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# A Conclusion in Search of Evidence
- URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/a-conclusion-in-search-of-evidence/
- Published: 2026-09-23T11:00:30.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-23T11:00:29.000Z
- Description: 'Live Laugh Love' takes an abundance of cleverly written stories and creates from them a decoupage.
- Author: Mere Orthodoxy
- Tags: Books, Evangelicalism, Journal, Fall 2026, Kirsten Sanders

*This review will also be featured in the upcoming fall issue of the Mere Orthodoxy journal. To receive the entire journal, sign up to* [*become a member*](https://mereorthodoxy.com/membership/) *today.*

**Kristin Kobes Du Mez. *Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made*. Liveright, 2026\. $31.99\. 432 pp.**

Henrietta Mears is a heroine of evangelicalism, although you’ve likely never heard of her. Mears taught a Sunday school program in Hollywood, California that at one point reached nearly 6,500 people. She brought her skills as a school administrator to church life and focused on strengthening Bible curriculum, pedagogy, and age-appropriate instruction. When she discovered that the curriculum available was not up to her standards, she wrote her own, then founded a press to distribute it.

Her impact was vast; she mentored Bill Bright, who founded Campus Crusade for Christ, and Jim Rayburn, who went on to found Young Life. By all accounts, Mears’s life was marked by diplomatic engagement, hard work, and careful planning. She was known for her sense of humor and her deft touch in conflict, as well as her enthusiasm for the work of the gospel. What she wasn’t known for, at least primarily, was her position on women’s ordination or whether women should preach. She often wore flamboyant hats and broaches, costume jewelry, and large decorative collars. Somehow, without diminishing her gender nor leading with it, Mears went out furthering the work of the gospel. She didn’t “preach” in the technical sense, but her influence for the kingdom was vast. None other than Billy Graham called her “one of the greatest Christians I’ve ever known.”

When I first heard the announcement of Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s new book, *Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World they Made*, I thought I was sunk. I was [quite critical](https://mereorthodoxy.com/missing-subtler-yet-greater-problem-replying-jesus-john-wayne/) of Du Mez’s previous book, *Jesus and John Wayne*, not because I disagreed with her collection of evidence, but because I wasn’t convinced the clues led in the direction she specified. 

Du Mez argued that there was an organized, premeditated advance of Christian patriarchy that coalesced around the time of the Religious Right’s ascendance, but by her reading this ascendance was carefully arranged. I thought Du Mez played fast and loose with the evidence to secure her vision of an encroaching Christian patriarchy and said as much in my review. But with this new book, I was prepared to eat crow.

In *Live, Laugh, Love,* Kobes Du Mez teases a thread I too have noticed. Although “White Christian Woman” elides as much as it describes, the ascendance of social media-moderated culture *has* prioritized a certain version of religious piety. You can see it in the speakers who are platformed and who get major publishing deals. Scaffolded Bible journals and fancy pens, and underwritten by the religious teaching of women like Beth Moore and Ann Voskamp, it can seem like the popular version American religious woman has taken a hard turn toward the gentle and the pretty. You can hardly buy a Bible anymore without being advertised one that lets you color inside, like a preadolescent whiling away a summer afternoon. The aesthetics (colorful, pastel, with curlicue initials and floral graphics) seem to telegraph an accompanying femininity that is delicate, gentle, and largely decorative.

I am all for arts and crafts, the decorative, and even gentleness (though not known for it myself). Still, as a theologian and a writer, I have been concerned with the way that feminine religious tastes seem to lean toward the decorative and the sentimental, and sometimes even towards the saccharine. Even stories of deep suffering get tied up in a pink bow. The pressure is to make everything personal, make it relevant, make it touching—and this ends up producing a lopsided version of Christian thinking. Largely missing from today’s book market are women like Henrietta Mears. 

All of this means that I am a good target for a book about the way the religious market (including the publishing market) has prioritized a largely decorative type of women. Give me competence, deep biblical thought, even a little bit of antagonism—pink paper wrapping optional.

Du Mez might initially seem to be striking in this direction. Her book is comprised of chapters that tell interesting stories of women in American Christianity. We meet Hannah Whitall Smith and Henrietta Mears; Catherine Marshall and Mary Kay (of the cosmetics fortune); Elisabeth Elliot, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Betsy DeVos; Beth Moore and Ann Voskamp; Jen Hatmaker and Erika Kirk. Many of these women might be read as pinkwashing. Mary Kay is an obvious target; Elisabeth Elliot, though a much more complex figure, did as much to secure “biblical womanhood” as any modern writer. Perhaps Du Mez is going after pink as much as anything else?

