Mark Labberton: Welcome to Conversing. I’m delighted that we have the privilege of having Dr. Kristin Kobes Du Mez as our guest today. Kristin is a New York Times bestselling author and professor of history at Calvin University. She’s a senior democracy fellow with Public Religion Research Institute, and her primary research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion, and politics. Her first prominent book was the bestselling book entitled Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. And the book that we’re going to be discussing today is a book called Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made. Kristin, welcome to Conversing. It’s so great to have you. I look forward to our conversation.
Kristin Kobes Du Mez: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I’ve been looking forward to it.
Mark Labberton: You know, I’m a great admirer of your work and Jesus and John Wayne, which was in a way the book that I think sort of launched you in a bigger public way as a historian of religion in America. That’s probably narrower than you really work in, but you certainly are a historian of religion in America. And I want to start really on the topic of history itself, because it’s a somewhat risky thing these days to be a historian and to say things that are different than the narratives that may live in our bodies that we think are history, but that are really perhaps often just narratives that we carry around thinking they’re historical, but they’re not. So talk to us about why history—why you got into history and why you think history writing these days has the challenges that it does.
Kristin Kobes Du Mez: Yeah, I got into history for two reasons, actually. One, when I was an undergrad, I couldn’t decide what to do. I was actually pre-med. I was a German major. And then I just could not, like, limit myself. And so I became a history major because technically everything has a history.
Mark Labberton: Yes, yes.
Kristin Kobes Du Mez: You know, you can really just explore anything. But I was also drawn to history, and to study American history specifically, because I spent my senior year in high school as an exchange student in Germany. And this was a total immersion experience, right? This is before we had email or the internet. It was just snail mail. That was the only form of communication. I was just dumped in a German gymnasium, high school, and had to, you know, sink or swim. And over the course of that year—it was a congressionally funded program, and so it was very oriented towards history and politics and understanding cultural difference. And I actually came back from that year not only, you know, more informed about German history, but deeply curious about American history and culture, because so many of the things that I just took for granted looked strange from a German perspective. This was the early years of the Iraq War or the first Gulf War. And, you know, I had to personally answer for American patriotism, nationalism, the role that religion played in American flag-waving. And they told me, “Kristin, don’t you know how dangerous this is?” So I came back to the States wanting to better understand my own culture. And that was partly what I took with me.
Mark Labberton: Right, right. So when you decided to pursue history, you may have known—and we’ve come to know even more—just how problematic history seems to be to a lot of the debates that are going on right now. So how do you think about embracing it? You’ve gone clearly for the jugular, both in choosing to write Jesus and John Wayne and in writing Live Laugh Love. So you’re unafraid of the historical challenges, but tell us that journey and how you take it on.
Kristin Kobes Du Mez: You know, I think I was just naive. After I published Jesus and John Wayne in 2020, people started telling me, “Kristin, you’re so brave.” And I remember kind of thinking, oh, come on. You know, I’m just a historian. I wrote a history book. It does not take that much courage. But I’ve since come to understand. And frankly, it takes a bit more courage these days, even than it did back in 2020, to write the kind of histories that I do.
But honestly, I have always just been guided by a deep sense of curiosity, a sense of, you know, how did we get to where we are now? What is going on beneath the surface? Like, we all tell ourselves stories about where we come from, but the actual past is always more complicated. And I’ve just always been driven by that curiosity. I didn’t set out to write provocative histories. My first book actually wasn’t Jesus and John Wayne. It’s a book called A New Gospel for Women. And it’s a history of late nineteenth-, early twentieth-century Christian feminism, and centred on a global anti-trafficking activist who was a white evangelical woman, right? And so I do actually write about evangelical heroes from time to time. But I’ve just always been curious. Let me explore the past, like, turn over these rocks, figure out what it is that we’re looking at. And the past is always going to be more complicated and more interesting—and I would argue more useful—than the simplistic narratives that we tell ourselves.
Mark Labberton: Right, right. So as you took that on in a book like Jesus and John Wayne, however, the stakes suddenly were much higher than just another history about America. So tell us how that journey unfolded for you. You put a book out in the world and suddenly stuff starts happening. I can only imagine. So tell us a bit about that journey.
Kristin Kobes Du Mez: Yeah, you know, I published the book with a secular trade press, with Norton’s Liveright Publishing. And so because of that, I had a really kind of powerful launch. The book debuted on NPR’s Morning Edition with Steve Inskeep. So it kind of went out into the world with a bang. But it didn’t immediately find its way into evangelical spaces. I didn’t have any platform, really, to speak of. I was known within, you know, small religious history circles. I wasn’t known within evangelical spaces at all. It’s not a Christian publisher. It wasn’t immediately reviewed by any Christian or evangelical publications. I was an unknown.
