White women: Can we be holy? Can we try? Reflections on “Live, Laugh, Love” by Kristin Kobes Du Mez.
Christianity is still the best way to lose your whole mind while keeping the image of respectability intact. Reading Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s follow-up to her hit book Jesus and John Wayne, Live, Laugh, Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made, reminded me that this was the central thesis of the church that raised me. Free Methodists my grandmother’s age or older were told not to go to the movies (“demonic”), wear jewelry (out of respect for poor folks; as the parlance goes, “based”), or dance (“the vertical manifestation of a horizontal desire”). My to-don’t list in the early aughts was not as out there: don’t smoke, drink, cuss, consume too much secular media, be anything other than cisgender and heterosexual, and so on. Despite these abstentions, we were indistinguishable from the other middle class white American midwestern culturally hegemonic folks around us.
The Wesleyan-holiness church that raised me takes John Wesley’s entire sanctification doctrine and turns up the soteriological dial as far as it can go. If you submitted your will to God and disciplined yourself along this to-don’t list, you could live a life so holy it was free from sin. Perfect. This belief, for example, led my great-grandfather to lapse into silence while the rest of the congregation sang “prone to wander, Lord, I feel it/Prone to leave the God I love.” He rationalized to my mother that he was too grateful for these first and second works of grace to stray from God’s will again. In a mind like that, sin is not an ontological human reality but a skill issue.
Du Mez follows the thread of that evangelical holiness theology with dogged attention through its conception in the nineteenth century to our present moment. As both a storyteller and historian of American Christianity, Du Mez remains unmatched. She describes how holiness theology and its marriage to optimistic New Thought pseudo-psychology, rugged individualism, free market capitalism, and white supremacist imperialist patriarchy comprise the reality-bending substance that brought you phenomena like Precious Memories, Amway, Mar-a-Lago Face, and Doug Wilson. It is infuriating, vindicating, and undoubtedly a book worth reading.
In my reading of Live, Laugh, Love, Du Mez manages to write both an expansive history of white American evangelical Christian femininity and the violent systemic and systematic gaslighting that built it. After traversing two hundred years or so worth of seamless history, Du Mez reflects on her entry into this endeavor. She knew she could not talk about white Christian women without writing about interpersonal abuse. She writes:
“Holiness theology promised women that if they lived obedient, pure, submissive lives, God would bless them and men would love and protect them. Evangelical abusers and evangelical responses to abuse demonstrated that bargain to be a lie.”
White evangelicalism will tell white women that maintaining a vice grip rubric and regimen of youth, charm, innocence, productivity, consumerism, beauty, pluck, bounce, verve, and holiness will prevent them from harm. When those things inevitably cannot protect us, especially from people intent to abuse, Du Mez describes a pattern I can only describe as gaslighting — a form of emotional and psychological abuse where someone manipulates another person into believing a false reality by casting doubt on their memory and senses.
By framing submission to patriarchy as submission to God, participating in its consumerism, rape culture, a hollow “family values” domesticity in the home and in policy, and so on takes on metaphysical importance. Your continued journey to holiness is contingent on your performance. God only wants good things for you; if you struggle in any sense to meet God-ordained standards, your will must be misaligned. Feelings of grief or rage are not signs that the system has failed you; they’re a lie straight from the devil and a sign that you have failed.
It’s important, as well, to also name that the abusive theology whose history she narrates is one part of the method of engendering this system. She names the influence of movements like Spiritual Mobilization to fuse the language of Christianity to capitalism and in vehement opposition to communism. In the third chapter, “God Control,” Du Mez introduces Henrietta Mears, an influential figure on American evangelicalism with a hand in raising up Billy Graham. Mears’ work with Frank Buchman, a pro-Nazi pastor who formed the anti-communist Moral Re-Armament movement, took notes from the Left she organized against. Mears copied the “small cells” communists used to create triangles between two “believers” and one “non-believer.” She was one of many white women complicit in creating a world that denied even themselves autonomy and dignity.
Still, in the eighth chapter, “Selling America,” Elaine Rapping, “a Marxist feminist college teacher” began sitting in on Tupperware parties. This was a conscious effort to learn more about organizing, and she found that they were able to enlist working-class women in ways that feminists struggled to do. These parties filled needs that went beyond the items women peddled. Direct sales organizations, Christian contemporary music, Family Christian Bookstores, and so on are world-making endeavors, isolating these white women into what they believe is a malleable reality. Under the kitsch is a theology that’s embedded, as Carrie Doehring would say, into everyday life. It’s a world that has been deliberately organized by capitalists, all varieties of American media, church leaders, and even your loved ones.
