In “Undivided,” the political scientist Hahrie Han follows members of a mostly white congregation that resolved to fight bias and promote racial justice.
UNDIVIDED: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church, by Hahrie Han
Crossroads Church in Cincinnati has a style that stands out for its flash and irreverence even among its megachurch peers. At one Easter service, a production team shot confetti from the stage and presented a large cake with icing studded with communion wafers. “Jesus is alive!” they announced. “It’s a party!”
But in many other ways Crossroads is a typical American megachurch, an institutional category known for an eagerness to attract people unfamiliar or uncomfortable with traditional religion. The church is broadly conservative, but wary of stepping too noisily into political or cultural controversies.
Hahrie Han, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, encountered Crossroads when she was researching a campaign to bring universal preschool education to Cincinnati in 2016. The ballot initiative proposed to raise taxes and direct new resources to poor, mostly Black communities. Han was curious about the initiative’s decisive victory in a rancorous election year, and she began hearing from the campaign’s leaders about one surprising source of their success: Crossroads, a mostly white evangelical church, had marshaled hundreds of volunteers to phone-bank energetically for the measure’s passage.
As Han discovered, the Crossroads volunteers had gone through a six-week workshop on racial justice called Undivided. On the surface, Undivided sounded similar to a corporate D.E.I. training program meant to propel participants to examine their own biases and commit to personal and social transformation.
The difference is that Undivided worked. At least, for certain people, and not without a lot of conflict and discomfort along the way.
But the changes are real. In “Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church,” Han follows four people involved with Undivided over the course of several years: a Black woman, a white woman, a white man and Undivided’s co-founder Chuck Mingo, a Black pastor at Crossroads. She depicts them forming friendships, asking questions, challenging one another, shifting their politics, volunteering and finding the courage to stand up to casual and systemic racism around them.
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