Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made

如果说 Du Mez 的前作 《Jesus and John Wayne》 讨论的是白人福音派如何把耶稣塑造成一种粗粝、阳刚、民族主义化的偶像，那么这本书则转向另一个长期被低估的群体：白人基督教女性。
作者认为，今天我们在 Instagram、母婴博客、浪漫小说、家居装饰、基督教畅销书、Hobby Lobby 货架和“温柔生活美学”中看到的那种文化，并不是偶然的流行趣味。它有清晰的历史谱系：从 19 世纪末的 New Thought 运动 开始，到圣洁福音派、积极思维福音、繁荣神学，再到当代女性灵修消费文化，逐渐形成一种“看似赋权、实则规训”的生活方式。

书中最关键的一条线索是：“积极”不只是情绪，更是一种道德要求。
New Thought 强调人的思想能够塑造现实；福音派传统则把这种心理技术与信仰结合，发展出“要相信、要宣告、要感恩、要喜乐”的属灵语言。表面上，这给了女性希望：你可以通过祷告、态度、消费和自我管理改变生活。但它也可能把贫困、疾病、婚姻暴力、抑郁和失败解释为“信心不足”或“属灵问题”。
于是，女性被鼓励成为家庭的情绪管理者、信仰守护者和体面生活的生产者。她们被许诺赋权，却常常被要求以消费、顺从、温柔、忍耐和积极表达来证明自己

书名：Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made

作者：Kristin Kobes Du Mez

简介：From the New York Times best-selling author of Jesus and John Wayne, a revelatory history of white Christian womanhood in the United States.

In Jesus and John Wayne, a book that has changed how countless Americans understand their faith, historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez showed how evangelicals made Jesus into an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism. Now she unearths the roots of the glittering, Instagram-ready culture of white Christian femininity.

Opening in the late nineteenth century, Live Laugh Love traces how New Thought, a movement that championed the power of the mind to shape reality, combined with holiness evangelicalism to create the world inhabited by millions of Christian women. Du Mez introduces us to religious innovators who taught that positivity was the secret to spiritual and material success and reveals how they worked through consumer culture: mommy blogs and romance novels, Hobby Lobby aisles and pastel-scripted wall art. Marketed as empowerment, these products and slogans elevate vulnerability and domesticity, and in the process draw women into systems prone to manipulation and abuse. In this brilliant recasting of modern American Christianity, Du Mez unearths the hidden origins of our reactionary moment.