Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made

In Jesus and John Wayne, historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez showed how evangelicals made Jesus into an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism. Now, she unearths the roots of today’s Instagram-ready culture of white Christian femininity. Live Laugh Love traces how nineteenth-century New Thought, a movement that championed the power of the mind to shape reality, combined with holiness evangelicalism to create the world inhabited by millions of Christian women. Du Mez introduces us to religious innovators who taught that positivity was the secret to spiritual and material success and reveals how they saturated consumer culture through mum-blogs, romance novels, Target aisles and pastel wall art. Marketed as empowerment, these products and slogans elevate vulnerability and domesticity, and in the process draw women into manipulative and abusive systems. In this brilliant recasting of modern American Christianity, Du Mez unearths the hidden origins of this reactionary moment. Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne (9781631499050) was praised as:"Kristin Kobes Du Mez takes on [the Religious Right’s] version of toxic masculinity… Du Mez writes from the inside..." – Anne Nelson, Times Literary Supplement

• Publication date: 13 October 2026
• Page count: 432
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Ltd
• Format: Hardback
• ISBN-13: 9781324090977