Biblical Womanhood Came from a New Thought Press: Kristin Du Mez on Live Laugh Love

Kristin Du Mez signed the contract for this book about a week before Beth Moore tweeted about Jesus and John Wayne, and that book took on a life of its own inside evangelical spaces. Then January 6th happened. So she wrote Live Laugh Love while still very much living inside the Jesus and John Wayne moment, which is partly her excuse for why it took so much longer than agreed — the other excuse being that once she started tracing what white Christian women were actually reading, buying, and building their lives around, she discovered she had to remap twentieth-century American religion. The neat boxes break down. Fundamentalist, evangelical, charismatic, mainline, Mormon, secular wellness — the women's cultural products cross all of them, and the through-line running underneath is New Thought. Here's the payoff that stopped me: what gets sold today as biblical womanhood traces back through Marabel Morgan's The Total Woman to Helen Andelin's Fascinating Womanhood to a set of 1920s booklets published by a New Thought press. They just added Bible verses to the top. We also got into the Amway tour, the rules against negativity, why toxic empathy makes perfect sense once you see the system, and — at the end — what she learned studying the German Christian movement that she cannot stop thinking about now. She's at Beer Camp in a few weeks.

You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube

About our guest

Dr. Kristin Kobes Du Mez is Professor of History at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and a Senior Democracy Fellow at the Public Religion Research Institute. She holds her PhD from the University of Notre Dame, with doctoral work on twentieth-century Germany and the German Christian movement. She writes Du Mez CONNECTIONS on Substack and co-hosts The Convocation Unscripted with Diana Butler Bass, Robert P. Jones, and Jemar Tisby. Her new book is Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made

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