Hahrie Han: What we have lost in so much of American civic life, I think, is this sense of creating a core through which people are organized. The analogy that I use sometimes is if you think about how a fire is constructed a fire is only going to burn as bright as the structure of kindling and tinder that’s at the heart of it.

If you have no tinder and kindling the fuel logs are going to—they could flame up for a second, but they’re going to go right out in a minute. The fuel logs are kind of like the mobilizers, but the tinder and the kindling is like the organizers.

To really make the fire of social change or whatever burn you have to have that architecture of tinder and kindling in place, and I think that’s where the organizing becomes really important.

Alex Lovit: Welcome to The Context. A podcast about the past, present and future of democracy from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. I’m your host, Alex Lovit. Today’s conversation is with political scientist Hahrie Han about a book she recently published which tells the story of an organization that created an intensive racial justice program.

Participants in this program committed to an ongoing process engaged in substantial, and sometimes painful self-reflection, and built enduring relationships often across racial divisions. What institution created and managed this intensive DEI program with its own members volunteering to participate? It’s a majority white evangelical megachurch, and if that surprises you, maybe evangelical Christianity is a more complicated category than you knew.

Crossroads Church which is based in Cincinnati, Ohio boasts one of the largest congregations in the United States with about 35,000 people attending weekly services in person. It also created the program that Han writes about in her book, “Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church.”

The Kettering Foundation’s main offices are in Dayton, Ohio less than a 15-minute drive from the closest Crossroads Church location. But the real reason this conversation is important to us is that part of the Foundation’s mission is advancing and defending inclusive democracy. So we’re interested in anything that can help people empathize across difference and act personally and politically in ways that confound stereotypes of polarized identity.

As Han argues during this interview, Crossroads’ Racial Justice program isn’t perfect, but it can help us see some of the elements that can lead to real change including long term dedication, interpersonal relationship building and individuals feeling empowered.

For the people Han writes about these elements contributed to committed anti-racist action including leveraging personal and professional relationships to call out prejudice and address racial inequities. These same ingredients; commitment, relationships and empowerment are important for any political movement that seeks to build collective power and drive sustainable, systemic change.

Hahrie Han is at Johns Hopkins University where she is the Stavros Niarchos Foundation professor of political science, the director of the SNF Agora Institute, and director of the P3 Research Lab. She’s published five books and has written for many national publications including the New York Times, The Washington Post and The New Republic.

She’s won multiple awards including being named a Social Innovation Thought Leader by World Economic Forum’s Schwab Foundation in 2022. Her new book was also named one of the best books of this year by The New Yorker magazine.

I learned a lot from this conversation about social change movements, and it certainly shifted how I think about evangelical Christianity. Hahrie Han, welcome to The Context.

Hahrie Han: Thanks so much for having me.

Alex Lovit: So I want to talk about your new book, “Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church,” and that’s about a program called Undivided at the Crossroads Church which is based in the Cincinnati area. So first off, just tell me about Crossroads. How big are they? Who are they? Besides Undivided is there anything particularly unusual about them?

Hahrie Han: Sure, so Crossroads is a non-denominational Protestant evangelical megachurch that’s located in Cincinnati, Ohio. They have at one point been the third largest megachurch in America so they’re one of the largest churches in America. Now, they draw, I think, about 35,000 people per week in person.

I did now grow up in a Protestant evangelical tradition and so, I was surprised just to be able to witness a church that operates at that scale when I first got to know them. But also, I grew up in a Catholic tradition in Texas. If you know anything about Catholicism it’s very liturgical.

So there’s an alter, and there’s churches with steeples, and a pew. And then, you sit, and you stand, and you say prayers, and there’s whole kind of set of rituals that goes around it, and I was surprised when I first went to services at Crossroads that it takes place in a building that literally, used to be an old strip mall.

They converted it into a giant space that has free artisan coffee in the lobby. They have a coworking space. They have free daycare for families. The services take place in a giant auditorium. There are multimedia experience. They have a full band. The pastor comes out in jeans. Is preaching with notes on an iPad. There’s no alter so it’s a very different kind of experience from what I was accustomed to.

As I came to understand the church more one of the things I learned is that from the very beginning they styled themselves as a church for people who don’t like church. So they wanted to deliberately try to be hip and more culturally current so that they would reach people who might not like the traditional rituals associated with organized religion.

It’s a really interesting church, I think, and one last thing I’ll say is that Crossroads is one the large churches in America and doing research for the book I learned that they’re part of obviously, a much bigger phenomenon of megachurches in America.

Right now, church attendance is so skewed towards large churches. The largest nine percent of churches in America contain about 50 percent of the church-going population. The average megachurch grew by, I think, 34 percent between 2015 and 2020 which is the last period over which we have data. These churches are the growth edge of American Christianity for better or for worse.

Alex Lovit: Okay, well, so that’s a description of Crossroads as an organization. Let’s talk about Undivided which is a program —

Hahrie Han: Sure.

