Live Laugh Love: The Secret History White Christian Women and the World They Made Kristin Kobes Du Mez (Liveright) $31.99 // OUR PRE-ORDER SALE PRICE at 20% OFF = $25.59  releasing September 15, 2026

Sometimes, when I like a book very, very much, and I also think others will be helped by it — that they either will enjoy it as I did or that they ought to read it — when I sense that confidence that this is it, one of the books of the year, one I really want to get behind, press into the hands of nearly every reader I know, well, I sometimes then get a bit verbose trying to make the case.

I have sometimes been told that I say too much about my favorite books — that I should just recommend them briefly and trust that folks don’t need any breathy arm-twisting. But yet, when I love a book I want to say why. I want to honor the author by showing that I’ve read the book and appreciate both its spirit and its content, its literary verve and the information it shares.

Which is a long way to ask: should this be a long review or a short one? Because, ladies and gentleman, older and young readers, folks near and far, this right here is one of those books.

We really want you to pre-order Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s  Live Laugh Love: The Secret History White Christian Women and the World They Made. We will send it out to you the day we’re allowed (the official street date is September 15th) and we will have them autographed.

We already have a nice number of names on the waiting list and we are sure there will be more wanting to pre-order it so they can get it as soon as it becomes available. We’re selling it at 20% off (which is a lot cheaper than that faceless mega-chain that could hardly care less) and there hopefully will be autographed plates with Kristin’s nifty signature.

I suppose you know that Du Mez is somewhat of an acquaintance of ours — we’ve long been fans of Calvin University (where one of our kids went and knew her a bit on campus) and we knew some of Kristin’s own college teachers when she was a student at Calvin’s poorer cousin college, Dordt, now University. (That she quotes the late Calvin Seerveld, from a talk he gave at Dordt in Live Laugh Love just made me smile to heaven.)

We reviewed her first academic book, A New Gospel for Women: Katharine Bushnell and the Challenge of Christian Feminism (Oxford University Press; $60.00 // our sale price = $48.00) when it came out over ten years ago. We raved (early on, if I may say so myself) about Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (Liveright; $18.99 // our sale price = $15.16.) That is a thrilling ride through US evangelical history from the last 60 years or so and baby boomers will especially resonate with so much of it, even if you weren’t reading early evangelical feminism books in the 1970s as we were.

Beth and I are celebrating our 50th wedding anniversary this year — yep, we married in 1976, the year of the US Bicentennial, and we still are dazzled by the Bicentennial Bible we were earnestly given as a patriotic wedding present. You know, right there is a symbol of the beginnings of an ungodly blend of Americanism and faith that, as Du Mez shows so righteously, developed into the religious right and eventually the idols of MAGA ideology. She shows how rugged masculinity shaped much of that faith and the militarism that seemed to go with it, hand in glove. Anyway, agree fully or not, Jesus and John Wayne was a huge cultural marker, a book that so many talked about and named something that wasn’t clearly stated before. As a historian she received accolades. Popularly, she was both lionized and lambasted (often cruelly — those macho theo-dudes seemed determined to prove her point with their vile threats.)

But what about the women in the story? How did this John Wayne macho-culture of patriotic hyper-evangelical faith affect them? What role did they play, pro or con? What was their experience in the white evangelical subculture of the last lifetime?

Kobes Du Mez starts off Live Laugh Love with two personal comments that I found fascinating. First, she realized the John Wayne book was heavy stuff — masculinity gone pagan, the KKK,  gross militarism, patriarchy and misogyny and abuse all in the name of a judgmental Jesus — and although Jesus and John Wayne was still a pretty entertaining read of 20th century history, she hoped to do a lighter book next time. And she thought it would be shorter, too. Ha.

Like J&JW, Live Laugh Love is fabulously-written social history and at times a delightfully informative page-turner. But as the chapters unfold it picks up steam and by the end she is talking about some pretty darn ugly stuff. The book was meant to be lighter and it ended up being heavier, even searing, at times, and a bit longer than its companion predecessor.

