The Messy Thicket of Change

A different sort of pre-election piece

Programming Note: We’re switching things up this week because obviously what we need is more chaos. On Monday, we’ll have the subscriber-only THIRD ANNUAL FALL SOUPTRAVAGANZA, which will fill your soup-making schedule for the rest of winter. On Tuesday, there will be a subscriber-only piece. So if you’re not already a paid subscriber and want access to either:

Now, as for this week’s interview: let me just say that I didn’t plan the timing this way. I heard about political scientist Hahrie Han’s new book — a long-term examination of an anti-racism program at a evangelical church with more than 30,000 weekly attendees in Cincinnati — reached out for a copy, and the scheduling for an interview just happened to align with the Sunday before the U.S. election.

I should also say that I am deeply pessimistic about the outcome of this election: if Trump wins, Trump wins, and we have a very good idea of the sort of chaos, fear, and very real harm will unfurl as a result. If Kamala Harris wins, Trump will claim he won, and millions of Americans will believe him. The animus and division — between, ultimately, dueling understandings of truth and reality — feels intractable. And I’m not hopeful about that changing in the short-term.

But I am hopeful about small changes happening in communities working through the messy work of figuring out justice. And I’m heartened by books like Han’s, which refuses to shy away from that messiness — or paint an overly-rosy picture of what this work looks like. Participating in a racial reconciliation program run by a Cincinnati megachurch might be as far from your own experience as you can imagine. But that doesn’t mean that there’s not something to learn from people, even people with different backgrounds and beliefs from you, really trying to do the work.

So I’ll leave you with one of my favorite bits from the interview — and the hope that you’ll give it a chance.

Too often, social change solutions are designed by professional technocrats, tested by experts, and funded as “data-driven solutions” by philanthropists. The people who are living with the challenge are not invited to design their own solutions, practice vulnerability, or take emotional and strategic risks. Instead, they are given easy solutions — buying tote bags, donating money, signing petitions — that leave control in the hands of people who design them. Ordinary people — those who need to be the agents of change — are never given the chance to own it. Without that opportunity, their support remains forever fickle.  

What I really learned from and respected about Undivided and Crossroads is that they both had the courage to grapple — in often painful ways — with the question of what it meant for them to step squarely into the work of anti-racism, and navigate their way through the messy thicket of change. It meant that both Undivided and Crossroads made mistakes, as did all the characters in the book. But they were all committed to trying to figure it out — and to give other people the freedom (and grace) to do the same.

You can find more about Hahrie Han’s work here and buy Undivided here.

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As a way of introducing readers to the work of Undivided, I thought we’d start by describing the church behind it. In my life and in my reporting, I have attended so many different types of churches across the United States — but I don’t think I’ve ever gone to a church quite like Crossroads.

Can you talk about some of the more flashy parts of what makes Crossroads what it is (I’m thinking here of the Super Bowl of Preaching).....and the more theological/ideological components? How is it both like and unlike the stereotypical “cool” church OR evangelical megachurch? (I keep thinking of the founders’ idea of a church that was “neither boring nor frightening”) 

Before researching this book, I, too, had never encountered a church like Crossroads. I was raised in the Catholic church, which has a much more traditional, liturgical approach to services than Crossroads. But I also grew up in Houston, Texas, which has some very large megachurches that dominate the city’s landscape (consider Ed Young’s or Joel Osteen’s churches). Crossroads is distinct from all of those institutions, and to understand how/why, I had to learn a lot!

Let me describe Crossroads first, and then put it into a little context. As I write in the book: “Crossroads began in 1995 when a group of eleven coworkers from Procter & Gamble came together because they were seeking a church that was, as you noted, neither boring nor frightening. Many of their friends were turning away from churches that seemed irrelevant, remote, or off-putting. They wanted to build a church that would attract people who professed not to like church.”

They spent a year planning, looking for a pastor, and gathering the resources they needed to open. When they finally opened in 1996, they “advertised their first service as an opportunity for ‘great music, free coffee, and real topics.’ They wanted to attract congregants who hated institutionalized religion but still desired a relationship with God. As they cheekily put it, they wanted people to say ‘yes to God’ even as they said ‘no to religion.’” 