Alex Lovit: — within Crossroads which is really the focus of this book. And now, it’s a separate organization from Crossroads, but for most of the period you’re writing about it was a program within the Crossroads church. So if I went to an Undivided program, if I participated in this in 2016 or 2017 what would I have experienced? What did that look like?

Hahrie Han: Undivided was a racial justice program that was started by Chuck Mingo along with a couple other people. Chuck was the highest-ranking black pastor in Crossroads at the time. Crossroads is a white-dominant church meaning it’s about 80 percent white, 20 percent non-white.

Chuck spoke out in 2015 about feeling called to speak about issues of race in Cincinnati. He had grown up in the black church in Philadelphia and moved to Cincinnati because of a job with Proctor & Gamble. And then, eventually got called into ministry, but hadn’t really spoken about race from the pulpit in the past.

In 2015 there was a police shooting of an unarmed black man in Cincinnati that brought some of the debates about policing to Cincinnati. He felt like he wanted to speak out in that moment. He was surprised to get this unexpected outpouring of support from people in the congregation. He said, “Hey, if you’re going to do something I want to be a part of it.”

He had to build the thing, and the thing that he built was Undivided which started off essentially as a six-week racial justice program that took participants through a curriculum that ranged from history of structural injustice within Cincinnati to lessons about empathy and implicit racism.

And took people through what would be not unsurprising elements of a typical DEI program, but they organized people into small groups where everyone’s experience of the program was really had through these small groups of eight to 10 people that were deliberately mixed race so that as people were learning these lessons they had to put the lessons in to practice in relationship with other people. Some people were of the same race as them, and some people were of the opposite race as them.

Alex Lovit: So this is [the part] where people are showing up once a week for six weeks in fellowship and partnership with a small group of eight to 10 other people so that’s the experience that people are having. There’s also, if I understand correctly, there’s presentations given to a larger group, but the bulk of the work is happening within these smaller groups.

Hahrie Han: Yeah, so every week there would be a teaching that would come from the main stage, and then there would be an exercise that they would have to do in their small groups. There usually would also be homework to do in between the weekly sessions. But one thing that’s really important to say is that when Undivided was first born they thought of it just as this six-week experience. But as they went through the first session which had 1,200 people organized in to these small groups they realized they can’t just take people on this six-week journey, and then drop them off at the end and say, “Good luck with the anti-racist and stuff.”

[Laughter]

Hahrie Han: They realized they needed to create a vehicle or a structure through which people could continue to grapple with the questions and the lessons that they had learned from the program. They created what they called a set of on-ramps which were essentially invitations for people to get involved in the ongoing work of anti-racism in different ways in Cincinnati.

Now, when they talk about the Undivided experience the six-week program was really just the spark, and it’s really the on-ramps where the rubber hits the road.

Alex Lovit: A lot of the book is told through the stories of a few particular individuals and their experiences with this program. You’ve already talked about one of those people, Chuck Mingo, the pastor who founded the program or co-founded the program. Let me ask you a couple questions about some of the other participants and other characters in the book. Let’s start with Jess.

She’s a white woman who had been raised in a family where some of her close relatives had explicit white supremacist beliefs. How did she get from there to signing up for Undivided and committing to anti-racist work?

Hahrie Han: Yeah, Jess grew up with a father who literally had the words “white power” tattooed on his triceps, and he preached an ideology of white supremacy to his children. Jess as a kid lived in the world that her parents created for her, but when she was in high school she got addicted to opioids, and then eventually was incarcerated for some crimes that she committed as a result of her addiction.

When she was in prison I think a couple of things happened. First, she was imprisoned with other women who were of different races from her, and they, of course, did not conform to the stereotypes that her parents had taught her.

Second, she also developed a personal relationship with God. She had found God in prison so when she came out of prison she was trying to figure out as she navigated this world that she was in how it was that she would be able to sustain her faith.

She found Crossroads because that was a place where she could go to maintain her relationship with God. When the call came or the invitation came to join Undivided she at first was really scared. She wasn’t sure that they would welcome A) someone who had been imprisoned; but B) someone who had been taught the kind of lessons that she had been taught.

At the time she really just knew enough to know that there was a lot she didn’t know, but she had never heard the term “blackface” before. There was a lot of things about structural racism in America that had just never been taught, but it was really the mismatch between what she was hearing from her father and some of her other close relatives and what she had experienced with people in her life that drove her to want to be a part of Undivided.

Alex Lovit: So let me ask a couple questions about some other characters in the book. I mean, I say characters. These are real people. Sandra is a black woman. She’s married to a white man, and in the book she’s going through some struggles with her identity. Some of her closest relationships at one point as part of the Undivided program she’s paired up with another black woman.

She finds herself ashamed to admit how much she’s prioritized building relationships with white people. She has difficulties in her marriage. A lot of the work of Undivided and the work of anti-racism more generally is about relationships between people, but it seems to me that a lot of Sandra’s stories about reconciling her own identity and her own sense of self. Do you agree with that? Is that how you understand her story?