One of the reasons the LLL book had to be longer is that Du Mez, historian that she is, realized that the thought patterns that so influenced many mid-to-late 20th century evangelicals (shaped, at first, by an upbeat sort of holiness theology and a revivalism formed at camp meetings and Keswick) were even more basically influenced by a positive thinking sort of ideology that swept the country in the tail end of the 19th century and into the early 20th.

How fascinating to see the dots she connects — vividly, insightfully, and, finally, compellingly — between the likes of new thought positivity and charismatic preacher women like Aimee Semple McPherson (who disappeared in 1926) and Kathryn Kuhlman (known at first in Pittsburgh, she died in 1976.) As a writer, Du Mez shines in weaving stories of the influences that shaped people like Norman Vincent Peale (Donald Trump’s childhood preacher) and multi-level marketing movements (Tupperware was invented by a Mr. Tupper) like Mary Kay; Oprah Winfrey was captured by that philosophy, going back to thinkers like French physician Franz Anton Mesmer (from whom we get the word “mesmerize”) and other mind-cure philosophers, as were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emanuel Swedenborg, and Mary Baker Eddy (of Christian Science fame), not to mention early “name it and claim it” positive confession / prosperity guy E.W. Kenyon (and, adjacently, what is known as the Latter Rain movement.) I love this kind of social history which draws out the trends, ideas, and the genealogies of attitudes and practices in a smart combo of intellectual history by way of stories and biography. And there were so many colorful characters leading up to the 21st century that she had to start earlier. Hence, the book is a bit longer and your enjoyment under her tutelage that much more thorough. Hooray.

Dr. Du Mez’s exploration of Hannah Whitehall Smith is spectacular and her wide influence will be important information for many of us.  Her chapter on Elizabeth Elliott is excellent, marking shifts in Elliott’s own sense of the rightness of evangelical truisms and her later deep journey into submission to God by way of submission to males in general and a possibly abusive husband particularly. (A footnote documents letters to Virginia Ramey Mollenkott which is a breathtaking bit of information. If you know who she is, you’ll be astonished.) It’s an amazing part of the book.

And there you have it, or at least one thread of this fabric — submission as an ideology, humility developed by covering up desire and placing oneself as a woman strictly under a God-ordained male. This is, for many women, the religious teaching about the very order of the universe.

Curiously, then, a certain sort of (worldly?) beauty was necessary to please men, and a movement development (first among Mormon women) called “fascinating womanhood.” Who knew how many millions of their booklets sold and how many drew from this notion? It may be where Marabel Morgan got her Total Womanhood stuff, submissive sexiness as a key to female happiness. That Marabel Morgan’s erotic suggestions about how to greet a husband coming home from work with little to nothing on were being published and bought (by the millions!) In the early-to-mid-1970s by evangelicals, the whip-smart Roman Catholic Phylis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum was heating up as conservative women were taught to fight the Equal Rights Amendment. Anybody paying attention to the mid-’70s social debates knows this stuff and Du Mez’s chapters had my heart racing. I remember well those efforts to get states to ratify the ERA and how Southern Baptists Jimmy and sweet Rosalyn Carter were demonized for their support of the ERA.

Chapter after chapter Du Mez opens new avenues of exploring women’s lived experience of faith and their social settings. There’s so many amazing threads such as the odd influence of Keswick preacher Jessie Penn-Lewis over Frank Bachman (who went from Penn State ultimately to Oxford to create what became known as Moral-Rearmament that nearly fell in with Nazis), some great stuff on Little House on the Prairie (can anybody say “tradwives”?), multi-level marketing schemes (then and now), women’s ministry (see Beth Barr’s Becoming the Pastor’s Wife) and more. There is a fabulous chapter on the rise of contemporary Christian music, and her bit on Amy Grant is fantastic. The chapter called “Like a Virgin”, for some readers, will be worth the price of the book. And, oh, those of us who have worked in Christian bookstores? Hang on. She’s not wrong, you know.

And her bit about the ever popular Amish romance novels and the art of the troubled Thomas Kinkade is fascinating and generative. (Thank goodness she quoted The Thrill of the Chaste:The Allure of Amish Romance Novels by Valerie Weaver-Zecher!)

