What Happened When An Ohio Megachurch Decided To Tackle Racism
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.
The span of Han’s research is punctuated by high-profile killings of unarmed Black men by police officers across the country, complicating her subjects’ progress with urgency and grief.
In one of the most poignant story lines, a Black Undivided participant whom Han calls Sandra, a pseudonym, sees her marriage to her white husband unravel over the course of the book. After a fight on their honeymoon about the killing of Trayvon Martin, the couple had maintained their peace by avoiding all discussions of race. As Sandra explores her own identity deeply for the first time, her husband withdraws.
Han has written and co-written previous books about volunteerism in the 2008 Obama campaign and civic participation by underprivileged Americans, among other topics. She is attuned to the subtle and unglamorous work of effecting real change. Her intimacy with her subjects shows in the way she convincingly portrays not just meetings and marches, but quiet family moments and internal wrestling. Yet she also makes clear that individual change is tenuous on its own.
Grant, a white man, begins his Undivided journey by confronting blind spots in his close relationship with his adopted Black brother. Ultimately, he leaves his job in the Ohio state prison system after realizing he can no longer stay silent about the injustices he has observed there.
People learn about race and social control in community, Han writes: “If individuals strike out on isolated journeys of antiracism, but allow the families, workplaces, faith institutions, social groups and neighborhoods they inhabit to sustain the status quo, change always remains fragile.”
The workshop itself is hardly magical. Undivided sessions open with prayer, followed by a lesson delivered on the main stage and in small-group sessions. The premise, as Han puts it, is that “antiracism was fundamental to their calling as Christians.” Most of the participants are strangers to one another — Crossroads had 22,000 weekly attendees when Han started her research — but they begin with a level of trust because of their shared faith. And the leaders plan to push beyond the kind of performative antiracism that consists of social media posts and tote bags.
Undivided launches with the church’s full support. But later, the program’s leaders begin exploring other political actions, including involvement in another ballot initiative that would have reclassified crimes like drug possession as misdemeanors. These discussions cause tension in the church, where older white members prefer messages about unity and civility. Han deftly describes a moderate, well-meaning institution lurching toward and away from substantive activism, without giving up entirely.
By implication, the book serves as a portrait in miniature of the American religious landscape. Crossroads’ top leaders, who cooperated with Han’s reporting, see Undivided as meeting a real desire in their congregation to confront racial injustice, but they are also understandably sensitive to internal blowback.
How can an institution where attendance and participation are voluntary encourage their members to grow without making them so uncomfortable that they decamp for other churches, or for the innumerable other places to spend a Sunday morning in 21st-century America? “Undivided” offers a refreshingly complex portrait of an institution and its members on the rocky path to change.
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