Hahrie Han: Yeah, Sandra has a line in the book where she talks about this idea that when she first started Undivided she thought racism was a problem for white people to deal with. But then what she realized over time is in her words she says, “We all have racial wounds.”

She realizes that even as a black woman she had struggles with her own racial identity and had her own set of internalized assumptions about what the racial hierarchy in the United States was. She really had to grapple with that.

So I do think that you’re absolutely right that there is a self-reflection and a self-understanding that is pivotal not only for Sandra, but for all the characters because they all have to figure out—in some ways they’re asking this question of, “Who am I in this world? Because of who I am what must I do?”

That’s what Undivided is calling them to do, but I wouldn’t say that it’s an isolated journey for anybody. That part of how Sandra is able to struggle through these questions is by being in relationship with a whole range of other people within Undivided and also, other people in her life.

Alex Lovit: Yeah, one thing that really comes through in the book is how much these participants in Undivided did build real and enduring relationships. Not just through the six weeks, but much longer-term than that.

Hahrie Han: Sure.

Alex Lovit: Well, let me ask about one last person in the book is Grant who is a white man. During much of the period covered by the book he’s working for the Ohio Department of Corrections. His experience with Undivided causes him to reevaluate some of the racial inequities in the prison system.

He’s not in charge of the whole thing, but he has some limited amount of power, and he starts trying to push back on some of those inequities in the system. Pushing back on some of the assumptions of some of his coworkers. That sounds like a real success story to me in terms of inspiring cultural change in other institutions. Is that how you see Grant’s story?

Hahrie Han: Yeah, I think I would see that in all the characters is the way the book is organized the first half of the book is called “agitation,” and the second half of the book is about backlash because all of the characters, they become agitated through this six-week experience in Undivided. Then they each experience backlash in different parts of their life.

So for some it comes through the church, and the church community, and others it comes through their family, and others it comes through the workplace. Each of them have to decide based on, “What I feel called to do and what it is that I am trying to do in living out my anti-racist values. What cost am I willing to take?”

One of the questions I think the book tries to examine is this question of, “What scaffolding and support did people need around them to persist in the work even when it got really hard?” That’s what that section on backlash is about.

I do think that that’s right that Grant really struggled to think about what was, as he experienced, backlash in his workplace? What was he willing to take and not take as a result of that? What kind of risk was he willing to take with his own employment as a result of that?

But that was not dissimilar to the same kind of risk that Jess experienced when she was thinking about calling out the racism in her family, for example, or Sandra having to struggle within her own marriage, or talk within the church community.

Alex Lovit: Yeah, well, in all of these stories there is real difficulty. I mean, they are willing to make sacrifices and endure some degree of pain of backlash for pushing.

Hahrie Han: Yeah, and that’s one of the messages that I hope really comes out in the book is one of the things I try to be really about is that I’m not trying to argue that Undivided has some perfect formula and if only every organization in America enacted that formula that we would all become undivided, or something like that, or that Crossroads is a perfect church.

I think both institutions as all human institutions are, are really flawed. That’s just a reality of being human and creating human institutions. But what I really respected in spending so much time with the people in the book, but also, all the people in Undivided and within Crossroads is that as individuals, but also as organizations they were committed to staying in the struggle.

They were committed to continuing to grapple with how it is that you really navigate values of anti-racism in your life. As an organization Undivided and as an organization Crossroads they’re both committed to grappling with this question of, “What did it mean for us to build a program or build a church that really tried to take seriously this idea that we can live in a pluralistic, multiracial community.”

Each of the individuals in each of the organizations made choices that I would not have necessarily made that I personally might have disagreed with, but that wasn’t the point. The point instead was that they were committed to continuing the struggle with these ideas.

I think that’s a really important lesson for me that came out of the book is that there’s no formula to doing this work. There’s no perfect way to make these kinds of values a reality. Instead, we all have to figure out how to negotiate these answers in our own ways.

Alex Lovit: I agree with you that no institution is perfect, and Undivided is not, but I hope there’s lessons we can draw from it, and I want to ask you about some of those. Part of that is the seriousness of the commitment that you’re speaking to there of the individuals and the program institution that they really took this seriously. This was not some box they were checking.

Hahrie Han: Right.

Alex Lovit: Part of that is the long term commitment involved. That it was a six-week program and even longer than that as you pointed out earlier. That’s a pretty serious commitment to ask of people. To give up their busy lives and show up once a week for six weeks.

Do you think that it being part of a church made that part of it easier? That this is an institution that is used to convening people once a week. These are people that have a habit of convening with other people once a week. Are churches better positioned to do that?

Hahrie Han: Yeah, people have asked me a version of that question a lot since the book came out. Sometimes, people ask a question in a way where it’s like it doesn’t matter that people had a shared faith in a shared God, and that’s what made Undivided possible.

