One of my favorite things about having studied such different disciplines in my different degrees is that each of them gives you a unique perspective to ponder, and, when you put them together, your perspective as a single subjective person is made more whole. And what I want to share here today is a pondering of sorts that joins together different perspectives informed by my interdisciplinary academic brain, my therapist brain, and the tender depths of who I am as a human first.
So, what’s the topic? As you might be aware, Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s new book Live Laugh Love recently released, and I’ve been curiously chewing on all the chatter that it’s stirred up. Some of the chatter is praising the book, grateful for a follow up after her best-seller Jesus and John Wayne. Some of the chatter has been harshly critiquing the book, and her. And then there’s also some chatter trying to grapple with this significant divide, which is sadly a representation of very real divisions that already existed before this book released. Especially if you’ve read reviews from Christianity Today and the Gospel Coalition, or Bonnie Kristian’s book In Defense of Evangelicalism, you know there’s tension in the air here.
Now, the therapist in me (and really, just the way that I’m wired) can’t not pick up on how much is lurking beneath the surface in people’s reactions to Kristin’s work (and for that matter, other books like The Making of Biblical Womanhood by Beth Allison Barr… the list could go on!). People clearly aren’t just responding to a book or an author. You don’t have to be a therapist to see and feel that there’s something deeper going on, something bigger that’s at stake for people. And while there are loads of layers we could explore here, in one short substack post that I can feasibly write between trying to finish my doctoral dissertation and maintaining my sanity (not an easy balance to strike at this point in my PhD…!), we’ll look at one dimension of things that I find especially curious.
A central facet in the divide between different reactions to Kristin’s work seems to center around how we respond to trauma, abuse and harm. Now, inarguably, it’s a fact that trauma, abuse, and harm have happened in different shapes and forms for centuries within Christianity, and specific to Kristin’s specialty as a historian who researches “the intersection of gender, religion, and politics in recent American history,”1 there are unique dimensions of trauma, abuse, and harm that converge with current and recent lived experiences of evangelicalism in America.2 And the ways people are responding to her work have been reminding me of the various ways that different members of the same family respond to trauma, abuse, and harm that’s occurred (or is still happening) in their family.
Anyone I know who’s had strong conflicting reactions for or against Kristin’s work either currently identifies as an evangelical, previously identified as an evangelical, or has some other connection to evangelical Christianity in America. So, in one way, it’s not a far off reach to consider these different perspectives to be coming from people who are related in a way, having been or being connected within the same larger system. And as a therapist, researcher, and human, I’ve seen over and over again how different family members in the same family each have their own experiences of abuse and harm that happened in that same family, as well as their own distinctively different reactions to their own experiences. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll sketch this out in terms of siblings, even though this picture could also be painted with different family members like cousins, aunts or uncles, step siblings, parents, etc.3
Having experienced abuse or harm, one sibling might leave the family or refuse to ever reminisce on the more positive parts of a childhood (or any parts of their childhood). And if something good is said about their childhood, they might be quick to go quiet, shutting down, or speak up, clearing the record. It might feel intolerable for someone to paint their childhood in a positive light when they had to live through very real and painful trauma or harm that wounded them deeply, very real and painful trauma or harm that forever altered their sense of safety in the world.
Another sibling in the same family might say, “I had a great childhood!” or “I have a great family!,” refusing to ever acknowledge the abuse or harm that happened in their home. Maybe they didn’t experience the abuse themselves. Maybe they dissociated to survive it. Maybe they genuinely weren’t aware of how bad it was for others. And then, if something negative is said about their childhood or their family, they might be quick to dismiss that perspective. It might feel intolerable for someone to bring up pain that feels overwhelming, that feels like it takes away from good memories they want to cherish, from the positives that they desperately wish were simple, whole, and pure. It might feel like their sense of safety in the world is threatened or tainted by having to face the complex both-and of both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ they (or others) encountered in their family.
And another sibling might feel torn between their other siblings who hold positions like the ones described above, paralyzed to figure out how to continue in relationship with both of them when they feel pressured to ‘take sides,’ but those sides seem mutually exclusive. All they want is peace, and they already had to live through terror invading any semblance peace of their childhood, meaning any continued conflict between their siblings only continues to erode the sense of safety they so desperately long for with their family.
