“It was a sh—ty party. There was nobody there. I was like, ‘These are your friends, Lisa?’ There was like five people there. I was just like, ‘Ugh.’” —Heather Gay, Latter-day Saints apostate
The distance between those two voices says everything you need to know about where the Bravo Network has chosen to stake its claim.
For Bravo has found religion—as in, found it to be a source of revenue.
Gay isn’t an outlier—she’s part of a growing class of paid-for apostates the media has marketed and embraced.
The network that gave the world 11 versions of the soapy, catty Real Housewives of [fill in the blank] has decided to descend one tier further by taking Real Housewives of Salt Lake City cast member, lapsed Mormon Heather Gay, and giving her a platform from which to badmouth her former faith.
That platform is called Surviving Mormonism.
Bravo has evidently concluded that, when presented alongside high cheekbones, inches of make up and carefully crafted lies, hate sells.
Heather Gay is an apostate—a former member of a faith who has since renounced it. The overwhelming majority of her fellow apostates simply move on, harboring no ill will toward their former religion. But then there are a few who commit themselves to defaming the spiritual community that once nurtured and sustained them.
And making a few dollars while they’re at it.
In other words, Gay isn’t an outlier—she’s part of a growing class of paid-for apostates the media has marketed and embraced.
These include ex-Muslim “Apostate Prophet” aka Ridvan Aydemir, who spreads his bile on Islam through YouTube videos pandering to (and profiting from) anyone with the stomach to listen.
And there’s also Leah Remini, who was provided a comfortable living by A&E, manufacturing rubbish about her former religion until, abandoned by sponsors and audiences alike, she was reduced to hosting a quiz show (and is now too toxic to sustain even that).
Their shtick follows a pattern so predictable it’s practically a case study—one scholars have long recognized: Apostates simply cannot be believed, as their “stories” are nothing more than vengeance masquerading as moral revelation.
As the late Dr. Bryan R. Wilson of Oxford University—an expert on religions—explained: “Neither the objective sociological researcher nor the court of law can readily regard the apostate as a creditable or reliable source of evidence. He must always be seen as one whose personal history predisposes him to bias with respect to both his previous religious commitment and affiliations. The suspicion must arise that he acts from a personal motivation to vindicate himself and to regain his self-esteem, by showing himself to have been first a victim but subsequently to have become a redeemed crusader.
“As various instances have indicated, he is likely to be suggestible and ready to enlarge or embellish his grievances to satisfy that species of journalist whose interest is more in sensational copy than in an objective statement of the truth.”
It’s why courts routinely dismiss the unreliable testimony of apostates.
But the media feeds on attention. Their fodder is the very “sensational copy” Dr. Wilson warns against.
Clickbait apostates thus find themselves in demand by outlets that trade on sensationalism and hate—and, as the author of multiple anti-LDS books, Ms. Gay has plenty to offer. First, she used her rep as a “Bad Mormon” to badmouth the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, and now she can spread her campaign of anti-religious bigotry into millions of American homes.
It’s downright dangerous.
Because apostates, for whatever twisted reason, crave revenge on the faith that once gave them comfort and community. They want that faith to die, no matter the cost in heartbreak or human lives, and that desire expresses itself via the deranged actors they incite into acts of real-world violence—violence the apostates are unwilling to commit themselves for fear of consequences.
This year, four people died at a Latter-day Saints church in Michigan when a man drove his vehicle through the front doors, opened fire on hundreds of worshippers inside, then set the building ablaze.
We can only wonder: What sent that hater over the edge? Did he watch Ms. Gay on TV? Did he read one of her anti-Mormon books?
But we don’t need to wonder where Erin McMurtry got her “inspiration” to ram her car through the doors of a Texas Church of Scientology. She posted her gratitude to Leah Remini online. Then, when informed no one had been hurt, she remarked, “That’s too bad.”
Likewise, hate crimes against Muslims continue to soar—and don’t think for a moment that the “Apostate Prophet” Aydemir and his YouTube screeds aren’t driving that shameful statistic.
Remini, Aydemir and Gay are three apostates who couldn’t give a flying fig for the millions of former friends whose faith they now smear if they can line their pockets by trashing their former religions.
And for every Remini or Gay, there are a dozen more—in line at the media’s ATM of hate, awaiting their 30 pieces of silver.
They count on bottom-feeders like Bravo to lay out the welcome mat for them.
And they oblige.
