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8 days and 01:03:20
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Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made
Not yet published
Expected 15 Sep 26Win a free print copy of this book!
8 days and 01:03:20
10 copies available
U.S. only
From the New York Times best-selling author of Jesus and John Wayne, a revelatory history of white Christian womanhood in the United States.
In Jesus and John Wayne, a book that 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 unearths the roots of the glittering, Instagram-ready culture of white Christian femininity.
Opening in the late nineteenth century, Live Laugh Love traces how New Thought, a movement that championed the power of the mind to shape reality, combined with holiness evangelicalism to create the world inhabited by millions of Christian women. Du Mez introduces us to religious innovators who taught that positivity was the secret to spiritual and material success and reveals how they worked through consumer culture: mommy blogs and romance novels, Hobby Lobby aisles and pastel-scripted wall art. Marketed as empowerment, these products and slogans elevate vulnerability and domesticity, and in the process draw women into systems prone to manipulation and abuse. In this brilliant recasting of modern American Christianity, Du Mez unearths the hidden origins of our reactionary moment.
In Jesus and John Wayne, a book that 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 unearths the roots of the glittering, Instagram-ready culture of white Christian femininity.
Opening in the late nineteenth century, Live Laugh Love traces how New Thought, a movement that championed the power of the mind to shape reality, combined with holiness evangelicalism to create the world inhabited by millions of Christian women. Du Mez introduces us to religious innovators who taught that positivity was the secret to spiritual and material success and reveals how they worked through consumer culture: mommy blogs and romance novels, Hobby Lobby aisles and pastel-scripted wall art. Marketed as empowerment, these products and slogans elevate vulnerability and domesticity, and in the process draw women into systems prone to manipulation and abuse. In this brilliant recasting of modern American Christianity, Du Mez unearths the hidden origins of our reactionary moment.
432 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication September 15, 2026
About the author
Kristin Kobes Du Mez
8 books807 followersBorn and raised in Iowa with brief sojourns in Tallahassee, FL, and Ostfriesland, Germany. PhD from the University of Notre Dame, and now I reside in Grand Rapids, MI. I have 3 kids, 2 chickens, and a dog, and I write on gender, religion, and politics.
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April 7, 2026Take all my money
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
“The was suppose to be the fun book.” Only the second paragraph in and I knew I was in for a ride. When I read a book like this I always feel compelled to give my credentials: I was homeschooled, I spent most of my life in a southern baptist church (the rest in presby-churches), and I live in the Bible Belt. Though I’ve read Jesus and John Wayne, I felt like someone on the outside looking in, recognizing things but never quite feeling like they touched my life in any drastic way. This book hit a lot closer to home and really shocked me at times (it is very hard to shock me anymore), I confess letting out a few expletives.
Something pervasive throughout this history was the influence of New Thought: a movement that pushed the idea of “right-thinking” that can heal, bless, and change a persons life for the better. Now we may call it “Word of Faith” or “Prosperity Gospel.” Out of that came books like the Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale, the Power of the Positive Woman by Phyllis Schlafly, and How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie just to name a few. The thinking was that if you just gave up and submitted to God (or to those above you who “represented” God) and thought positively, you would be healthy, wealthy and wise. Finally living the promised happy life. If you weren’t blessed with the desires of your heart, well, it was your fault for being lazy and negative.
This book covers many more pieces of history like Christian marketing of books and TV shows (Janet Oke novels and Little House on the Prairie), Contemporary Christian Music artists (Amy Grant, Stacie Orrico, Etc), Multi-Level Marketing schemes, Hallmark, and Christian women influencers like Elisabeth Elliot, who was “as close as one could come to evangelical sainthood.” Through recent biographies of Elliot, we find that much of her work came out during her third marriage to an abusive and controlling man. Even when her family tried to help her, Elliot stayed with her husband. Believing that “submission to her husband was obedience to God.” This wasn’t just Elliot’s message. Marabel Morgan, Anita Bryant, and Hannah Whitall Smith all preached a similar message to their ladies. Although is was much easier to preach submission than to live it as Bryant found out. Her husband/manager, pastor, marriage councilor, and all-male board, tried to control her money, engagements and events. When she fought them they threatened her. Bryant finally divorced her husband and the world she built came tumbling down around her. A woman who didn’t follow the rules couldn’t be trusted.