Regardless of what path a sibling might take, when there’s been abuse and harm in a family, whatever these siblings do in response is often prompted by a protective response, coming from a place of wanting to preserve whatever sense of safety and security they can for themselves. And in and of itself, this is not a bad thing. This is an incredibly normal thing that we do as humans. Unfortunately though, when we’re not aware of what’s prompting a protective reaction in us, the reaction can take over before we’ve had time to consider what exactly we’re protecting, why we’re protecting it, and how we’re protecting it. In other words, we’re not necessarily consenting to our response when it’s a protective reaction. Instead, the protective reaction can pop up before we have time to think about it, and then shape how we continue to respond, whether we realize it or not (quite literally, when we react protectively and instinctively, this happens in milliseconds, before our thinking brain has a chance to consider what we’re doing or why. There is no ‘mind over matter’ in this equation, no matter how strong we think our mind is, it can’t override how our brains and bodies are wired).4
And since all of this has to do with trauma, abuse, and harm, I also can’t not think about a concept referred to as rupture and repair.5 If you’ve heard anyone from the therapy world talk about rupture and repair, you’ll know this concept isn’t about helping us avoid conflict or rupture to build a sense of safety in relationships and life. Instead, this concept recognizes that conflicts and ruptures do and will always happen, and what builds a sense of safety in relationships isn’t avoiding these things. It’s engaging in the very real (and sometimes scary) process of repair on the other side of rupture that builds a sense of safety in relationships and life. Safety is not the absence of ruptures, it’s knowing that we can repair even when ruptures inevitably happen. Ruptures will happen, and so, the process of repair is what builds safety, it’s what helps us know that we’ll be ok even though the world is a place where ruptures will continue to happen.
And our different sibling responses all have implications for how they do or don’t help move us toward repair after trauma, abuse, or harm, and therefore, all have significant implications that intersect with our sense of safety, something that can strike us at an existential level.
Let’s think of this in terms of a physical wound for a minute. If something is seriously harmed or infected in your body, it likely won’t heal by ignoring it. It won’t heal by saying, “Look, the rest of the body is healthy!” It won’t heal by saying, “Well, everyone’s bodies experience wounds at different times, why are you focusing on this wound in this body?” A lethal infection or harmful bacteria won’t magically disappear by saying, “But look at all the healthy blood cells that are trying to do good things!” Instead, when wounds have caused damage, they heal when we acknowledge the wound and tend to it accordingly—when we understand what has been harmed, and then repair the damage caused by the harm. And while healing relational and systemic ruptures is not as simple as healing a straightforward physical wound, I think this analogy can help us get curious about the different responses we’re seeing to Kristin’s work.
Sometimes, to acknowledge a rupture (along with the needed repair) is overwhelming, especially when it has to do with significant attachment relationships. In the same way that it can be hard for many children to acknowledge the shortcomings or harm done by parents (because to acknowledge this would indicate that they don’t have the predictable safety and security they need and it would feel like a life threat at an existential level to acknowledge), we can carry the same kind of self-protective instincts about other relationships. And this will absolutely transfer with faith communities that we consider to be our family.
If we experience that a faith community—at a local, national, and/or global level—is (or was) just that, our family, then a lot is at stake here. And I can’t help but shake the sense that this is the thing beneath the thing for many people, that this is precisely why works by Kristin and others provokes not only such charged reactions, but reactions that have a hard time seeing things from another point of view.
I can understand why Kristin’s work could feel incredibly threatening if the people and systems referenced in her books have been foundational figures in a person’s faith and formation, whether that’s evangelicalism as a whole, specific figures in evangelicalism, or both of the above. In these cases, of course her work could feel like an attack, even an attack that’s deeply personal, an attack that’s aimed at someone’s family, maybe even aimed at their father, uncles, loved ones—or how they understand their own self.
And also, for those who are frustrated or hurt by unkind and dismissive responses to Kristin’s work, it makes sense that people’s indifferent or hostile reactions to these books could feel incredibly hurtful, offensive, or threatening. If the work/legacy/theology of the people and systems referenced in her books have been connected to harm or wounds that a person has experienced (individually or systemically), then of course dismissals of Kristin’s work will not only feel offensive, but again, deeply personal, a dismissal that intersects with wounds we might carry in our bodies every single day.
