Live Laugh Love — Book Summary & Review

Live Laugh Love is organized around Du Mez’s insistence that today’s “white Christian femininity” grew out of older religious movements—especially New Thought’s mind-over-reality optimism—then got sold back to women through mainstream consumer channels. Du Mez doesn’t treat Hallmark, Mary Kay, multilevel marketing, or shiplap as background noise; she reads them as the cultural packaging for a theology that trained women to equate spiritual worth with emotional manageability, domestic competence, and visible positivity. One of the book’s sharpest stretches is her account of how religious innovators fused “positive thinking” with prosperity expectations, turning the inner life into a lever for external success. Du Mez’s historical work is at its best when she shows overlap rather than neat boundaries: Mormonism, holiness evangelicalism, and holiness theology’s charismatic offshoots keep bumping into each other in her narrative, which helps explain why the modern brand of “uplift” feels coherent even when its sources are messy.

A concrete example: Du Mez lingers on the way women moved between religious and secular retail—prairie fiction, Tupperware parties, Christian bookstores and radio, and big-box lifestyle shopping—without experiencing it as a contradiction. She argues that this flexibility created a Christianity that was influential in daily life while remaining “thin” in formal doctrine, because the real glue was a cultural ideal of womanhood. The book’s limitation is also clear: if you want a tidy, fully sourced academic monograph with exhaustive primary citations and a balanced treatment of every competing interpretation, Du Mez’s approach will feel more interpretive than exhaustive, and it can frustrate readers hoping for a strictly neutral history.