Undivided

Summary: An ethnographic study of an antiracism program in a Cincinnati evangelical megachurch.

Undivided was not a book on my radar. I had not planned on listening to the Holy Post Podcast which interviewed the author Hahrie Han. But then I got an email about a bonus segment which discussed the 2018 meeting at Wheaton College about what to do in response to Trump. I was well aware of that meeting and listened to that segment and then went back and listened to the whole podcast. If you are interested in just the interview, you can watch the YouTube video and skip to the 54 minute mark to get to the start of the interview.

Undivided in an ethnographic study of an antiracist training program in an evangelical megachurch. Hahrie Han became aware of it because of its involvement in passing a ballot initiative to provide free preK to Cincinnati students. She was told that the ballot initative was heavily influenced by a local megachurch. As she investigated she became intrigued because most DEI programs are not particularly effective at changing long term behavior. Han embedded herself in the church for nearly seven years to understand how the church and the program, which was eventually spun off to its organization, worked and what made it effective. Eventually the book discusses how it responded to the backlash to the program and the larger cultural backlash to antiracism programs within the US culture.

Undivided by Hahrie Han predominately traces four people while exploring the Undivided antiracism training program at Crossroads Church in Cincinnati. Han’s skill as a writer and researcher is evident throughout the book. Her four central characters are a Black male pastor (Chuck Mingo) who was the public face of the program. A white male participate in the initial program (Grant) who at the time worked for the Ohio Department of Corrections, eventually leading their social media team. Grant came to understand how much he didn’t understand about race, despite working in a racially diverse setting and having an adopted brother who was black. The third and fourth character are a Black woman (Sandra, a pseudonym) and a white woman (Jess). Undivided tells the story of these four characters of time and how they were changed by the program and by their relationships with one another. It is in large part the stickiness of the relationships with brought about the change within the characters.

I am a big fan of good ethnographic studies. Good ethnographic studies follow a group of individuals over a fairly long period of time to understand a context deeply. One of the best ethnographies I have read was Gang Leader for a Day, where a sociologist embedded himself in a Chicago housing project and local gang for years to understand how the culture and pressures of living in public housing and being within a gang worked. I was turned onto the model of ethnographic study after reading Slim's Table: Race, Respectability, and Masculinity

by Mitchell Duneier. I think I picked it up in the late 90s (it was published in ‘92) in part because I lived about two blocks from the restaurant at the center of that ethnography. Ethnography is inherently controversial because the act of embedding yourself into a community well enough to be able to report on the community impacts not just the community being studied (the observer effect) but also the researchers themselves are often changed because of the long term impact of the relationships. (At the end of the book, Hahrie Han say that her work with Undivided program and the people profiled and Crossroads church where the program was set drew her back to faith.)

I do not think I am an average reader for Undivided. I both have a good background in reading various ethnographies, but I am deeply invested in antiracism work in the evangelical world. I was interested in the book because I was well aware of a small meeting of Evangelical leaders which happened to be meeting at my Alma Mater, Wheaton College. Until recently I spent 15 years as a member of a different megachurch where I strongly advocated for racial awareness programs and called on the church to be more attuned to the need to center justice in their work. Throughout the 2016 to 2023 study of Undivided, I was involved in similar program in a different church and a different city. This story of Undivided is a largely positive one, but In 2021 I left my church after having lost faith that there could be change there.

There are a variety of reasons which I have mostly detailed in other places, but one aspect which I do not think got enough attention in Undivided, although it did get some, is that the megachurch model I think is inherently flawed. Even if I had full confidence in the leadership of my former church, I have come to believe that two aspects of the megachurch mean that I will never be satisfied. One, the megachurch model has been influenced by the Homogenous Unit Principle (HUP) of the church growth movement. Han mentions this in Undivided, but just in passing. The HUP was developed in a missionary context of India and then was brought back to the US and became part of a church planting and church growth movement in the 1970 to early 2000s. HUP suggests that the way to attract people to the church is to narrowly target a small demographic and cultural segment to meet the needs and attract just that group through culturally specific evangelism. A second aspect to the growth of the megachurch is not just HUP, but also targeting programming toward people who were not familiar with or uninterested in traditional church. My old church used to have the tag line, “A church for the unchurched.”

