Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made
by Kristin Kobes Du Mez
The empire white Christian women built.
For you if
you grew up inside evangelical culture and still can't fully explain what it did to you
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Kristin Kobes Du Mez — the historian who cracked open white evangelical masculinity in Jesus and John Wayne — turns now to the women. Live Laugh Love traces how white Christian women built their own parallel universe: New Thought spirituality, Christian bookstores, Hallmark movies, prosperity gospel, multilevel marketing, Hobby Lobby, Target home decor. These weren't random cultural accidents — they were a coherent project, built by women who were systematically excluded from formal religious power and responded by constructing an empire of domestic consumer faith. Du Mez names the mechanism that made Live Laugh Love a meaningful worldview for millions, and shows exactly how that worldview became a force in American politics. After this, you'll never look at a Christian lifestyle brand the same way again.
Where This Book Lives
- Topics
- christian right
Du Mez is a Christian historian at a Christian university — which means this is inside analysis, not dismissal. She's doing what the best scholarship does: taking seriously the world people built and asking what it was actually for. If you've ever wondered why Christian bookstores and MLMs and Hallmark Christmas movies feel like the same thing, this book explains it. The mechanism is religious, commercial, political, and domestic all at once — and once you see it, you can't unsee it.
Related Viewing
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Same event, different angle
The same history — told by someone who saw it differently.
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
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For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.
