Undivided : The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church

The inspiring story of evangelicals in Cincinnati struggling to bridge racial divides in their own church, their community, and across the nationIn 2016, even as Ohio helped deliver victory to presidential candidate Donald Trump, Cincinnati voters also passed a ballot initiative for universal preschool. The margin was so large that many who elected Trump must have—paradoxically—also voted for the initiative: how could the same citizens support such philosophically disparate aims? What had convinced residents of this Midwestern, Rust Belt community to raise their own taxes to provide early childhood education focused on the poorest—and mostly Black—communities? When political scientist Hahrie Han set out to answer that question, her investigations led straight to an unlikely origin: the white-dominant evangelical megachurch Crossroads, where Pastor Chuck Mingo had delivered a sermon the prior year that set in... The story of evangelical leaders in Cincinnati struggling to bridge racial divides in their own church, their community, and across the nation. In one of the largest evangelical megachurches in America, thousands of congregants have participated in a remarkable Undivided, a six-week program developed by church leaders, designed to cultivate meaningful relationships across race, and to foster antiracism grounded in action. The designers of Undivided recognized that any effort to combat racial injustice had to move beyond addressing only individual prejudice. Change, therefore, would have to be radicalfrom the very rootstracing both individual prejudices and the structures that perpetuate them. Hahrie Han, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University, was given complete and open access to tell the story of their work. In Undivided, she details the programs development, its participants efforts to navigate the complexities of race and faith during the Trump era, and its effects. Han also addresses the history of the white evangelical movement, including the ongoing contestation over its historic ties to white supremacy and exclusion.Hans narrative weaves together the accounts of four congregantstwo men, one Black and one white; two women, one Black and one whitewho participated in Undivided and dedicated themselves to carrying forward the work of constructing racial solidarity. Their journeys were courageous, eye-opening, at times painful, always complex and uncertainand unfinished.None of them came away unchanged. The inspiring story of evangelicals in Cincinnati struggling to bridge racial divides in their own church, their community, and across the nation In 2016, even as Ohio helped deliver victory to presidential candidate Donald Trump, Cincinnati voters also passed a ballot initiative for universal preschool. The margin was so large that many who elected Trump must have—paradoxically—also voted for the initiative: how could the same citizens support such philosophically disparate aims? What had convinced residents of this Midwestern, Rust Belt community to raise their own taxes to provide early childhood education focused on the poorest—and mostly Black—communities? When political scientist Hahrie Han set out to answer that question, her investigations led straight to an unlikely origin: the white-dominant evangelical megachurch Crossroads, where Pastor Chuck Mingo had delivered a sermon the prior year that set in...