The walls are covered in shiplap paneling. Over by the spare toilet paper, an essential oil diffuser hums quietly as it emits Young Living’s “Purification” into the air. Two wide-eyed Precious Moments figurines watch you from the windowsill. A framed Bible verse declares, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord,” but you already knew you were in the bathroom of a white Christian woman; the signs and wonders were all around you. In Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made, Kristin Kobes Du Mez dissects those signs—and their political implications.
Du Mez, a professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University, landed on The New York Times’ bestseller list for Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, her scorching dissection of white evangelical masculinity. With Live Laugh Love, Du Mez turns her eye to white Christian femininity. Because, “demographically speaking, women are the center of American Christianity,” writes Du Mez, “we should look beyond denominational seminaries and theological treatises and read Christian romance novels instead.”
It’s clear that Du Mez read at least a couple romance novels in her research for this book. She also read training curricula for midlevel marketing companies like Mary Kay, perused the Instagram accounts of “tradwife” influencers, and immersed herself in the cottagecore haze of Thomas Kinkade’s oeuvre. At times, the artifacts of white Christian femininity are funny, especially in the hands of someone as witty as Du Mez. But more often, Live Laugh Love reads as a tragedy.
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Ultimately, she’s looking at the past to understand how we got to this dark place—to a time when so many white Christian women support Christian nationalism and libertarian economics, embracing a post-feminism posture that not only submits to God and religious authority, but to authoritarians too. That question inevitably leads Du Mez’s research from the quaint and kitschy to the disturbing and perplexing: sermons commanding women to stay in abusive marriages, that Access Hollywood tape, Project 2025, and to the Turning Point USA Young Women’s Leadership Summit, where Erika Kirk called for “a revival of biblical womanhood.”
Significantly, and sometimes frustratingly, Du Mez tries not to play referee on what are legitimate examples of biblical womanhood and what is just patriarchal manipulation. Because she’s approaching the history of white Christian women not as a theologian or ethicist but as a historian, she isn’t aiming “to assess the ‘faithfulness’ of women … but rather to examine what women believed to be true, where those beliefs came from, and what the consequences of those beliefs were in their own lives, in the lives of other women, and in the life of the nation.” This means that while Du Mez’s writing is informative, some readers may wish it was more theologically probing. She’s meticulous about tracing how white Christian women came to understand “biblical womanhood,” but less concerned with adjudicating whether those understandings are true to scripture.
My guess is that most people who pick up Live Laugh Love are looking to understand why so many Christian women embrace a president who is religiously illiterate and morally repulsive—especially toward women. 82% of white evangelical women voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and 83% of white evangelical women voted for him in 2024.
The numbers are sad and in many ways, confusing. For a large swath of progressive Christians, myself included, the support of Trump feels like a betrayal of Christian vaules—of everything from welcoming the stranger to loving your enemy to feeding the hungry to stewarding creation. But Du Mez makes a compelling case (in both Live Laugh Love and Jesus and John Wayne) that “evangelical support for Trump was not a betrayal of evangelical values. We simply needed to better understand what those values were.”
There’s one value in particular that’s easy to point to: opposition to abortion. Trump opposes abortion, and evangelical women oppose abortion more than any other group, therefore, the common argument goes, they vote for him. But that explanation has always felt too tidy to me. After reading Live Laugh Love, I finally feel like I have a more satisfying—albeit long and complicated—answer to a question that has plagued me for years: Why do so many white Christian women not just tolerate Trump, but champion him?
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To begin answering that question, Du Mez takes us back to the 1800s, when the powerful and amorphous philosophy of New Thought permeated into Christianity. New Thought has become so much a part of American culture, Du Mez explains, that it can be hard to notice. On the surface, its bootstrap, mind-cure mentality sounds empowering: Positive thinking leads to positive outcomes. If you say you are happy, you will become happy. Christians like Norman Vincent Peale successfully integrated New Thought with the New Testament by pointing to passages like, “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” and “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (John 10:10; Philippians 4:13).
But this way of thinking is also dangerous. If happy thoughts lead to happy outcomes, what does that imply about people experiencing hardship? Du Mez writes that “women attributed unhappiness not to systemic inequality or a husband’s behavior but to their own failure to follow the rules. Since every woman had within her the power to create her own heaven on earth, they blamed themselves for a husband’s drinking problem or adulterous affair.” This line of thinking also left little room for understanding inequality as structural. “Focusing on attitude over social circumstances and history meant that the rights revolutions of the 1960s and ’70s could be framed not in terms of marginalized groups pressing for fair treatment, but rather in terms of bitter and entitled people complaining about their lot in life instead of putting in the work to succeed.”
When this emphasis on individual responsibility is paired with a religious mandate to submit to authority, Du Mez argues, it creates fertile ground for both unrestrained capitalism and unchecked sexual abuse. Trump benefits from both. In perhaps the most powerful line of the book, Du Mez writes, “before the Access Hollywood story broke, evangelicals were accustomed to dismissing allegations of abuse, blaming victims, and protecting the authority of powerful men.”
When this emphasis on individual responsibility is paired with a religious mandate to submit to authority, Du Mez argues, it creates fertile ground for both unrestrained capitalism and unchecked sexual abuse.
Du Mez identifies these sorts of patterns with sharp clarity, but sometimes moves on too quickly from the people who could have given those patterns a real pulse. Too often, Du Mez sacrifices depth for breadth, cataloging characters instead of lingering on them. I would have liked to learn more about the personal histories and theologies of Erika Kirk and Allie Beth Stuckey, for instance, and in exchange, scrapped the introduction of a few male leaders and one or two multi-level marketing schemes. Du Mez is at her best when she sticks with one historical figure for an extended period of time. Her most fully drawn characters, like Hannah Whitall Smith and Elisabeth Elliot, are complex and dynamic; they anchor and enliven the book’s arguments.
Taken together, Live Laugh Love makes a compelling case that the seemingly innocuous trappings of white Christian womanhood—positive thinking, domesticity, pioneer mythology, consumerism, and submission—are linked to larger systems of power. Du Mez traces how these ideas evolved as they traveled from 19th-century New Thought through Christian publishing, consumer culture, and evangelical institutions into today’s politics. The result is a history that makes the present feel less like an acute infection and more like the product of a long, complicated inheritance.
Live Laugh Love, according to Du Mez, is not “simply a history of the religious lives of white Christian women. It is also, somewhat inadvertently, a new genealogy of twentieth-century American religion.” That new genealogy now includes far more women: Helen Andelin, Janette Oke, Mary Kay Ash, Paula White, Beth Moore. I don’t agree with most of them when it comes to politics, theology, and likely, bathroom decor. We don’t get to choose our family. We can, however, try hard to understand them.
Jenna Barnett is the culture editor at Sojourners and the producer of the award-winning podcast Lead Us Not.
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