Evangelicals Are The Original Trad Wives

Kristin Du Mez's new book is just as important and fascinating as Jesus and John Wayne

Kristin Du Mez’s book Jesus and John Wayne changed the way that America sees evangelicals. It even inspired many evangelical women to leave the church, giving them words for the inequalities they’d felt all along.

Aimee Saunders and Kristin Kobes Du Mez

This week’s guest host Aimee Saunders is one of these women. She grew up in the evangelical church and did everything that was expected of her: submitting to her husband, homeschooling her kids, only making friends within the church, and not pursuing her own career.

It didn’t feel right, but she was told that she was the problem. The rigid structure was fine, she just had to pray and obey harder. But reading Jesus and John Wayne with a virtual bookclub six years ago, Aimee realized she needed to break up with the evangelical church.

Now, Kristin Du Mez has a new book coming out in September: Live Laugh Love, The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made. Aimee and Kristin’s conversation about gender, community, politics, and the church was fascinating... after all, Aimee lived the history that Kristin writes about in her books.

Many conservatives, including evangelicals, are trying to convince us right now that hierarchy and power are holier than empathy and equality. They even have a new word for it: toxic empathy. There are new ways of getting women to be submissive too, with trad wives on social media selling the same rigid gender roles that evangelical women have taught each other for decades.

But whether you’re religious or not, we can’t allow them to redefine goodness or justice. For some, like Aimee, that means leaving the church entirely. For some, like Kristin, it means sticking around but standing up for her values. For the rest of us, we’re just lucky to hear these two smart women have this important conversation.