Cultural historian Dr. Kristin Kobes Du Mez tangles with the influence of white Christian women in Live Laugh Love
In the six years since its publication in 2020, historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s book Jesus and John Wayne has become an invaluable source for contextualizing and explaining the unholy union of white evangelical Christianity and conservative politics that currently dominate American public life. That book focused primarily on the role of rugged masculinity in defining and developing Christian nationalism. Covering approximately 75 years of history, it is an exhaustive exploration of how we got to where we are today.
Or, to put it more correctly, it’s an exhaustive exploration of part of how we got to where we are today.
Du Mez’s new book, Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made, tells another important segment of that story from the perspective of women. The book digs into the positive thinking mindset, “trust and obey” subservience and savvy marketing gimmicks that helped create the white Christian femininity we now see all over Instagram, mommy blogs, Hobby Lobby and Altar’d State. Like Jesus and John Wayne, the roots of what we live with now are deep, tangled, and lead to some surprising origins.
Du Mez will visit the Kansas City area Oct. 8 to speak about Live Laugh Love at William Jewell College in Liberty. Ahead of that event, she spoke to The Pitch about religious abuse, spiritual identity and the hyper-specific Christian cultural ephemera that shaped generations of women growing up in evangelical spaces, from Precious Moments to Love Comes Softly.
Abby Olcese, The Pitch: You’ve mentioned elsewhere that your book tour experience with Jesus and John Wayne led to some deep interactions with readers. What have you encountered so far promoting Live Laugh Love?
Kristin Kobes Du Mez: It’s been amazing, similar to my experiences last time, but more intense. Nearly everyone who comes to a Live Laugh Love book tour event has read Jesus and John Wayne, and most who line up to talk to me afterward at signings have a story of how Jesus and John Wayne changed their life. Sometimes they’re beautiful stories, sometimes they’re painful stories.
As a historian, it’s incredible to have a book read so widely and received so personally. I heard stories of pastors who got pushed out of their churches for doing a Jesus and John Wayne book club. I’ve had a woman who said, “You saved me, because I was in an abusive relationship and a biblical counselor told me tough it out, and your book helped me realize it was time to leave.” Now I’m hearing stories from Live Laugh Love. The book has revealed to a lot of women the lives they’ve lived, and I think it’s brought them greater clarity. 
Before you wrote this book, what female-centric Christian cultural artifacts had you experienced in your own life? What was your impression of them at the time?
I loved (Janette Oke’s Christian romance novel) Love Comes Softly. One of the reasons I went back to it in writing this book was because it made such an impression on me. It was that way for many girls who grew up in those spaces. You get a copy from your mom, or at a Christian bookstore. I still vividly remember the scenes from that book.
I had fun writing that chapter of Live Laugh Love in particular. I wanted to bring readers back into that space for people who’d read it decades earlier, or who maybe never had, to give them an immersive feel. At the same time, I was reading that book again through a critical lens, trying to understand some of the deeper cultural and political values embedded in these texts that I was oblivious to when I read them as entertaining works of fiction. There’s a devotional value in there; you have characters who are brought along on a spiritual journey and taught lessons about what it means to be a good, obedient Christian, and those are lessons the reader is supposed to take on.
I’m in Missouri, so I have to ask: Did you get to visit the Precious Moments Chapel while researching this book?
No, but I wish I had!
It’s a wild place. I grew up not far from Carthage, so my family ended up taking a lot of visiting friends there, mostly because we thought it was so strange.
You know, we can laugh about that, but these kinds of cultural products are really imbued with meaning and values. They’re part of women’s day-to-day lives, but they’re also not taken seriously as real sources of cultural and theological formation. I ran up against that while writing this book.
Live Laugh Love doesn’t sound like a serious book. I have scholars who tell me, “You’re writing about Precious Moments figurines and Hallmark movies; that doesn’t seem like serious work.” They’re looking at theological treatises. The book doesn’t ignore that, but it also prioritizes the culture women consume day in and day out. They may be listening to Christian radio 8-10 hours a day. Why don’t we look to those spaces to learn about formation?
Brio (the Focus on the Family girls’ magazine) only shows up briefly in your book, but just seeing the title gave me flashbacks. Did you look into their magazine articles at all during the research process? Did your research assistants have any history with it?
I didn’t subscribe to Brio growing up, but I really wanted to because my friends did and it was the “acceptable” girls magazine. Seventeen was not, so Brio was our alternative. There’s always a safe alternative. The secular products are off limits, they’re unsafe, you don’t listen to secular music. I believed top 40 radio was sinful, so I listened to Christian radio. Same thing with books.
I had a wonderful team of undergraduate researchers at Calvin University. It was lovely because they brought their own experiences in, like “Do you know about this latest YouTuber?” They were also raiding their mom’s bookshelves and talking with moms and aunts and grandmas about their experiences. We had a nice generational spread.
I also started a research group on Facebook for women interested in the topic, and 200-300 women eagerly joined so they could be a sounding board for me. They’d bring their own experiences, and some of them are directly quoted in the book as well.
