Live Laugh Love explores a world intimately familiar to millions of American women: Christian bookstores and radio, Hallmark movies, multilevel marketing companies, and contemporary lifestyle brands. Du Mez explains how theological exclusion led women to build their own brand of Christianity, rich in cultural influence if thin in formal doctrine.
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.
Gripping and unnerving ... Du Mez brings both the personal experience and the research and writing skills that the job requires ... 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.
