Q&A with Natalie Brown, author of After Happiness September 14 2026

Greg Kofford Books caught up with Natalie Brown to ask her about her recently released book, After Happiness: Living with Faith in a Time of Crisis.

The Core Thesis: Happiness is a Recent Emphasis within the Church

Q. In your book, you trace how the concept of “happiness” is a relatively recent, late-twentieth-century emphasis within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its culture, heavily influenced by post-war American capitalism and individualism. What initially sparked your interest in examining these cultural “happiness formulas” and their enmeshment with church culture and discourse?

A. I am an elder millennial who was raised in an affluent community during the 1990s. This was a period of unusual prosperity and stability in the United States as well as in my family. During that period, we frequently heard—or perhaps wanted to hear—that following the gospel would lead to happiness. We were given individualistic formulas for what it meant to live a righteous and happy life. To paraphrase Nephi, however, I was exceedingly young.

From the vantage point of 2026, it’s an understatement to say that life has not gone as planned, despite many of us doing all the right things. As an adult, I have mourned the loss of my academic career ambitions, the loss of our country’s stability, and, on a personal level, the loss of my father. My own children have already experienced a pandemic, a mass shooting in our neighborhood, and a wildfire that burned over a thousand homes in nearby communities.

The messaging and expectations I grew up with now strike me as artifacts of a more privileged time. The idea that doing the right things will lead to happiness feels naïve. We need a faith that is resilient enough to provide strength even in unhappy times. So, I began studying the Book of Mormon more urgently and pondering the legacy of my father (who became disabled when I was in high school yet managed to move forward with purpose and optimism) in a search for other values and perspectives that were obscured during happier times.

Q. You chart how the Church increasingly emphasized happiness in the late-twentieth century. In its emphasis on happiness, was the Church mirroring other trends in the United States?

A. Absolutely. The concept of “happiness” is powerful in this era because happiness has so much secular currency in our individualistic, capitalist society. Our society’s emphasis on happiness hit home for me while I was a stay-at-home mother. During this period, people would repeatedly feel the need to affirm my circumstances by applauding me for choosing what I “wanted” or doing what made me “happy.” The thing is, I did not want to be a stay-at-home mother. I wanted to be a professor and a mother, but that didn’t work out. Mothers today, however, are asked to justify their families in terms of personal happiness and agency. I hear Latter-day Saint mothers using this rhetoric all the time to defend having children.

Our society tends to only affirm our pursuits if they align with our desires. It’s some kind of character flaw or sign of failure if we are unhappy or self-sacrificing. We often do not want to see or acknowledge the experiences of people who feel less than happy—or who are intentionally sacrificing their happiness—because unhappiness challenges the contemporary values, religious frameworks, and socio-economic structures through which we have organized our lives. It is easier to ignore, for example, the lack of material support our communities provide parents when children are viewed primarily as the happy products of individual choice. There’s more sense of collective responsibility for the next generation when we collectively see raising children as a commandment that is essential to the Lord’s plan.

Grieving and Cultural Policing

Q. You highlight Walter Brueggemann’s work regarding how real criticism begins with the visceral capacity to grieve, drawing a distinction between our baptismal covenant to mourn and a cultural mandate to project positivity. You center mourning in this book and argue for its transformative power as you narrate your father’s experience with disability and your lost academic career ambitions. Why do you think Latter-day Saint culture is often so quick to police expressions of unhappiness or dismiss discontent as mere complaining?

A. Latter-day Saints often point to their happiness as evidence that the gospel is true. In our self-narration, Latter-day Saints’ happiness marks us as different, and our happiness is grounded in our knowledge of the gospel. As a child, I routinely heard mission stories about nonmembers inquiring as to why Latter-day Saints are so happy. There’s heavy pressure to perform happiness when happiness is viewed as evidence of the gospel’s truth—and personal happiness or prosperity become viewed as evidence that you are leading a righteous life.