What is your own relationship to Evangelicalism, given that you specialize in researching it, but it’s not necessarily your own faith background? That’s similar to my own experience, so I’m curious how you’d describe how it feels to be in that world but not of it at the same time.
It’s a hard question to answer, “Are you an evangelical?” because I didn’t identify as an evangelical growing up. Billy Graham and Elisabeth Elliot weren’t household names for me, but I also listened to Amy Grant and Sandi Patty on my pink cassette player. Relatives gave me Precious Moments figurines for Christmas and birthdays. There was one bookstore in my town growing up, and it was a Christian bookstore. It’s typical of many American women who may or may not have grown up in an evangelical church but found themselves immersed in aspects of this culture.
I actually find it a pretty helpful vantage point, having one foot in and one foot out of that world. It’s kind of all I know, but it’s given me familiarity with many of the key products and some of the key individuals. The book has a significant amount of research, but I kind of knew where to start because of my own experience, or through close observation—reading some of the Christian bloggers who were big in the early 2000s, listening to this music, keeping tabs on this culture.
However, because I wasn’t totally immersed in that world, I don’t identify myself with the deconstructionist (Exvangelical) movement. My own Christian faith was never wholly defined by this theological system, so I haven’t felt burdened or needing to shed an identity. That isn’t to say that people who identify as exvangelical can’t write great books about evangelicalism, but I have both a familiarity and a certain amount of distance. I found that worked well in terms of the research process.
You talk both in the book and in other interviews about how the theology of positive thinking—that a positive attitude about God will bring about positive outcomes and success—doesn’t hold up to theological scrutiny. At the same time, I’ve seen plenty of people who believed in that, but were really hurting and weren’t being helped by that kind of theology. I’m sure you have, too. In your experience, what makes people stay in a situation like that, even when they’re being taken advantage of?
First and foremost, people believe that it’s true. Many of the women I write about in Live Laugh Love, I have no reason to think that they didn’t really accept the teaching that by following these rules they’d be obedient to God. These were women who desperately wanted to be faithful and obedient to God.
And then, this theology, which includes the prosperity gospel, you know, “Believe hard enough, follow these simple steps and you’ll be #blessed,” “You get your attitude right, and you’ll attract good things.” They’re all intertwined. They all give you a formula which is unfalsifiable. If good things aren’t happening, you only have yourself to blame. You go back and think, “Maybe I didn’t believe hard enough. The promises are supposed to come true. God can’t fail so where did I go wrong?” So you buy another book, attend another seminar, or maybe at some point you just walk away.
Within these systems themselves, there are rules against complaining or doubt. If you want to succeed you have to clear these things from your life. This is how people get trapped in these spaces. If it doesn’t work, they keep going back to that starting point and trying again.
All of these rules come with tantalizing promises. “You’ll be blessed by God, have a loving husband, a great marriage.” It really is enticing, and a lot of the books tell women what they want to hear. They offer these promises, and life is difficult; we want an escape, we want a simple formula. We want to be happy. What they’re selling, there’s always going to be a market.
The kind of research that’s in Live Laugh Love and in Jesus and John Wayne often uncovers unpleasant truths about the church and people in it. As a practicing Christian and a serious historian, how do you differentiate between an honest telling of history and what may look to some readers like criticism?
I think I was trained in a rather critical tradition, not just in scholarship, but if you’re trained to study popular culture or cultural studies, you’re trained to look carefully at power, and power is always complicated. It’s not just in the hands of people who seem to be the most powerful. Women have agency in Live Laugh Love, but so does the market. Who is exercising power, and what are the constraints? That’s standard cultural history.
That’s not standard in the history Christians tend to tell about themselves. They’ll interpret what they’re doing through God calling them. “We’re doing this because we’re being faithful.” These aren’t the kinds of capital-T Truths that historians tend to work with.
When I write as a historian, I’m not saying whether a given religious doctrine is true or false. I’m not in a position to answer that question. What I am deeply curious about is why, at this moment in this place, these Christians prioritized this doctrine in this way. Often the sources are much more complicated than the stories they’d tell themselves. It’s a much more interesting story, because you realize everything has a history.
Certain individuals worked hard in the 1930s and 40s to elevate a view of Christianity that aligned with free-market capitalism and opposed liberalism. Publications like Christianity Today elevated that view as the only way to be a faithful Christian and good American. You can say, “Huh, that’s curious,” and “That’s how that idea took hold.” You can see it’s a lot messier, and more questions follow.
That’s the work that I do as a historian. I say up front in Live Laugh Love that I’m not interested in assessing the faithfulness of the women I write about, though I assume they were faithful. What they were taught about what that looks like changes over time; that’s the kind of work that I do.
Much of what passes for history in evangelical spaces isn’t critical, not in an academic sense. It functions as apologetics. They’re invested in evangelizing and attracting people to their faith. They try not to air the dirty laundry. That’s why it contrasts with the kind of work I write, which doesn’t have that intention. I’m not trying to attract people to a brand, but I’m motivated by the questions, “What are we looking at?” and “What did it do?”
