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.
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.
