I Lived, I Laughed, I Left.

Twenty-five years ago, I was a college senior preparing to celebrate my 21^st birthday. While many of my peers spent their 21^st getting dunked in the school fountain after spending a night at clubs downtown, I was at the grocery store picking up a single serving bottle of wine to accompany the dinner I’d planned to make for myself and my husband after he got home from work. At the time, I took pride in being someone with her head on straight, trusting God, and enjoying the fruits of right living. We had shared our first kiss at the altar a few months prior, right after spring semester ended. Our wedding kicked off another busy summer wedding season for the campus ministry we were involved in. Over the summer, I was busy setting up our married-student apartment on campus and volunteering at the local crisis pregnancy center. By fall, I started my final year in school, my husband was starting his dream job at our beloved church as the new Youth Director, and everything seemed like it was going according to God’s plan. The next day was 9/11. We were angry, distraught, and leaned on our faith and conservative talk radio to help us make sense of what was happening in the world.

I guess everyone looks back at certain choices they made in their 20s with some amount of regret. But for the past few years, I have tried to understand what made a #tradwife lifestyle so appealing to me, a woman who did not grow up in an evangelical church. This summer, the puzzle pieces began sliding into place as I read Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made, by Kristin Kobes Du Mez.

Du Mez traces the history of influential White Christian women in the United States from the early 1800s to present day, weaving the stories of one generation with the next and pointing out the common threads holding them together. As an experienced historian and expert storyteller, she brings them to life on the page. As a reader, I vacillated between feeling compassion for them and frustration with some of the choices they made. By the end of the book, I better understood the history and culture of White Christian women and why it’s not a coincidence that so many of them love Hobby Lobby and view Charlie Kirk as a Christian martyr. Understanding the women helps you see how they shaped both evangelical Christianity and the current political landscape in the United States. So, even if you’ve never heard of them, these women have impacted your life.

Du Mez’s first book, “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation,” helped me put together the puzzle of why evangelicals embraced Trump, thinking of him as just the right hero to fight for the Christan cause. Her New York Times bestseller brought clearer focus on the spiritual motives behind conservative political alliances and why 81% of White Evangelicals supported him. As part of the 19% who didn’t, my husband and I struggled to understand how our brothers and sisters not only voted for him but saw him as a first choice not a last resort. We sat stunned in our staff ministry team meeting the day after the election as our boss seemed giddy and made us all watch the coverage on TV while our administrative assistant joked that “the Trump had sounded.” I don’t think we realized how much we had changed in the previous decade. A few years after 9/11, my husband stopped listening to Rush Limbaugh because he noticed it just made him angrier and he felt like it wasn’t good for his soul. In 2011, we began working for a ministry to internationals and contact with more diverse people expanded our understanding of what the global church looked like outside of US evangelicalism. We enjoyed Christian hip hop and some of the artists we liked began speaking up about their experience of racism and we listened. After the election, my husband and I were confused by and disillusioned with fellow Christians because of their support for Trump. Reading Jesus & John Wayne a few years later was like finding a pile of missing puzzle pieces on the floor and everything began to make more sense.

Where her first book traced how the idea of “Biblical Manhood” was commandeered for political purposes, Live Laugh Love details how “Biblical Womanhood” was similarly misappropriated. This latest contribution continues to trace the link between Christianity and conservative politics by explaining the influence of the Seven Mountain Movement, how it led to Project 2025, and why many are happily cheering on a rightward trajectory of government, hoping for a Christian theocracy.

If you are an outsider looking in, bewildered by this trend, both her books should be on your TBR list. If you are an insider to Christian culture like me, this book will read like a familiar story (although even I could have used a cheat sheet or index of women to keep them all straight). For everyone, it’s important to understand how we got to where we are today and examine the impact so we can make course corrections. The encouragement I’m taking from the book is that White Christian women have a lot of power and influence. As a White Christan woman myself, I want to leverage that power to advocate for change that will benefit those who may not have the same cultural capital.

Next month, the college ministry that my husband and I were a part of, Campus Crusade for Christ (now CRU) will celebrate the 60^th anniversary of being at our alma mater. Because I had often heard Bill and Vonette Bright’s origin story, I understand why college campuses were considered a strategic mission field for the gospel. Because of Live Laugh Love, I am now able see how the closely the crusade for Christ was linked with a conservative political mission and how women like Vonette facilitated that movement.

I often wonder about my friends from college. I know several marriages were over before we even had our first child and many since then have left Christianity altogether. My husband and I are still #blessed and still practicing Christians, but we are not the same people and not sure if we even consider ourselves evangelicals anymore. Would we have much in common now with people at the reunion? In some ways, reading Live Laugh Love helped me to understand some of the choices I made back then, like joining a multi-level marketing company and becoming a stay-at-home mom, a reflection of the ideals put forth by the women in this book and promoted by the women in my home church.

The prohibition against women in ministry leadership meant women had to find other ways to utilize their God-given gifts. I believe God had called me to ministry, and I was following that call in the best way I could, by being a pastor’s wife. My husband probably stayed in ministry longer than he felt called to it because I wanted to keep “minister’s wife” as a part of my own identity. Six years ago this month, I joined the staff of our beloved church because they wanted to have a woman’s voice at the leadership table. I also started seminary and my convictions around complementarianism came crumbling down as I realized I had been shaped by Christian culture rather than what the Bible said about women. Finally, four years ago today we left our beloved church because as I found my voice and used it at their table, they silenced it and put me out.

Like Du Mez, I am concerned about the trajectory of our nation and evangelical Christianity in the US. Live Laugh Love was supposed to be the “fun book,” she says. However, it ends at a moment in time where future White Christian women must decide if we want to continue to continue repackaging the 1800’s version of “Fascinating/Biblical Womanhood” or whether we will go back even further to the Bibe itself. From there we can find role models in the women whose stories have been ignored and suppressed. Will we aspire to be like Phoebe, who Paul entrusted with his most important theological treatise, the book of Romans? Will we learn how the apostle Junia was made into a man to obscure the role women played in early church leadership? Will we keep relying on what pastors and books have told us about the Bible or will we investigate it for ourselves?

Live Laugh Love connects the dots and once you’ve seen the connections, you can’t unsee them. Will we take the blue pill and ignore this history so we can continue to embrace ignorance and comfort? Or will we take the red pill, embracing our freedom in Christ and looking reality in the face. Instead of continually scapegoating feminism and liberals as the root of all evil, it’s time that Christian women take a long look in the mirror at our own history and recognize how we have been complicit in our own subjugation, causing harm to the body of Christ and suppressing the good news of the gospel. And then decide, what do we do want to do next?