Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s highly anticipated new book has caused quite a splash this fall and in delivering what it promised has sent ripples throughout the evangelical world.
Live Laugh Love tells the story of American evangelical womanhood, or as the subtitle describes: “The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made.” Du Mez expertly traces the 20th century Biblical Womanhood movement’s origins to the late 19th century New Thought movement, then on to Holiness Theology. Next comes the inception of multi-level marketing (where New Thought marries capitalism), and then on to the era of “Fascinating Womanhood.”
So what’s the point of exposing the faults of the thing known as “Biblical Womanhood”?
In 1963 (the same year as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique), Mormon housewife Helen Adelin would repackage the 1920’s Fascinating Womanhood books into her own book (of the same title) in which she spiritualized the Flapper-Era guide to alluring womanhood. This would become the blueprint for the Biblical Womanhood movement that followed in the 1970s, inspiring a generation of Christian women to strive for “a life of love and happiness”1 by way of submission and an impossibly high standard of femininity.
The goal was to charm husbands, by being a fun and “silly, frilly female.”2 Don’t take yourself too seriously, she advised, but be saucy, sexy, irresistible. Adelin’s vision of a hyper-femininity centered around beauty, submission, calculated attention to men’s needs, and protecting men’s egos. The promise: a “fairy tale marriage”3 would result. If not:
Women had only themselves to blame, but for that reason they also had the power to fix things. With the Fascinating Womanhood formula in hand, any woman could secure her own happiness.4
Ideas about women’s place in the church and society were further solidified by the creation of the Religious Right and the founding of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. From the mid-1800s up to our current time, LLL is a wild ride and an excellently crafted story.
So what’s the point of exposing the faults of the thing known as “Biblical Womanhood”? Several reviewers have concluded the book is not worth reading because the narrative didn’t match their experiences in evangelicalism. Is LLL mere “history as gossip” or is there something to learn from this story? I would suggest that whether LLL perfectly encapsulates your experience in evangelicalism or completely misses the mark, the history of American religion that Du Mez points us to is worth considering because, whether we know it or not, it has shaped our culture and churches in undeniable ways.
History Repeats Itself
In order to frame Du Mez’s argument, let’s start with another book, Harold Bloom’s 1991 work, The American Religion. Du Mez doesn’t quote Bloom’s book, but his ideas are buzzing in the background of LLL and are worth considering in tandem.
What all these expressions of American Religion have in common is emphasis on the self.
Though best known as a literary critic, in The American Religion Bloom attempts to describe what he calls the “indigenous American religions.” This includes: Latter Day Saints, Southern Baptists, the Second Great Awakening, the Holiness movement, pentecostals, and even the cults (Christian Science and Jehovah’s Witnesses). Bloom’s goal is to understand his moment in history (the first Bush administration and the ascendency of the Religious Right) by tracing American religious ideas back to their roots.
His conclusion: none of these expressions of faith came about in a vacuum. They were reactions to other events or built upon ideas that came before them. History is not just a linear timeline, but ideas recapitulate and reemerge. This is exactly what Du Mez is seeking to show us in LLL by connecting our current era to an earlier time.
What all these expressions of American Religion have in common is emphasis on the self. The individual’s thoughts and good feelings could control circumstances and even manipulate the physical world into bringing blessing and prosperity. Mix this with the American dream of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and we get a kind of “American Shamanism.”
Bloom’s other conclusion is that these expressions of faith could only come about in America. Spiritual solitude, self-revelation, and a restorationist impulse are common to all forms of American Protestantism. That faith and success are self-made is an essentially American idea found in everything from Transcendentalism to current-day teachings on self-help and even Christian living books. One of its first modern expressions was New Thought.
New Thought Is Where It’s At
Whether you feel it or not, New Thought has influenced almost every aspect of American (and yes, American evangelical) culture.
