Live Laugh Love
The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made
Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s 2020 runaway bestseller, Jesus and John Wayne, begins with a jolting personal anecdote. The Calvin University historian recounts the shock she experienced in 2016 as Donald Trump, then a candidate for president, stood on the campus of the Christian college she had attended and claimed he could shoot someone on the streets of New York City without losing his supporters. The book exists to unpack how such a moment could come to pass.
Du Mez’s follow-up, Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made, also begins with a crystallizing moment. Sitting at a seminar table with other scholars of evangelical Christian history, Du Mez referred to a bouquet of major touchpoints in female-centric evangelical church culture—Hobby Lobby, Rachel Held Evans—and was met with blank stares from all but one of the men present. As a church historian, Du Mez was well aware of the pervasive influence of White women on the formation of Christian culture, and as a descendant of Dutch Calvinists—one who had received Mary Kay makeup lessons at Calvinette camp as a young girl—she knew that influence at a personal level.
According to Du Mez, two seminal works established the foundations for feminine American Christianity: Hannah Whitall Smith’s 1875 book The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life and a series of booklets published in 1922 by Louis and Loyola Grafe called (wait for it) Fascinating Womanhood, Or, The Art of Attracting Men: A Practical Course of Lessons in the Underlying Principles by Which Women Attract Men—Leading to the Proposal and Culminating in Marriage. If it seems like Smith’s treatise on holiness theology and the Grafes’ manual on how to be a delicate flower of a lady are disparate topics, Du Mez would beg to differ. Smith established the groundwork for the positivity movement that would take hold in American religion and profoundly influence the “correct” way to be a Christian wife, mother, and PTA member. Trapped in a miserable marriage to a fellow holiness evangelist whose philandering behavior brought down scandal and shame, Smith taught, according to Du Mez, that “abandoning oneself fully to God left no room for bitterness and despair.” Instead, Christians ought to be known for, in Smith’s words, “sweetness under provocation; calmness in the midst of turmoil and bustle; yieldingness to the wishes of others, and an insensibility to slights and affronts; absence of worry and anxiety; deliverance from care and fear.” The designers of Fascinating Womanhood essentially took all of this and added lipstick.
The world these White women made was nothing if not for sale. A common thread throughout Live Laugh Love is the extraordinary consumerism of evangelical Christianity—unsurprising, since the title itself is a reference to the sort of kitschy word art one might snatch up at Hobby Lobby while shopping for scrapbooking supplies. Books, programs, makeup, music, tchotchkes, conferences, attention—seemingly everything under the sun that could be monetized by the women of White American Christendom was. The sheer scale of the Christian market is staggering; Du Mez notes that “by 2011, annual revenue of religious collectibles, music, and other items totaled $4.6 billion.” She drops the infamous Thomas Kinkade factoid, that one in 20 American households hung one of his paintings on their walls.
Additionally, evangelical Christian women harnessed their robust women’s ministry networks to sell one another candles, leggings, and Amway products via multilevel marketing. Often, the vast fortunes amassed by the few at the top of the pyramid—not that these schemes were shaped like pyramids, of course!—funded conservative political movements while the masses made mere pennies.
Some of the most compelling chapters of Live Laugh Love cover the complicated lives and contributions of female figures in Christian history such as Aimee Semple McPherson, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Elisabeth Elliot. Yet I found myself often frustrated by how many of the book’s pages are peppered with the names not of powerful women but of powerful men. Chapter after chapter details the exploits of Frank Buchman, Norman Vincent Peale, Billy Graham, and James Dobson. This is not the book I signed up to read, I thought. I’m tired of hearing about these men and their outsized influence on American Christianity. But the truth is, even if these White Christian women made a world, they made a world by and for men—men they were responsible for attracting, men to whom they were required to submit. The chapter that covers the 21st century includes some refreshing stories of women like Jen Hatmaker who openly rejected this narrative. It does not always go well for these women. Insubordination is punished, and not just by men.
Du Mez initially imagined Live Laugh Love would be more fun than its predecessor. Sure, the secret world would have some shady corners, but the pink Cadillacs and shiny optimism of church lady culture should have been at least a bit of a romp. But, as with Jesus and John Wayne, there’s a clear telos to the story: the hard turn to Christian nationalism and the capitulation to MAGA Trumpism. Just as Du Mez was completing this manuscript, the wildly influential Erika Kirk—as quintessential a White Christian woman as can be—was violently widowed in a horrific and public way. Du Mez found it hard to keep things light. “Ultimately,” she writes, “this is a book about power—about women’s power to define their own lives, men’s power over women, and the power women wield over one another. It is about discipleship and devotion, authority and submission, manipulation, cruelty, and control.” Ultimately, Live Laugh Love is no laughing matter.
