Interview with Kristin Kobes Du Mez
Christian Culture and the World We Inherited
John sits down with historian and author Dr. Kristin Kobes Du Mez to talk about her new book, Live, Laugh, Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made. Their conversation wanders through Christian bookstores, Little House on the Prairie, purity culture, multi-level marketing, women in ministry, and the quiet ways faith, culture, and commerce have become tangled together over the last century.
Kristin invites us to become more curious. What has shaped us? What stories have we inherited without noticing? And what might it look like to hold onto faith while seeing our own history more honestly?
Find this interview on the Ministry Forum Podcast (wherever you get your podcasts) OR listen here.
About Dr. Kristin Kobes Du Mez
Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a New York Times bestselling author and Professor of History at Calvin University. She is a Senior Democracy Fellow with the Public Religion Research Institute. Her research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion, and politics. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Religion News Service, and Christianity Today, and has been interviewed on NPR, CBS, and the BBC, among other outlets. Her most recent books include Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020) and Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made (September 2026). She is a Distinguished Associate at the Institute for Christian Studies (Toronto) and recently served as a Fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Philosophy of Religion (2024-2025). She previously taught at Calvin Theological Seminary, Williams College, and the University of Notre Dame. She holds a PhD from the University of Notre Dame.
About the Books
Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation | 2021
Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping, revisionist history of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, revealing how evangelicals have worked to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism—or in the words of one modern chaplain, with “a spiritual badass.”
As acclaimed scholar Kristin Du Mez explains, the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the centrality of popular culture in contemporary American evangelicalism. Many of today’s evangelicals might not be theologically astute, but they know their VeggieTales, they’ve read John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart, and they learned about purity before they learned about sex—and they have a silver ring to prove it. Evangelical books, films, music, clothing, and merchandise shape the beliefs of millions. And evangelical culture is teeming with muscular heroes—mythical warriors and rugged soldiers, men like Oliver North, Ronald Reagan, Mel Gibson, and the Duck Dynasty clan, who assert white masculine power in defense of “Christian America.” Chief among these evangelical legends is John Wayne, an icon of a lost time when men were uncowed by political correctness, unafraid to tell it like it was, and did what needed to be done.
Challenging the commonly held assumption that the “moral majority” backed Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 for purely pragmatic reasons, Du Mez reveals that Trump in fact represented the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values: patriarchy, authoritarian rule, aggressive foreign policy, fear of Islam, ambivalence toward #MeToo, and opposition to Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ community. A much-needed reexamination of perhaps the most influential subculture in this country, Jesus and John Wayne shows that, far from adhering to biblical principles, modern white evangelicals have remade their faith, with enduring consequences for all Americans.
Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made | 2026
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. This consumer culture may seem trivial, but Du Mez demonstrates that it has an unlikely and revealing history that stretches all the way back to the late nineteenth century and the emergence of New Thought, a movement that championed the power of the mind to shape reality. Du Mez shows how this idea drew together disparate traditions, including Mormonism, holiness evangelicalism, and holiness theology’s charismatic offshoots. Usually seen as distinct, these creeds in fact overlapped, and in the process gave rise to prosperity theologies and to the gospel of positive thinking.
But positivity had a dark side. Du Mez introduces us to religious innovators who taught that positive thinking was the secret to spiritual and material success, and reveals how these notions gave rise to a new feminine ideal. As women read prairie fiction; bought and sold Tupperware containers and Mary Kay makeup; shopped at Hobby Lobby, Target, and Altar’d State; and decorated homes with shiplap, they moved freely between the religious and the secular. Marketed as empowering, these products were part of a consumer culture that elevated domesticity and vulnerability while exposing women to systems susceptible to manipulation.
Combining sweeping cultural history with intimate storytelling, Du Mez explains how theological exclusion led women to build their own brand of Christianity, rich in cultural influence if thin in formal doctrine. Ultimately, Live Laugh Love explains how a powerful yet elusive vision of womanhood has shaped lives, families, and politics for more than a century now—and how it has brought us to our reactionary moment.