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

"A smart, endlessly interesting exercise in connecting cultural dots to learn how we got here." ―Kirkus Reviews, starred review From the New York Times best-selling author of Jesus and John Wayne, a revelatory history of white Christian womanhood in the United States. In her “paradigm-influencing” (Christianity Today) bestseller Jesus and John Wayne, which has changed how countless Americans understand their faith, historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez showed how evangelicals made Jesus into an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism. Now she uncovers the roots of today’s glittering, Instagram-ready culture of white Christian femininity. Live Laugh Love explores a world intimately familiar to millions of American women: Christian bookstores and radio, Hallmark movies, multilevel marketing companies, and contemporary lifestyle brands. This consumer culture may seem trivial, but Du Mez demonstrates that it has an unlikely and revealing history that stretches all the way back to the late nineteenth century and the emergence of New Thought, a movement that championed the power of the mind to shape reality.