These attitudes, however, did not come out of nowhere. I spend several pages in After Happiness documenting how these tendencies need to be understood in light of the very real persecution the Saints faced. For example, Susa Young Gates, a daughter of Brigham Young and one of the most influential female voices in the Latter-day Saint tradition, erased references to polygamy in the second version of her novel John Stevens’ Courtship as the need to disassociate the Church from polygamy became more urgent. Church members are still often sensationalized and depicted in unflattering terms in mainstream media. Projecting happiness and concealing unhappiness may be a learned or inherited way of countering negative views of Latter-day Saints.

Influencer Culture

Q. Do you see intersections between the Church’s emphasis on happiness and LDS influencer culture?

A. Oh, yes. The success of Latter-day Saint influencers is a logical extension of our performance of happiness and twentieth-century domestic ideals. What I find interesting, however, is that the family ideals and lifestyles some of the more “traditional” influencers perform are now out of reach for many members and for Americans more generally. People envy the ability to live ideals that many middle-class Americans once assumed were possible. Personally, I have gone from youthful frustration at the overly rigid gender roles in the 1995 family proclamation to middle-aged regret that forming families and having a parent who can stay home is now so difficult.

A Community Faith Crisis with Economic Roots

Q. You argue that the Church’s focus on happiness has left members struggling to respond to a moment in which the aspirations we associated with happiness are increasingly out of reach. Can you explain more?

A. I think our faith community is in a crisis that is less about truth claims than about the collapse of the economic, social, and political structures on which the modern church was built. When I was growing up in the 1990s, for example, the model of the nuclear family outlined in the 1995 family proclamation was often depicted as the primary gospel formula for finding happiness. Today, this formula is economically out of reach for many couples and often fails to translate globally. Moreover, adult members are increasingly single.

This has huge practical consequences for a church whose basic operations and staffing assumed a critical mass of families, with fathers who could fill priesthood functions and mothers who could provide volunteer service. It also has spiritual consequences. Doing the right things, and living in a certain way, was supposed to lead to happiness. For many people, however, it didn’t. Even those who could live these ideals sometimes found that they did not feel happy doing so. Unhappy members are conceptual challenges for the Church precisely because it has so often emphasized the connection between the gospel and happiness.

To be clear, I think there was a real need for the Church to move towards more individualized models of the gospel. The teachings when I was in Young Woman’s were too inflexible and too focused on performing Utah-centric cultural norms. It was hard to find room for my own desires in church teachings, and there was a lot of judgment of those who failed to conform. However, we have perhaps now overcorrected and don’t have effective ways of theorizing what it means to respect our individual authority and desires while also engaging with institutional forms of authority.

Q. You point out that modern national crises, economic shifts, a housing shortage, and dual-income necessity have placed the traditional nuclear family model from the 1995 family proclamation out of reach for many young adults. How can the Church adapt its language to relieve the profound anxiety members feel when they cannot perform this sanctioned script?

A. We can’t fix what are fundamentally economic and political problems merely by tweaking our language. In fact, I argue that part of the problem with happiness language is that it became centered on individuals while we deemphasized our material and economic relationships with each other. We are seeing the Church trying to adapt its language for a global church by centering Christ and focusing on individual covenants. Christ and covenants surely must be at the center of our faith. However, simply pointing to Christ and covenants does not answer important questions about how to live ethically in the now, does not address our deep societal problems, and does not provide the community so many of us feel is missing.

We need a practical religion and relationships with each other as well as Christ and covenants. My instinct is that we should have more local ability to innovate and build communities that meet the unique needs of members in different areas. I also think we should lean in to the scriptures to find a unifying message and identity since cultural norms about gender, families, and homes do not translate well globally. I thought Emily Belle Freeman’s recent example of rooting the new Young Women’s names in scripture rather than cultural norms was very effective. The scriptures encompass stories from many cultures and periods and can serve as a common canon.