But what happened is people started to find the book and then bring it into their evangelical spaces. I like to joke that if there is a white evangelical man who does not have his own podcast, I probably haven’t met him. So kudos to all those white evangelical men who read Jesus and John Wayne early on and said, “Hey, guys, we need to talk about this.” And they would bring me into their spaces and introduce me to their audiences. That is how Jesus and John Wayne started to take hold. Beth Moore tweeting about it was another really big thing that just, you know, like, introduced evangelicals—”Hey, guys, we need to reckon with this. This is our story.” And then it just started to spread by word of mouth. Since that book published, I have received literally thousands of messages from evangelical readers or former evangelicals who say, “This is the story of my life, but I never understood how all these pieces fit together.”
So when people think about how Jesus and John Wayne has been received in evangelical spaces—if you were on Twitter during that era, you would think that—I mean, I took a lot of hits. There was a lot of hate out there. I’m not going to lie. A lot of very public animosity, a lot of misrepresentation, blatant lies about me, about the book. But I kept showing up. And I would just say, “That’s false. Here’s the truth. Here’s the screenshot. Here’s the evidence.” This is how historians work. So if you don’t like what I said here, then you need to either have to show how I misrepresented the evidence, or you need to reckon in a different way with this evidence, or you need to accept what I have here. And by that point, the critics were gone, right? You know, like, they wouldn’t step up to the plate.
And what I realized—and I should have maybe known this, but what I realized is many of the evangelical critics actually had little concept of history and of the discipline of history, of the methodologies that we use; that in certain evangelical spaces, history is really seen as a branch of apologetics. So you are writing history books in order to evangelize your version of the faith. So you want to make yourself look good. Why would you want to turn potential converts away from evangelicalism, right? Their souls are at stake. So you want to present—you can criticize a little bit around the edges, but end of the day, it needs to be an attractive story that you’re telling about yourself. I clearly didn’t get that memo. I was not in it for that at all.
And I’ve actually thought a lot about this, of how I missed that memo. And I think that part of it is probably due to the fact that I didn’t grow up in mainstream evangelicalism. I grew up in a Dutch Reformed subculture—very Dutch, right? My mom herself was an immigrant. My dad, an ordained pastor in the Christian Reformed Church, a theologian. I grew up in this little subculture that embraced a very critical and highly intellectual understanding of the faith. We in Reformed and especially Dutch Reformed circles don’t do much in terms of evangelism. We kind of leave that up to God, right? We’re just highly critical as an intellectual tradition. That’s what I was raised in. And I’m just really kind of applying that skill set, which works well as a historian. But I think that there is a disconnect there between my version of kind of theological education and intellectual grounding and that which many evangelicals were brought up in.
Mark Labberton: Right. So it makes me curious, then, how your book was received in CRC—Christian Reformed—context. Jesus and John Wayne, that is. How was it received, given that background?
Kristin Kobes Du Mez: I have a lot of fans in the CRC, but also critics. But the critics that I have inside the CRC—indistinguishable from evangelical critics. Because really what has happened over the past few decades—and this is not unique to the Christian Reformed Church; this is a pattern that you see across denominations, Protestant denominations, especially those that lean conservative in the United States—is we have seen the growing influence of evangelicalism on these distinctive traditions. And so, you know, this is true of the Church of Christ, folks in Mennonite spaces. You know, you can just—like, I’m sure you hear these folks, too. I’m brought into a lot of these spaces, talk with leaders and parishioners who say, “But this is not who we are.” But now this is who we are.
And over the last decades, because of the influence of popular culture, of Christian radio, of evangelical publishing, and of organizations and networks like the Gospel Coalition, we see that where we once had many really distinctive traditions—and some of them ethnic traditions—now many of them have become essentially de facto evangelical, right? And so the critics that I’ve had inside the Christian Reformed Church have tended to be echoing the voices—you know, these are pastors that, you know, go to the Gospel Coalition and feel like their criticism of Jesus and John Wayne is, you’re making evangelicalism look bad. Why on earth would you do that? You’re trying to destroy, quote unquote, the church. Now, of course, “the church” is doing a lot of work there. But within evangelicalism, there is a real tendency to conflate evangelical Christianity, and a particular strand of conservative evangelicalism, with the church, with Christianity writ large. And therefore, I can be seen as an enemy of the church, which, of course, I would contest, but I certainly run into that.
Mark Labberton: Yeah. So, Kristin, let’s jump to the book that we’ve really come to talk about today, which is your newest book, called Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made. For those who haven’t yet read the book, give us the arc of the book. What is the argument of the arc of the book?
Kristin Kobes Du Mez: So I think of the book in terms of kind of three layers. There’s the surface layer. And when a woman of a particular demographic—you know, white, Christian, middle-aged or older—hears Live Laugh Love, they know exactly what’s in this book, right? They know it’s going to be about Christian romance novels and Hallmark movies and Hobby Lobby and Mary Kay and LuLaRoe and Joanna Gaines, right? We just know it. Like, this is the cultural world that millions of Christian women inhabit. So that’s what it is about on the surface.