I do think there are elements of the church experience that made Undivided better able to succeed potentially than other programs, but I don’t think it’s so much about the shared faith. I think the two elements that are the most important are one, when you go to an evangelical church there’s inherently a belief in the power of people to transform themselves. That’s really unique if you think about it.

So evangelicalism is based on this idea that people can be born again. That’s almost a definition of what evangelicalism is. If we really believe that people can change their views on racism then you have to believe in the ability of people to transform themselves.

I think a lot of our social and political institutions are based on the idea that people are kind of static. How they come in the door is how they’re going to leave. That belief in transformation, I think, is one thing that made the church setting stand out.

The second, I think, is what you eluded to which is the idea that because Crossroads as a community really emphasize the importance of community. That all the people who came into Undivided at least when it was just situated within Crossroads were people who had a visceral understanding of the value of collective life.

That people knew that if they went to weekly services, and participated in all the small groups, and hung out in the coworking space, and took their kids to the daycare, and did all the things that Crossroads offers that they are part of a community that’s bigger than themselves, and that they value that.

I think those two orientations both did create a foundation that made it more possible for something like Undivided to work, but neither of those things are things that have to be unique to faith institutions. We can bring the power of transformation into secular organizations.

We can bring the power of collective life into all different kinds of organizations yet we don’t. I think those are the choices that are possible even if they’re not necessarily just positive.

Alex Lovit: Yeah, but I think that’s a real challenge. It’s a difficult thing for organizations to do to bring people together in community and to build long term relationships. Do you feel like the long term relationships is another important element of what made Undivided successful insofar as it was successful?

Hahrie Han: Yeah, absolutely. I just want to gently push back on the point that you just made which is that I actually think we know a lot about how to build a community. The question is, “Are we willing to do that work?” It is hard to be in community with other people.

As anyone who has been part of a family like my husband and I have been married for almost 25 years now, and I love him, and we have two great children, and we have a wonderful family, but it is work. [That you know] how to forge a common life together is not something that we just wake up, and wave a magic wand, and then it’s done.

We’ve had to negotiate, and struggle, and disagree, and figure that all out over the years. But our behaviors flow from the commitments that we have and because we’re committed to making our marriage work the way in which we fight is we fight like we want to stay together. We don’t fight like we want to get divorced.

The way in which we treat each other flows from the kind of commitments that we have. It is true that it’s hard to build community, but I think we actually know a lot about how to do it, but sometimes, it’s hard to find organizations that are willing to put in the time. That are willing to put in the effort.

I want to think about this as a supply side problem and not a demand side problem. I think there are a lot of people out there who are actually really hungry for opportunities to be in authentic community with other people. But they’re often not invited into those kind of spaces, to get to your actual specific question.

I think one of the things that we have in the 21st century is that we live in a world in which a lot of people have lots of interactions, but not a lot of relationships. I might talk to the barista when I get my coffee in the morning, and that’s an interaction so I’m interacting with another human, but there’s not actually a relational basis there.

A relationship is defined by a situation in which both parties have a shared expectation for the future. And that they’re both willing to put in because of that commitment to a shared future. That’s what’s really atrophied, I think, in a lot of American life, but Crossroads created a culture in which relationships were key.

They did that not because of wanting to do work like, programs like Undivided do, but they did that because they’re belief is that you can’t bring people to God unless people are willing to do the hard work of being in a relationship with each other. And then, developing that same kind of relationship with God.

Alex Lovit: Part of the reason I say it’s hard or seems hard to me is there’s a lot of social science arguing that there is a decline of associational life —

Hahrie Han: Totally.

Alex Lovit: — in the United States and around the world that people are involved in less organizations. They have fewer close friendships than they used to perhaps. The most famous example of this is Robert Putnam’s, “Bowling Alone.” That book is now a quarter century old, but I guess first of all, do you agree with that argument? That thesis.

Hahrie Han: Yes, absolutely, and I don’t mean to minimize that. I think the tweak that I am offering is that it doesn’t have to be like that. The fact that we allowed those associational entities to decline was a societal choice that we’d made, and it doesn’t have to be that that’s the case necessarily.

Alex Lovit: Then it feels to me like the type of work that Undivided does which requires long term relationship-building, requires intense time commitment, and can be transformational. Can be genuinely transformational. That does require organizations that bring people together in that long term. It requires people to make that kind of long term commitment.

Hahrie Han: I totally agree with that. One of the things I thought was really interesting about both Crossroads and Undivided is because what they’re doing is countercultural. They’re building community and authentic relationship in a moment in which a lot of other societal institutions are not doing that.

They worked really hard to explicitly identify a set of norms that they wanted people to abide by. Both Crossroads and Undivided were really explicit about saying, “Look, if you’re going to come be part of our community you should know that at some point you’re going to be uncomfortable. You’re not growing. You’re not learning if you’re not uncomfortable. We’re not doing our job if you don’t come here, and you’re not uncomfortable.”

