Michelle Mueller

New Religions and the Mediation of Non-Monogamy examines the relationship between alternative American religions and the media representation of non-monogamies on reality-TV shows like Sister Wives, Seeking Sister Wife, and Polyamory: Married & Dating. The book is the first full-length study informed by fieldwork with Mormon polygamists and fieldwork with LGBTQ Neo-Pagan/Neo-Tantric polyamorists. The book tracks community members' responses to the new media about them, their engagement with television and other media, and the likeness of representations to actual populations through fieldwork and interviews.
The book highlights differences in socioeconomic privileges that shape Mormon polygamists' lives and LGBTQ polyamorists' lives, respectively. The polyamory movement receives support from liberal media. As reality TV has shifted the image of Mormon polygamy to one of liberal American middle-class culture, Mormon polygamists have gained in public favor. The media landscape of non-monogamy is mediated by, in addition to these alternative religious populations, the norms and practices of the reality-TV industry and by sociocultural and economic realities, including race and class.
This book adds to the fields of media studies, critical race and gender studies, new religious movements, and queer studies.

Mormon polygamy has become a popular subject for contemporary reality television shows. TLC's polygamy reality shows center around Mormon polygamist families from the families' points of view. In contrast from these, Lifetime/A&E Networks' Escaping Polygamy (2014-) centers around three twenty-something ex-members of a Mormon fundamentalist sect known as the Kingston group. The show depicts the ex-members as heroines who rescue other young adults as they are leaving Mormon polygamist sects. In this article, Escaping Polygamy is interpreted as an "atrocity tale" that relies on a history of moral panic around Mormon polygamy and perpetuates reductive stereotypes about Mormon fundamentalist groups. After an evaluation depending on content analysis of the series and informal interviews with key individuals represented on the series, this article explores the possible damage Escaping Polygamy causes for Mormon polygamist sects and even the young adults shown leaving the groups.

Since the 1970s, some religious practitioners of the contemporary Pagan movement (a.k.a. Neo-Paganism) have embraced spiritual BDSM, or "sacred kink," as a spiritual discipline relating to their tradition. The "sex wars," debates around pornography, prostitution, and sadomasochism, have appeared in the history of Wicca and contemporary Paganism. Pagan feminists have brought theological questions to the same debates. They have focused on the Wiccan Rede ("harm none") and the affirmation of pleasure in Doreen Valiente's Charge of the Goddess that states that, "All acts of pleasure are [the Goddess's] rituals." While support for BDSM has become the dominant public perspective in twenty-first-century Paganism, the movement's late twentieth-century history includes instances of anguish as individuals wrestled with their personal sexual desire and their feminist principles.