But if you look at the subtitle of Live Laugh Love, it’s not about white evangelicals. It’s about white Christian women. So evangelicals play a really key role here, as do charismatics, right? If we want to include that alongside evangelicals—charismatic Christians, right? A lot of this is about prosperity gospel teachings that spill out beyond charismatic spaces. It’s also about Mormon women, right? LuLaRoe—if we look at tradwives, you know this is about evangelicals and Mormons. And importantly, it’s also about a secular philosophy of positive thinking, positivity, right? Again, if you think about these things—Hallmark movies, influencers, right? Tradwives. All of this makes sense. Multi-level marketing. It’s all of these strands. And so part of the book is how women can move freely between these spaces and consume products from across these spaces without even noticing that they’re coming from these different spaces, because the boundaries have always been porous. So that’s kind of the second layer of the book.
But then I would say the third layer is, ultimately, this book is about systems of manipulation and control inside these spaces. And that’s where things turn darker. And I think that’s where some of the real takeaways are, and where I think evangelical Christian readers would have to wrestle with some of these portions of the book. I certainly had to wrestle with them as I was researching. What am I actually looking at here? And what have millions of people actually been participating in?
Mark Labberton: Right. So in the subtitle, The Secret History, tell us about the secret, because that is, in a way, the launching pad for so much of what you lay out.
Kristin Kobes Du Mez: So the first chapter of the book is called “The Secret.” And it is based on Hannah Whitall Smith’s bestselling nineteenth-century book, The Christian Secret of a Happy Life. And so essentially, this is introducing not just evangelicalism to the story, but a particular strand of evangelicalism that emerges in the nineteenth century: holiness evangelicalism. And Hannah Whitall Smith is one of the pioneers, along with Phoebe Palmer and others. But she encapsulates it so well in this book, The Christian Secret of a Happy Life. That secret is the power of the will—that if you totally surrender your will to God’s will, you will tap divine power and be given this access to power, which will make you—holy. This is a version of Wesleyan perfectionism. You can become perfect, even perfectly holy. And very importantly, with that holiness comes happiness—the Christian secret of a happy life. And essentially, this is trust, believe, power of the will, trust and obey, total surrender to God. There’s no other way to be happy in Jesus but to trust and obey.
Now, that’s a central thread of the book, and I pull it through holiness evangelicalism. An offshoot of this is Pentecostalism. And then prosperity gospel teachings—you can see that, right? With the right attitude, the right belief, the right words of affirmation, you can manifest your reality. But alongside this story of American Christianity, you have a kind of secular philosophy that mirrors that. And that’s this philosophy of New Thought, which also promises the secret. And it is the secret power of the will, the mind. And the mind can shape reality. And this is, like, where we get books like Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. With the right attitude, you can manifest your reality.
That’s the central secret that I trace through this book, and how secular and Christian philosophies are intertwined, how it leads to things like prosperity gospel, how it suppresses traditions of social justice, how it blinds people to systemic inequality, how it goes hand in hand with free-market capitalism, how it ends up baptizing the rich and powerful because clearly they did the right things. And this is kind of the broader story of the book as it’s marketed to Christian women, and also as it comes to define American evangelicalism and really American culture over the course of the twentieth century.
Mark Labberton: You know, I found as I was reading the book, which I thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated—as dark as it gets toward the end of the book, it also captures something that for me was just very, very helpful and interesting. And part of it turned around this sort of tension between, on the one hand, this kind of New Thought secret approach is very empowering to a sense of agency. So it’s hugely appealing to that, especially at a time and context in which women’s self-empowerment, or women’s capacity to live into the fullness of their gifts and their abilities, is not necessarily being affirmed by the whole culture that surrounds them. But secondly, as a contrast to that, it’s also subversion of personal agency, because it’s this action of submitting into a way of thinking, being, doing, speaking, dressing, reading, decorating, spending. That is all part of this. So it’s this two-edged dynamic where this is really strengthening to me. And you can see and understand the voices of those that you quote and many others that probably anyone listening to this has run into—a strong assertion of strength of will. And then, on the other hand, it feels like a loss of will, because it’s based on conformism rather than the much more distinct particularity of a given person’s own individuality in community. Those are really different things. Can you just talk about that?
Kristin Kobes Du Mez: You said that so beautifully. You’re right. This is—on the surface, this promises empowerment. It feels empowering. And in some ways, it legitimately is empowering, because this is the message that you—every single person, no matter your circumstances—you have the power to change your reality, right? If you are a woman in an oppressive marriage with no real education to speak of, no job experience, you know, what feminists are selling you is just not feasible, right? Claim your rights, go get a career—that’s not even accessible. But what you can do is change your attitude and please your husband. And by submitting to him and making him happy, he will be kinder to you, and he will give you all the things that you desire, right? It obviously comes with risks.