So they have always had the intention to deliberately upend church conventions to try to draw more people into their community. Their approach to Super Bowl Sunday exemplifies their philosophy. In most churches, that day sees some of the lowest church attendance of the year. To compensate, Crossroads decided to host an annual “Super Bowl of Preaching.” The church’s most popular pastors assemble teams to compete through four “quarters” of competitive preaching. Each quarter, they draw a silly phrase out of a hat and deliver a sermon that incorporates that phrase. The more smoothly they work it into the sermon, the more points they get. The event also has its own referees, commentators (including some former National Football League players), penalty flags, and all the trappings of the real Super Bowl.

They even put on a glitzy halftime show and produce their own commercials, which alternate between advertisements for Crossroads events and snarky spots rivaling Saturday Night Live in quality and humor (one of the first Super Bowls of Preaching that I watched included an ad that mockingly depicted Brooklyn-esque hipsters working at a whiteboard to come up with the idea for “AirDnD”—an app like AirBnB for people who wanted to rent out their bathrooms for people who didn’t want to defecate in public bathrooms. It had nothing to do with church; it was just funny, culturally current, and somewhat profane!). In the book, I recount a story of watching one Super Bowl of Preaching with my then seven-year-old, who had been raised attending weekly Buddhist meditations. My child watched the performance intently, and when it ended, turned to me and solemnly declared, “Mommy, I think I might be Christian.”

What I learned through my research is that Crossroads grows out of a missionary “seeker-sensitive” tradition within evangelicalism that has always sat alongside the more political traditions—but potentially gotten less public attention. “Seeker-sensitive” churches are designed to appeal to the person who is “seeking” God but may be ambivalent about organized religion, church, or otherwise just not in relationship with their faith yet. Many of the largest churches in America grow out of this seeker-sensitive tradition (or other missionary-oriented traditions) because they are explicitly focused on evangelizing as many people as possible—so growth is key to their philosophy. They explicitly focus on being culturally current and draw on lessons from customer growth models to engage more people as effectively as possible. Unlike the more politicized churches that are often covered in the news, these churches are less political—and sometimes deliberately avoid politics—because they do not want to turn people away.

(It is worth noting that there is another tradition within evangelicalism of the “prosperity gospel,” which includes large churches like Joel Osteen’s church. This is a very controversial tradition within evangelicalism because it promises financial prosperity to people in exchange for their faith. There are some very large churches that preach the prosperity gospel, but Crossroads actively rejected the prosperity gospel.)

I worry sometimes that the public conversation about evangelicalism ignores the nuance between these different strands of evangelicalism, and underestimates the extent to which many of the largest churches in America adhere to traditions distinct from the most politicized ones. Crossroads is not estimated to be a church that draws 35,000 people each week to in-person services, and another 500,000 people online. And they are not alone. As I note in the book, church attendance in America has gotten so skewed towards large churches that the largest 9% of churches by size contain 50% of the churchgoing population, and the average megachurch grew by 34% between 2015-2020. For better or for worse, megachurches are at the growth edge of American Christianity and understanding them, and all the variation within, is important!

One of the most interesting parts of Undivided is that it launched before 2020 and the murder of George Floyd and *before* the 2016 presidential election — but after the 2015 murder of Michael Brown and the Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Missouri.

What set the program up to avoid the antiracism journey that, as Jennifer Chudy and Hakeem Jefferson put it, “started in a bookstore and ended on their couch” and/or a framework of antiracism that mostly involved thinking as a consumer? 

I asked myself this same question many times throughout my research for the book! Part of what was so surprising about Undivided was the way it bucked the trend of both corporate DEI programs (that, based on research shared in the book, are often not as effective as they might hope to be) and social change efforts more broadly.

So many social change efforts are good at animating people’s initial outrage around a topic, but not good at channeling that outrage into the kind of ongoing work needed to make real change. The consumer mentality emerges because we are better at getting people to do a thing (sign a petition, donate money, vote, march, etc.) but not good at getting people to become the kind of people who do what needs to be done (initiate tough conversations and authentically wrestle with questions of racial justice in their own lives—instead of just waiting for someone to spoonfeed them actions to take).

As the book traces the journey of these characters in Undivided, we see them become animated around anti-racism, and then grapple with the question of how to sustain their work even when it gets hard, when they face backlash from family, friends, their workplace, church community, and so on.

Over time, I’ve come to focus on three key features of Undivided that I think really differentiate it from other similar programs. 