Inspired by Quaker and Puritan Inner Light theology and wedded to secular ideas of “mesmerism” and the “mind cure movement,” New Thought was an ideology that swept late 19th century America. William James, in his 1902 work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, praised New Thought and even went so far to call it “Americans’ ‘only decidedly original contribution to the systematic philosophy of life.’”5
For James, and others after him, the principles of New Thought captured the essence of American Religion. The self was not only able to secure salvation, but could manifest happiness and prosperity in this life. As Du Mez explains:
New Thought would profoundly shape American religion, but not primarily as a stand-alone tradition. A system rather than a church, it intermingled with Hannah Whitall Smith’s holiness evangelicalism, with liberal Protestantism and Mormonism, and despite their apparent incompatibility, with various iterations of Calvinism. And beyond traditional religious spaces, it inspired the modern self-help industry. Blurring the divide between the religious and the secular, New Thought contributed to a wider cultural embrace of positivity and prosperity, and to the elevation of self-interest over benevolence as the basis of a moral society. It also inspired a distinctive vision of femininity, one that presented women themselves as commodities to be advertised and acquired, and that taught women that attracting a man and keeping him happy was their pathway to power. Over the course of the twentieth century, these notions remade evangelical, Mormon, and secular ideals of femininity, even as the influence of New Thought remained largely out of sight. Its teachings were promoted as universal, natural, “traditional,” and “biblical”—simply the way things were, or the way things ought to be.6 (emphasis added)
Once you’re aware of New Thought, even now in the Year of Our Lord 2026, you find it under every rock. From the latest Oprah book club self-help pick, to App store affirmation apps, to the friend from high-school who promises you will achieve all your goals by becoming a part of her downline, to classic books on Biblical Womanhood that suggest that if you become “the sunshine of your home”7 your entire family will magically transform into the people you wish they were, to the idea that “thoughts are things” and we have the power to manifest either blessing or curse—New Thought has just become part of the air we breathe as Americans.
This is one of Du Mez’s most important points: whether you feel it or not, New Thought has influenced almost every aspect of American (and yes, American evangelical) culture.
Holiness Theology built on the foundation of New Thought and added a bit more of a to-do list. A product of the 1840’s Second Great Awakening, Holiness Theology cherished right thinking for good living. Its emphasis on total surrender, subsequent salvation experiences, total sanctification, and Keswick-inspired Higher Life teachings promised a guaranteed recipe for spiritual highs and success:
At a time of rapid industrialization and social change, anxieties about “the nature of man, society, and the universe” abounded. Holiness theology’s simple steps to spiritual success offered believers a sense of agency and control over otherwise unpredictable lives.8
But in the words of Anita Bryant, one-time Religious Right activist who was shown the door when she sought a divorce from her abusive husband, “The answers don’t seem quite so simple now.”9
“White Christian women had helped create the metastasizing system in the US.”
I think this sentence on page 298 is where some reviews of LLL took up the pitch fork. It feels like an affront for Du Mez to trace Biblical Womanhood to MLMs or Republican politics to social media Trad-Wife content.
Immense influence and power can come by way of modeling submission and a certain kind of femininity or domesticity.
This is not to say that white Christian women single-handedly built the MAGA machine, but history has shown how women have always recognized that the way to power, position, and influence was by capitulating to what the men in the room wanted them to be. Submission and femininity promise a seat at the table. This is the world we live in. Even today, post-third wave feminism, to be a loud boss babe is a hard sell. Women have always found creative ways to not only influence men in high places, but to simultaneously sell a version of Fascinating Womanhood to other women.
