Announcing Kristin Du Mez's LIVE LAUGH LOVE

A perfect reading companion to BACKSLIDE.

Dear Redeeming Democracy readers,

If you’ve been following me for any length of time, you know the high esteem I hold for Kristin Du Mez , Professor of History at Calvin University and author of the New York Times bestselling bombshell book, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. Over the last five years, Kristin and I have become friends and collaborators—together with Jemar Tisby, PhD and Diana Butler Bass for our weekly The Convocation Unscripted podcast. We’ve also been in conversation as we’ve both been writing new books that address the current threats to both Christian faith and democracy in America.

I was excited to find out that her long-awaited new book, Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made, will be published on September 15—just one week after my new book, Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy. While each has their own distinct focus and mission, both books take a rigorous look at history and our own cultural experiences in the evangelical world—“Calvinettes” for Kristin and “Royal Ambassadors” for me, for example—to help us understand how we got here and illuminate alternatives for those wanting to walk a different path. I think they would make perfect reading companions.

For those like me who have been mesmerized by Kristin’s ability to distill the complexity of cultural history into a compelling narrative, you won’t be disappointed. LIVE LAUGH LOVE is a rigorous piece of historical scholarship—one destined to be an instant classic in the field—that reads like a political thriller. And it’s arriving right on time to help us find our way forward during these dark days in American history.

Here’s how Kristin described the book in a recent post on her own Substack newsletter Du Mez CONNECTIONS :

Live Laugh Love is about exactly what you think it is. It is about prairie fiction and Amish romance, Amy Grant, Jen Hatmaker, and Joanna Gaines. It is about multilevel marketing (from Amway and Mary Kay to R+F and LuLaRoe). It is about Christian bookstores and Hobby Lobby and Altar’d State, about beauty and bloggers, about purity culture (of course) and about Elisabeth Elliot—but not exactly the Elliot you might expect. (Elliot became one of my favorite people in the book—not the missionary Elliot or the Passion & Purity Elliot, but the woman she was in between.)

The book is also about power. It is about systems of manipulation and control. (That’s partly where the “secret” in the subtitle comes in.) For people who have been immersed in these worlds and for those who have left or tried to leave, it will make so much sense of so many things. I had no idea…

Unlike Jesus and John Wayne, this book isn’t just about evangelicals. If you think about influencers and MLMs and Hallmark movies, you know that this goes beyond evangelicalism. It is about evangelicals but also about charismatic, mainline, Mormon, and secular women. And it’s about the philosophy of positive thinking: Change your attitude and you can change your life!

Since writing Jesus and John Wayne, I’ve received thousands of messages from readers. People often assume I get a ton of hate mail, but I don’t. Hardly any, actually. But almost every day, to this day, I receive letters from readers saying “thank you.” Almost all of them convey some version of the same: This is the story of my life. But I never understood how all these pieces fit together.

Live Laugh Love does the same, but this time there are more pieces, and by the end, the picture that emerges is even darker than where we arrive at the end of Jesus and John Wayne. (Yes, it features Erika Kirk and Karoline Leavitt and Kristi Noem, and that Thomas Kinkade-inspired DHS propaganda.)

In so many ways, Live Laugh Love is a bigger book than Jesus and John Wayne. It is also a more disruptive one. (I know, I know…this should be fun…)

It’s probably the most important book I’ve written. Once you see how all of these pieces fit together, you won’t be able to unsee it.

I hope you’ll join me in pre-ordering Kristin’s book. (Note: If you order using one of the links in this newsletter, a portion of your purchase goes to support my Redeeming Democracy newsletter). And stay tuned—we’ll certainly have some joint conversations about our books between now and the early September pub dates!

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ICYMI at Redeeming Democracy

And here’s a link to our collaborative work at The Convocation Unscripted :