Another norm that they had was, “We do life together,” with the idea being that transformation doesn’t happen by coming to services one hour a week on Sunday morning. It happens by integrating our lives together so that means we want you to be—come take advantage of the free coffee, and the free daycare, and the coworking space, and all the small groups. They really wanted people to integrate in.

Another norm that I think was really important to Undivided in particular is this idea that belonging comes before belief. The ideas that the church was really clear about what it stood for. It believed in God, it believed in the inerrancy of the Bible. There are certain [tenants] that it was very clear about.

But they said, “Look, no matter what you believe you’re a part of our community. You can be atheist, you can believe in a different God, you can believe in no God. It doesn’t matter. We still welcome you with open arms into our community.” Now, they created that community of belonging, and then they would try to evangelize you.

[Laughter]

Hahrie Han:  It was clear what they were trying to do, but if you think about it that’s really contrary to how a lot of our other social institutions work in which really, they implicitly put belief before belonging. So the idea is, is that if I’m in an environmental organization and who do I recruit I go out and try to find other environmentalists to join my cause.

Then what that ends up meaning is that you have communities that are built on shared belief as opposed to creating belonging first. That’s how we end up with the kind of homogeneity or the echo chambers that are plaguing a lot of our communities right now.

Alex Lovit: You’re making an argument for that organizations should commit to relationship-building. To mass membership, and that does enable some of the things we’re talking about here. That enables the relationship-building that enables the long term commitment. I want to ask about one more element that maybe is important or maybe not.

Hahrie Han: Sure.

Alex Lovit: Something that struck me in the book, I don’t know if this is an intentional theme, but it came up a few times, and I presume that means it came up a few times in your interviews as well is eye contact. So there’s a couple of times that in these small groups people mentioned making eye contact with somebody else struggling to make eye contact with someone else.

That made me think that perhaps an element of this is the in-person nature. That these are people gathering in physical space together. Covid happened, I think, while you were writing this book, and it had impacts on Undivided as well as every aspect of American life. Do you think that this work does require in-person interaction or can this be done virtually?

Hahrie Han:  So in my mind that data on that is still unclear. What I will say is I think that in-person interaction makes it easier for sure to create and construct the kind of relationships that we’re talking about. Does it have to happen exclusively offline? I’m not sure. Part of that is I will say I sat through several cohorts of Undivided that happened exclusively online.

Where they were bringing together clergy, let’s say, from around the country, and there’s never a moment at which all that clergy came together in person. I think what’s more important than the technology or the mode of interaction is the question of relationship. And the question of whether or not people are committed to a shared future or not.

The other element that I think does make Undivided stand out relative to other programs that we haven’t touched on is it’s commitment to allowing people to develop their own solutions. To put their hands on the levers of change. Most DEI programs, they teach you about empathy. They teach you how it works, and then they tell you what to do.

What Undivided did is they taught you about empathy. They gave you some suggestions, but then they put you into these small groups, and then you had to struggle with how to really have an empathic response to someone who had a very different life experience from yours.

It’s kind of like learning how to ride a bike. It’s very rare that children learn how to ride a bike by reading a book, and then getting on the bike. Most children learn how to ride a bike by getting on the bike, and then falling off, then getting back on.

[In essence], what the small groups did is they enabled people to get on that bike to make mistakes, and then to fall off, and to get back on that bike. When people were able to navigate towards their own solutions when they began to develop their own internal compass around the way in which they wanted to live their lives then they could own the solutions as opposed to having them be externally imposed.

I think that commitment to learning, and a risk, and exploration is something that was unique to Undivided, but part of the broader Crossroads culture and really, an important part of what made that program different from others that I’ve seen.

Alex Lovit: So you mentioned some other DEI programs there that you think maybe could learn from Undivided. I want to be careful here because obviously, you’re not opposed to DEI programs. You wrote a whole book about it.

Hahrie Han: Of course not.

Alex Lovit: But you want them to be done well.

Hahrie Han: Right.

Alex Lovit: What does a DEI program that isn’t done well, what characterizes that, and what lessons should they learn from your book?

Hahrie Han: Historically, the way that DEI programs evolved is they were really a response in the 1970s that a lot of corporations had to the civil rights movement when they were trying to think about what to do. They happened to emerge historically around the same time that you had this legalistic framework around equal employment opportunities and so on that emerged.

Over time they began to become much more legalistic in a way, and for many institutions now are box-checking exercises. “We have to get all our employees to go through this process, and then we can check the box that they did it. And then, if some crisis happens we can say, ‘But we did the right thing. We had them go through this program,’” or something like that.

That might be good from a legalistic standpoint, but it’s terrible in terms of actually getting people to own the results of change and actually getting people to become motivated to want to do the hard work of understanding, and then living out the [unintelligible] racism.

I think that part of what I took away from Undivided is that for so many of these complex, sticky social problems that we have we have to figure out how to develop peoples’ sense of their own agency in being agents of change as opposed to feeling like they’re just recipients or pawns in the game that someone else is controlling. Part of what Undivided was really good at, Undivided along with the on-ramps afterwards was helping people see themselves as the agents of change as opposed to consumers of it.