• First, like Crossroads, Undivided operated from the motto of “belonging comes before belief.” So regardless of what people believed or what views they held, they welcomed them into a community of radical welcome, and deep belonging. Because evangelicalism has, at its core, a deep belief in the possibility of people being transformed (in the faith context, through belief in God), they could stand powerfully in this standpoint of belonging. They did not feel like they had to move their own goalposts in order to engage people who disagreed. In Undivided, this meant that people who had very different experiences around race in America could be in deep community with each other. 

• Second, unlike DEI programs that often script actions people should take in response to racial injustice, Undivided created venues for people to strategize and rehearse their own solutions. People weren’t told what to do — instead, they were asked, within these communities of belonging, to move to a place of vulnerability and try different ways of being and acting in the world that reflected principles of anti-racism. And, they had to rehearse these ways of being in mixed race groups. That was a harder ask to make of people, but it allowed people to put their own hands on the levers of change, and own the process of change themselves. People didn’t just repeat actions that someone else created; they developed their own solutions, which made them inevitably more durable and resilient over time. 

• Third and finally, Undivided nested intimate, human-scaled action within a larger structure that enabled people to do work that was small and big at the same time. So the heart of Undivided was these small groups, where people would develop bonds of belonging and take the risk of trying to new strategies. And, they could rehearse a new way of being at a scale of action that people can understand and deeply experience. But, at the same time, people felt like they were part of something bigger because all of these small groups were connected together into a honeycomb-like structure in both Undivided and Crossroads. 

I found the book to be so engagingly interdisciplinary: there’s history and pretty intense theology and geography interwoven seamlessly throughout, and the book itself is incredibly readable. Can you talk a bit more about how the past and present of Cincinnati made a church like Crossroads (and a program like Undivided) possible? 

I’m so glad that you found the book to be so readable! And, I appreciate the recognition of the many strands of research and experience that I tried to weave throughout — writing about the intersection of faith, race, and politics in America is no easy task, and I think the only way to do it is to draw on knowledge from many different areas!

Cincinnati is a city that has followed the trajectory of many Rust Belt cities, in that it had a big economic boom in the industrial economy of the 19th century, and then saw its economic fortunes wane over the course of the 20th century. Paralleling this economic rise and fall was the changing racial make-up of the city. Sitting on the banks of the Ohio River at the border between Ohio and Kentucky meant that Cincinnati demarcated the line between slave states and free states prior to the Civil War, so it had all the complicated racial politics of border states.

By the twenty-first century, Cincinnati was a city with some of the highest rates of racialized poverty in the country—the city was very segregated along racial and economic lines. Big corporations like Procter and Gamble and Kroger are headquartered in Cincinnati, meaning that it has a prominent business elite in the city that sits alongside high rates of poverty. An officer-involved shooting of an unarmed Black man 2001 sparked three days of civil unrest in Cincinnati that highlighted the debate about race, policing, and poverty in America years before it became prominent in the national dialogue. As the national debate heated up in 2012-2015, another officer-involved killing of an unarmed Black man in Cincinnati it 2015 brought the national debate into their backyard.

This racial and economic history, alongside its geographic location, inevitably shaped both Undivided and Crossroads. I think the fact that it is located in “America’s heartland” away from the fierce, politicized debates on the two coasts meant that both Undivided and Crossroads had a kind of freedom to develop without the scrutiny of national institutions seeking to define them before they were ready to be defined. The balance of corporate wealth alongside economic struggle in the city, as well as the history of structural injustice by race meant that the city had a set of important material and non-material resources to grapple with questions of race.

Okay reporter/anthropologist/process question: How did you convince church leaders — and participants in Undivided — to participate in the larger book project? I’m talking granular, here: How did you frame yourself and your work, how did you dress and introduce yourself to others at presentations, how did you talk about your own experience in the church and your curiosity about the project? 

I love this question because I thought so much about it! As I wrote in the book, when I first got to know Crossroads, “I was worried its leaders and congregants might be suspicious of me and unwilling to talk. I was a college professor, a member of the purported coastal elite that the media liked to pit against midwestern evangelicals. I was neither white nor Black, but Asian, occupying a liminal category of race in America.” And I was a lapsed Catholic, not evangelical or Protestant. So I thought very carefully about this question—but it turned out that most of my concerns were unfounded.

