Sitting with the Uncomfortable Truth
A Feature Review of
Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made
By Kristin Kobes Du Mez
Hardcover: Liveright, 2026
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Reviewed by Rachel Lonas
“How great is the love the Father has lavished upon us, that we should be called sons and daughters of God!”
I just quickly typed that paraphrased verse from 1 John 3, not because of Bible drills, but because Steven Curtis Chapman’s Speechless was one of the few CCM CDs I had in 1999, right alongside my favorite Beatles and Smashing Pumpkins albums. My youth group and I were excited to see him on tour in a packed auditorium in Chattanooga. As he quietly shared from the stage about how he was influenced by missionary Elisabeth Elliott’s book, Through Gates of Splendor, he brought to the stage Mincaye—one of the men who slew missionary Nate Saint— and Saint’s son, Steve, creating a moment of embodied representation of Jesus’s love and forgiveness for murder.
In 1999, that whole evening of music mashed up with jungle videos, tales of missionary zeal, widowhood, and God’s salvation seemed completely normal and inspiring to me. Now at age 42, although I live in the same town, I’m in a different place from that subculture, but I do remember how I was drawn to Steven Curtis Chapman for his sincere faith, tender lyrics, and poetic earnestness. I think about that album every time one of our pastors gives those words from 1 John as a benediction.
This conflict is the emotional complexity of growing up evangelical in America that historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez writes about in Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made. As a Christian herself, focusing on the past 200 years of Christian history, she weaves together many loose threads of American evangelicalism and how Christian women (like Elliott, whose faith inspired Chapman) were often sold self-abandonment as a way to a fulfilled life. She explores where our ideas of femininity, submission, service, and womanhood really began and makes it clear it wasn’t the Bible. Through the book’s three sections, Du Mez traces these developments across American (and also British) evangelicalism.
Part 1, “Spirit and Flesh (1800s to 1950s),” offers a primer on New Thought—essentially the idea that if we believe something we can call it into existence, a forerunner to the prosperity gospel (i.e. do these prescriptive religious things in your Christian life and you will reap spiritual rewards). Similar concepts that we would recognize today would be “name it and claim it,” “mind over matter,” “manifesting,” or “the law of attraction.” Du Mez anchors this section in discussing Hannah Whitall Smith’s 1875 book The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life and comes back to Smith’s themes of using the will to master the emotions throughout the book. She features women who, in trying to make sense of their role in a male-dominated society, picked up Smith’s book for comfort in their unhappy marriages and others who borrowed it as source material, sometimes credited but often not, for their only-promote-the-positive-in-life curriculum for Christian women’s groups.
Du Mez’s historical training shines by providing context for the complicated lives and legacies of these women. She doesn’t take any shortcuts and lays the groundwork well, knowing that if you don’t keep going upstream you’ll never fully understand the downstream impact of these developments. She tracks the flow as it moved in specific religious communities and as it filtered out into popular-level Christian parenting and marriage advice.
Du Mez shows how New Thought has long influenced the publishing industry, even leapfrogging spiritual books to mainstream self-help and business books like Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. She connects this leap to the free-market capitalism era of Tupperware parties, Amway, Mary Kay, and LuLaRoe products. Aside from tangible goods, these brands pedal lifestyle convenience, femininity, charm, and success. The subtle but charismatic blueprint for what worked in women’s small groups and parties is similar to how evangelism was taught in many circles—find the person who’s ready to change their life and assure them of victory and blessing if they accept.
In Parts 2 and 3— “The World We Wished for (1950s – 2000s)” and “Casting Stones (2000s to the present)”— Du Mez recounts the legacy of Elisabeth Elliott, who feels like a genuinely conflicted and often lonely person in this telling. Many of us are familiar with Elliott’s works, but not the complexity and distortions of her own story. Furthermore, that complexity is tied to expectations directly related to her gender in a way that is not true for men. Du Mez’s juxtaposition of Elliott’s Passion and Purity with the rise and fall of Amy Grant as a CCM darling and Joshua Harris’s I Kissed Dating Goodbye adds even more layers to the cultural push and pull of the 1990’s.