The Book of Mormon, in fact, begins as a response to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Nephites’ need to build a new society after a cultural rupture that is even bigger than our own. One of the first things the Lord commands is for Lehi’s sons to retrieve the brass plates. The new society needs to be rooted in scripture rather than in Jerusalem’s culture, most of which Nephi intriguingly decides not to pass on. Scripture can provide us with continuity and a map forward. In fact, I argue in After Happiness that Nephi is a model of how to we can expand and adapt our faith in response to our own societal rupture.

Q. Is there a term you think is more rooted in our faith and scriptures than “happiness?”

A. “Joy” is used more often in the scriptures and conference talks than “happiness,” but it too is poorly defined and often conflated with happiness in our present usage. It’s become the kind of word you see on wall décor or a Christmas card. I came to prefer Nephi’s term “tender mercies” as a more accurate description of what occurs in this life than happiness. The scriptures rarely depict people who are happy. They typically show people who sacrifice, serve, and endure to the end in contexts that are very hard. However, the gospel can make our burdens light. By contrast, it’s actually Laman and Lemuel who complain in the Book of Mormon that they are not happy and want to go back to Jerusalem because they can’t accept that it has failed.

More profoundly, when Nephi speaks of the emotions surrounding his relationship with the Lord, he describes something far stronger and more palpable than anything we associate today with happiness or joy. Nephi says, “He hath filled me with his love, even unto the consuming of my flesh” (2 Nephi 4: 21). That’s what I want to feel and be transformed by.

Communitarian Zion vs. Individual Self-Reliance

Q. Historically, leaders like Brigham Young advocated for a communitarian Zion. However, you argue that the modern Church has largely replaced this communal vision with an individualistic version of “self-reliance” and localized family responsibility. What do we structurally and spiritually lose when a religious community privatizes the responsibility for systemic vulnerabilities?

A. In a Zion society, there is “no poor among them.” It’s hard for me to practically envision how to achieve such a society today. However, I think it’s important that we think seriously about this question and take the actions we can to materially uplift others and protect our shared environmental resources. We cannot be united when some groups are left behind for the benefit of a few.

I’m a big fan of doctrines like tithing and the Word of Wisdom that ask us to make real sacrifices of our own happiness for the sake of the community. Samuel Brown and Kate Holbrook observed that prohibitions on substances like alcohol are not just laws of individual health but also laws to protect the community from problems like alcoholism that can adversely impact generations. These kinds of communal laws can be correctives to an over-emphasis on personal happiness and build community.

Staying in the Faith

Q. Are you an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?

A. Despite the suspicion surrounding people who write for The Salt Lake Tribune, I am an active, lifelong member and hope to remain one. My own faith crisis (for lack of a better term) was about academia—not the Church—and I share a bit of that story here.

Q. You open up about the systemic obstacles you faced as a highly educated woman within a patriarchal church hierarchy where your credentials tend to provoke suspicion rather than praise. Why do you stay?

A. People routinely ask why I remain in a church that sometimes fails in its treatment women and other minorities. Others assume I am naïve or that I don’t know church history. My philosophy is to build Zion where I am and to work for progress in my own community because there are no perfect organizations. There’s certainly no new promised land to which I can flee.

I am a strong believer in the importance of institutions in maintaining our faith and society. Institutions are designed to outlast any one individual. I do not think the purpose of the Church (or of any institution) is to always reflect my views and priorities. Instead, I think the institutional Church is a space where we can ideally work through our differences and be keepers of our faith as we strive toward common purposes. Sometimes this process is messy. I understand why people leave. However, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is where I have had profound spiritual experiences and developed my most lasting communities. It’s where the Lord put me. Surprisingly, my wards have also been the spaces in which I have encountered the most economic and viewpoint diversity. People I have met through school, work, and neighborhoods tend to be very similar to me.

Of course, my views are solely my own. I have no insight into how the Church operates beyond what is publicly available and known to all members. I have never had a leadership calling. I have never had the privilege of teaching at BYU or working in the Church History Department. I have never met a General Authority. I certainly do not represent or speak for the Church or other members. However, every ordinary member has a story to tell.

After Happiness: Living with Faith in a Time of Crisis was published in paperback and as an ebook on July 21, 2026.