Stone Center Affiliated Scholar Hahrie Han is a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and the inaugural director of the university’s SNF Agora Institute, which is dedicated to strengthening global democracy. In September, she published her latest book, Undivided: the Quest for Solidarity in an American Church.
In 2016, Hahrie Han went to Cincinnati to research what struck her as a political anomaly: voters had recently approved a ballot initiative on universal preschool that raised their own taxes — approved it, in fact, by the largest margin of any new education tax in the city’s history. This was the same year that Donald Trump, with his divisive rhetoric on race, won the state of Ohio. Yet somehow this education measure — which targeted resources for the city’s low-income, and primarily Black, families — passed by numbers that indicated that some Trump voters must have been among its supporters.
As Han, a political scientist, began to untangle this surprising outcome, many people told her that she needed to take a look at Crossroads, an evangelical megachurch that had been sending volunteers to support the initiative’s campaign. Han soon learned that these volunteers numbered in the hundreds, and that they were young and extremely motivated.
Han also learned that the volunteers had all participated in Undivided, a six-week program that gathered small groups of Black and white congregants for weekly conversations on the topics of racial justice, healing, and reconciliation. The program had been developed and launched earlier that year by Chuck Mingo, a Black pastor at Crossroads, then the third-largest megachurch in the country. “I wanted to understand what it was about Undivided that was able to animate so many people to get involved in this campaign around structural inequality,” Han said at a recent event at the New York Public Library (NYPL).
She wound up spending seven years finding out. The result is Undivided: the Quest for Solidarity in an American Church, published in September. The book follows four people — one Black woman, one white woman, one Black man, and one white man — who came to the program for various reasons and confronted different challenges once involved. The first half largely follows those journeys, but the second does something very different: taking a close look at what the participants experienced after the program ended. “After Undivided ended, all four of them continued to agitate for racial justice, lovingly calling out racism in their families, gently interrogating certain practices in their workplaces, and pushing the church towards justice,” Han said via email. “In doing so, they all experienced backlash from people close to them.” As Han said at the NYPL: “So the question is: What is the scaffolding that they need around them to sustain the work in the face of the backlash they’re receiving?”
Much of Han’s work focuses on social change. Her previous books include Prisms of the People: Power & Organizing in Twenty-First-Century America and Groundbreakers: How Obama’s 2.2 Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning In America. She approached the community at Crossroads as a true outsider — a self-described “lapsed Catholic” and “professor at a university on the East Coast” — who had to first learn about the history of the Evangelical movement and the increasing presence, and influence, of megachurches. Even though church attendance overall has declined in the United States, the average megachurch, defined as a church with at least 2,000 congregants, has grown by about 34 percent from 2015 to 2020, Han says. Currently the top 9 percent of U.S. churches by size account for approximately half of the nation’s church-going population.
In the Crossroads participants, Han found an embodiment of what one of her mentors told her: creating social change requires a critical eye and a hopeful heart. “It’s the combination of those two things together that enable us to critique what we see and act on it, and also have the hope to be able to make a difference,” Han said at the NYPL. “The work of trying to bring racial justice to an institution as complicated and flawed as a megachurch like Crossroads is not easy. It’s a struggle. But the commitment to engage in that struggle, that’s where the critical eye and the hopeful heart come in.”
Undivided is now an independent nonprofit that has spread to other megachurches and organizations. As Han writes in her book, its future is uncertain. The program has critics, including from the LGBTQ community, and has set off controversies — such as in 2022, when Crossroads invited a speaker who’d made homophobic and transphobic statements to speak to its members.
“In many ways, the work still feels fragile,” Han writes in her conclusion. “Will the efforts of all the people [Undivided is] animating into action add up to something more? Will the structures they create to sustain the work they are doing be able to withstand the forces of backlash — which are only likely to grow?”
Han, who’d wanted to study how social change could work within an organization as complicated as a megachurch, came away from her project with a new interpretation of radical change: “Change is radical not when it is extreme, but when it makes change from the roots up.”
“Systems as complex as racism in America do not change when disconnected people without any roots in a community yell a little louder or reshuffle a few priorities,” Han writes. “Instead, it changes when people rooted in their own interests and connected to one another organize themselves into just structures that enable them to put their hands on the complex levers of change.”
Read the Book:
Undivided: the Quest for Solidarity in an American Church