Du Mez is a wonderful storyteller. She has a knack for detail, and as someone who grew up in a similar part of American Christianity (I was even a Pioneer Girl!), I knew most of these stories. What is unique about Du Mez’s book is the way she combines them, weaving them together to craft a particular narrative about American womanhood. By her reading, White American Christianity has crafted a version of womanhood with softened edges—innocent and girlish, trusting and submissive. In the words of Hannah Whitall Smith, it was a positive attitude that characterized the Christian life; in her words “Christians should be known for ‘sweetness under provocation; calmness in the midst of turmoil and bustle; yieldingness to the wishes of others, and an insensibility to slights and affronts; absence of worry and anxiety; deliverance from care and fear.’” 

This combination of deference, delicacy, and positive thinking added up to form a version of womanhood that sought strength in innocence, sexuality, and femininity. “Clever women knew to feign helplessness,” Du Mez writes, and success as a woman often looked like speaking in a girlish high-pitched voice while dominating your field as a Tupperware saleswoman or a Mary Kay representative. 

Du Mez has a decent thesis in the first part of the book: New Thought philosophy gained prominence as the economy of the 1950s started to heat up. Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 *Power of Positive Thinking* became a manifesto not simply for self-help, but for religion, business, and family life. The post-War society was ripe for a vision of life that stitched together hard work, family life, and financial reward. The rewards *did* seem to follow if you applied yourself and believed in the possibility of your own success, whether you were selling Amway or building a log cabin in the American frontier, like Pa Ingalls. “Holiness theology”, she writes, “often ended up propping up respectable, middle-class womanhood.” Because Christianity was the dominant religion of the day, this combination of shared social mores and religious assumptions seems uncontroversial. (Vibes have always been a problem for the theologians). 

But the second part of the book pushes on the clean connection between hard work, family values, and reward—and it pushes hard. Du Mez’s vignettes get increasingly varied, both topically and historically. She writes about Janette Oke and Amy Grant (whose divorce scandalized CCM audiences); Christian Becky and Saddleback Sam, whose target demographics collapsed Christianity and middle-class respectability; Beth Moore and Paula White, whose success relied on positive thinking. There is a discussion of direct sales marketing and MLM’s, and don’t forget Ann Voskamp and Christian mommy bloggers. And there is Erika Kirk. 

We need to pause for a moment on Erika Kirk, because for a woman whose provenance is so recent and whose cultural capital so relatively slim, Du Mez spends a disproportionate time invoking her. And I think invoking is the right word.

Kirk, the widow of political figure Charlie Kirk, is known for her “Barbie-pink” aesthetics and her preaching of “less feminism, more femininity.” She seems to be a symbol for everything Du Mez has identified. She is traditionally beautiful in the beauty queen style, mother of two, successful businesswoman, and a great motivational speaker.

Kirk is probably best known for two things; speaking about the lies feminism told women, and for forgiving her husband Charlie’s murderer. So what is it, exactly, that Du Mez is after in bringing her into this book, even including a photo of her in it?

I think the reason women like Erika Kirk or Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neelman or Helen Andelin (author of *Fascinating Womanhood*) feature so prominently in this book is that they are not individuals. Through a combination of clever marketing, careful personal curation and self-promotion, these women have become icons of a particular form of womanhood and a particular form of life. Kirk, a former beauty queen, is known for her outspoken views against feminism’s main tenets. Kirk’s open endorsement of “traditional” lifestyles—meaning valuing children and homemaking—has made her a target for those concerned that such views cut against modern gains for women. Neelman and Andelin have similarly endorsed traditional views of women as conventionally attractive, domestic, and submissive. But in doing so they crafted massive economic engines for themselves and created social power that seems to undercut any notion of “submission.” Femininity can be its own economic engine, feminist theorists will confirm.

But Du Mez’s concern with Kirk especially seems to have a different target in mind. She is not arguing against traditional femininity alone—her constructive goal is not to habilitate women’s competence or value in the workplace. 

