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Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made. Liveright, 2026.
Katie Gaddini, Esther’s Army: The Christian Women Who Power the American Right. W. W. Norton, 2026.
A specter is haunting American religious historians—the specter of the 81 percent. That’s the percentage of white American evangelicals estimated to have voted for Donald Trump in 2016; the figure hardly budged in 2020, and apparently rose to 84 percent in 2024. Commentators have produced an avalanche of literature attempting to understand this phenomenon. Along the way, the very concept of “evangelical” has been deconstructed so many times that few agree any longer on its meaning.
Kristin Du Mez entered the Roman arena of explanations in 2020 with Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. Few academic books become bestsellers; this one did. Her thesis: White evangelicals “did not cast their vote despite their beliefs, but because of them.” Evangelicals hadn’t betrayed their values. Donald Trump was the “culmination of their half-century-long pursuit of a militant Christian masculinity.” Her book was an exploration of the forces that sculpted today’s form of toxic masculinity.
In Jesus and John Wayne, Du Mez swung for the fences and hit a home run, prompting the outraged cries of her critics. Predominantly coming from the theo-bro right, they threw up website posts, blogs, tweets, and YouTube channels to rebut her. Their problem: she has the receipts, and they don’t.
Du Mez’s new book is an equally invigorating tour through the same time period, from the later nineteenth century to the present, this time with a focus on what we might call militant, even toxic, femininity. It also provides, she suggests, a “new genealogy of twentieth-century American religion.”
Live Laugh Love is a densely detailed, relentlessly forward-moving, and amply footnoted statement of her case. She highlights in particular the role of the nineteenth-century New Thought movement (a metaphysical tradition that emphasized mental healing and self-affirmation techniques), the prosperity gospel, and consumer capitalism. All supposedly served to empower women in their pursuits of happiness and promised to “free individuals from societal constraints.” But they turned out to be exploitative traps: “Submission to the divine too easily morphed, especially for women, into submission to divinely appointed authorities.” Through the twentieth century, she concludes, the kinds of “mind-power” that came from New Thought and later from the “power of positive thinking” would “ultimately serve the interests of libertarianism, free-market capitalism, and neo-liberalism. . . . they would also pave the way for the reactionary populism of our current moment.”
Another explanation for this “reactionary populism,” and for why conservative evangelical women are so central to it, comes from sociologist Katie Gaddini. Her new book, Esther’s Army, is just as serious as Du Mez’s but more lightly written; it reads like a New Yorker piece or a New York Times Sunday magazine profile. Her account comes mostly from interviews with a multiethnic group of contemporary women active in the MAGA (as well as MAHA) movement. Gaddini treats her subjects empathetically, gently correcting a few of their more egregious falsehoods but mostly letting them have their say.
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The result is a rich portrait of women who are angry at being rebuked and scorned by the media, “the Left,” and mainstream political thinkers; who are bonded by “shared grievances, common enemies, and biblical convictions;” and who are convinced that “the future is theirs.” As they see it, “the Left moved the needle of cultural acceptability so far in such a short time that the Right had had no other choice but to claw back.” Fascinatingly, Gaddini discovers, they see themselves as moderates occupying a middle ground of American politics, while their left-wing opponents are “radical, extreme, and irrational.” They also come from various parts of the Christian world—evangelical, Catholic, mainstream Protestant, megachurches. This is not just the white evangelical Protestant world that (with some exceptions) is the focus of Du Mez’s historical account.
Where did they come from? Du Mez gives us the longue durée historical account; Gaddini focuses on the last two decades or so, from the creation of the Tea Party to the early 2020s. The two books fit together nicely, providing complementary accounts, but there are some important differences in their approaches.
The diverse cast of characters in Gaddini’s book is one of these, as Du Mez centers her book around white women. Another important difference: Gaddini wants you to get to know her subjects personally, and indeed many of them (at least in my reading) are likable. Despite their peddling in conspiracy theories, they are optimistic, and they have spunk. Phyllis Schlafly would have been proud of them.
Du Mez’s account is darker, and her methodology toughly analytical. It’s a masterclass in sharp history writing. The outcomes of the history she details have been destructive, both for many individuals and for our national political life. In the long run, the white women (with male accomplices) who either created or bought into this world—from New Thought to twentieth-century fundamentalism and the Prosperity Gospel of Norman Vincent Peale, onward to Multi-Level Marketing schemes and a huge Christian publishing and music industry, and finally into the waiting arms of MAGA organizers—wove the web that ensnared them. They hoped to live, laugh, love; what they ended up with instead was (as the title of the last chapter has it) a more sinister tale: live, laugh, lie. The “lie” here refers both to the ideas sold to these women and to the lies they told themselves once they accepted them.