Alex Lovit: Correct me if I’m wrong, but in my mind, part of what makes Undivided work is the long term commitment. It’s also the trust in people as you’re saying there. Really trying to empower people to figure out their own solutions, but also, putting them in these long term relationships so it’s not just a one-time box-check. It’s a real commitment on the participant’s part and a commitment to relationship-building.

Maybe DEI works less well without those kind of commitments. How about relationship-building without the DEI? How do you think about institutions like educational institutions, workplaces that bring diverse people together from diverse backgrounds? May not have an explicit DEI focus, but brings people together in pure relationships. Do you think that has an impact on racial expectations, attitudes?

Hahrie Han: Yes, I do think the data on that—there’s a lot of research on what’s scholars might call “contact theory” essentially. If I come into contact with people who come from a different racial background to me does that make me less racist, let’s say? At least my read of a lot of that literature is that it’s conditional. It depends.

It depends on the nature of the contact, the structure of the interactions, the context within which that contact is happening. A whole host of other things that go into it. One of the, I think, things that I take from that then is this idea that it’s not just about just putting people into contact with each other, add salt, and mix. It’s about, “How do we make meaning of the kind of interactions that we have? The relationships that we construct.”

That’s where you really do need communities like the one that Undivided was trying to construct where there was a space, and a language, and a framework within which people were invited to make meaning of these kind of interactions. Often, interactions that could be quite conflictual. Where people had really differing views on reality.

Alex Lovit: In an ideal world we’ve managed to both build institutions that bring people together and also, consciously engage in this work of connecting them and building empathy. Let me ask a question just about this book and the audience of this book. You’ve always been, I think, an uncommonly good writer for an academic.

Hahrie Han: Thank you.

Alex Lovit: But this book is a little bit of a departure for you.

Hahrie Han: Sure.

Alex Lovit: Your previous work has been mostly published by academic presses, academic journals. This is from Knopf trade publication and is really told through these stories of individuals. These human-level stories which makes it a much easier read than the vast majority of academic studies. But also, there’s a lot of lessons, a lot of intellectual engagement you can get from it. Was that a conscious decision on your part or are you seeking a different audience here?

Hahrie Han: Yeah, well, I had the incredible opportunity to publish the book with a trade press which I just had to have the opportunity to do, and my previous books [unintelligible] presses as you said. I had a really generous editor who worked a lot with me on the craft of learning how to tell a story and how to make characters come alive on the page.

That part of it was really fun, but it was also an intentional choice in the sense that [unintelligible] book the structure of the narrative is around an argument in the set of ideas where I’m trying to argue that, “Here’s an answer to a question that we’re asking.”

I think that going back to what we’ve been talking about I’m not trying to argue that there’s a formula to how you do this work. What I’m trying to argue is that it’s messy and it’s complicated, but to make it happen what we have to do is be willing to dive into that messiness and that complicated, and then equip people to navigate to their own solutions.

How do they become adaptive agents in a complex system that is structurally racist in a way? The best way to tell that was by just showing the complex, messy journeys that all these different people had to go through.

I think there’s a way in which I felt like story and narrative was a much more powerful way to make the points that are really necessary than trying to impose some kind of neat box onto these experience that really can’t be boxed in any perfect way.

Alex Lovit: Well, in some ways it’s similar to the Undivided program itself. Coming into contact with another human and having to reckon with their perspective on the world. Their experience of the world.

Hahrie Han: Sure.

Alex Lovit: It’s a powerful book. The way the book ends or the way that the Undivided program ends is it hasn’t ended. It is ongoing, but it is no longer associated with the Crossroads Church. So in 2020 it was spun off and became an independent organization after some degree of tension within Crossroads about its role and how far it could go.

Crossroads did provide substantial financial support for this independent organization for the first year. Really helped it stand up, but as a reader of the book I was a little disappointed to get to that point and think, “Oh, no, this couldn’t be sustained within the context in which it was founded.” Do you see that as a problem, a warning sign, or do you think that the independent organization of Undivided will be able to continue to do the same work it has been doing?

Hahrie Han: Yeah, so just to clarify, the choice to move it outside of Crossroads was not necessarily born of the tension that existed between Crossroads and Undivided. That’s a very common model that Crossroads uses where it incubates a program within the church, and then it spins that program off into its own independent entity.

That’s true for its created business incubators for Christian businesses. All different kinds of organizations well, they’ll start within the church, and then the intention is to eventually spin it off. So that had always been the intention behind Undivided just to be really clear. It wasn’t something that as tension arose they decided, “Oh, my gosh, we need to get this thing out of here.” That wasn’t at all what happened.

And then, the other thing I should say is that Undivided is continuing to do work within the Crossroads community. Chuck Mingo, who is the cofounder of Undivided is still on the pastoral staff. At Crossroads there are still a lot of ties. I think the pros and cons to having it move outside.