Du Mez, quoting one woman’s story about Harris’s influence around dating and courtship, says it all—the girls in her Baptist youth group were obsessed with the book, taking mental notes, while the boys didn’t pay much attention and just needed to “bounce their eyes off women” (222). But “an impure girl wasn’t just sinning; she was a danger to everyone around her” (221). This is similar to what Du Mez says about Marty, Christian author Janette Oke’s female protagonist, “Marty Claridge could cuss and complain just as long as she transformed into an ideal Christian woman by the last chapter, but real women living real lives were not afforded the same grace” (206).
History is a sobering teacher, and Live Laugh Love reminds Christians that they are not as apolitical as they believe, regardless of which side of the aisle they stand on. The same can be said for multi-level marketing and Christian influencers with a need for constant reinvention to adapt to trends. Du Mez shows how all of this has significant political ramifications for America in Part 3. She also highlights countercultural women like the late Rachel Held Evans and her loving call not to submit to anything without a healthy dose of critical thinking; spiritual bypassing has a cost not just for individuals, but to communities and nations.
The importance and relevance of Live Laugh Love lies in the themes it examines and the questions it asks. What social networks are Christians both aware and unaware of that influence evangelical culture? Are evangelicals’ spiritual practices rooted more in theology or marketing? How do Christians decide who is “in” or “out” of church circles? Why does evangelicalism so often seem to be missing a global and historical Church perspective? If submission is the way to sanctification, why does its application to a consumeristic, suburban life feel so empty?
For some, Live Laugh Love may be a difficult read because many of the famous Christian names Du Mez tags are both victim and oppressor, often unaware of how their own trauma influenced their spiritual decisions and ministries. The book indicates that being willing to accept nuances about an admired person requires reconsidering nostalgia and uncomfortable truths, namely harmful political and church policies directly influenced by a ministry’s teachings. It invites the reader to wrestle with surprises including the layers of grief that might unfold along with the re-examination. Du Mez wants her audience to know that contending with that cognitive dissonance is a needed exercise in seeing others’ humanity and having compassion for your own.
I suspect many readers are like me, who grew up more adjacent to these names rather than consumed by them. However, through attending a conservative Christian college, marrying someone who worked for a mission agency, and being a young, overly-faithful churchgoer all in the early 2000’s, the themes of Part 3 that I lived through make so much more sense now. The book reminded me, as it will so many other readers, that we didn’t know what we didn’t know about who was pulling the strings of our spiritual influences.
Even with the tongue-in-cheek title and cover image of a 1950s woman’s face in profile, Live Laugh Love “is for all of us” (14). Du Mez has said many times on her own Substack that the beauty of writing a book like this is the immense privilege of bearing witness to the individuals and their stories (particularly women’s) of lingering harm from the misguided teachings she names. That’s the kind of compassion a reader should want from an author writing this type of book and that is what Du Mez brings to the table.
Like Du Mez’s previous book, Jesus and John Wayne, Live Laugh Love is also an invitation for adult children who, if there is safety with their parents or siblings, can make this book a starting point of compassionate conversation about unhealed areas of religious trauma in their relationship. Being a librarian and serial book club host, I know Live Laugh Love’s content would make for some lively dialogue with an engaged and curious group. It has been easy to pass around my copy to friends because this book is not a Christian hit piece but rather insight into broken systems. To those with the courage to re-examine their faith in light of her historical insights, Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made provides clarity from the first page all the way to the thorough index.
Rachel Lonas
Rachel Lonas is a writer and educator specializing in literature and composition. She enjoys her work in community development as a librarian and running her own tutoring business, as well as watercoloring and gardening. She lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with her husband, Justin, and their four daughters.
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