But here’s the trick: when you embrace that theology, ideology, if things don’t work out well for you, it’s your own fault. It has to be your own fault. Because if you have within yourself—if everybody has within themselves the power to improve their circumstances, and their circumstances do not improve, clearly it is your own fault. You didn’t believe hard enough. You weren’t disciplined enough. You didn’t submit well enough. So go back and try again. And within these systems, both within holiness theology and within the philosophy of positive thinking, doubt is literally demonized. Doubt is of the devil. To question the system is in and of itself to go against the system, to disobey. And so if you question, “Is this really true?”—well, there’s your problem, right? This isn’t working out for you.
And by the way, both of these ideologies together form the basis of multi-level marketing. And you can see how it plays out in those predatory systems, right? If you’re not making money—which is the case for 99.7 percent of people, people who get drawn into these systems—it’s on you. You only have yourself to blame. If you question, that’s doubt. You can’t possibly succeed if you doubt. If you question, that is negative. Oh, also, you need to cut yourself off from anybody in your life who would question, “Is this really in your best interest?” And you can see, then, that this is a pernicious system, whether it takes hold in an MLM—multi-level marketing company—and draws people in and holds them there. But you can also see how this has the makings for extremely high-control systems, religious systems as well.
Mark Labberton: It’s really breathtaking, I have to say. It’s such an encompassing form of thinking that it allows no exit plan. It allows nothing but the reinforcement, again and again and again, of this circular thinking that brings you back to, really, your own failure in many, many ways. It’s the gutting of a person. Anything that’s wrong in my life is ultimately my doing because I’m not being faithful enough, right? That sort of feedback loop, which is so damaging. I’m curious, when you think about the arc of how this has all unfolded in the last century and a half, how would you imagine Hannah Whitall Smith, who wrote—in a way, we’ll call it the defining document that set this in motion—how would she read your book today and respond to the circumstances that you’re outlining?
Kristin Kobes Du Mez: Oh, my goodness. I love this question. What I would say about Hannah Smith is that she was an amazing woman. Born a Quaker, converts into evangelicalism, and then holiness evangelicalism, writes this bestselling book. Very importantly, she never confused submission to God—this total submission of the will that’s going to unlock holiness and happiness. She never confused submission to God to submission to men. She was a feminist. She was a preacher. She certainly wasn’t going to submit to her husband, who was a jerk. He was having affairs, like, sexual scandals. She ignored pastors—actually made fun of pastors who said that she couldn’t preach. Absolutely would not submit to these authorities, male authorities, who interfered with her understanding of what it meant to submit to God.
Mark Labberton: Right, right.
Kristin Kobes Du Mez: That changes as her work gets carried through the twentieth century in the hands of evangelicals. And her work, by the way—this holiness theology comes to define, I would say, the dominant strand of mainstream American evangelicalism. And so I pick up the thread with Elisabeth Elliot. Elisabeth Elliot grew up in a home steeped in this holiness theology—Keswick holiness theology, specifically. She goes to Wheaton College, right, also part of this tradition, and then to Prairie Bible Institute in Alberta, also part of this tradition. Her great-great-uncle actually founded the American Keswick organization—right, conference. And so, steeped in this, a treasured copy of Hannah’s book was passed down through her family line and ends up on her bookshelf, right?
But in Elisabeth Elliot’s hands, ultimately, total surrender—this total surrender to God becomes conflated with total surrender to the man that God has placed in authority over you. And this is what we see take hold in Passion and Purity, in her anti-feminism, and how she ultimately becomes a leading voice for complementarianism, for the sexual purity culture, for the double standard, right? This applies to women more than to men. And that for women to obey God becomes reduced to obeying the man that God has placed in authority over you.
I think Hannah would be horrified by what would become of her teachings in the hands of somebody like Elisabeth Elliot, even though I think she would be extremely sympathetic to Elisabeth Elliot as a person, because in a way, their lives mirrored each other’s. Hannah Smith herself did not receive the promised happiness that her theology had guaranteed. She had three children die—absolutely just agonizing deaths, losses for her. You know, her husband was not the godly man that he was supposed to be, and he was a preacher himself, but that didn’t make any difference. That actually made things worse. And she herself had ill health at the end of her life, and she knew it didn’t match what she had promised in her bestselling book, right? It would sell millions of copies.
For that reason, evangelical publishers, while they kept reissuing the book itself, The Christian Secret of a Happy Life, kept selling that promise to generations of Christians—for decades, they resisted publishing a biography of her, because they knew that her own life undercut the very message that they wanted to propagate. So I think that Hannah would be horrified by what has become of her teachings, but I think she would also relate in many ways to the women who tried to carry it forward.
Mark Labberton: Right. It’s a provocative thing to me that at the very beginning of the book, in the early pages, even before the table of contents, is a quotation from Elisabeth Elliot, which captures so much of what the book eventually unfolds. And I’d like you to just reflect on it. She said—this is from Elisabeth herself:
And if you make your system your god, you’ll soon be telling lies in order to remain consistent.
