Undivided

July 29, 2024
In this perceptive account, political scientist Han (Prisms of the People) traces the evolution of a racial justice organization founded in 2016 at a Cincinnati megachurch. Sparked by the “outpouring of support” for pastor Chuck Mingo’s sermons on racial injustice, the Undivided program developed as a six-week curriculum that examined “personal prejudice” as well as systemic racism, with participants split into small, mixed-race discussion groups. Han follows three of those participants through and after the program: Jess, a white recovering heroin addict, who began working at a prison ministry and spreading antiracist messages to friends and family; Grant, a white, conservative man with a Black brother, who grappled with the disparate parts of his identity; and Sandra, a Black woman who got divorced from her white husband after he began to chafe against her participation in Undivided and eventually found his way to white nationalist communities online. In the process, the author movingly links the expected finding—that meaningful social change begins in communities in which people are rooted and interconnected—with a Christian concept of grace that, for Undivided’s participants, “manifested itself as the courage to fight for one another’s dignity.” Rigorously researched and richly nuanced, this deserves wide readership.

September 1, 2024
An evangelical megachurch struggles to reckon with systemic racism and inequity. In 2016, in Cincinnati, voters overwhelmingly approved raising their taxes to fund city preschools, "with targeted resources for poor--mostly Black--communities." Johns Hopkins political scientist Han took note, especially because the numbers were markedly different in the presidential election: Cincinnati went for Clinton by 10 points, but the voters approved the school initiative by 24, so that "thousands of voters who supported Trump must have also supported Issue 44." Digging deeper, Han discovered that a Cincinnati megachurch called Crossroads had mounted an antiracism training program called Undivided, one of whose outcomes was that many conservative members supported more funding for minority schools by way of a curriculum very much like the "diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training programs that pervaded corporate America"--a source of loud outrage for right-wing politicians. Han examines the many paths Crossroads clergy, staff, and parishioners took to arrive at views about structural racism that, as Han writes, defy received wisdom about evangelicals on many points. It helped that the megachurch's demographics skewed younger and more racially diverse than most, with many members who "believed the core theological tenets of evangelicalism, but explicitly or implicitly rejected the right-wing politics associated with it." Many of those members also voted for Trump, but no one can doubt that on some matters concerning race, doors to understanding were opened rather than slammed shut. "At the most basic level," writes Han, "Undivided equipped [its] participants to understand both the interpersonal and systemic dimensions of racial injustice and offered them tools to have difficult conversations around race." Her book ably charts that course even as it illustrates the Christian concept of grace in action. Inspiring: a key text for any reader seeking strategies for racial reconciliation--or at least beginning to talk about it.

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