When I first approached church leaders and Undivided participants, what I found was that most of them wanted to start by getting to know me. In many cases people explicitly said something like, “I want to understand where your heart is.” So we would enter into a conversation in which we were getting to know each other as humans — not as researcher and subject, or interviewer and interviewee, but instead as peers. They wanted to know about my background, my family, and my interests in this project. 

I quickly realized that the stereotypical differences that divided us did not matter (very likely, the church’s culture of “belonging before belief” was on my side!). Instead, they were trying to assess how sincere my interests were, and how much I was willing to put of myself into the work. I would tell them about my background as a professor, my responsibilities to informed consent and what that meant, but also the way this project fit into my broader research agenda (on social movements, democracy, and organizing in America).

But I also talked to them about my own faith background, why I struggled with Catholicism, why I chose to take my kids to Buddhist meditations, and how I thought about the role of religion in America. And, I would talk to them about my own experiences of race—what was it like to be the daughter of Korean immigrants? How did I make sense of the racial divide in America? 

I was always very honest in my responses, and I found that if I was willing to be candid about my own background, it made them more candid about theirs. So there was a mutuality to the relationships that we constructed that was important —and that, in the end, was more important than things like how I dressed. 

The bulk of the book follows individual participants in Undivided —a Black woman, a Black man, a white woman, and a white man. You narrate their histories with religion, with race and racism, how they got involved in Undivided, and how it challenged them. Sandra, who’s Black, told you about walking into the first meeting of Undivided and finding herself at a table with one other Black woman and a bunch of white people, including a couple from a rural area where she knows there are very few Black people. She remembers thinking to herself: Who is this *for*?

I realize this is a hard question, but at the end of your reporting, observation, and research, who do you think the program was for? And an even tougher question: who is your book for? 

This is a tough question! Sandra initially asks this question because she wondered if Undivided would only be for white people, to teach them about their own racism. But as she says later in the book, she realizes through Undivided that, “We all have racial wounds.”

Sandra, like all the characters in the book, goes on a journey that I describe as “audacious, uncertain, filled with tension—and unfinished….They formed new friendships and broke off old ones. They switched jobs, confronted racism in their personal relationships, got discouraged by the work, and renewed their courage to act, again and again. None of their journeys formed a straight line from complicity to justice.” As Sandra delves into an exploration of her own Black identity, her white husband withdraws, creating tension in their relationship. Sandra has to confront the question of how to intertwine her evolving views on her own racial identity with her most personal relationships— over time, Sandra is surprised by how much she changes through the program, despite some of her initial skepticism.

Here’s one way of thinking about the question of who the program (and the book) is for: one of the things that I tried to emphasize in the book is that I am not trying to argue that Undivided unlocked some secret code for fixing racial injustice in America. Nor am I trying to lionize Crossroads as exemplary in its effort to tackle the question. Instead, I’m trying to argue that for problems as ingrained in American society as racial injustice, we need solutions that are willing to be as messy and intractable as the problems themselves. 

Too often, social change solutions are designed by professional technocrats, tested by experts, and funded as “data-driven solutions” by philanthropists. The people who are living with the challenge are not invited to design their own solutions, practice vulnerability, or take emotional and strategic risks. Instead, they are given easy solutions — buying tote bags, donating money, signing petitions — that leave control in the hands of people who design them. Ordinary people — those who need to be the agents of change — are never given the chance to own it. Without that opportunity, their support remains forever fickle.  

What I really learned from and respected about Undivided and Crossroads is that they both had the courage to grapple — in often painful ways — with the question of what it meant for them to step squarely into the work of anti-racism, and navigate their way through the messy thicket of change. It meant that both Undivided and Crossroads made mistakes, as did all the characters in the book. But they were all committed to trying to figure it out — and to give other people the freedom (and grace) to do the same. Granting freedom like that is hard, because people may not always make the choices you want! (I have a friend who is a community organizer who always says “The hardest thing about organizing people is the people”, lol).

For problems that are as structurally ingrained like injustice, I think the courage to grapple in that way has got to be part of the solution. In the book, I call it “revolution by trial and error,” and I came away from the journey feeling like Undivided had something to teach any of us who are trying to understand how we can be part of such a revolution.

