In this episode of Wild & Waking, I’m joined by New York Times bestselling author and historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez to discuss her new book, Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made. Kristin reveals how the seemingly harmless products, stories, aesthetics, and slogans consumed by generations of women carried deeply embedded ideas about femininity, domesticity, capitalism, race, religion, and political power—and how white Christian women were not merely shaped by this culture, but helped create and sustain it.
Together, we trace the surprising connections between positive thinking, prosperity theology, multilevel marketing companies, Christian consumer culture, and the expectation that a “good” woman should remain beautiful, grateful, submissive, and endlessly optimistic. We explore how these systems offered women belonging, identity, influence, and community while also making that belonging conditional—and why doubt, anger, grief, questions, and conversations about systemic injustice were so often dismissed as personal failures or dangerous negativity.
Kristin’s work invites us to see more clearly what shaped us, reckon honestly with what we helped create, and begin asking: Is this who we want to be… and what do we want to build instead?
In this episode, we explore:
- How white Christian women shaped American religion, culture, consumerism, and politics
- The hidden history behind the “Live Laugh Love” version of white Christian femininity
- How New Thought, positive thinking, evangelical Christianity, and prosperity theology became intertwined
- The “good Christian woman” ideal of beauty, submission, domesticity, gratitude, and self-sacrifice
- Why MLM culture became especially influential among white Christian women seeking income, identity, purpose, and community
- How belonging within evangelical communities can feel deeply loving while remaining conditional upon loyalty and conformity
- The difference between the realities of rural life and the performative tradwife aesthetic sold online
- How nostalgia for an imagined, morally pure past can fuel authoritarianism and Christian nationalism
- The symbolic role of white womanhood within patriarchal visions of the Christian family and Christian America
- How the gospel of positivity discourages conversations about systemic racism, structural inequality, and racial justice
- Why religious deconstruction often involves grief, isolation, identity loss, and the rebuilding of an entire worldview
- How women can reckon with their complicity in harmful systems without losing compassion for themselves or others
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