Kristin Kobes Du Mez: The Secret History of White Christian Women

Lee C. Camp (0:00)

You can get all episodes of No Small Endeavor a week early and ad free on Patreon. Check out all of our membership offerings, including bonus content, community discussions, and pre-sale access, by going now to visit patreon.com/nosmallendeavor. Now, on to the show. I'm Lee C. Camp. This is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.

In 1875, a woman named Hannah Whittle Smith published a book called The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life. The title, obviously not modest, neither was it a metaphor. She believed she had found an actual formula.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez (0:43)

Christianity begins with an act of the will, belief. It's an act of total submission. You totally submit your will to the divine will, and that opens up channels of spiritual power.

It's a formula. You do this, it's going to happen. When that spiritual power then flows through you, through total submission, you will be blessed with holiness, perfectionism, sanctification, and importantly, with happiness.

Lee C. Camp (1:13)

Submit completely and holiness and happiness will follow.

The book became one of the best-selling religious works of the 19th century. But the life that Hannah Whittle Smith lived raises some questions about this formula.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez (1:27)

Her life is absolutely disastrous in so many ways. Her beautiful children die tragic deaths. Her husband, who is also a holiness preacher, cheats on her and she just has no use for him and for men in general by the end of her life. She struggles with health issues later in her life. One of her daughters marries the famous atheist, Bertrand Russell. He has no respect for her and she has a little respect for him, right? So her life does not look like the ideal that she held up.

Lee C. Camp (1:56)

So what do you do? You've staked everything on a promise and the promise has not materialized.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2:01)

Some people double down, become more legalistic. Some people abandon their faith entirely.

Hannah did something interesting and this is also a theme that we see come up over and over again. She knew she was not happy. So what she did, rather than abandon her theology, she redefined happiness. Happiness itself was not a feeling. Happiness itself was an act of the will. You will yourself to be happy and she conceded this was not very satisfying, but it's all she could come up with at the end of her life.

Lee C. Camp (2:29)

Here is how Hannah Whittlesmith put it near the end. It does seem an odd sort of thing to do, she said, to become satisfied by saying one is satisfied when one is not. But what else can we do? I choose to be content.

Hannah Whittlesmith's formula did not die with her. It became, according to my guest today, the operating system of an American subculture, one you can now buy at Target.

I first spoke with Kristin Kobes Du Mez back in 2021, after the release of her New York Times bestseller, Jesus and John Wayne, which explored the rise of Christian nationalism and helped make her one of the country's most prominent public intellectuals on religion and politics. Now, she's back with a new book, and she's turning her attention from evangelical manhood to the pastel-tinted world of white Christian femininity.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez (3:26)

When I say it in front of rooms of women, everybody laughs and knows exactly what's in it and what it's about. Then those outside of those cultural spaces, clueless. I literally had men, scholars of American religion, down to the layer telling me, I gotta choose a different title. Those words mean nothing.

Live, Laugh, Love is simply an attempt to make sense of the cultural world inhabited by millions of white Christian women. A world shaped primarily by the things they consume, by Christian radio, Christian romance novels, and home decor.

Lee C. Camp (3:59)

The Christian consumer markets big business in the US. Though exact numbers are hard to find, the Association of American Publishers reported $2.2 billion dollars in religious book sales in 2025 That's before you count music, gifts, or wall signs that say things like live, laugh, and love.

Kristin's argument is that if you want to understand how American Christian women have actually been formed, you should spend less time in the seminaries and more time in the gift aisle.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez (4:29)

In many religious spaces, women are not elevated to positions of institutional power. Women are kept out of seminaries. Women are not pastors or seminary professors as men are, but women consume vast quantities of essentially spiritual formation, products that shape them spiritually, objects that women are bringing into their homes, that they put on their wall as daily reminders of their values.