Why do a majority of white Christian women enthusiastically support the MAGA project? These women harbor a drive for female empowerment but insist that the way to achieve it is to submit body and soul to the man of the house. They celebrate purity but in many cases leave no cosmetics jar or surgical enhancement off the table in their quest to turn themselves into sex objects. They preach a religion of universal love but practice a politics of division, exclusion, and hate. They are relentless in their performance of positivity yet see themselves as besieged in a world of evildoers. They have aligned themselves with a uniquely corrupt administration and a movement that now brands empathy as toxic. Amid the wreckage of America’s democratic institutions in recent years, a substantial number of MAGA women have risen to positions of prominence, including Erika Kirk, Allie Beth Stuckey, Paula White, and Karoline Leavitt.
Here to make sense of the tragedy is Kristin Kobez Du Mez with her gripping and unnerving new book, Live, Love, Laugh: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made. The author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, Du Mez brings both the personal experience and the research and writing skills that the job requires. She grew up in an ultraconservative Dutch Calvinist community, attended a summer camp where girls, known as “Calvinettes,” were given “glow-ups” and taught which pastel colors best suited their skin tones. Now she is asking a community of believers to hold itself accountable to the principles in which it professes to believe. Having exposed in her earlier work the misogyny and abuse that have corrupted American evangelicalism in recent decades, and which set the stage for Christian nationalism, she knows very well that the reaction to this book, in many quarters, will be unpleasant, not to say dangerous. She does not lack courage.
The rise of a class of female enablers of an authoritarian patriarchy, Du Mez shows, is neither a novel development nor an accident. In a deep, narratively engaging history, she traces the roots of our present predicament to a nineteenth-century movement called New Thought. The formula for a twenty-first-century phenomenon like Erika Kirk, she argues, was already present in the work of Hannah Whitall Smith—an almost unknown figure for most people today but a major Christian celebrity in her time.
In The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life, which was published in 1875 and went on to sell over three million copies, Smith lays out the recipe for the new American evangelical woman. The book exudes the relentless positivity that now freeze-frames the smiles on women like Erika Kirk and compels evangelical women to insist that the sun shines all day in an unending parade of occasions to praise the Lord. Even when Smith’s own life became unspeakably miserable—several children died, her husband cheated and abandoned her, a surviving daughter married, of all people, the atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell—Smith doubled down on the conviction that “every snub and mortification” was an opportunity for spiritual growth and that she could will her way to happiness.
The critical ingredient here is the assumption, echoed by the American philosopher William James, that the mind controls reality. Think the correct thoughts, and all good things will come to you. The Lord will reward you with material security, a loving husband, godly approval—everything one could possibly desire. The Prosperity Gospel, as Du Mez makes clear, comes in early and strong; it is among America’s greatest contributions to theology.
At the core of the doctrine that stretches from Smith to the self-help pioneers of the early twentieth century, to the God-and-country nationalists of the mid-twentieth century, and to the social media influencers of the twenty-first century, in Du Mez’s telling, is a firm commitment to the salvific potential of submission. Obedience—unconditional, unstinting, utterly abasing—will set you free. The lesson applies to all believers, but it has special meaning for women in a deeply unequal society. Being happy means being happy that you are a woman. And that means obeying your (male) pastor and your husband. In everything.
The message receives its clearest expression in the work of Elisabeth Elliot, a midcentury missionary and the author of over two dozen books. Elliot is one of the more disturbing figures in Du Mez’s narrative. After her rage-filled and controlling first husband was murdered by members of an Ecuadoran tribe he was seeking to evangelize, Elliot suffered through two more catastrophic marriages to two exceptionally cruel and angry men. (Her second husband, Addison Leitch, demanded that her daughter from her previous marriage be moved out of the house.) Then she made a career of telling women that “submission to her husband was obedience to God” and that “woman was made for man,” not the other way around.
The same message today can be found in the work of Nancy Wilson, the wife of the pastor Doug Wilson, famous now as a spiritual mentor of self-styled “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth. Nancy “trained women in her church ‘to always be cheerful and never complain,’” as Du Mez reports. “A woman should revere her husband and submit to him, arrange her day around him, and ‘never speak ill’ of him to anyone. If a woman was married to a man who was not a good leader, she must ‘get lower … just get underneath him.’ If he made irresponsible decisions, she must “‘Respect the Uniform.’”
Present at the creation, too, was the dark secret of the new gospel. If you’re not happy, you have only yourself to blame. It isn’t that your husband is an alcoholic with a record of physical abuse; it’s that you’re just not thinking the right thoughts. The mindset here is an obvious invitation to abuse and exploitation, and Du Mez provides a grim bill of particulars stretching across the centuries.
Examples include Stacie Oricco, a Christian musician popular in the early 2000s. When she filed a lawsuit against her manager accusing him of having sexually abused her from the age of 14, her career was sidelined. Christa Brown, abused by her pastor as a teenager, has been excoriated by religious leaders for decades for exposing the systematic cover-up of sexual abuse by leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention. “When people talk about turning the US into a Christian nation, it makes me quake,” she warned. “To ponder what that would mean for women in this country … I have seen what it means.… And it is bloody awful.”
The other, not-so-secret aspect of this new gospel is that it is extremely useful for the rich and powerful—and especially rich and powerful men. One of the more haunting sequences in Du Mez’s book is a survey of the sordid history of multilevel marketing businesses in the U.S., which have enlisted millions of Americans, including many white Christian women, in its lower ranks. “From its inception,” Du Mez writes, “Amway marketed a religious, political, and economic vision inspired by positivity” and Amway founder Richard DeVos Sr. spoke in the language of the Prosperity Gospel: “I believe that life is good, that people are good, that God is good. And I believe … that life in America under God is a positive experience!” DeVos also had a very clear idea of a woman’s place, providing over $5 million in support to the influential preacher D. James Kennedy, who served on the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and whose complementarian views on marriage advanced a gendered view of who should do what.
Those who signed up as distributors in MLMs called themselves “independent businesswomen” and paid for their own indoctrination—purchasing motivational books and tapes, and paying out of pocket for branded merchandise to sell to their networks. One woman, who attended Tupperware parties in the 1970s, observed that selling Tupperware was not a good way to make money. As Du Mez explains, women attended the parties and bought Tupperware even when they didn’t really need more containers and “paid more than comparable products cost elsewhere,” while “dealers earned only twenty-five cents on every dollar of sales, and their compensation was often in merchandise.”
The big winners were the owners of the MLMs, who have directed their fortunes toward political donations and influence, and who promoted an ideology of “free enterprise,” “capitalism,” and “the American way” that involved stripping the social safety net and defunding public goods. (Members of the DeVos family, among them Trump’s former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, are extraordinarily deep-pocketed donors to the Republican Party.) Even when women managed to get in on the winning side of this brutal formula—as in Mary Kay Cosmetics—they largely replicated the dynamic of exploitation.
Live, Love, Laugh is, to be clear, a history of white Christian women, and mostly white evangelical women (until the very end, when ultraconservative Catholics start joining in the fun). There is almost nothing about Black or Latino evangelical Christianity, and there is no exploration of the parallels between American conservative Christianity and comparably misogynistic and patriarchal systems around the world. This is not meant as a criticism; the tight focus of this book accurately reflects the claustrophobia of American evangelicalism, which often seems to take for granted that God came to America alone and never left.
Where do we go from here? The emergence of the Christian social influencers, the rise of Christian nationalist women in the Trump administration, the sanctimonious show ponies on propaganda networks, and the ongoing abuse scandals that fill the last chapters of Du Mez’s story offer a grim perspective on the future. A corrupted religion is unlikely to reform itself. And yet that hope is in some sense the unstated premise of this brave new book. Here’s hoping it somehow finds a place inside the bubble, and leads at least some of the people there to listen carefully to their own words and look honestly at the world that they have helped create.