As the book moves towards the 21st century there are chapters on well-known women, from Joyce Meyers to Nadia Bolz-Weber, from Paula White to Sarah Bessy, to the influencers Joanne Gaines and Jen Hatmaker. I found each of these short bios to be very well done, moving, even. Her stuff about the tragedies of how Beth Moore was treated is excellent (even if you’ve read her fabulous memoir.) Her bit about Rachel Held Evans is illuminating. From Kathy Keller to Sadie Robertson to Aimee Byrd to Ann Voskamp, they are all here.

I’m glad she discussed the important role of black evangelical leader Latasha Morrison (author of Be the Bridge: Pursuing God’s Heart for Racial Reconciliation.) As in Jesus and John Wayne our historian is focusing on a broad social movement largely comprised of white women but she is not unaware of the ways in which this white evangelicalism has fueled racial tension and pushed us deeper into institutional structures and reflexes that can only be called racist. It is all captivating and it is all important.

I loved the line from the back cover where Beth Allison Barr (author of The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth) notes in her rave review that this movement of Biblical womanhood “married capitalism with spirituality, harnessed the language of submission to broker their own networks of power, and refashioned right-wing authoritarianism into a romantic mythology of family values.” 

“…married capitalism with spirituality, harnessed the language of submission to broker their own networks of power, and refashioned right-wing authoritarianism into a romantic mythology of family values.”

If you sense that this is about right, you’ll love this book.

If you don’t quite follow how this happened (or why it is troubling) you really need to read this, no matter your gender or faith. This gives the background to a good bit of our contemporary socio-religious landscape. We all need this book.

Dr. Du Mez’s in-depth research really pays off as the focus moves from various pearls to the string that holds them. The colorful details matter but soon the big picture becomes evident. Her diligent efforts — massive amounts of archival work, tons of interviews, painstaking reading of records, pondering how this fits with that, and writing about it all so well, is a sheer gift. And how it all relates to power? Wow. Jeff Scarlett, himself an excellent researcher and writer about the often secretive movements within far-right evangelicalism, calls this book “startling, heartbreaking, and terrifying” and insists that Live Laugh Love is both groundbreaking and vital:

You simply cannot grasp the scale of Christian nationalism without this vivid and essential exploration of a distinctly American religion of white womanhood.

Again, Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made by Kristen Kobes Du Mez (which is almost 400 pages) is on sale at 20% off and releases September 15th.  We hope you use our order form page at the link at the end of this column and safely enter your pre-order. We’ll take it from there. Thanks.

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Although we take pre-orders for anything, anytime, here is a title coming September 1st that we wanted you to know about. It is somewhat related to Kristin Kobes Du Mez, offering some firm push-back to her and others like her and their take on things.

In Defense of Evangelicalism: A Response to Its Cultured Despisers Bonnie Kristian (Forum Books) $27.00 // OUR PRE-ORDER SALE PRICE = $21.60

releasing September 1, 2026

I will say it right out. Bonnie, who I have met and whose previous books I have liked a lot, has a chapter in this forthcoming book offering criticism of Dr. Kristin Du Mez, both her Jesus and John Wayne book and her tireless blogging on Substack about overly masculine and militaristic faith and her speaking and organizing to resist the inappropriate blending of faith and nationalism. In an on-line tussle a week ago about changes at CT (where Bonnie Kristian works) Du Mez both apologized and pushed back a bit.

Which says something about the nature of In Defense of Evangelicalism. Chapter by chapter she tries to show — sometimes convincingly, sometimes, not so well, in my opinion — how critics of evangelicalism overstate the problem, caricature conservative Protestants as fire-breathing tyrants or goof-ball yokels or creepy power-mongers who routinely cover up child abuse, thereby ignoring the evidence that most evangelicals are just trying to be good Christians, living in grace and showing care to their neighbors the best they can. Whether the critics are exposing crass nationalism within MAGA fundamentalism or egregious sex-abuse cover-ups in the SBC or racism all over, Bonnie Kristian (trained in professional investigative journalism) attempts to show that passion gets the better of the critics and they make it sound worse than it is.

