Kristin Du Mez signed the contract for this book about a week before Beth Moore tweeted about Jesus and John Wayne, and that book took on a life of its own inside evangelical spaces. Then January 6th happened. So she wrote Live Laugh Love while still very much living inside the Jesus and John Wayne moment, which is partly her excuse for why it took so much longer than agreed — the other excuse being that once she started tracing what white Christian women were actually reading, buying, and building their lives around, she discovered she had to remap twentieth-century American religion. The neat boxes break down. Fundamentalist, evangelical, charismatic, mainline, Mormon, secular wellness — the women’s cultural products cross all of them, and the through-line running underneath is New Thought. Here’s the payoff that stopped me: what gets sold today as biblical womanhood traces back through Marabel Morgan’s The Total Woman to Helen Andelin’s Fascinating Womanhood to a set of 1920s booklets published by a New Thought press. They just added Bible verses to the top. We also got into the Amway tour, the rules against negativity, why toxic empathy makes perfect sense once you see the system, and — at the end — what she learned studying the German Christian movement that she cannot stop thinking about now. She’s at Beer Camp in a few weeks.
Highlights from the conversation
- Why the whole map had to be redrawn. Du Mez is a cultural historian of religion and gender, and the field of evangelical history has been led largely by evangelicals themselves — theologically trained, mostly men, working top-down through important figures, doctrines, and institutions. Useful, and not the whole story. Because conservative evangelical women are largely excluded from institutional authority, they’ve stayed off the radar of scholars tracing where the real decisions get made. But look at what women were consuming and producing — Christian radio eight hours a day, the Christian bookstore, the daily devotional — and the tidy categories collapse. These books weren’t read for fun. Women read them devotionally, discussed them in church groups, and patterned their lives on them.
- Hannah Whitall Smith, and the theology that got redirected. A nineteenth-century holiness preacher and women’s rights activist whose The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life was one of the century’s bestsellers. The theology: a deliberate act of the will totally submitting to God’s will sets spiritual laws in motion — sanctification, holiness, and therefore happiness. Much more positive than dour Calvinism, and doubt is of the devil. Du Mez found Catherine Marshall, Elisabeth Elliot, Marabel Morgan, and Mary Crowley all pointing back to her. And within two generations, total submission to God’s will became total submission to your husband — with the same promises of holiness and happiness attached. The irony: Smith’s own promise never came true for her. She wasn’t a fan of her husband, for good reason, and her life held a great deal of tragedy. Her solution to the conundrum was to redefine happiness itself as an act of the will rather than a feeling — don’t trust your emotions, just obey. Then watch the wreckage of that theology across the next century and a half.
- “Biblical womanhood” came from a New Thought press. The clearest thread in the book. 1973: Marabel Morgan’s The Total Woman sells 10 million copies and is the bestselling nonfiction book of any genre in America in 1974. Not fringe. Where did she get it? She’d taken a class based on Helen Andelin’s Fascinating Womanhood — a Mormon writer, a decade earlier, 3 million copies, self-published. Where did Andelin get it? Directly from a set of booklets from the early 1920s, also titled Fascinating Womanhood, published by Psychology Press, a New Thought publisher, teaching women the law of attraction: be attractive and you will attract good things. Tripp’s summary: a multitude of plagiarism. Or syncretism.
- Amway, and the moment it clicked. Du Mez lives down the road from Amway headquarters in Grand Rapids, and they gave her and her research assistant a personal tour. Then she spent time lurking in MLM Facebook groups. What fascinated her was the rules: the upline and downline, obeying your upline, the prohibition on negativity, the prohibition on questioning the pyramid structure, the prohibition on talking across lines — because then you could compare notes and discover it isn’t working for anyone. Plus paying for your own training. Plus cutting yourself off from anyone outside who might make you question. And at a certain point she stopped and thought: this is an awful lot like evangelicalism in its high-control instances. That question took two years of research to answer. Her crucial addition: the coercive control only works because it runs alongside genuine rewards — belonging, platforms, book contracts, affirmation. Some of them actually good things.
- Toxic empathy, decoded. Tripp assumed the phrase must mean something like Paul Bloom’s argument that empathy narrows the site of moral attention. It does not, even though they footnoted his book. Du Mez’s read: high-control systems require an us-versus-them frame, a harsh doctrine to fail against, and — crucially — a closed system where morality gets defined by loyalty to the system rather than any external standard. And the impulses in this theology are genuinely disruptive; they can run in liberal directions. Love your neighbor. Love the immigrant. So the discourse around toxic empathy is an effort to blunt the disruptive power of love. Women told their whole lives to be loving are now told: not in that direction. Love channeled toward the stranger, the foreigner, the enemy is actually sin. Which makes perfect sense inside the logic, and no sense at all if you look back at the scriptures.
- Not brainwashing. Discipleship. Du Mez presents both sides on the language of cult, honoring people who reach for it to describe something they’re struggling to name (and tracing that history back through mid-century Chinese Communist thought reform). But she gives Robert Callahan the counterpoint — a Black Christian in Texas who watched white evangelicals he considered brothers and sisters turn during the Trump years, and who refuses the language of cult because it absolves people of responsibility. This is not brainwashing. This is discipleship. They were taught to do these things. They were rewarded for doing them. They revel in doing them. Du Mez wants readers caught between those two ideas, and is happy if they walk away with questions. Her related hope: that this book helps people in deconstruction understand why leaving is so hard. The answer is that it was deliberately designed that way.
- What she learned in Nazi Germany, and cannot stop thinking about. Du Mez’s doctoral training was in twentieth-century Germany with a focus on the German Christian movement, and she taught a class this spring on patterns of resistance under authoritarianism. Two takeaways. First: reactionary gender roles are always part of the authoritarian playbook, and she wishes people who hold complementarian convictions out of personal sincerity would reckon with how easily those convictions get weaponized. Second: how easy complicity is. Lay low, go with the flow, and — the part she keeps returning to — take the perks. She tells the story of reading about a department store’s fiftieth-anniversary celebration held the same week as Kristallnacht. Taken from one, given to another. Her ask of those who aren’t targeted: at minimum, refuse the perks handed to you for compliance. And she assigns Bonhoeffer’s After Ten Years alongside Howard Thurman — Bonhoeffer’s morally tangled reflection on acting when there are no good options, and Thurman writing in the 1940s that hate and contempt are not an option because of what they do to you.
About our guest
Dr. Kristin Kobes Du Mez is Professor of History at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and a Senior Democracy Fellow at the Public Religion Research Institute. She holds her PhD from the University of Notre Dame, with doctoral work on twentieth-century Germany and the German Christian movement. She writes Du Mez CONNECTIONS on Substack and co-hosts The Convocation Unscripted with Diana Butler Bass, Robert P. Jones, and Jemar Tisby. Her new book is Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made
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