I’ve often wondered what tools from that place have use in my life now that I’ve left. It’s clear that this movement is closer to wealth that can fund it than we are. Reading and seeing Du Mez’s focus narrow on the interpersonal and broaden to the movement’s systematic effort with fluid ease, I know that’s not entirely it. These people are great organizers — and they learned it from movements whose values align more with ours than theirs.
This is where a history this expansive is instructive to folks among progressive mainline traditions. We have a singular opportunity, as progressive and Left Baptists, to build solidarity across a plurality of belief. Many of us already do. So much of that solidarity-building, in my experience as a labor organizer, happens over good food. And beer. It happens when people are able to handle feedback on how their behavior harmed someone — and value repair and repentance enough to hold their attention on those tasks and their feelings safely. Or when someone sees an obstacle keeping you from freedom and moves it without needing to be told. Solidarity is built when we sit down without any other business but being together; our tradition is no stranger to robust table theology. Our ability to trust one another in times of crisis is as vital to our justice work as our efforts to confront systemic injustice.
For me, the soul freedom our Baptist tradition builds itself in part upon makes that relational and internal work an imperative. You are free to work out your walk with God unmediated; you are obligated to do it in community. As a post-evangelical Baptist, I have a space to learn what it means to work out my salvation in a white and feminine body; I can learn a better way to be holy here.
The rich pneumatology of the tradition that raised me equipped me with the very thing it used to drive me out. As a woman, I could be ordained, but not as a queer person. I’d never be pure. I also could not help but hoard a bit of that holiness with me as I left that place. I resonate with what Du Mez includes describing Nadia Bolz-Weber’s contribution to the post-evangelical canon Shameless:
“‘Holiness itself should be reexamined,’ Bolz-Weber believed. Defining holiness as purity, and purity in terms of ‘separation from,’ resulted in either pride or despair — in hypocrisy, double standards, and a culture of secrecy. The basis of her new sexual ethic was the conception of holiness as ‘union with’” — as moving people towards wholeness and flourishing.”
Right when I tired of defending my adamant and contrary existence at church, I found the Desert Mothers. Women who left the church when it wed itself to the Roman Empire and ousted them from leadership. Who eschewed riches and inheritance for strange and holy lives. I read Dr. Laura Swan’s The Forgotten Desert at the church camp boathouse, lifeguarding the waters I was baptized in at camp meeting one last time. I found sisters in struggle among long dead women who believed that nothing separated them from the love of God — and lived as close as they could to that reality. To me, that spare wisdom is an antidote to the cloistered and suffocating world of the white women in Live, Laugh, Love.
If I follow the aims of the holiness theology that raised me and the liberation theology that matured me to their logical end, I’m not confident I’ll ever be holy, as a white woman. Not like Grandpa Hayden said he was. Not until I’m willing to be so othered that I come as close as I can, in this life, with the God who prefers those oppressed by violence. What does it mean to commit to where those values lead me?
Since I’m always reading at least three books at once, I read Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young by Zayd Ayers Dohrn, the son of Bernardine Dohrn, a militant activist against American imperialism, white accomplice to the Black Panther Party, and the subject of the book. His dad, Bernardine’s partner, is a regular at the bookstore where I work and recommended I pick it up. In it, I saw a white woman so serious about liberation that she knew how far she’d go and when to adjust her tactics: “a time to plant and a time to uproot.” Dohn’s moral seriousness worked apophatically against the figures in Live, Laugh, Love.
These tandem readings revealed what’s most indelible from them: white women are a load-bearing part of the system of white supremacist patriarchal violence, and we have always had the choice to refuse to treat anyone the way we have been treated. We might not be as holy as we’d like, but we have a heavy and blessed obligation to sanctify our lives by our efforts to heal this broken world — and the worlds within it too.
Elizabeth, or Ez, Pence is a writer, bookseller, and semi-professional churchgoer on Chicago’s South Side. Raised in rural Michigan’s Wesleyan-holiness churches, they are a deacon and in care for ordination at Hyde Park Union Church, a progressive American Baptist congregation. She holds a Master of Divinity from Chicago Theological Seminary, a Red Card with the Industrial Workers of the World, and writes about trauma, theology, narratives, and everyday revolutions of the Spirit over at sybilonbigwater.substack.com.