These two aspect matter to why predominately white evangelical megachurches are so bad at racial issues. The very DNA of most megachurches is a narrowly targeted cultural group. Willow Creek popularized Unchurched Harry and Mary as their target demographic and then proceeded to teach other churches to do the same. Part of my work in the late 1990s was working for a local association of churches and doing demographic reports for churches and church plants who were trying to find the narrow group they should be targeting in order to quickly grow. Once churches have this in their DNA, and then they prioritize being a comfortable place to go to church, avoidance of discomfort becomes the priority of the local church. A church that prioritizes avoidance of discomfort and who has a narrow cultural demographic as the base of its congregation, cannot address an inherently uncomfortable topic like race, which is not salient to most of the members because those members have been attracted because it is monocultural.

Again, it is mentioned, but the added layer to the problem is the increasing role of Christian Nationalism which has been empowered by the increasing reliance of fear of the other by the religious right. There have been whole books about the relationship of Christian nationalism to the rise of the religious right and how race is inherently tied into the very concept of Christian nationalism and to a lesser extent the development of the white evangelical movement. Books like Bad Faith by Randall Balmer and Religion of Whiteness by Emerson and Bracey approach the history and sociology of race within the evangelical church world.

The real draw to the book Undivided is how much the writing is centered on the characters. The reader learns about the program and about the issues of race within the evangelical world as the characters come to understand themselves and one another through the program and their relationships with others. These are not simply stories. As I hinted above in introducing the characters, each of them had significant changes in their life as a result of their connection to the program and one another. In many ways those changes were positive, but not all of them were. Undivided is in part about the cost that it takes to address race in a system that discourages the directness.

One of the difficulties of discussing race or economics or other topics that are “just in the water” is that language is difficult. For instance, Han occasionally uses the word “Whiteness” to describe the cultural belief in a system of racialization and hierarchy. Some readers view “whiteness” as meaning “all white people,” but the sociological definition does not mean all white people. Jonathan Waltonlikes to use the phrase “White American Folk Religion” instead of Christian Nationalism even if they have overlapping meanings because he wants to use language that is less fraught. The two different approaches of using whiteness to specifically name a problem with a name that can be misunderstood, or using a name like "White American Folk Religion" which needs to be defined but has less initial baggage is a topic that repeatedly comes up in Undivided. Studying the culture, something that people don't directly talk about because it is assumed to be understood, is necessary in a pluralistic world where people do not necessarily mean the same thing when using the same language.

The idea of ethnography centers the experience of the focus characters both as particular people, but also models who stand in for larger groups. The pastor, Chuck, grew up in the Black church and intially left Crossroads because of frustration over racial issues. But he came back and was hired and the social capital he earned through long term relationship with the church leadership allowed him some leeway to press in on difficult issues. But the tension on maintaining those relationships means that he was always wondering if he was not pushing enough or was pushing too much and if he was self censoring so that he could maintain relationship. Grant was a young white man who thought he knew it all because he had a black friend and a black brother. As he explored racial issues and the way that race played a role within his work at the Department of Corrections he became an activist. He started a prison ministry group at the church. And he work in his role as a social media manager to profile inmates through podcast interview and written profiles. But eventually he left the Department of Corrections because of backlash against his activism. Becoming a church staff members who continued his activism around racial issues there.

Sandra was a Black woman who was married to a white man. She grew up being taught by her father to not trust white people. After an early divorce and a young child, she was brought back to faith through Crossroads church. She eventually remarried a white man and had three additional children. Again, the book skillfully tells the story of how racial identity matters not just to white racism, but also the racial identity of those who are not black. It takes years and many small steps, but he comes to find her voice and understand how gender and race both play a role in her marriage struggles.

Jess is the youngest character in the book. She grew up in a family that was overt white supremacist, her father (who died when she was 11) had "White Power" and other similar tattoos and her uncle had a swastika tattooed on his chest while in prison. Jess also spent time in prison after a felony conviction and a serious drug addiction. While in prison she became a Christian and upon release she found Crossroads, regained custody of her son, and was just getting settled when she started participating in Undivided. She eventually completed college and becomes a social worker and presses back against the racism of her family and the systems she works and lives in.