The thesis, frankly, seems to be that traditional femininity is not outmoded but dangerous. It corrupts individual women and makes them susceptible to males who are power-hungry and authoritarian. On a personal level, this can lead to abuse and domestic violence. But the dangers are much more significant on a national scale. The Trump administration’s authoritarian project, Du Mez writes, is implemented by women who display the combination of innocence, sexiness, and hyper-femininity. Examples include Kristi Noem, Michele Bachman, Sarah Palin—and, especially, Erika Kirk.

It is clear throughout the book that Du Mez believes that the traits associated with traditional femininity have an explicit political agenda. She traces Ronald Reagan’s love of *Little House on the Prairie* to his economic agendas, noting that Reagan’s “words resonated powerfully with how Americans ‘feel in their bones.’” By her account, the *Little House* franchise had helped put that feeling into people’s bones in the first place.

Du Mez also takes on the Christian Businessman’s Association, accusing it of intending to minister not to the “down and out” but the “up and out.” We leave the pink world behind for a time, as we consider Pastor Peter Marshall’s influence as Senate chaplain, the Presidential Prayer Breakfast, and the more hidden work of religious associations like Focus on the Family. “The group’s cell structure was akin to that of communists, the mafia, and the Marines,” Du Mez writes, adding that “Hitler and Lenin, among others, ‘understood the power of a small core of people.’” 

The argument gets increasingly more conspiratorial at this point. “In the face of communism” in China, 

> holiness theology supplied a totalism of its own. Demanding total submission, unquestioning obedience, and absolute purity, and using small group confession to cultivate self-discipline and secure group loyalty, the faith embraced by figures \[in holiness theology\] bore a striking resemblance to \[Communist China\]. This likeness was not entirely incidental. From 1913 to 1918, a young Chinese student named Yun Daiying attended YMCA summer camps overlapping with Buchman’s extensive work in the association.   
> Fascinated with the group’s ability to forge a disciplined moral community through prayer, mutual confession, and group accountability, Yun replicated YMCA practices of confession and accountability in a secular mutual aid society he founded in 1917\. Without a strong theological core, however, its effectiveness was limited. In Marxism, he found a robust substitute for religious doctrine. Four years later, he helped found the Socialist Youth League of China. One of the earliest members of the Chinese Communist Party, he was placed in charge of party propaganda in 1928\. Three years later he was executed by order of Chiang Kai Shek, but his methods lived on.

The sort of claim Du Mez makes here is so outrageous, it is hard to believe it passed the editor’s desk. Is she saying that the model of small groups was borrowed by (checks notes) Communist China? And that the idea of hierarchy and submission to authority, utilized by any organization, is attributable to Hitler and Lenin?

That is exactly what she says. And she says it again:

> More than half a century earlier, the Chinese student Yun Daiying had discovered that without rigid doctrine, cell groups, and confession failed to produce the conformity he sought. In Marxist doctrine, he discovered a sufficient substitute. Seeking to combat communist totalism, postwar evangelicals found in holiness theology the mechanisms to create a totalist system of their own. The doctrine of inerrancy, combined with theologies of hierarchy and submission rooted in Calvinist theology, supplied the rigid doctrine necessary for maintaining conformity and control.

To sum up, Du Mez’s argument here is that a leader in the Chinese communist party learned about the importance of rigid doctrine and small groups from his time in a Calvinist youth group.

Du Mez’s main concern at the first part of the book is that New Thought and mid-century society “reduced Christianity to a system of successful living.” An argument explaining that a system of successful living is not itself a religious vision could be a compelling thesis. Instead, *Live Laugh Love* takes an abundance of cleverly written stories and creates from them a decoupage. What you see when you take a step back is the glaring face of Donald Trump, with all the vile misogyny, violence and devastation she sees as his hallmark. The reader of the book sees the picture Du Mez intends. It comes through loud and clear. The challenge, however, is that the micro-images are so diverse and varied that they don’t quite fit together into a coherent whole. The resulting narrative does not represent historical thinking. It's more like arts and crafts.

In her chapter critiquing Laura Ingalls Wilder’s romanticized views of the freedom and possibility of the American West, Du Mez quotes Wilder, intending to indict her fast-and-loose telling of history. Wilder mulls, “Facts are infinite in number” but “the truth is a meaning underlying them; you tell the truth by *selecting* the facts which illustrate it.” 

Wilder’s words could easily have come from Du Mez’s own pen. The question the reader needs to answer is whether the truth Du Mez tells is in fact supported by the facts.