If Kristin Kobes Du Mez showed us how white evangelical femininity was built, this book shows us what it costs. In Live Laugh Love, historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez traced the cultural roots of white Christian womanhood in America — the positive thinking, the consumer culture, the pastel-scripted wall art. In The Secret History of White Christian Women & the World They Made, Clouds Michael picks up where Du Mez's groundbreaking work begins and follows the money, the algorithm, and the damage to their sources. This companion volume asks the questions that Du Mez's cultural history opens the door to: Who profits when evangelical women sell LuLaRoe leggings from their garages? Who benefits when complementarian theology keeps women out of the workforce? Where do the tithes actually go — and who decides? What does the Instagram aesthetic of #blessedmama and #coffeeandjesus do to women's mental health? And what happens to the bodies of women raised in purity culture when the wedding night arrives and the theology's promises don't hold? Drawing on research into multilevel marketing, the Christian publishing industry, evangelical women's conferences, the tradwife movement, purity culture, toxic positivity, and the global export of American Christianity, The Secret History of White Christian Women provides the economic and structural analysis that completes the picture Du Mez painted. It traces white Christian femininity from the Amway rallies of the 1950s through the mommy blogs of the 2000s to the tradwife TikToks of today, revealing a system in which women's unpaid labor, women's consumer spending, and women's emotional performance sustain an infrastructure they did not build and do not govern. Written with warmth, moral seriousness, and unflinching honesty, this book is for every woman who has smiled on Sunday morning and cried in the parking lot — and for everyone who loves her. For readers of Jesus and John Wayne, Live Laugh Love, Pure by Linda Kay Klein, The Making of Biblical Womanhood by Beth Allison Barr, and The Great Sex Rescue by Sheila Wray Gregoire.