It is very clear in Undivided that struggle is central to growth. The point is growth, not a particular destination. Even as the book is very clear about the struggle I think it may be too positively framed. The backlash, which is clearly the focus of the second half of the book I think is stronger than what just what is talked about. The book was published in September, 2024, which means it was largely finished in 2023 and written about events that were mostly 2022 or before. The reelection of Trump, the continuing overt Christian nationalism within the christian community and the backlash against DEI, immigration, and other topics I do not think have reached their zenith yet.

One of the strengths of Undivided is that Hahrie Han is not an evangelical insider. She is coming at the story with a different lens and different assumptions. But her not being an insider means that there are a lot of minor issues which I see as an insider. Some are minor fact problems like identifying Charlie Dates as the pastor of Progressive Baptist Church of Chicago starting in 2023. He actually became pastor of Progressive Baptist in 2011, but in 2023 also became senior pastor of Salem Baptist, jointly pastoring two different churches. The unusualness of the situation can be a part of why the detail was wrong. But there were a dozen or so similar minor errors that I think show a lack of evangelical editorial input. She also had some framing issues with describing people as "in the faith" in a way that felt very unevangelical. When she talks about Bebbington's evangelical quadrilateral and the National Evangelical Association, she incorrectly identifies them as nondenominational.

I think some of the lack of detail in the backlash section also is attributable to her outsider status. While she details the 2018 Wheaton meeting, she doesn't detail the 2018 MLK 50 or the 2018 T4G meeting which were both very much concerned with race in the Evangelical world. MLK 50 was jointly sponsored by the Southern Baptist ELRC and The Gospel Coalition (TGC) and is arguably part of the impetus of the national anti CRT movement. MLK 50 is regularly cited as evidence of those very conservative evangelical organization being "woke". TGC in 2019 published The Incompatibility of Critical Theory and Christianity, which directly identified the language being used in antiracism programs like MLK 50 or Undivided as being incompatible with Christianity. That eventually morphed into opposition to Critical Race Theory and the SBC's resolution about CRT and SBC seminary presidents unequivocally opposing CRT.That anti CRT eventually spread to school and political world with Trump's anti CRT statement in the fall of 2020. Part of the reality of the problem of race and Trump is that those who are opposing Trump and those who are trying to address race often, but not necessarily overlap.

As detailed more in the discussion on the Holy Post than in the book, many who were willing to speak out about racial issues are no longer willing or able to speak out because of the identification of discussion of race with political issues. One of the issues that led to my leaving from my church was the church's unwillingness to simply say that Marjorie Taylor Greene was not an active attender of the church. She was baptized in 2011, but according to staff who I have talked to, there is no evidence that she had any church involvement after 2013. In 2020, when she ran for congress she identified the church as her church and that she was involved in small group ministry there. The church was at the same time trying to address racial issues through small group and larger groups not unlike Undivided. In direct conversations with leaders at the church I told them that they could not be taken seriously as addressing race while avoiding other discussions trying not to offend. The problem is not conservative members of the church who are republicans, but the rhetoric being used.

I think Undivided made the very good point that to help people changes over time requires relationship. And that withdrawing from relationship precludes the ability to speak into people's lives. Undivided talks about how Jess' continued involvement with her uncle led to him having his swastika tattoo removed. And that she was able to discuss the problems of race within policing with officers who she regularly worked with in her role as a social worker. But the book also talks about how eventually Sandra and her husband divorced in part because of issues of race and his attraction to Christian Nationalism and how that impacted their relationship. There just are not simple solutions and what works in one case will not work in another.

What is helpful about Undivided, the book, is that is shows how slow on-going change through relationship matters. It also show why the context of a program matters as much as the program. It was not the six weeks as much as the context of putting people in settings where they can both build relationship and workout the ideas and context of what they were learning in settings where that matters. But the systems of white evangelicals and megachurches are not long term conducive toward addressing either race or broader justice issues. Isaac Sharp's The Other Evangelicals is in part about how choices have been made and are hard to unmake.

I do have some issues with some of the framing and there are some things that are mistakes more than framing problems. But I do think this is a very helpful book that I want to recommend to be read widely.

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/undivided/