I will talk about our recent studies of the spin liquid phases in kagome antiferromagnets, including the numerical discovery and theoretical investigation in the framework of the lattice gauge theory. I will first present our numerical (DMRG) study of the kagome XXZ spin model that identifies two distinct spin liquid phases, namely the chiral spin liquid and the kagome spin liquid (the ground state of the nearest neighbor kagome Heisenberg model). Both phases extend from the extreme easy-axis limit, through the SU(2) symmetric point, to the pure easy-plane limit. They are separated by a continuous phase transition. Motivated by these numerical results, I will then focus on the easy-axis kagome spin system, and reformulate it as a lattice gauge model. Such a formulation enables us to achieve a controlled theoretical description for the spin liquid phase, and we show that the chiral spin liquid is indeed a gauged U(1) symmetry protected topological (SPT) phase.