And while I can understand these different types of reactions, I’m also reminded that a historian researching and writing about specific intersections of recent evangelicalism in America is not an attack, it’s academic scholarship that’s accessibly written in the form of a book. Said differently, even if her work strikes a nerve for protective reactions, it doesn’t mean her work is an attack. Her work is simply her work, and rather than positioning oneself against her or in defense of her, I wonder how much more constructive it might be to pause and consider why her work feels like an attack of something that needs defended, creating space to consider the nuances of protective responses referenced above—considering what exactly is being protected, why it’s being protected, and how it’s being protected.
And what I continue to come back to over and over as I think about these reactions is this: It’s not just a question of what someone’s protecting, it’s really a question of who they’re protecting. Even if someone doesn’t realize it, an instinct to protect systems where trauma, harm, and abuse has inarguably happened is ultimately protecting those who have done or are doing harm, rather than protecting those who have been harmed or are being harmed. And wherever you fall in your spirituality, I think we can all agree that’s not very Jesus-like (cue stories of Jesus and Pharisees…).
Now, hear me here, I know it’s easy to think we could never be someone who is protecting systems where harm has happened or is happening—let alone harm that’s done in God’s name or in the name of what’s biblical. When what we see is happy faces while everything looks good on the surface, we don’t always question or realize there might be more to story. Maybe we’ve even been told by people that there’s more to the story, heard rumblings of religious harm or abuse, or even experienced it ourselves, and put those things in a box because it’s too confusing, unimaginable, or unbearable to face, too overwhelming to figure out how in the world to wrestle through the painfully messy both-and that’s present in so many faith communities: both harm that has happened, and, seemingly good and beautiful things.
And that’s exactly why the work of scholars like Kristin Kobes Du Mez (and Beth Allison Barr, etc.) is so important—their work invites us to not only know things that make us feel good or comfortable, but also, to learn about the very things we might prefer not to know, things that we might not initially believe, that we might prefer to dismiss. And while critics of these women might make it feel easy to dismiss the legitimacy or importance of their work, let’s remember, we’re not talking about random bloggers here. We’re talking about real-deal academics who are not only giving us an opportunity to learn things we wouldn’t otherwise know—they’re also giving us an opportunity to choose how we react when we learn things that make us uncomfortable, or learn things that might complicate the version of history or picture of current reality we carry in our heads.
Now, I hold this tenderly, knowing that when our sense of security that’s tied to family or faith is threatened, it hits deep at an existential level.6 It can feel like being knocked over by a wave, like an semblance of homeostasis is at risk of shattering. So, again, I can understand why reactions to Kristin’s work can be so strong.
And also.
I can’t not believe that this is certainly a scenario in which ignorance is not bliss.
We might not want to know how the larger culture of Christianity we are (or were previously) involved with is connected to living legacies of power and harm. We might not want to face the overwhelming complications of wrestling with spirituality and faith having become deeply intertwined with culture and ideas that were never even Christian in the first place—culture and ideas that we’ve come to believe are Christian because we don’t know the history of how those things became intertwined, let alone how those things not only became assumed to be Christian and good, but also intertwined with harm that intersects with faith, community, and God. We might want to stay in our own little bubble where everything seems fine, no feathers are ruffled, and we continue to feel comfortable, believing there’s not a problem here to address, viewing these authors as creating issues where there are no real problems.
And maybe that’s the heart of the issue: Whether it’s Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Beth Allison Barr, other authors, or people who have lived through what these women write about—are we willing to hear them when they make clear that there have been ruptures that need repaired? Even if it feels confusing, unimaginable, or unbearable to listen, will we listen?
Along with these questions, I can’t help but also wonder, when people react protectively in defense, do they really want to reactively protect systems in which harm, trauma, and abuse have happened, dismissing realities that feel uncomfortable, ultimately protecting trauma, abuse, and harm to continue to happen? And if not, what would it take to create an openness to learn about and grapple with realities that aren’t always comfortable to hear, strands of history that complicate a certain story about Christianity in America?
