are you talking about me?’”
Leavitt wasn’t talking about her, so Layla accidentally confessed on television that she’d never had an orgasm. When she realized what had happened, Layla was embarrassed. She was new to filming and worried about how she might be perceived (not to mention that her dad would be watching).
Layla’s castmates reassured her, and when the show aired, their reassurances were confirmed. Layla says she got so many messages from other young women, thanking her for speaking up about her experience.
“A lot of women think that it's okay to not be pleasured,” she says. “I was just happy that I was able to normalize [talking about] it to the point that women felt comfortable to DM me and message me and just ask for advice. I was able to help some of them and send recommendations for things.”
What kind of things? Vibrators, mostly, Layla says. To find out whether she’s now had an orgasm, Layla says something that perfectly illustrates the difference between who she is now and who she was when we first met her on television. The somewhat reserved, very unsure emerging divorcée is now a more self-actualized woman, ready to reveal her secrets, but not before it’s time.
“You're going to have to wait,” she says slyly, “for season two.”