Kristin Kobes Du Mez: Wow. So Elisabeth Elliot—I have to admit, when I started writing this book, Live Laugh Love, I’d already written about Elisabeth Elliot to some extent in Jesus and John Wayne, and I was not eager to return to her. I’d done that, move on. But I knew if I was writing a book about white Christian women, I had to include Elisabeth Elliot. It turns out she is so much more interesting than I had anticipated. And so credit to the two biographers who published works on Elliot as I was researching my own book. This is Ellen Vaughn and especially Lucy S. R. Austen. Her book was just eye-opening to me and made me go back to Wheaton, to the Wheaton archives, and spend some time immersed in the collections there to figure out Elisabeth’s story.
And most listeners here, if they are familiar at all with Elisabeth Elliot, they probably know her as this intrepid missionary who went to Ecuador with her husband, Jim Elliot. Jim was killed by members of the Waorani tribe. Elisabeth accepts this as God’s will and comes back to the United States as an evangelical celebrity—really, an evangelical saint. And she is held up as this example of Christian faithfulness and sacrifice. Then later in her life, she writes anti-feminist books and helps ignite modern purity culture with her book Passion and Purity. Again, total surrender to God means total submission to men. That’s the Elisabeth Elliot that most people know today. Some love her for that, and some have experienced a lot of pain in their lives because of her teachings. What almost nobody is aware of is the Elisabeth Elliot in between those two chapters. I like to call it her deconstruction era.
And she comes back from Ecuador and starts to question the simplistic Christian truths she had been taught—specifically holiness theology: if you obey, God will bless you. When she went out to the field already, even before Jim’s death, she immediately encountered that the missionaries themselves were often crooked and corrupt, and that she had obeyed—she had sacrificed and gone to the mission field—but God was not blessing her with positive results. Her language informant was murdered, and she couldn’t do her work. She felt that God was letting her down. He wasn’t keeping up his end of the bargain. And then her husband is killed. She maintains that faithfulness. But then she does start to question.
And part of the reason is—oh, first she’s questioning: can you even convey the truth of the gospel and the Bible across this great cultural difference? She didn’t think it was even possible. But it wasn’t just to the members of this Waorani community. She also met a photojournalist, Cornell Capa from Life magazine, who comes in after Jim’s death to document. He is not Christian, and they become very close. But she discovers, too, that the evangelical jargon, the simplistic platitudes, simply did not communicate even across that cultural difference. She’s meeting these secular people who are wonderful people and reflecting on so much corruption inside Christian spaces. All of this leads her to question almost everything. She does not lose her faith in Jesus. She does not lose her love of the Scriptures. But she does reject all the—in her words—gobbledygook, the evangelical cultural trappings, the jargon, all of this. She starts to question—maybe same-sex relationships can in fact be godly, right? She is really just rejecting the trappings of conservative evangelicalism, so much so that evangelical leaders like Harold Ockenga are deeply concerned. Family members are deeply concerned—interventions with her—and she is just content to follow truth wherever it may lead.
Let me say, one of the funniest moments was when she goes back to Wheaton—at least funny for me as a historian. She goes back to her alma mater, Wheaton College, is standing there in the chapel, and she’s giving a lecture on Christian literature—aka the Christian publishing industry. Christian literature, she says, is neither Christian nor literature. It’s propaganda, right? It’s simply telling evangelical readers what they want to hear, but it is not true. It is lucrative. You can make a lot of money doing that. But if you tell readers the truth—if you follow the truth wherever it may lead, if you don’t start with your foregone conclusions and just do works of apologetics to prove it—that’s not what literature does. And that’s not—that cannot capture the mystery of God and the reality of Christianity itself.
She is wild. I will have to say, when I turned in those chapters to my editor—and my editor is from completely outside this world—I just said, “By the way, in case you don’t notice, that Elisabeth Elliot is me.” You know, like, following—not giving up on her faith, just not fitting that faith within the strict cultural and theological trappings of contemporary evangelical culture. And then she remarries and snaps right back and ends up the rest of her life essentially building the cultural trappings that she had found so wanting. And the story actually is tragic.
Mark Labberton: And what was the trigger of that?
Kristin Kobes Du Mez: The trigger for that? I don’t get all the way to the bottom of it, because as I understand it, she was already moving back in that direction before she married her second husband, Addison Leitch. He certainly helped facilitate it. But they were also in a relationship before they married. His wife was dying. It was not a romantic relationship, but it was a close relationship—so close that it was just six weeks after her death that they became engaged. So they were in a tight relationship. But—so certainly he did have influence over her. I know her family also were concerned about where she was going. But I still can’t ultimately get to the bottom of it, because the Elisabeth Elliot that I know from that era didn’t care. She didn’t care about other people’s disapproval. She was going to follow wherever that truth would lead. And somehow she was convinced that that truth led her back in the opposite direction. And she stayed there for the rest of her life, with tragic repercussions for herself personally.
