Hahrie Han’s Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church was inspired by a surprise.
Namely, voters chose to support a 2016 ballot initiative in Cincinnati, OH, for universal preschool education. This civic win came about when Blacks and whites collaborated to achieve this win, even though more children of one race would benefit vs. those of others. The choice was to benefit the larger society by enhancing early childhood education by raising taxes.
Han describes the surprise outcome this way:
Many white Cincinnatians who struggled to attain the picket fences and matching living room sets they coveted blamed Black communities. Yet in 2016, a supermajority of Black and white residents passed a ballot initiative to raise their own taxes to fund universal preschool education with targeted resources for poor—mostly Black—communities. The initiative passed by the largest margin of any new education levy in Cincinnati history.
The typical trajectory of such endeavors is an original outrage which ends “with a whimper.” Durable social change is a high bar.
How was this miracle pulled off? As this researcher dug deeper, she found that a six-week program focused on racial justice at a Protestant evangelical mega-church was a large contributor to the difference. Crossroads church, a predominantly white church, had some 22,000 participants a week when Han first started her research. It is the country’s fourth largest church and has an annual budget of $68 million. Weekly in-person attendance numbers more than 35,000, and the online audience involves half a million. The multi-site church has nine physical campuses in southern Ohio and northern Kentucky.
She describes a savvy group in terms of church leadership, such as doing their own Super Bowl-based events to keep membership attending even during the Super Bowl Sunday. She observed that the focus was on being “hip” more than “holy.”
From this N=1 case study, she conducted in vivo research and followed the life experiences of four individuals related to the church. There is a white woman, Jess, who has had a rough upbringing and run-ins with the law. There is Sandra, who is a mother of two and is married to her second husband, a white man. There is Grant, a married Christian with a Black brother, who does not realize how little he and his brother connected. There is Chuck, a pastor at the Crossroads church.
The four individuals are striving to be moral persons in a complex world with serious injustices. As a qualitative researcher, Han works to capture both their shared information in Undivided, a church group within the body, and their inner internal thoughts as they engaged (from interviews).
Undivided captures the fact that a church may strive for holiness, as they see it, but it can be misled by leadership and the body. She writes:
Even though megachurches like Crossroads had more nonwhite faces interspersed into their congregations, they remained effectively white dominant, unable to share power. They scorned the scourge of racism in people’s hearts, but ignored the way racial subjugation was entangled in American life and the way it molded people’s social interactions, their dreams, their judgments of those who fail, and the workplaces, prisons, schools, communities, and social systems they inhabited.
She captures the memories of one churchgoer whose parents each remembered how the KKK were intertwined with their local churches in different states in the U.S. Han writes:
People in their circle told them that integrating white supremacist policies with their faith in God was normal, and they never thought to question it. Jess recalled hearing stories about her parents attending Baptist services in Florida (for her mom) and Southern California (for her dad) n Sunday morning, then staying for a potluck lunch. As people digested their sandwiches and coffee, the men would participate in a Klan meeting. Women socialized and children played while men sat and in their Sunday church clothes discussing ways to advance an agenda of white supremacy. Pursuing an agenda of white power thus felt natural to Jess’s father. He tattooed the word White in a large scripted font on the back of his left triceps and the word Power onto his right triceps. He deliberately wore muscle shirts and tank tops in public to ensure everyone could see the words.
The experiences of the four read like a slice of middle America. There are misunderstandings and missed insights. There are tensions. There are struggles. Each may be a type of persona or profile, even as they read as authentic individuals, struggling with self-identity in a race-aware race-biased America. [Some of the subjects’ real names were used, and those of others were held back to protect their privacy and safety. A note on research standards was shared early on.]
As a political scientist and professor at Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Han showcases the bravery of the four in putting their social relationships at risk to stand up for racial justice.
This work does not offer easy platitudes for how people may bridge to each other across racial divides, but a shared faith may help mitigate the sense of differences and help peoples work together at larger scale for the betterment of societies, including pluralistic democratic ones.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