This Fascinating Womanhood is a double edged sword, however. Aimee Semple McPherson, Hannah Whitall Smith, Henrietta Mears, Phyllis Schlafly, Elisabeth Elliot, Catherine Marshall, Dorothy Patterson, Hannah Neeleman, even Erika Kirk, all prove that immense influence and power can come by way of modeling submission and a certain kind of femininity or domesticity. These women built empires. On one hand, it is admirable. They found an effective way that codes as “safe” and “biblical” to subvert the system by building a theater of submission. On the other hand, it is destructive because they don’t just model a certain kind of femininity, but attempt to convince other women that emulating it is the key to happiness and success:
When happy endings failed to materialize, Marshall doubled down on positivity and obedience. For her part, Elisabeth Elliot turned to love as the guiding principle of her faith. When blessings failed to appear in readers’ lives, many bought another book. If their own deficiencies were to blame, the solution was more self-improvement. In this way, a theology that promised success created perpetual demand, and Christian publishers were happy to keep up the supply.10 (emphasis added)
The fruit of New Thought mixed with the fears stoked by mid-20th century cultural upheaval resulted in an entire industry of books and teachings marketed to women. This was truly a confusing time. And yes, popular culture in the 1990s and early 2000s really was THAT bad. Evangelicals were justified in creating their own alternative sub-cultures. The result, though, was the creation of a system with new burdens and new gods that demanded allegiance.
While there is nothing wrong with being a wife, mother, homemaker, relying on those roles (or relying on doing them well enough) to bring you favor with God, win over your husband, or secure your children’s salvation, is not the answer. Books like The Secret Power of Femininity, The Excellent Wife, Total Woman, Let Me Be a Woman or The Fruit of Her Hands turn a good thing into the ultimate thing. They promise that with enough faith, submission, womanliness, and self-reliance, women can secure happy endings. Du Mez shows us that there is a soft prosperity Gospel at the heart of everything from New Thought to MLMs, and this includes many of the ideas marketed to women in Biblical Womanhood content.
What’s the Point?
As we hold the mirror of history up to ourselves, what are we supposed to do? Most of us in evangelicalism have been around these ideas our entire lives. Some have suffered abuse at the hands of those who twisted Scripture. But for many of us, it was always just in the water and we haven’t been that damaged by what we listened to and read in Lifeway Bookstores in 1999.
It’s the soft prosperity gospel that is dangerous. It’s the subtle idea that we can manufacture success, happiness, freedom, safety, faith, flawless marriages, or well-behaved children.
It’s the soft prosperity gospel that is dangerous. It trickles down to the smallest fundamentalist churches and the biggest mega-churches. It’s the subtle idea that we can manufacture success, happiness, freedom, safety, faith, flawless marriages, or well-behaved children if we run hard and fast enough. Or are submissive and holy enough. This is not the message of the Gospel, and equating this kind of self-determining American religion with true Christianity has devastating consequences.
What New Thought, Holiness Theology, MLMs, the Religious Right, and Biblical Womanhood all have in common is that they fail to ultimately deliver on what they promise. Manifesting the miraculous, being completely committed to purity, working hard enough, putting the right people in office, or making sure you have placed yourself under authority will not save us. The problem is us and we need a solution that comes from the outside.
Du Mez doesn’t offer a concrete solution going forward. She is a historian, not a theologian, and has done her job by connecting our moment to the filaments of history. But what Du Mez points us to in the conclusion of LLL is that the way of Jesus is not the way of Empire. True Christianity has never been about securing power for ourselves or triumphing over our enemies (real or imagined).
In fact, sometimes following Jesus looks a lot like losing. But in reality, a Christianity free from the trappings of the allure of power, success, or prosperity tells a better story. Abundant life looks like being able to give it all away, to give of ourselves, because we no longer have anything to fear. Only when we have been set free to love, can we truly live and love in return. And yes, maybe even laugh.
This piece was originally published on Holy Ordinary on October 9, 2026. Republished here with the author’s permission.
- Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2026), 120. ↩︎
- Du Mez, Live Laugh Love, 109. ↩︎
- Ibid., 109. ↩︎
- Ibid., 109-110. ↩︎
- Ibid., 13. ↩︎
- Ibid., 13-14. ↩︎
- Marabel Morgan, Total Woman, quoted in Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Live Laugh Love, 125. ↩︎
- Du Mez, Live Laugh Love, 27. ↩︎
- Ibid., 144. ↩︎
- Ibid., 102. ↩︎