Mark Labberton: You know, one of the most remarkable things I’ve heard Mark Noll say—and he has said, as you well know, many remarkable things—but one of them is in a conversation I was having with him on this podcast, when he was describing, in response to the discussion of his book America’s Book—the Bible, the use of the Bible in the nineteenth century—one of the things that—was this, that he said both readers of the North and the South, the readers of the Bible, were guilty of the same things. One was a lack of self-consciousness, and the second one was a lack of self-critique. Now, I just think that is such a handy little duo of challenges.
And in what you’re describing—and as I was reading this book—I kept thinking, where’s the self-consciousness? Where’s the self-critique? The interesting thing about the Elisabeth Elliot story is that in one sense, she comes to self-consciousness. She’s willing to exercise self-critique. And then it unravels for these reasons that you’ve just hinted at. So, first of all, do you think that those two categories—of the need for self-consciousness and the absence of self-consciousness, or the need for self-critique and the—sometimes its presence or its absence—are those phrases that you think are constructive in understanding the long argument of this book?
Kristin Kobes Du Mez: Oh, absolutely, right. And, you know, the work of a historian is to assist in that self-consciousness, right? To show—because when it is the air you breathe, it’s the only world you know, it can be hard to see, you know, the culture you’re inhabiting for what it is. Now, this is hard for everyone. This isn’t just uniquely hard to American evangelicals, right? All of us grow up in value systems, and we learn, quote unquote, truths that shape the way we see the world. And we tend to prioritize those as actually true until something shakes it up.
All right. That said, evangelicals have perhaps a more robustly established understanding that the way they see the world is the capital-T truth. And then they were able to build this subculture of Christian products, right? The Christian publishing industry. It’s just—Christian radio, to build out these megachurches, so that it was very easy to essentially exist almost entirely within this subculture, right? There are many evangelical families who would not go into a secular bookstore, would not dream of buying a secular book on parenting, on marriage, who would not listen to secular radio. I certainly grew up, even just on the very edges of this culture, thinking Top 40 radio was sinful. I wanted to be an obedient Christian. I would only listen to CCM, right? So I’m, like, largely oblivious to, like, huge swaths of American culture from the ’80s and ’90s, because I was inhabiting this other cultural space.
And then within American evangelicalism, alongside that, you know, very tight subculture—oh, and we didn’t talk about churches, where you can not just go on Sunday, but you do life together. You have small groups together. Your kids are in youth group and in Sunday school. Your whole social system is that church. And it can be beautiful and lovely, but also isolating. It can become a closed system that keeps challenging thoughts on the outside, and even defines any challenges as threats, as coming from places that want to attack truth with a capital T.
I think it’s important to realize that many American evangelicals do not self-identify primarily as evangelical. At least historically, they have not. Rather, they identify as Bible-believing Christians, or just Christian, right? And they define Christianity around their little expression of it—not so little, but certainly globally, you know, white, conservative American evangelicalism is just a small subset of global Christianity, right? But then that is their standard, their default, without them even realizing how unique it is, and how their capital-T truths, many of them, have actually been shaped much more by culture and their own, you know, history than they are ready to admit. That’s what history does. So it can increase that level of self-awareness.
Whether it then leads to self-critique, I think you need other values brought in, right? Because a question that I think needs to be asked—once you have an understanding, oh, the value system that I inhabit came from somewhere. It wasn’t just directly handed down by God. It’s not just quote-unquote biblical womanhood or biblical finances or whatever, right? There’s a history here. Then you still have to ask, and does this align with my values? Is this where I want to be? Is this the world I want to help create? And history can’t ultimately answer that for you.
Mark Labberton: Right, right. Kristin, let’s make one more connection that you do in your book, and that is, how does all this intersect ultimately with white Christian nationalism?
Kristin Kobes Du Mez: So, you know, white Christian nationalism, or Christian nationalism, is a term that has gained a lot of attention just in recent years, for good and ill, I think, because people are using it in different ways. What I can say is that in historical spaces, that’s not a new term. But it’s a messy term, again, because people mean different things by it. So with that caveat: the Christian nationalism that we’re largely talking about today has roots—and the dominant form of Christian nationalism, when social scientists are measuring, do you think America should be a Christian nation? Do you think our laws should reflect, you know, biblical laws? Those sorts of things—the vast majority of people who answer yes to those questions are part of the Christian right. And they are embracing a version of Christian America promoted by the Christian right that emerges in the 1960s and ’70s, right?
So they aren’t talking in terms of—you could identify a quote-unquote Christian nationalism in Black Protestant tradition, in the civil rights movement, for example. You could go back earlier and find it in the social gospel, right? Progressive Protestantism, liberal Protestantism. By and large, when people are talking about Christian America today, most embracing kind of these convictions, they are part of this more recent movement, the Christian right.