In the conclusion of the book, you spend some time grappling with what radical change — and racial justice — might actually look like: 

“Most use the word radical to refer to change that is extreme,” you write, “But the word radical actually comes from the idea of being rooted. Change is radical not when it is extreme, but when it makes change from the roots up. And what I learned from the people I met through Undivided was that making change not only had to alter the roots of an unjust system, but it also had to be rooted in real people. Systems as complex as racism in America do not change when disconnected people without any roots in a community yell a little louder or reshuffled a few priorities. Instead, it changes when people rooted in their own interests and connected to one another organized themselves into just structures that enable them to put their hands on the complex levers of change.” 

“So even as I remain unsure about what direction Undivided as a program or Crossroads as a church might take, I find myself believing that the march toward justice will find its resilience not necessarily in one DEI program, any one church, or any one leader, but rather in the people who commit to grace, to one another’s dignity, and to the work it takes to create a world that recognizes it.” 

I’d love to hear you connect the dots a little more for readers here (as you do in the book) between the concepts of justice and grace — but also talk a bit, too, about an approach to both that doesn’t seek out one big text or program or leader who can do all the work, but so many working differently, in different contexts, putting together individual pieces in this larger justice-seeking puzzle. 

I had learned about the Christian concept of grace — or belief in the idea of unmerited favor from God — when I was kid attending Catholic school. But learning from the people in Undivided made me understand grace in a new way. As I write in the book, “People in Undivided were willing to risk some of their deepest and most personal relationships to stand up for justice. This courage was not scripted by the how-to manuals on antiracism. Instead, it was rooted in a deeply personal commitment to a vision of the world that Jess, Sandra, Grant, and Chuck were desperate to see realized. And what is justice but unconditional love for and belief in the dignity of all people? In other words, what is justice but the belief that everyone deserves grace?” 

In Undivided, I witnessed people engaged in real struggle around the question, “What do I believe?” Not everyone asks themselves that question, but it is not that rare to find someone who does. What is more unusual, I think, is the next question people in Undivided asked themselves: “Because of what I believe, what must I do?” The people in Undivided engaged directly with the question of what their faith called them to believe, but then also what that meant for how they must behave in a complex, messy world. That is how grace and justice became linked, I think. If their faith calls them to believe in grace, then the encounter of grace with the world calls them to invest in justice.

I love the image of the justice-seeking jigsaw puzzle that your question raises. Like I mentioned above, decentralized problems require decentralized solutions! But we live in a world that favors the quick fix, not the revolution by trial and error. Revolution by trial and error depends on giving everyday people the freedom to own the process of change, so that change becomes resilient even to the uncertain, unpredictable realities that the world will inevitably bring. Get people not just to do a thing but to become the kind of people who do what needs to be done, and they will have the internal compass they need to adapt strategically to a changing world.

But let me highlight one additional piece here that I only briefly mentioned above: structure. Problems like racial subjugation are intractable partly because they are so decentralized but also because they are so ingrained into the fabric of American life. So the solution is not just about changing hearts and minds, but also about figuring out how to change structure. Undivided was committed to that, as should any justice-seeking jigsaw puzzle. But how do you make that possible? Undivided did it by connecting people’s small actions to bigger structures.

Because it was asking people to do something that is fundamentally countercultural to most of American life, it had to give people intimate opportunities to rehearse a different way of being. That’s what the small groups did. But then, the work did not stop there. Those small groups were all connected in a latticework, or a honeycomb of change within Crossroads. That cellular structure gave Crossroads the capacity to bend without breaking under the weight of disagreement. And the intimacy of the small group meant that the bonds that people forged across difference were not as brittle as the bonds most social change efforts have.

Finally, the fact that Undivided channeled people’s activity after the initial 6-week program into ongoing vehicles for change, such as the Justice Team (a small group created within Crossroads to organize the activism of people seeking to do ongoing racial justice work) meant that people had the scaffolding around them to both (a) connect their individual and interpersonal work to policy change, and (b) have a structure through which they could make sense of the messiness that ensued.

In the end, working on this book stretched my mind and my heart in ways I couldn’t have imagined. I have spent my career trying to understand how to equip people to work together so we can all become architects of our own futures; working on this book taught me urgent lessons about the science of organizing, movements, and social change I didn’t know I needed to learn. And, along the way, it renewed my hope in the power of faith to heal our broken world, and the vital importance of organizing and politics, properly understood. ●

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You can find more about Hahrie Han’s work here and buy Undivided here.