In her new book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eliza Griswold chronicles the fate of an idealistic congregation fractured by internal divisions.
When I picked up Eliza Griswold’s new book, “Circle of Hope,” I thought I was going to be reading a deeply researched story about a unique Philadelphia church. Instead, I found myself reading a story that countless millions of Americans might instantly relate to — about how political disagreements can fracture the closest friendships and break the best institutions.
Circle of Hope, the evangelical church where Griswold embedded herself, is one of the more unusual such churches in the United States. The vast majority of American evangelicals have embraced political conservatism. According to exit polls by The New York Times, Donald Trump won 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2016 and 76 percent in 2020. Within the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, the split between Republicans and Democrats, close to even in 2008, grew to 75 percent to 21 percent in favor of Republicans in 2022.
Yet as the rest of evangelicalism was doubling down on conservatism, Circle of Hope became more progressive. The church was founded in 1996 by Rod and Gwen White, two alumni of the Jesus movement, a countercultural, free-spirited Christian movement that began in the late 1960s and fully flowered in the 1970s. Its members were sometimes called “Jesus freaks,” and their lives were very different from those of more mainstream Christians.
The Whites, for example, lived in a commune in California before they moved to Philadelphia to create a new kind of church. It was Anabaptist, a Christian sect that abhors violence and tends to shun political involvement. It focuses on service, with an emphasis on aiding the poor, demonstrating hospitality and living simply. Anabaptists are often critical of American militarism and consumerism.
Circle of Hope was no exception. Its members melted guns to turn them into garden tools. Though their church was roughly 80 percent white, they lived in diverse neighborhoods, sent their kids to the local public schools and tried to integrate themselves into the communities they served.
Griswold’s book is a story of rise and ruin. The rise is inspiring. When we first encounter Circle of Hope, it’s a thriving congregation of hundreds. The founders had ceded control of the church to their son Ben White and three others, including one pastor of color, an Egyptian American man. Each pastor led a branch of the congregation, and each demonstrated a breathtaking capacity for love and compassion.
Griswold, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who writes often about religion, describes in detail the church’s best moments, including its members’ openness to anyone who walked in the doors and acts of grace toward addicts, the mentally ill and the gravely sick that shamed me for my own complacency and selfishness. There were times when, reading about Circle of Hope, I felt I was seeing what a church could be if it made a radical investment in loving its neighbors.
Then came 2020, the outbreak of Covid, a national racial reckoning and an ultimate crisis in the congregation.
None of the pastors was embroiled in a sexual scandal. There was no abuse, and there was no financial malfeasance. Instead, the church chose to center much of its mission on antiracism, and small ideological differences among its leaders tore it to pieces. Routine discussions about complex subjects turned into allegations of white supremacy. Tempers flared, feelings were hurt and before long the church was broken beyond repair.
The political conversations weren’t confined to the insular world of the church. Imagine my surprise when I read that one of the pastors was angry at me. As Griswold paraphrased the man’s views: I am a fundamentalist “passing as reasonable among the white liberals who read the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times.” Readers couldn’t recognize how “dangerous” my ideas were.
But what makes Griswold’s book so valuable is the way in which every combatant in the church’s internal culture war is treated with humanity and empathy. Each chapter focuses on a particular person — usually one of the four pastors — but she also writes about other key members in the congregation. As a result, you feel as though you are standing in their shoes.
Unlike much writing about 2020, “Circle of Hope” does not adopt a “woke” or “anti-woke” perspective. It’s not a book of heroes and villains. It’s instead about a collection of people who possess great conviction and endure and inflict immense hurt in the face of conflict.
Circle of Hope suffered from the same maladies I’ve seen time and again in both religious and secular organizations: With great passion can come great intolerance. Small differences create big arguments, and then the way in which people argue becomes more important than what they argue about. People can heal from disagreements over, for example, the best way for a church to respond to the history and legacy of American racism. It’s harder to heal when disagreements turn personal.
At the end of the book, Griswold writes that the four pastors “harrowed” one another, “raking one another’s souls, like fields, and freeing them to grow.” That is a positive approach to what happened when Circle of Hope collapsed. And Griswold shows that the fires kindled in the church’s last months didn’t end up consuming its pastors; they gained wisdom, as good people do when they undergo trials.
But there’s a deep sadness behind that note of hope. The tensions that drove the church apart were small, yet the pain the pastors and other members of the church inflicted on one another was profound — and profoundly unnecessary. As the American church and American society remain divided, it’s very much worth reading Griswold’s book, examining our own hearts and asking ourselves a vital question: Are our differences so great that they justify destroying relationships or institutions that are truly good?
READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE
Comments