My kindle says that I highlighted 353 passages in this book. It was such a fascinating and horrifying history that, had I read a hard copy, the whole book may now be highlighted. In my opinion, like with Jesus and John Wayne, this is a must read for the church.
Something pervasive throughout this history was the influence of New Thought: a movement that pushed the idea of “right-thinking” that can heal, bless, and change a persons life for the better. Now we may call it “Word of Faith” or “Prosperity Gospel.” Out of that came books like the Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale, the Power of the Positive Woman by Phyllis Schlafly, and How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie just to name a few. The thinking was that if you just gave up and submitted to God (or to those above you who “represented” God) and thought positively, you would be healthy, wealthy and wise. Finally living the promised happy life. If you weren’t blessed with the desires of your heart, well, it was your fault for being lazy and negative.
This book covers many more pieces of history like Christian marketing of books and TV shows (Janet Oke novels and Little House on the Prairie), Contemporary Christian Music artists (Amy Grant, Stacie Orrico, Etc), Multi-Level Marketing schemes, Hallmark, and Christian women influencers like Elisabeth Elliot, who was “as close as one could come to evangelical sainthood.” Through recent biographies of Elliot, we find that much of her work came out during her third marriage to an abusive and controlling man. Even when her family tried to help her, Elliot stayed with her husband. Believing that “submission to her husband was obedience to God.” This wasn’t just Elliot’s message. Marabel Morgan, Anita Bryant, and Hannah Whitall Smith all preached a similar message to their ladies. Although is was much easier to preach submission than to live it as Bryant found out. Her husband/manager, pastor, marriage councilor, and all-male board, tried to control her money, engagements and events. When she fought them they threatened her. Bryant finally divorced her husband and the world she built came tumbling down around her. A woman who didn’t follow the rules couldn’t be trusted.
My kindle says that I highlighted 353 passages in this book. It was such a fascinating and horrifying history that, had I read a hard copy, the whole book may now be highlighted. In my opinion, like with Jesus and John Wayne, this is a must read for the church.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
4.25 ⭐️
I really enjoyed it, though I feel like the subtitle is a bit misleading. While it focuses a lot on the history of women in white evangelical Christianity, I felt like the bigger focus was on New Thought and prosperity gospel. Which was still interesting to me, just not quite I expected initially. Similar to Jesus and John Wayne, I occasionally found it dense and challenging, but worth the read to better understand the current evangelical movement.
I really enjoyed it, though I feel like the subtitle is a bit misleading. While it focuses a lot on the history of women in white evangelical Christianity, I felt like the bigger focus was on New Thought and prosperity gospel. Which was still interesting to me, just not quite I expected initially. Similar to Jesus and John Wayne, I occasionally found it dense and challenging, but worth the read to better understand the current evangelical movement.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Another ARC for me!!! and perhaps the one that I was most excited about!! Thank you!!
Du Mez is an incredible academic, researcher, and writer, and this is evidence of that. Meticulously researched, this book provides a highly insightful historical timeline of how women have simultaneously been players, victims, and oppressors in the realm of white Christian (read: evangelical) nationalism. For me, perhaps the most unsurprising but illuminating piece of information was how MLM leadership became so intertwined with republican administrations circa the Reagan era, with right-wing governments continuing to utilize those same fundraising tactics to their own base.
Further: really enlightening to have that solid connection drawn between “boss babe” MLM participation all the way back to the origins of right wing Christian nationalism and so-called Christian capitalism. Interesting that it was something that started as a highly controlled and falsified way of enabling women to make some semblance of money on their own right into the machine that works to roll women’s rights all the way back to the stone ages.
Du Mez is an incredible academic, researcher, and writer, and this is evidence of that. Meticulously researched, this book provides a highly insightful historical timeline of how women have simultaneously been players, victims, and oppressors in the realm of white Christian (read: evangelical) nationalism. For me, perhaps the most unsurprising but illuminating piece of information was how MLM leadership became so intertwined with republican administrations circa the Reagan era, with right-wing governments continuing to utilize those same fundraising tactics to their own base.
Further: really enlightening to have that solid connection drawn between “boss babe” MLM participation all the way back to the origins of right wing Christian nationalism and so-called Christian capitalism. Interesting that it was something that started as a highly controlled and falsified way of enabling women to make some semblance of money on their own right into the machine that works to roll women’s rights all the way back to the stone ages.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
A thoughtful history of the often cirular relationship that Christian Womanhood as an identity has had with American society.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews