Live Laugh Love proceeds by the logic of the listicle, reliant on the assumption that best sellers carried enormous cultural weight ... One yearns for a wider historical context. Du Mez convinces us that greed and idolatry have overtaken modern Christianity. But religions have been subjugating women for centuries, and believers have been amassing holy crap just as long ... Du Mez is right: This story does end in a dark place, and she can’t find her way out of it.
An essentially misleading book—not, to my knowledge, in its history but in its argumentation. The evidence cannot support Du Mez’s sweeping conclusions about American evangelicalism ... The best of Live Laugh Love is its detail and surprises. A biography of 19th-century author Hannah Whitall Smith, for example, is sharp and affectionate. This is Du Mez writing in her expertise and doing it with style ... It’s reasonable to ask not just for open critique but for a fair shake, and Live Laugh Love often fails to provide that.
Entertaining, expansive, often surprising, and occasionally horrifying ... Enlivened with an occasional touch of snark, Live Laugh Love is both thoroughly researched and provocative as it raises questions about how contemporary American Christianity got where it is and where it may be going next.
Du Mez connects today’s rhetoric around gender roles and Biblical womanhood to the holiness theology that informed Hannah Whitall Smith’s 1875 The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life ... Moving skillfully through such seemingly disparate topics as purity rings, multilevel marketing schemes, contemporary Christian music, the second wave of feminism and the rise of trad wife influencers, Du Mez assembles a sprawling network of evidence ... Combining the critical lens of an academic with the deep sympathy of a someone who recognizes the many ways women in conservative religious cultures are denied access to traditional power, Live Laugh Love highlights their efforts to control their own narratives while shining a light on the systems that limit and diminish those efforts.
This sprawling account from historian Kobes Du Mez (Jesus and John Wayne) explores how white women shaped and were shaped by conservative American Christianity ... An astute dissection of a repressive strain of American womanhood.