This disdain and exaggeration, she reminds us, is nothing that new. For the last century cultural elites have mocked evangelicals, “a favorite scapegoat of American public life.”

To be clear: each of the troubling exposés she investigates are (she says clearly) about real problems. She goes out of her way to assure readers that the critics should be heeded: racism and violence and sexism and anti-immigrant hostility and homophobia are all wrong and not uncommon in faith communities of all sorts. (It isn’t just evangelicals who support warmongering and anti-immigration policies, policies Bonnie herself has spoken against.) So even though the publishing imprint she is on is aligned with agenda driven socio-political conservatism and even though the subtitle (a historic line from Friedrich Schleiermacher) is an unhelpful dig, we should take her assessment at face value on the merits of her case.

She is right when she says things like:

“Evangelicals have work ahead on matters of sex and gender, theology and discipleship, and more. And, of course, we should be polite and considerate wherever we find ourselves. Yet our failures do not justify treating public religion as a sinister imposition.”

Have some of those who are angry about toxic stuff they’ve encountered in traditionalist evangelicalism thrown the baby out with the bathwater, dismissing evangelical piety and doctrine and service, because some have been hypocrites and behaved badly? Surely. Are some who are called to prophetic denunciation missing some nuance and caution? Probably so. So, her new book is a good corrective, calling for caution in analysis and wiser discernment. She is somewhat right, I am sure.

For starters, I recommend this forthcoming title for anyone who is wondering if, given the zeitgeist, they still want to use the word evangelical to describe their faith tradition. She says we should and that some of our bad press isn’t accurate or fair. Frankly, this would be good for anyone wanting a realistic look at typical evangelical types today. Mainline, liturgical, progressive or secular readers — come on!

I’ve raved before about great books on this question about the viability of the phrase “evangelical” for those of us within that camp. For instance, Still Evangelical? Insiders Reconsider Political, Social, and Theological Meaning edited by Mark Labberton (IVP; $24.00 // our sale price = $19.29) shows several views and the authors are good folks. Struggling with Evangelicalism: Why I Want to Leave and What It Takes to Stay is by Dan Stringer (IVP; $18.99 // our sale price = $15.19) and is wise and honest. And don’t miss Restless Faith: Holding Evangelical Beliefs in a World of Contested Labels by Richard Mouw (Brazos Press; $22.00 // our sale price = $16.00.) These three are exceedingly balanced — thoughtful and honest, critical and gracious.

Bonnie Kristian, who works in editorial roles at Christianity Today is herself an Anglican who is in favor of women’s ordination and admits she is a Biblical pacifist. So she’s not a MAGA ideologue or a Jerry Falwell acolyte. Yet, she worries that too many critics of evangelicalism seem to almost despise their former evangelical roots; in offering legitimate critique, they end up smearing the good reputation of many of their ordinary brothers and sisters by being sloppy with their accusations. She does a close reading of texts and looks specifically at Calvin University historian and gender studies scholar Kristin Du Mez, Baylor church history prof and author Beth Allison Barr, sociologist of religion Samuel Perry, journalist and bestselling author Tim Alberta (of a book I very heartily recommend, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, among others.

She tells lots of good stories and names the names of her alledged culprits. She dissects the writings of former right-wing operative turned anti-Trump evangelical Peter Wehner and his sociological efforts to describe the ways which many evangelicals are attracted to Trump. Yet, she says, “They don’t talk about Donald Trump if you ask them for the meaning of their evangelicalism. They talk about Jesus.” She continues, “Wehner has come to see evangelicalism as a partisan tribe, but they haven’t.”

Is she right? I hope so.

