My Missing Piece - A Review of “Live Laugh Love” by Kristin Kobes Du Mez
“There's nothing easier in the world than convincing a woman to blame herself” - Marci Jones
As a kid I dressed up for church in a suit, memorized dozens of Bible verses from the King James Version, and one Sunday night as a teenager I surrendered to the Lord for full-time service at an altar call. Only one thing would follow: going to our independent Baptist fellowship’s flagship school, whose most famous alumnus was none other than Jerry Falwell, Sr.
Like with any other church, mine had a culture that we all “caught" more so than being directly taught. And what I caught was that God was almost always disappointed in me. I felt like we were on the outs all the time, as if the light switch defaulted to “off.” It was up to me to switch it on and keep it on through depriving myself of worldly things or waking early to read my Bible. Whenever I backslid, I would frantically pray in hopes my salvation was still okay. Sure, my pastor taught eternal security - “once saved, always saved.” But I’d often wonder at night while trying to go to sleep if my prayers were being heard at all. I felt as if I only had myself to blame.
My wife and I grew up in the same fellowship of churches before we met in Bible college. She was born and raised in Kenya as a missionaries’ kid, while I called Kansas City home. Over the years she has done a lot of unpacking of how that spiritual environment shaped her, including her default feeling that she’s never good enough. There was always plenty of guilt, shame, and self-blame to go around as the daughter of fundamentalist missionaries who found herself so many times unwittingly wearing the wrong thing or behaving the wrong way.
All these years later we’re both still Christians, still Baptists even. But as I unpack the faith of my youth I’ve long recognized the presence of dispensationalism and inerrancy, but there was one more element I never put my finger on until reading Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Live, Laugh, Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made. She identifies the third strand that made up my childhood faith - Keswick holiness theology, and behind it what she labels “New Thought."
As electricity swept the developed world at the turn of the 20th century, holiness teachers often compared the power of the Spirit to electricity. Turns out my feeling of the switch stubbornly being turned off between God and me might have been by design all along. Du Mez summarizes the paradoxes of this theology well:
Promising self-fulfillment, it demanded sacrifice. Granting peace, it stirred anxiety when blessings failed to materialize. Requiring continual surrender and vigilant discipline, it fueled demand for devotional materials to assist in these efforts. Much like modern advertising and the New Thought–inspired self-help industry, Victorious Life theology made promises it could not keep and responded to disappointment with more of the same (p. 55).
What Du Mez labels “New Thought” and “Victorious Life” theology is the belief that "the mind controlled reality, and that the mind itself could be controlled. Over the course of the twentieth century, how to achieve this control became a matter of spiritual, economic, and political urgency” (p. 321-22).
Du Mez traces the strands throughout the decades of how holiness theology adapted as progress marched on in terms of new technologies and media, branching beyond its pentecostal and charismatic roots to help shape those raised in fundamentalist, pentecostal, Reformed, Mormon, and even Catholic circles, especially among their women. She also traces simultaneous strands of how this new thought was co-opted to be exploited by those who wanted to advance ever-evolving political agendas through the methods of totalizing theologies and by those who wanted to make money off of it through the methods of free-market, consumer capitalism - or in many cases, do both.
Yes, this book talks about recent events, which might scare some readers away, depending on what their trusted gatekeepers have already said about it. However, someone’s political agenda has nearly always been wrapped up in this movement, going back to the nineteenth century. And some people have always made money off of it too. Thus, it is a fair question to ask how much of the movement has its basis in the Gospel of Jesus Christ and how much comes from something else.
While America might have been the original home of this new thought, she has exported it all around the world. As a missionary in Brazil I see it among even my Baptist students and friends. If someone struggles with health or finances, the blame is put on them, as a chorus of Job’s friends shake their heads, wondering if the one struggling was simply not praying enough or hiding some secret sin. And, although Du Mez does not make the connection, the nouthetic counseling movement is another extension of this not-so-new thought, as its proponents question the relationship between our physical brains and our immaterial minds - with little concern to address the former, while focusing on controlling the latter.
I’ll leave it to female readers to reflect on their experiences as Du Mez tracks what it means to be a totally fascinating woman, the curious life of Elisabeth Elliot, Multi-Level Marketing friendships, and what the airline JetBlue has to do with tradwife influencing. As for me, I’m thankful to have recognized a missing piece of my first spiritual formation as well as another explanation for why I have continued to feel so out-of-place for the past decade among so many of the people who had a hand in shaping it.