The pro is that now Undivided is working not only within Crossroads, but in other churches across America. It’s also created a secular version of the program that is has done in different workplaces across America, too. In that sense it’s able to bring the work of Undivided into other communities.

The downside as I think maybe you’re intimating is that institutional change is really hard. When an organization is outside of that institution its ability to change that institution from the inside is inherently different.

In some way I think the question that you’re asking is this question of, “Well, what’s the big purpose of Undivided? Was it to change Crossroads? Is it to bring this work of anti-racism to other communities in America? I think different people can have different ways of understanding that, but that was the kind of debate that was going on within the program.

Alex Lovit: Well, we’ll have to wait for the sequel to see how things turn out.

[Laughter]

Alex Lovit: Let’s talk a little bit about politics. This is purportedly a podcast about democracy, and it sounds like part of what drew your interest to Crossroads and Undivided in the first place was the result of the 2016 election in which there was a levy in Cincinnati for a preschool program that mainly benefitted poor kids. A lot of poor black kids in the Cincinnati area.

Volunteers from Crossroads helped to promote that levy, and that levy passed by a large margin. At the same time Donald Trump won the state of Ohio and so, by inference you can compare the election’s results so a lot of people voting to raise their own taxes to support children in poverty.

And at the same time they’re voting for a candidate who’s advocating for cutting funding for the federal Department of Education. How do you understand that contrast? How do understand what’s happening in those voters’ heads?

Hahrie Han: Yeah, so I think the education levy that you’re talking about in Cincinnati passed by the largest margin of any new education levy in Cincinnati history. They were able to build this really cross-party, cross-racial, cross-class coalition that passed a new tax on Cincinnati residents in order to provide targeted resources to the poor, black community in the city.

It was really unusual, and as you know, there must have been some voters who voted for Trump and voted for that levy. How do we understand that? I think there’s a bunch of lessons that come out of the book for me as I think about this moment in politics.

I think there’s a lot that we still don’t understand about what drives people to vote for Trump. I think people make assumptions about what it is, but I think there’s a lot that we still don’t understand. One thing that I observe as a political scientist is this idea that if you look at the past few decades of elections in America, federal elections in America what you see is a constant flip-flopping back and forth between different parties.

Which party controls Congress, which party controls the presidency, and what that tells me is that we’re in a moment of what some political scientists might call unstable majorities. It’s not like the New Deal era where there’s one party that’s captured a stable majority of the American population, and they continue to win elections, and then advance that agenda.

Instead, voters keep switching back and forth as to who it is that they want to control the institutions of government. That to me signals that there’s a lot of people that are disaffected from both parties right now. I think what Undivided did in that moment is they gave people an experience of public life that was not merely spectacle.

They gave people an experience of what it meant to grapple concretely with questions of, “What does it mean to be in pluralistic community with other people? What does it mean to disagree about the summer of racial reckoning after George Floyd? What does it mean to reconcile my commitment to my faith and my political values?”

These are all questions that are really hard to answer, and so much of our politics happens at the level of the media and spectacle where you can’t really bring a lot of nuance to these very complicated questions. Undivided was able to give people this human-scaled experience of struggling and negotiating those questions.

But it wasn’t that people felt like, “Oh, I’m just talking to two people or the five people in my family,” because it was part of this bigger structure the work felt both small, and concrete, and big at the same time.

I think that experience is what we’re really missing in politics. I wonder how much of the disaffection that people feel is a function of the difference between understanding public life as a spectacle that I consume, and I go, and I’m invited to make a choice every two to four years about which product I like better versus the experience of public life as actual practice.

My instinct is that the more that we can move people to a place where they are able to understand public life as practice the more that we can begin to struggle with some of the uncertainties that I think are confronting a lot of American families right now.

Alex Lovit: Well, I agree with you about the unstable political coalitions right now. I think there’s a risk of over-reading the results of any individual election, 2016 or 2024 when people are voting on a whole range of issues. I’m wondering about the challenge of getting from the human scale that you’re talking about that that’s what Undivided did successfully. That’s what this book does successfully to the political scale.

It’s maybe easier for me to see I want to support poor children in my own community than it is to think about national-level politics and how that’s going to affect people. Is it possible? Are there messaging techniques or are there ways to get people to think more about the human scale when they’re making national-level decisions?

Hahrie Han: Yes, absolutely. I would push back on the question in the sense that I don’t think the answer is messaging. I think what made Undivided work at scale was not that it had a certain message, but that it was embedded within a structure that looked like a honeycomb. If you imagine a beehive it has lots of these little cells, and all those cells are connected to each other into a giant beehive.

That cellular structure is essentially what made Undivided work. You had 1,200 people who were each organized into these small groups. Those small groups gave people a human-scaled experience in which they could rehearse a different way of being, but then that experience was connected to hundreds of other experiences that people were having. That was then embedded within this larger 35, 000-person church which is then embedded in this community of Cincinnati and so on, and so forth.