In Defense of Evangelicalism is not exactly a defense, doctrinally or theologically, of evangelical faith. That is, she doesn’t defend their loyalty to the Bible, their insistence that one must have a conversion experience, the personal sense of vibrant piety, and their conviction about a mandate to share the gospel through evangelism and world missions. Rather, she is pushing back against the assessment of many writers that evangelicalism, as such, is in bed with idols of the far right. In this sense, the book is defending the reputation or honor of those in the tradition, the run-of-the-mill people in the pews (or megachurch theatre seats, as the case may be.) Still, a majority of those who identify as evangelicals did vote for Trump, after all, and many still support the rampage of the Capitol that fearsome January 6th. So Bonnie’s defense against those criticizing the political agenda of the religious right is, in my view, an up-hill battle. Saying that most evangelicals don’t know about nationalist Doug Wilson, for instance, which may be true, doesn’t make the problem go away. His brand is growing and what he stands for is not uncommon. Still, she makes her case powerfully and clearly, in part by dissecting many of the books these authors have written. You should read it yourself.

In 2022 she published Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community which looked at celebrities who pass disinformation, right wing mania about election frauds, Q-Anon stuff and exceptionally biased media and the like. It was a thoughtful and important study of how we know what we know, inviting us to integrity and honesty in our media consumption. Is she trustworthy, herself, now, in this latest jeremiad? Is she guilty of “corrupting Christian community” in attempting to blow the whistle on what she sees as terribly unfair “guilt by association” tactics, smearing ordinary church-going believers with the foolishness of the few? I think there is a connection between her research on truth in communications and our “mass minds” and this call to think through what popular (lefty) critics are saying. Even if they are touted in BookNotes, I might add. Ha! As Jake Meador notes, she has an “intolerance for pablum.” Fair enough.

The always interesting and always eloquent and always impressive Alan Jacobs wrote a short foreword to In Defense of Evangelicalism and I have enjoyed reading it several times. Evangelicals are his people (even though he publishes on Oxford and clearly is of a different social location than many conservative evangelicals.) They are Bonnie’s people, too, apparantly.

About a decade ago she wrote a fabulously fascinating book on the many different ways to be Christian, showing wildly different faith traditions from Pentecostals to the Bruderhof or the Amish, from those who worship in sacred spaces with highly liturgical ceremony to those who gather in informal house churches, from edgy postmoderns to conservative straight arrows, from monastic isolation to exciting “new monastic” communities that serve the poor. That book is A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (Faithwords; $19.99 // our sale price = $15.99) and I wonder if her generous explorations there somehow deepened her virtue of respecting differences. And she’s now annoyed at those who castigate others.

Alas, she is a bit firm in her rebuke throughout the book, I think, overstating her accusations of those who maybe overstate the scope of their critiques. Despite that, she may often be right, and I recommend In Defense of Evangelicalism to be pre-ordered asap and read with discernment. It would be great to read it alongside Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne if you haven’t read that yet, or her forthcoming Live Laugh Love.

Read this quote from near the end of the book, where Kristian once again explains her process:

The [evangelical] movement is rife with flaws and failures, as any movement spanning centuries and continents and communities will be. Pick a vice and some evangelical or other will be guilty of it. Evangelicals have done and condoned and ignored terrible things, sometimes in characteristically evangelical ways. We haven’t always loved God with our whole hearts or our neighbors as ourselves. We don’t always look like Jesus.

All that is granted— evangelicals are sinners. The point of defending evangelicalism from its despisers, then, is not to exempt it from fair scrutiny. It’s to clear out specious and spurious attacks so we can conserve what is valuable and make room for real repair.

I think I’d feel better about this if she hadn’t called those with whom she disagrees about the scope of their criticisms “despisers.” And to suggest that scholars like Du Mez are making “specious and spurious attacks” goes too far; she is falling prey to the very lack of caution and prudence that she is warning against.

Bonnie continues, “Effective critique will be made from evangelicalism’s own commitments and by its own people.” Geesh, I am not sure if that will happen or not or on what basis she thinks that is plausible. We can hope.

But she is very right about this:

“We need less revulsion and ridicule from without, more reformation from within. Disdain does not bring renewal.”

If you are ordering both of these, please let us know if we should send In Defense of Evangelicalism first and then, two weeks later, Life Laugh Love OR if we should consolidate, sending them both together mid-September. We’re at your service, so do tell us how you’d like us to handle shiping these two titles. Use our simple order form page at the link below. Thanks very much for your care for good books and these tough topics.

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