Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made

Summary

In her “paradigm-influencing” (Christianity Today) bestseller Jesus and John Wayne, which has changed how countless Americans understand their faith, historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez showed how evangelicals made Jesus into an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism. Now she uncovers the roots of today’s glittering, Instagram-ready culture of white Christian femininity.

Live Laugh Love explores a world intimately familiar to millions of American women: Christian bookstores and radio, Hallmark movies, multilevel marketing companies, and contemporary lifestyle brands. This consumer culture may seem trivial, but Du Mez demonstrates that it has an unlikely and revealing history that stretches all the way back to the late nineteenth century and the emergence of New Thought, a movement that championed the power of the mind to shape reality. Finding expression in the seemingly disparate traditions of Mormonism, holiness evangelicalism, and holiness theology’s charismatic offshoots, this idea gave rise to prosperity theologies and to the gospel of positive thinking.

But positivity had a dark side. Du Mez introduces us to religious innovators who taught that positive thinking was the secret to spiritual and material success, and reveals how these notions masked the systemic nature of inequality and contributed to a new feminine ideal. As women read prairie fiction, bought and sold Tupperware containers and Mary Kay makeup, decorated homes with shiplap, and shopped at Hobby Lobby, Target, and Altar’d State, they moved freely between the religious and the secular. Marketed as empowering, these products were part of a consumer culture that elevated domesticity and vulnerability while exposing women to systems susceptible to manipulation and control.

Combining sweeping cultural history with intimate storytelling, Du Mez shows how theological exclusion led women to build their own brand of Christianity, rich in cultural influence if thin in formal doctrine. Ultimately, Live Laugh Love explains how a powerful yet elusive vision of womanhood has shaped lives, families, and politics for more than a century now—and how it has brought us to our reactionary moment.

“Kristin Kobes Du Mez isn’t just one of our boldest historians; she’s also one of our finest writers of nonfiction. A brilliant, infuriating, inspiring read for anyone who wants to understand modern Christianity—and how it got that way.”—John Fugelsang, New York Times best-selling author of Separation of Church and Hate