UNDIVIDED

An evangelical megachurch struggles to reckon with systemic racism and inequity.

In 2016, in Cincinnati, voters overwhelmingly approved raising their taxes to fund city preschools, “with targeted resources for poor—mostly Black—communities.” Johns Hopkins political scientist Han took note, especially because the numbers were markedly different in the presidential election: Cincinnati went for Clinton by 10 points, but the voters approved the school initiative by 24, so that “thousands of voters who supported Trump must have also supported Issue 44.” Digging deeper, Han discovered that a Cincinnati megachurch called Crossroads had mounted an antiracism training program called Undivided, one of whose outcomes was that many conservative members supported more funding for minority schools by way of a curriculum very much like the “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training programs that pervaded corporate America”—a source of loud outrage for right-wing politicians. Han examines the many paths Crossroads clergy, staff, and parishioners took to arrive at views about structural racism that, as Han writes, defy received wisdom about evangelicals on many points. It helped that the megachurch’s demographics skewed younger and more racially diverse than most, with many members who “believed the core theological tenets of evangelicalism, but explicitly or implicitly rejected the right-wing politics associated with it.” Many of those members also voted for Trump, but no one can doubt that on some matters concerning race, doors to understanding were opened rather than slammed shut. “At the most basic level,” writes Han, “Undivided equipped [its] participants to understand both the interpersonal and systemic dimensions of racial injustice and offered them tools to have difficult conversations around race.” Her book ably charts that course even as it illustrates the Christian concept of grace in action.

Inspiring: a key text for any reader seeking strategies for racial reconciliation—or at least beginning to talk about it.