And what if, those stories (and defenses of them) can only hold firm by silencing those who know that it’s not that simple?
Back to our siblings analogy, there’s no easy formula to help siblings who have experienced varying degrees of abuse or trauma in their family to hold space for each other’s experiences and reactions. It’s incredibly complex and messy. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have choices to learn and grow, not only for the sake of our own development, but also for the sake of others.
Even if we feel we have no dog in this fight, what might it look like to learn facets of history we wouldn’t otherwise know to consider how we might be someone who sees and cares for vulnerable people who have been harmed? Wherever we find ourselves, ultimately, asking, what kind of sibling do we want to be to other humans around us? Regardless of whether we identify as a Christian or evangelical, we’re inextricably connected to other people in the societal and cultural systems around us, which are inextricably connected to evangelicalism in some way. Whether it’s calling the same faith community family, whether it’s calling the same country home, whether it’s simply breathing the same air—we are connected, regardless of the divisions that are deeply present.
As we started with at the beginning of the post, different perspectives can help us see the world from different viewpoints, making our perspective more whole.
So maybe our final question for the day is this:
How might our perspectives be made more whole by learning about the specific facets of history that scholars like Kristin Kobes Du Mez and Beth Allison Barr help us not only recognize, but also connect to very real living history we’re intertwined with today? And if that history (and present reality) makes us uncomfortable, what do we want to do about it? Ignore it? Dismiss it?
If I’ve not already made it clear, my hope would be that instead, we might be part of creating a different story—a story that doesn’t dismiss some perspectives to preserve a sense of comfort or simplicity, a story that doesn’t silence certain voices, but instead, a story that’s listened and looked with humility, open to learning, open to change.
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I’ll land there today… for more thoughts on this topic, see Season 3 of New Rhythms (also available on Apple Podcasts & Spotify), and, come April 20, 2027, you’ll get to read many more thoughts and reflections that I have on this subject :)
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If you’re curious to check out the books I’m referencing in the post here, I’ve linked them below:
Here’s a link to Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s book, Jesus and John Wayne
Here’s a link to Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s new book, Live Laugh Love
Here’s a link to Beth Allison Barr’s book, The Making of Biblical Womanhood
Here’s a link to Beth Allison Barr’s recent book, Becoming the Pastor’s Wife
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Lastly, here are just a couple of articles I found especially helpful in response to the chatter surrounding Kristin’s release of Live Laugh Love:
What’s So Upsetting to Evangelicals About Kristin Kobes Du Mez? by Rick Pidcock
TGB, Kristin Du Mez, and Penis Homes by Sheila Wray Gregoire
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And just because, here’s an adorable sheep that gladly posed for a picture last weekend on a hike :)
https://calvin.edu/people/kristin-kobes-du-mez.
For example, see: “Percentage of U.S. Adults Suffering from Religious Trauma: A Sociological Study,” Society for the Historical Research of Evangelical Religion, 2023, https://www.shermjournal.org/articles/percentage-of-u.s.-adults-suffering-from-religious-trauma%3A-a-sociological-study; Jennifer Durkin et al., “The Impact of Clergy Sexual Abuse on Spirituality and Health: A Systematic Scoping Review of the Literature,” _PLOS ONE_ 20, no. 4 (2025): e0317821, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0317821; Also more accessible resources like Holy Hurt by Dr. Hillary L. McBride.
While these examples are grouped together in broad strokes, they of course are often much more complex than just one of these three types of responses.
If you’re curious to explore protective reactions like this in greater depth through the lens of Polyvagal Theory and parts-work, with some safe and gentle spiritual integration, see my book The Sacred Art of Slowing Down. There’s also an additional resource in the back of the book that lists researchers and authors that are central to the concepts I draw on, along with some lovely lengthy footnotes that can point you directly to great books and research that can help us understand how our brains and bodies are wired.
Edward Tronick, John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth are key figures who influenced the development of this concept.
For more on how these things can hit at an existential level, especially as it relates to people experiencing shifts in their spirituality, see the work of Sara Showalter Van Tongeren & Daryl Van Tongeren.