So what we’re talking about there is the idea that Christian America must be founded—its kind of basic societal unit is the patriarchal Christian family. And also the idea that a Christian society is hierarchically ordered, that God orders society through God-ordained hierarchies. And so this is where modern Christian nationalism is drawing on teachings that we see in Bill Gothard’s circles and even, I think, more directly, Christian Reconstructionism. This is the teaching by Rushdoony—R. J. Rushdoony—which orders all of society hierarchically. So the God-ordained Christian society must embrace patriarchy. Now, Rushdoony also imposed racial hierarchy here. And the degree to which that infuses mainstream evangelical ideas of Christian America is up for debate, but it certainly has a presence there.
So all of society has to be organized hierarchically. Only then—when you organize your family around patriarchy and hierarchy and then organize your country around God’s laws, and they like to look back to the Old Testament for that, and they tend to ignore teachings of Jesus about, you know, the poor, and the prophetic books in the Old Testament, and they’ll ignore “love your neighbour as yourself,” “love your enemy,” the Beatitudes—all of that don’t really register here. But for Christian nationalism, right, it is this hierarchy and order and the values that essentially map on really closely to the modern Republican MAGA agenda, right?
Now, the idea, then, is that when you bring society under God’s control in this way and align our nation’s laws with what they perceive to be God’s laws, and then enforce that through coercion if necessary, then the nation will be blessed by God. This is the promise of Christian America. And Christian nationalists today all are operating out of a sense of something that was lost, right? A mystical understanding that at one time—whether it’s our nation’s founding, whether it’s just, you know, pre–Civil War South, whether it’s 1950s America, pre–civil rights, significantly—at one point things were good, and we were mostly obedient as a nation, but then things went wrong: liberalism, right, Democrats, feminists. And so it’s a project of restoration.
And that restoration is going to have to come through some coercion, because this Christian nationalism is also built on an us-versus-them mentality. Either you are with us—you are among the obedient, the pure, and if so, you must be protected—or you are against us: again, feminists, Democrats, liberals. And then it is a responsibility of Christians in the political sphere to promote their vision and not to compromise with Americans who are against this vision, right? And then—but the promise is that ultimately it will even be good for them, right? If they aren’t kicked out or, you know, put in prison, they’re going to find out that when the nation aligns with God’s laws, that they too will be blessed, because the nation will be blessed. And so Christian nationalism is deeply rooted in this history. And I tell about that history in this book, and the methods of discipline and control, but it also always comes with this promise. And it also has within it this trigger that is a quid pro quo—that God will be good to us only if.
Mark Labberton: Yes. And it’s under these certain conditions that then make the way for God to be able to be good—who would like to be good otherwise, but will not be wholly good or fully good toward us unless we set the right triggers in motion—which then comes back to human agency again as really the central trigger.
Kristin Kobes Du Mez: Yeah. Yeah, Christian nationalism is not an ideology that prioritizes grace whatsoever. It is one that relies on this transactional—you know, you obey, you will be blessed. If you disobey, you should be punished, because that will correct your behaviour. This is why also we’re seeing, in kind of Christian nationalist spaces these days, this discourse of toxic empathy, or the sin of empathy, right? Not surprisingly, you know, Toxic Empathy—that book was written by Joe Rigney, who, you know, is part of the Doug Wilson religious empire, which is informed by Christian Reconstructionism, the teachings of Rushdoony, right? Very, very big on this toxic empathy. And then we’ve seen it popularized further by the Christian influencer Allie Beth Stuckey with her book Toxic Empathy.
The point here is that if you have empathy for those who are not obeying God, that is toxic empathy. Do not express empathy or kindness to those who are disobedient. That will only encourage their disobedient behaviour. They need to be punished. They need to be ostracized. And only then will they be corrected and align their lives with God’s laws, or they have to suffer the consequences. And that is what God is calling you to do, right? That is the logic here. There is no sense of the common good. There is no sense of common grace. There’s no sense of grace, period, right? It is that every Christian, to be faithful, has to act somehow as—in terms of disciplining anybody who is seen to not measure up.
And in these books—you know, I can say I read cover to cover—you know, for Allie Beth Stuckey, toxic empathy just happens—the bad kind of empathy happens to line up with showing any sort of empathy towards anybody who does not align with the right-wing MAGA agenda. Empathy towards immigrants—toxic, right? Think about the children killed by immigrants. That’s where your empathy has to focus. Empathy for LGBTQ individuals—toxic, because you’re allowing them to go against God’s will for their life, right? Empathy for the poor—pick yourself up by your own bootstraps, right? This is how that works.
Mark Labberton: Right, and hence public military executions.
Kristin Kobes Du Mez: Exactly. You know, people are trying to figure out, you know, what hypocrisy—these are quote-unquote pro-life Christians. That just shows a fundamental misunderstanding of this worldview. It is that obedient Christians, innocent life, is to be protected. But people who are evil, who do evil things, they must suffer the consequences. And putting that on full display for all to see, that’s—right? That’s the inner logic here, right? Sympathy should not extend. Grace, mercy should not extend to those who disobey, unless they’re inside the fold, right? So an abuser, you know, is somebody who’s inside the system, who is using their power to protect and promote the system. Well, then there’s forgiveness, right? Then there’s forgiveness. So there’s a lot of forgiveness for powerful men, even predators, as long as they are promoting the ideology—then you can forgive. So again, this us-versus-them framework is absolutely critical to understanding the moral system as well as the political allegiances of many conservative evangelicals.