The origins of Du Mez’s story of self-delusion go back to Hannah Whitall Smith, author of the 1875 book The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life. That “secret,” in short, was that it was possible for the individual to have a “positive transformation” that would align the individual with “God’s intent.” In effect, she promoted the power of positive thinking, the assumption that one could will oneself into both holiness and happiness simply with the power of the mind. But Smith herself could do no such thing. The tremendous success of her book hid the fact that her life was a wreck. That, it turns out, was the fate of one woman after another that we meet in Du Mez’s book.
Aimee Semple McPherson famously faked an abduction and later died at 53 in part from overdosing on sleeping pills. Evangelical hero turned apostate turned heroine again Elisabeth Elliot landed in a third marriage to an emotionally abusive man who dictated their daily lives and controlled her legacy. Helen Andelin’s 1963 Fascinating Womanhood (go here for your membership in the current masterclass on this) and Marabel Morgan’s repackaging of that book in her 1970s bestseller The Total Woman, with its titillating admonitions to make your man happy by keeping sex exciting, ended in promoting systems of patriarchal authority and abuse within closed evangelical worlds. Anita Bryant was cast out from the fold after her divorce. The same happened to Christian music star Amy Grant.
One may also add the countless women stuck in debt after putting their faith in multi-level marketing programs, leaving them not fulfilled and happy but instead with closets full of unsold Amway detergent, Mary Kay cosmetics, Tupperware containers, and Precious Moments figurines. Bernie Madoff’s pyramid scheme fleeced one set of hopeful investors; the even more hucksterish evangelical multi-level marketers sucked fortunes from another, much larger, set of ordinary Christians seeking fulfillment and happiness.
Du Mez concludes that the world of white evangelical women promised “transformation and fulfillment,” not to mention power, but gave them instead a way to serve a rapacious form of capitalism and the neoliberal social order. “Prioritizing personal happiness and positivity,” she writes, “they curtailed efforts to address systemic inequality and social injustice.” Thus the way was paved for Charlie Kirk’s friend and current evangelical social media star Allie Beth Stuckey, author of Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, to posit that empathy becomes “toxic” when it substitutes for biblical moral judgment. Gaddini, however, embraces empathy for her subjects, and that is one of the pleasures of her book. Her section on Stuckey herself, in fact, brings this creator of the 2016 Facebook group “The Conservative Millennial” and organizer of Turning Point USA’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit vividly to life.
Ultimately, Gaddini and Du Mez agree that the fears of these (particularly white suburban) Christian women resulted in one consistent conclusion: women were destined to be the “symbolic and literal guardians of the nation,” responsible for maintaining the boundaries of American Christian civilization against the forces of secular humanism, criminal immigrants, and “Leftists” in power. One of Gaddini’s informants explains her position this way: “Sometimes you have to fight fire with fire.”
Taken together, these two books convey the long genealogy of evangelical women’s culture and portray some contemporary versions of it that feed MAGA-style conservatism. That 81 percent figure from 2016 and 84 percent from 2024 seem more understandable with this context. But a mere political reading does not do justice to the richness of these two texts. These are histories and ethnographies of depth and subtlety, bringing both respect, historical context, and tough analysis to their subjects. Du Mez’s lengthier text will surely bring out an army of critics [editor’s note: it already has]. What those critics won’t be able to do, with either book, is take down arguments securely rooted in years of serious research and reflection on the evidence of things seen.
There are more stories of conservative womanhood to be told and analyzed, and historians cannot predict what will become of the MAGA movement. Whatever else one may say about him, Donald Trump has changed American politics. His ascension resulted from many factors, including the growing power of the activist women given life in these pages.
These two books go a long way toward explaining where they came from, the significant feats of political organizing they have accomplished, and why they believe as they do. I now have a much deeper understanding of these women. I also know more than ever that there is plenty to fear from our current historical moment. This is a movement with a long history, and it will outlive its current impresario. It will do so in substantial part through the groundwork laid by the women analyzed in these two books.
Paul Harvey is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. He is the author of Martin Luther King: A Religious Biography and coauthor of The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America. He is currently completing a book entitled Religion, Race, and Democracy in American History and an edited collection of essays on religion and politics in Colorado Springs and the Front Range from 1871 to the present.