This is the research that [unintelligible] does. We used to have many more civic and social institutions that were structured in that way. Those have really disappeared and now, we have a lot of civic organizations that essentially have a structure that is one to many.

I’m the paid staff person, and I have a list of a million people, and I reach out to them on a weekly, monthly, whatever, basis that I want, but there’s no cellular structure that mediates that relationship. Yes, if I’m only going to experience public life or organizations through an email list then there is necessarily less nuance, and the message becomes that much more important, but if you create a structure through which messages are mediated through relationships then I think you have something very different.

Alex Lovit: This will recall some of your previous work where you draw a distinction between mobilizing and organizing. Mobilizing being more of a top-down, “I need you to do this thing,” and organizing being more, “I’m going to train you, give you the skills and empower you to take leadership and take ownership.”

Hahrie Han: Right.

Alex Lovit: Do you think that political activists have been over-investing in mobilizing and under-investing in organizing? Are there lessons we can learn from Undivided not just about racial justice, but —

Hahrie Han: Yes, and thank you for reading the previous work, too. I think mobilizing absolutely is like the analogy that you give is like a net. We try to cast a wide net which we can now do with technology in ways that we never have been able to do to capture people who are already motivated or excited to take action on any particular issue. And that we match them with opportunities for involvement.

Organizing is less like a net and more like an engine where it’s not just that I’m going to try to match you with opportunities for things that you already want to do, but organizers are trying to shape the interest capacities and capabilities that people have to take action in ways that they may not have necessarily imagined.

Part of what I try to argue is that you need both in any kind of change campaign. Not everyone wants to be organized. At some point you might need to do some mobilizing, but what we have lost in so much of American civic life, I think, is this sense of creating a core through which people are organized.

The analogy that I use sometimes is if you think about how a fire is constructed a fire is only going to burn as bright as the structure of kindling and tinder that’s at the heart of it. If you have no tinder and kindling the fuel logs are going to—they could flame up for a second, but they’re going to go right out in a minute.

The fuel logs are kind of like the mobilizers, but the tinder and the kindling is like the organizers. To really make the fire of social change or whatever burn you have to have that architecture of tinder and kindling in place, and I think that’s where the organizing becomes really important.

Alex Lovit: I guess as a last question I just want to ask about white evangelicals and their relationship to anti-racist work, to politics. You’re writing about a community that is majority a white evangelical community. Eighty percent white, all evangelical. That group, white evangelicals in NBC’s exit polls they went for Trump by 82 percent in this recent election.

There just seems to me to be such a contrast between the type of work you’re writing about in Crossroads and Undivided with many of the same community and the way that Trump talks about race which is essentially, ignore it. Anyone who is trying to get you to think about race is racist themselves.

Of course, that’s appealing. That’s easy to think like, “Oh, I just don’t need to worry about this as a problem,” as opposed to Undivided that’s saying, “No, you need to worry about this as a problem, and you need to really commit yourself to thinking about it hard for a long period of time.”

Do you think that there are lessons specific to the evangelical community from your book, from Undivided? Is there potential to engage that audience in this work?

Hahrie Han: Yeah, one of the things that I hope people take from the book is the idea that I think there’s a lot more heterogeneity in white evangelicalism than is commonly understood. The data that eight in 10 evangelicals voted for Trump comes from surveys that are based on people self-identifying as evangelical.

One of the things that we know is that the people who self-identify as evangelical tend to adhere to the political label less so than the faith label. I think that there are—in fact, I know there are substantial portions of Crossroads congregants who believe all the faith tenants associated with evangelicalism.

But if I was a pollster, and I called them up, and I said, “Are you evangelical?” they would say, “No.” They would say they are Christ followers. They might say they’re Christians, but they wouldn’t necessarily evangelical because they think that what the pollster is asking is, “Are you MAGA?” And they say, “I’m not that even if I believe in all these other things that are associated with the faith of evangelicalism.”

The data is a little bit confusing in that sense in the sense that I think it picks up on a particular portion of the evangelical community that certainly is a large portion of the community, but not necessarily the only portion of it. Part of what I hope people understand is that I think there’s more heterogeneity in the white evangelical community itself.

And then, secondly, there is a lot of potential for transformation in ways that I think is not commonly portrayed in the static polling data that we get. I think those kinds of lessons are lessons that are true not only as we think about the role of evangelicals in American politics, but also, as we think about any effort to make change across a range of different kinds of issues.

Alex Lovit: Okay, well, Hahrie Han, thank you for your work. I found this book to be inspirational at a moment I was in a dark mood politically, and thank you for joining me here on The Context.

Hahrie Han: Well, thank you for reading and for all the great conversations. I really appreciate it.

Alex Lovit: The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. I’m Alex Lovit, a senior program officer and historian with the Foundation. Our Director of Communications is Melinda Gilmore. George [Strait], Jr. produced this episode. Visit kettering.org to learn more about the Foundation or to sign up for our newsletter.

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