Mark Labberton: What are the underlying questions that are still knocking around in you, that you just think, but what about, but what about? What are a few of those that are still—
Kristin Kobes Du Mez: So many. You know, one thing I will say is, you know, the self-awareness and this humility of—as a Christian myself, and as somebody who interprets Scripture in different ways than many of the people that I write about, I can also see how they are drawing their convictions from the Scriptures, right? All of us are going to interpret the Scriptures in different ways. We’re going to find favourite verses or passages that we centre. And then we’re going to be disregarding others, right? And so when I’m reading holiness theology, holiness views of sanctification, of perfectionism—you know, I’m a Calvinist, so I don’t really go for that. Never have. When I see what verses they point to, I’m like, you got a point there, right? Now, you’re not looking at some other verses.
And then I bring in voices like Nadia Bolz-Weber, Sarah Bessey, who look to Scripture and then reject prosperity gospel teachings, reject purity of all sorts. Nadia Bolz-Weber, as a Lutheran theologian, right, contests evangelical purity culture, because she says the Bible shows her that every single person is simultaneously 100 percent saint and 100 percent sinner. This destroys this us-versus-them, right? We are all sinners. We are all saints. Christians, too, are fallen. Like, as a Calvinist, I’m down with that, right? That’s speaking my language. But grace also abounds, right? And that’s the beauty of the gospel—not just for the insiders, but for everyone, right? So I resonate with that.
But I have to say, you know, as a historian, I bring her voice in, but I also let Elisabeth Elliot have her say. I have Hannah Smith have her say. And, you know, it can be kind of disorienting. And sometimes my readers want me to say, at the end, tell us what is right. That is not mine to say as a historian. You should not listen to me any more than you listen to your pastor, than you listen to—you know, actually less than, probably, depending on your pastor. But, you know, people have spent their entire lives studying scriptural interpretation. We have, you know, two millennia of history that we can engage with. We should be doing that with more humility.
But the questions that remain for me—honestly, the biggest one is, I spend a lot of time in the book mapping out these systems of manipulation and control. I go into the Chinese mission field in the early twentieth century. I go into Chinese Communist prison camps in the Korean War. I am looking at evangelical small groups, accountabilities, and how they can be used to manipulate and control. And it is stunning. So my problem is that—what do we do with the fact that this seems to work? It seems to work incredibly well from a psychological perspective, from building a highly disciplined movement, of shaping history, of intervening politically. They seem to have cracked the code, some of these folks. And I’ve tried to reveal that, of how that works.
At the end of the day, I’m left with, what do I do with this? Because it sure seems like a powerful way to manipulate people, to control people. And you can say that you are doing it for good ends, that you are doing it to bring the world under God’s control. And I believe many people really did believe that. But my goodness, it’s also dangerous. It’s dangerous if we don’t hold that together with humility—that we do not hold up an awareness of our own fallenness, that we are also, each of us, prone to temptation, to usurping God’s power, to claiming power and calling it righteous, which is unbiblical. You know, I bring in Reinhold Niebuhr in his critique in the midcentury that the man with power is always ultimately, to a certain extent, the Antichrist. Right? So what do we do with that?
How do we build a better movement? How do we evangelize into a different kind of Christianity that doesn’t prey upon these psychological realities, and instead is presenting a gospel which is more in line with the gospel of Jesus Christ, one in which Christ divests himself of power and continually disappoints his followers who want that power, who want that reward, and who think he’s this worldly messiah? He constantly disappoints his followers. No, the first will be last. And if you want to follow me, that looks like taking up your cross to follow me. So what does it look like to promote that version of Christianity when we’re up against this really powerful and effective system that really undermines, I think, the gospel of Jesus Christ?
Mark Labberton: Kristin, thank you so much for today’s conversation. This has been exceedingly rich, and I certainly want to commend this book, Live Laugh Love, to all of our listeners—and to not only take the book and read it, but to read it even more, perhaps, in groups where you have an opportunity to interact with all kinds of dimensions of the book, which are richly supported by research, and supported by both all the interviews you did but also all the careful analysis of historical documents and people. I’ve been really affected by reading it, and I’m extremely thankful that we had this opportunity to talk today. I wish you the very best in your ongoing work and can’t wait for the yet next book, which I know is already bubbling underneath the release of this newest one. Kristin, thank you very much.
Kristin Kobes Du Mez: You speak as a fellow writer. I can tell that. And yes, I deeply appreciate this conversation, the thoughtfulness with which you engaged the book and with which you’ve led this conversation. So I’m really grateful to you for your work.
