Live Laugh Love

Historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne, presents this companion volume as both a history of white Christian women's consumer culture and a new genealogy of twentieth-century American religion. Where Jesus and John Wayne examines white evangelical masculinity, Live Laugh Love traces how three interlocking traditions converged to produce a distinctive ideology of Christian womanhood: holiness evangelicalism, a movement teaching that believers could achieve victory over sin through faith; Mormonism; and New Thought, a philosophy rooted in the idea that the mind controls reality. Du Mez argues that these traditions together shaped millions of women's lives and the political landscape of the present moment.

Du Mez begins in the nineteenth century with Hannah Whitall Smith, a Quaker-born woman who endured the deaths of several children, her husband's loss of faith and infidelities, and relentless personal grief. Despite these circumstances, Smith wrote the best-selling The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life (1875), which taught that happiness depended not on circumstances but on willful belief in God's power. Du Mez argues that Smith's theology contained unresolved tensions: It empowered women through the Spirit but also encouraged acceptance of difficult circumstances, and its identification of meekness and submission as signs of holiness perpetuated Victorian ideals of femininity. In later hands, Smith's emphasis on submission to God was recast as submission to men.

Running parallel to holiness theology was New Thought, a philosophy that grew from the mind-cure movement, a healing tradition claiming that thoughts could cause or cure illness. Du Mez traces how New Thought's core principle, the law of attraction, which held that positive thinking produced positive results, blended with Christian theology and inspired a new vision of femininity. In 1922, Louis and Loyola Grafe published Fascinating Womanhood, a set of booklets teaching women to attract men by cultivating childlike vulnerability and marketing themselves like products. By midcentury, the similarities between holiness theology and New Thought meant the two were easily confused and readily combined.

Du Mez examines how holiness-inspired practices developed into systems of control. Frank Buchman built a global movement requiring followers to confess sins in small groups, submit to hierarchical authority, and maintain unquestioning loyalty. Buchman drew on Keswick theology, a restrained form of holiness teaching stressing surrender and sanctification. Henrietta Mears built the largest Sunday school in the nation and trained the men who constructed postwar evangelical infrastructure, including Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ. Du Mez draws on psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton's study of "thought reform" to argue that these movements bore a striking resemblance to totalist systems characterized by demands for purity, suppression of doubt, and hierarchical control.

In the postwar era, Du Mez argues, figures usually placed in competing theological camps were united by a shared commitment to positivity, free-market capitalism, and anti-communism. Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) fused New Thought with Christianity, Billy Graham preached that Christianity and capitalism were inseparable, and Oral Roberts discovered the prosperity gospel, teaching that God wanted believers to prosper materially. Funded by evangelical businessmen, these leaders built an infrastructure designed to sanctify success and demonize government assistance.

Within this larger world, women fashioned a consumer culture of their own. Catherine Marshall, author and widow of Senate chaplain Peter Marshall, blended Smith's holiness theology with positive thinking to shape modern Christian publishing. Elisabeth Elliot was initially a sharp critic of evangelical platitudes after her missionary husband's death in Ecuador. However, Elliot began shifting toward hierarchy even before marrying Addison Leitch, a conservative Presbyterian theologian whose influence deepened her embrace of female submission in books like Let Me Be a Woman (1976). Mormon housewife Helen Andelin discovered the original Fascinating Womanhood booklets, rewrote them with Bible verses emphasizing female submission, and sold over three million copies. Born-again Christian author Marabel Morgan repackaged Andelin's teachings for an evangelical audience in The Total Woman (1973), which became the best-selling nonfiction book in 1974, eventually selling over ten million copies. Together, these books taught women that happiness depended on changing their own attitudes rather than their circumstances.

Du Mez argues that these teachings were reinforced through direct sales organizations such as Tupperware, Mary Kay Cosmetics, and Amway, which blended positive thinking with evangelicalism and free-market ideology, promising women opportunity while delivering profit to very few. Amway's founders, Rich DeVos and Jay Van Andel, became major Republican donors and helped build the scaffolding for the Christian Right. Du Mez contends that multilevel marketing bore a striking resemblance to modern evangelicalism: Both forbade negativity and doubt, structured relationships around deference and authority, and promised that obedience would lead to success.

Prairie fiction, from Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books through Janette Oke's Love Comes Softly (1979), embedded these values in emotionally powerful narratives. Du Mez reveals how Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, one of the founders of American libertarianism, revised Wilder's memoir to accentuate self-reliance while omitting government dependence. In the 1990s, purity culture extended these dynamics to sexuality: Elliot's Passion and Purity (1984) and evangelical author Joshua Harris's I Kissed Dating Goodbye (1997) taught that sexual obedience would be rewarded with perfect marriages, functioning as what Du Mez calls a sexual prosperity gospel that produced shame rather than blessings.

The Christian products industry expanded these ideals into a comprehensive consumer marketplace. Women's ministry leaders such as Beth Moore, Joyce Meyer, and Paula White discipled millions into a faith marked by performative positivity and the promise that obedience would bring rewards. Christian radio tailored content to "Becky," a composite persona of the white suburban mother whose satisfaction drove profitability, while Precious Moments figurines, Thomas Kinkade prints, and Amish romance novels offered visions of an idealized world.

In the 2000s, the blogosphere briefly disrupted this system. Progressive writers including Sarah Bessey, Rachel Held Evans, and Nadia Bolz-Weber challenged purity culture, prosperity theology, and patriarchal hierarchies, while Latasha Morrison, a Black evangelical, facilitated conversations about racism in white churches. Conservative gatekeepers struck back: After Jen Hatmaker, a popular Christian blogger who had shifted toward social justice, affirmed same-sex relationships in 2016, her books were pulled from stores, demonstrating the consequences of dissent.

Du Mez traces how the ideology of Christian womanhood was mobilized in the Trump era. Paula White served as Trump's spiritual adviser, charismatic prophets declared him God's anointed, and hyperfeminine Republican women performed a conservative femininity rooted in the ideals of Fascinating Womanhood. Tradwife influencers promoting idealized traditional domesticity on social media reached across evangelical, Mormon, and Catholic spaces, while Turning Point USA, a conservative youth activist organization, hosted women's summits celebrating traditional femininity. Du Mez documents extensive patterns of abuse within evangelical institutions, arguing that theologies of submission created systems that shielded perpetrators and silenced victims.

The book closes by examining the human cost of the system's broken promises and the authoritarian project they serve. Du Mez connects these traditions to Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation blueprint to concentrate executive power under Christian nationalist principles. Prominent Christian women, including Lysa TerKeurst and Elisabeth Elliot, saw their marriages endure abuse despite following the prescribed rules, and women raised in purity culture found that obedience did not produce the happiness they were promised. Conservative influencers waged what Du Mez describes as a war on empathy, redirecting women's compassion away from those targeted by the state. The book ends with Rachel Held Evans's words, written before her death in 2019: "Patriarchy, White Supremacy, & Violent Religious Nationalism are one hell of an unholy trinity" (336).